My Share of the Task (50 page)

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F
rom experience, I knew I had to build a team of talented, experienced, and deeply committed professionals. I started at the core. My executive assistant, Charlie Flynn, would go, and he would be the primary architect of the team. As it was on the Joint Staff, his role in Afghanistan would be to understand my intent on a host of issues—everything from tactics to diplomacy—and ensure what I wanted done was translated into action. Never far away, Charlie would be a trusted, forthright adviser. But more than that, he would share with me the emotional highs and lows of command that provided witness to awesome heroism and humanity, as well as spells of frustration in the face of an obstinate, complex war.

It was asking a lot of my enlisted aide Sergeant Major Rudy Valentine, back less than a year from an eighteen-month tour in Afghanistan, to return there with me. But he looked at me quizzically and stated with quiet finality, “I'm going.”

When the chairman had first told me I'd be heading to Afghanistan, I'd had the presence of mind to ask him to let me take selected talent from his staff, and immediately identified Charlie Flynn's older brother, Mike, as the first and most important. Mike had helped transform TF 714, and I had a hunch the Afghan war effort's gathering and use of intelligence needed similar retooling. The chairman smiled, having fully expected the request, and agreed on the spot. In the weeks that followed, he let me strip his staff of further talented members. Lesser leaders might have balked. But the chairman's strong, quiet conviction to do what's right, and his instinctive admiral's sense of control for everything around him led him to act swiftly when pressing priorities required it.

The rest of the team came together in the following days and weeks as we reached out to talent we needed. On a phone call, Mike Hall, who'd helped me lead the Ranger regiment a decade before, came out of retirement to be the senior enlisted adviser of ISAF. Charlie meanwhile caught Colonel Kevin Owens, a former Ranger who'd spent a year at the Council on Foreign Relations as I had, while Kevin was having a beer in Germany.

“Count me in,” Kevin said. “Where do I go, what job will I do?”

“I have no idea,” Charlie said. “Get here, get in-processed, we'll get you a flight to Afghanistan. From there we'll figure it out.”

Others simply appeared, most of whom had served in Iraq or Afghanistan before, ready to drop everything and rejoin the fight. A joke circulated that “the band's getting back together,” and calls came in offering to put lives on hold, to take on any position we needed filled. There was a sense of purpose that drew steadfast, dedicated women and men.

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O
n June 11, 2009, we boarded a military aircraft that would fly to Brussels and then to Kabul. I had no illusions about the difficulties ahead of us. But as we settled into our seats on board the flight, and I looked around, Lincoln's words—“
The better part of one's life consists of his friendships”—came to mind.

Less settling were words that I had heard repeated in the quiet offices of the senators and representatives whom I had visited in the previous weeks. In my confirmation hearing, I had spoken of the need to see progress in
eighteen to twenty-four months. Those in Congress had a sharper view of things. In office calls on the Hill before departing for Afghanistan, congressmen had told me repeatedly that I had, at most, a year to show convincing progress. Representative Ike Skelton had set the bar clearly. “
All you have to do is win,” he said.

Easier said than done. It would require that we restructure, reorient, and reenergize the war coalition, and set it in pursuit of a sound strategy. To do so, the scale of change that we had made over the course of years in TF 714 would have to be done in months. That change would include building, staffing, and mobilizing a three-star command to run the campaign; running a thorough, countrywide strategic assessment to design that campaign; expanding the existing training command to a three-star operation that would be able to recruit, equip, train, and partner with the inchoate Afghan security forces that would continue fighting the insurgency after we left; renovating our detainee operations; shifting how our troops thought about and engaged with the enemy and population; and creating a cell to engage in reconciliation.

I had six months to accomplish these tasks and more. So, one week before we boarded our flight, I'd gathered the initial members of my team in the basement of the Pentagon where we were getting organized, and explained what that meant for us.

“By the end of this calendar year, our organization must demonstrate it is competent and credible,” I said, looking at the small group of men and women who would be critical to doing that in six months.

“And in one year,” I continued, “we'd better demonstrate progress—something that we said was going to happen, happened—or political support, left and right, will evaporate.”

Jeff Eggers, a brilliant SEAL whom the chairman had allowed me to pluck from his strategic advisory group, put the matter of time to me starkly in a dead-on assessment that I read that week: “This campaign may not end for a decade, but it will be
decided within a year.”

As we flew east toward the war, clocks were ticking.

| CHAPTER 17 |

Understand

June–August 2009

I
n the final minutes of an early-morning flight on June 13, 2009, rugged, nearly bare mountain peaks gave way to the fertile Shamali Plain, lush green with summer vegetation, stretching north from Kabul toward the famous Salang Pass. As the aircraft maneuvered to land, Kabul's lights, flickering yellow in the creeping dawn and hovering smog, blanketed the sheer slopes of the foothills encircling the capital. The lights were evidence of the city's dramatic growth since 2001, the population having tripled to over four million inhabitants. And yet I knew the picturesque sight was deceptive: Many of those lights, as well as the unlit homes on the higher ridges around the city, belonged to displaced Afghans, refugees from the war raging in their home provinces.

The Gulfstream's wheels touched the runway of Kabul International Airport a few moments later. It was my first time back in Afghanistan since May 2008, when I had made my last visit there as TF 714 commander. As the aircraft taxied, I reminded myself this experience would be very different, and very difficult.

I pondered our mission. America's aims and expectations had evolved in the preceding eight years. From President Obama's decisions and speeches I understood his priority was to defeat Al Qaeda, which was primarily in Pakistan. In Afghanistan, our mission was to prevent the reemergence of terrorist safe havens by conducting an integrated civilian-military counterinsurgency strategy focused on the most threatened areas of the country. By any measure, it was a tall order that implied Afghan sovereignty, protected by Afghans. I would take some time to assess the situation and decide whether, and how, we could accomplish the mission.

Intuitively I knew that the key to success lay in getting people to believe. Afghans of every ethnicity, Pakistani leaders, donor nations, U.N. agencies, the media, and ISAF soldiers, had to believe that we could win, and that we would. So too did our insurgent enemies.

Believing would require changing our strategy, our structure, and our relationship with Afghans. The undertaking would ask much of Coalition nations frustrated by limited progress after eight years of contributions and sacrifice. It would ask the most of Afghans, our most important audience. Afghans, after three decades of war, were smart, discriminating, and wary survivors. They had to be. And after years of unmet expectations, even the most hopeful had become cynics. They were safer that way. Their government would have to show them progress, show them a future that they wanted and believed was possible and worth fighting for. But in the minds of many, both Afghans and others, the onus was on us.

As the aircraft slowed on the tarmac, I reached into my backpack and pulled out the Velcro-backed cloth insignia that my enlisted aide, Sergeant Major Rudy Valentine, had passed to me earlier in the flight. I looked for a few moments at the three-star rank on my chest, which I'd worn since February 2006, four months before we killed Zarqawi. I thought of all the memories of those years, then pulled it off and replaced it with the other strip of cloth bearing four stars.

Charlie and Mike Flynn were both sitting across from me in the aircraft and chuckled at the lack of formality. I'd promoted Charlie three different times during his career, the last time to colonel. I'd promoted Mike twice, most recently to major general. Each occasion had featured their big Irish family, a ceremony, and then a party. This promotion was different. Although I wished Annie and my father could have been there, the four stars simply felt like a new task looming before me. But it was a task I shared with a team of people I trusted, and it was time to get on with it.

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A
fter touching down in Kabul, we drove through quiet streets to ISAF headquarters, which lay about a half mile north of the presidential palace and across the street from the American embassy. The walled compound had been the site of a pre-Soviet-era Afghan military club, and the yellow building that now housed ISAF's headquarters offices had been the main facility. The compound also fell within the footprint of the British army's 1842 cantonment site. It was from there that General William Elphinstone's force, encumbered with baggage and thousands of families and other noncombatants, began a tragic winter retreat that left a single British army surgeon alive after a gauntlet of ambushes and freezing temperatures to reach the gates of Jalalabad. Later, I had a replica of a period map of Kabul, complete with the route tracing Elphinstone's ghastly march, placed under the Plexiglas top of our dining table as a backdrop to warn against hubris.

As I entered the headquarters, briefly greeting the young guard at the entrance, I reminded myself that the command was still dealing with the trauma of the unexpected departure of a respected commander. There would be some resentment and much uncertainty. But I was aided by the fact that Dave McKiernan, to his great credit and my benefit, had epitomized professionalism throughout.

After a quick visit to headquarters, we moved to the prefab modules used for housing. In the small, convenient quarters I unpacked and arranged my gear as I had so many times before in other places, and then returned to the headquarters. As rapidly as possible, I needed to pursue two objectives. First, I had to understand as fully as possible how the war was going, and how prepared our Coalition was to win it. Second, I had to make the changes necessary to make ISAF ready for the challenge ahead.

In one of our conversations before I left D.C., Secretary Gates had given me four specific tasks. He asked me to conduct a strategic assessment of the war and to determine any necessary changes to the mission, strategy, or how our forces were organized. He told me to take sixty days, and specifically asked me to make no resource requests before its completion. Before flying into Kabul, I had visited the NATO headquarters in Brussels en route to Afghanistan. While there, at my recommendation, NATO secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen also asked me for an assessment. By combining the two assessments, I hoped to reduce any perceived gaps between my dual-hatted role as a NATO commander and that as commander of all U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

In addition to the strategic assessment, Secretary Gates had directed me to establish the ISAF Joint Command (IJC). As a three-star-level command, the IJC would run the day-to-day operations of the war and directly supervise the five regional commands that divided the country among the capital, north, west, south, and east. Although we'd operated with both three-star-level and four-star-level commands in Iraq beginning in 2004, in Afghanistan, ISAF had been required to operate both at the strategic level in Kabul, and also direct operations of the regional commands. The secretary was convinced we needed an intermediate level of command, and I agreed.

Additionally, he'd instructed me to review how our forces were currently employed to look for ways to reduce requirements or gain efficiencies. The U.S. military was stretched thin between Afghanistan and Iraq. We needed to look for ways to remove unnecessary positions and make every person count.

Finally, the secretary was deeply troubled by Afghan civilian casualties. He asked that I take all possible steps both to reduce them and to improve how we handled those we did cause. Like me, the secretary sensed an urgent need to mitigate Afghan resentment. This would be an ongoing effort.

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M
y first imperative, then, was to develop the best possible understanding of the war. This was always tricky, particularly for senior leaders in a complex, politically charged environment. My own ignorance, combined with agenda-laden opinions and flawed, incomplete information, challenged me to gather, evaluate, contest, and finally synthesize a mountain of information into a clear sense of reality. I had to be humble about my ability to truly comprehend all that was happening, and why.

Not only did I need a grasp of the war raging beyond Kabul, I also needed to understand the situation within our own walls. The ISAF compound was a crowded hodgepodge of buildings and trailers connected by twisting, casbah-like alleyways. In its way, the headquarters' plot reflected the amalgam of forty-two nations—from Turkey to Sweden, Australia to Bulgaria—that comprised our war-fighting coalition.

Across from the yellow headquarters building, I found a landscaped garden area with picnic tables and gazebos, where ISAF staff relaxed with coffee. It seemed blatantly inappropriate given the austere and dangerous conditions our troops faced only a few miles away. So too did the fourteen bars inside the compound that served alcohol to non-Americans (U.S. forces were forbidden by policy to drink anywhere in Afghanistan or Iraq). The garden gave me a chill of frustration and worry that I'd experienced vicariously before—over the pages of Bernard Fall's
Street Without Joy,
a searing chronicle of the French war in Indochina that I'd read in high school and many times since. While in Siem Reap, Cambodia, in 1953, Fall found himself watching two French officers play tennis and sip drinks at an officers' club mess. When the sun fell and a nearby bugle played “lower the flag,” they ignored it. Only a nearby master sergeant—a Cambodian member of the French Marines—snapped to attention and saluted the French flag. “
And in one single blinding flash,” Fall wrote, “I
knew
that we were going to lose the war.” I didn't draw as abrupt a conclusion from the symbolism in the quiet garden. But given my intent to reenergize and refocus our war coalition, the garden and bars were relevant pieces of terrain. It took some time, but in early September I banned alcohol in the ISAF compound. When I visited in November 2011, the coffee garden remained.

As I continued walking along packed gravel paths, the myriad uniforms reminded me anew that this would be a Coalition war. Most common were the familiar grayish green digitized camouflage of the Americans, varying only slightly in hue among the branches. Elsewhere, the sand-colored desert print of the Dutch stood apart from the Norwegians' lime-green highlights. I saw the familiar caramel-streaked fatigues of the Brits and brown-spotted shirts of the Australians, as well as the unfamiliar, dark, lizardlike print of the South Koreans. Ubiquitous were the beige boonie hats and wood-stocked weapons of the Macedonian guards who protected the headquarters. Rarer were the neo-British uniforms of Pakistani liaisons. Conspicuously absent, to my eyes, were any uniforms of our Afghan National Army partners. There were stars on some, epaulets on others, NATO patches on most. But beside some common markings, each uniform represented a different culture, set of marching orders, tour length, work ethic, language, experience level, and historical perspective. At the time,
forty-two different nations contributed troops to make up a 61,000-strong ISAF force, of which 28,850 were American. The rest of the United States'
57,600 troops in country that month served under U.S. forces–Afghanistan, as part of Operation Enduring Freedom, which I also commanded.

Forging an ad hoc multinational force into a cohesive team was always challenging, as Dwight Eisenhower had found. In ISAF we not only needed to construct a countrywide battle rhythm of daily processes to synchronize the fight, we also needed to reframe an effort originally intended more for peacekeeping than a coordinated war against an insurgency. For many nations whose domestic constituents had never envisioned a combat role, the deteriorating security situation was a difficult reality. I probably increased concerns by bringing a high-energy team of experienced war fighters into what had been a more deliberate headquarters atmosphere. But I didn't see another option to move as quickly as I felt necessary.

We would have to make these changes while conducting ongoing and planned operations. In this case that included not only ever-more-violent daily combat around Afghanistan but also the campaign just then beginning in southern Afghanistan's Helmand Province. Additionally, we had to prepare for the upcoming presidential elections in late August. These were significant endeavors, larger than anything in Afghanistan since 9/11.

To lessen the gap between what we knew and what we needed to know about the world beyond our walls and windows, Mike Flynn and I determined to establish regular “feeds” that would combine hard, often classified reporting with the perspectives of units, media, and other excellent sources of data. Experience had taught me that commanders too often relied on traditional intelligence reports and focused on metrics such as insurgents killed and levels of violence. But understanding the broader picture required accurately gauging the attitude of the people, levels of economic activity, and, most challenging, indicators of deviations from “normalcy.” For many Afghans, normal was a faint memory, long tattered by violence that had come to define the image of a country that had enjoyed
nearly fifty years of peace prior to the 1978 coup. A normal life, protected from government predations and insurgent threats, was still the goal for those who remembered, or heard stories of, that time. Understanding how Afghans defined normal, and gauging whether they believed we were moving toward it, could help us engage them effectively and win their support.

Almost immediately, Mike began building a network capable of providing this kind of holistic ground truth. One tactic was to empower talented observers, like a brilliant Marine lieutenant named Matt Pottinger, to circulate through the country and provide unvarnished reports. Matt's background as a journalist, including seven years in China, combined with experience in both Iraq and Afghanistan, made him prototypical of the informal side of Mike's network.

But, as I always had, I wanted to see for myself. I remembered first reading about Afghanistan many years before in a paperback version of James Michener's 1963 novel
Caravans
. The advice offered to a young American girl seemed more prescient every day I spent in Afghanistan: “Ask a lot of questions. Learn the country. Don't be afraid of looking stupid, because one of these days we could be driven into war across this terrain, and you'd be the only American who'd ever seen parts of it. Keep your eyes open.” Those words, as well as all my experience in Iraq, told me that to understand, you must first be quiet and listen. In that spirit, I determined to conduct an immediate listening tour around Afghanistan, to hear directly from Afghans and ISAF personnel.