The Longest War (55 page)

Complicating the issue, some of the detainees who had already been released from the prison camp then engaged in terrorism, such as Said Ali al-Shihri, a Saudi who was
released in November 2007
and who, like all other Guantánamo detainees released to Saudi custody, entered a comprehensive reeducation program. After passing through the program, Shihri left Saudi Arabia for Yemen and
became the deputy leader
of al-Qaeda’s Yemeni affiliate, the group that planned the botched Christmas Day 2009 attack.

Other released detainees appear to have been so radicalized by their time at Guantánamo that they turned to violence. Abdullah Salih al-Ajmi, a Kuwaiti held in Guantánamo until November 2005, conducted a suicide attack in the Iraqi city of Mosul on April 26, 2008, killing thirteen Iraqi soldiers. Ajmi had changed while incarcerated at Guantánamo. Letters to his Washington lawyer, Thomas Wilner,
chart his changing character
. His first letter is upbeat and friendly: “How are you and how is your nice team doing? I hope you are doing well. Tell me how you are doing, Mr. Tom, and what is going on in the outside world.” Ajmi’s final letter to Wilner was a different matter: “To the vile, depraved Thomas, descendant of rotten apes and swine.” Wilner said that Ajmi became more radicalized while he was jailed: “Guantánamo took a kid—a kid who wasn’t all that bad—and it turned him into a
hostile, hardened individual
.”

In May 2009 a
Pentagon fact sheet
about Guantánamo detainees who had been released but had since taken up arms was made public. What dominated news stories about the report was the claim that seventy-four of those released from Guantánamo, or one in seven, had “returned to the battlefield.” On May 21 the
New York Times
ran a story on its front page about the report under the headline “1 in 7 Detainees Rejoined Jihad.” The paper subsequently issued a correction, noting it had conflated those “suspected” by the Pentagon and those “confirmed” of engaging in violence, but the media splash surrounding the report overwhelmed the later correction. The
Times
story ran on the same day that President Obama and former vice president Cheney
gave their dueling keynote speeches in Washington about Guantánamo. Unsurprisingly, Cheney seized on the findings of the new report, saying of the released detainees, “
One in seven
cut a straight path back to their prior line of work and have conducted murderous attacks in the Middle East.” However, when threats to the United States were considered,
the true rate
for those released from Guantánamo who were either confirmed or suspected of taking up arms was one in twenty-five, or barely 4 percent, according to a review of the public record by the New America Foundation.

Despite Obama’s declarations that the “war on terror” was a construct of the past and the implication that his administration would dramatically move away from Bush’s policies, the shift was more one of tone than of substance. Guantánamo did not close a year after Obama was inaugurated, as he had promised; indeed around two hundred prisoners remained incarcerated there,
some fifty
of whom were likely to be detained indefinitely as they were deemed too dangerous to release, yet at the same time there wasn’t enough evidence to put them on trial; the some one hundred Yemenis in the jail similarly could not be released because of the lax Yemeni prison system, while the rest of the inmates would eventually face either a civilian trial or a military commission. Under pressure from New York politicians,
Obama backed away
from a promised trial in a federal court in Manhattan for Guantánamo’s most infamous inmate: 9/11 operational commander Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

There were other continuities with the Bush administration: While Obama did ban the use of the euphemistically named “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques,” the practice of waterboarding had already
ended in 2003
and the other coercive interrogation techniques were suspended three years later because of a ruling by the Supreme Court. And Obama
dramatically increased
the Bush administration policy of the targeted killing of militant leaders in Pakistan by drone strikes, while greatly expanding the war against “al-Qaeda and its allies” in neighboring Afghanistan.

The Taliban regime
is out of business, permanently.

—Vice President Dick Cheney in March 2002

[The Taliban] have a
dominant influence in 11 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces.

—Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the U.S.
Joint Chiefs of Staff, in December 2009

O
n January 22, 2009, two days after his inauguration, President Obama gave a speech at the State Department declaring that Afghanistan and Pakistan were the “
central front
in our enduring struggle against terrorism and extremism.” Of course, this was true, but few commented at the time how strange an outcome this was. After all, hadn’t the Taliban been defeated in the winter of 2001? And wasn’t Pakistan a close American ally in the “war on terror”?

At the State Department,
Obama announced
he was creating a new diplomatic post, appointing a U.S. special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan. The special representative would be Richard C. Holbrooke, the veteran diplomat who had cajoled, charmed, and bullied the warring parties in the Balkans to make peace, at Dayton, Ohio, in 1995. His appointment was a
recognition by the Obama administration that stability could not come to Afghanistan without a stable Pakistan, and vice versa, and also of how much work needed to be done in the region to end its status as the “central front” for al-Qaeda and its allies.

Just as Holbrooke
was making his first official visit to the region, eight Taliban fighters carrying AK-47s and wearing explosive vests mounted simultaneous attacks on several government buildings in Kabul, including the Ministry of Justice and the Prisons Department, spraying gunfire indiscriminately and killing at least twenty. It was a particularly brazen daytime assault designed to demonstrate that the Taliban could penetrate even the most sensitive Afghan government ministries. And the attacks, which took place on February 11, 2009, just hours before Holbrooke landed in Kabul, were designed to send a message from the Taliban to the United States: We own Afghanistan. The Taliban seemed to understand instinctively that what the Pentagon termed “information operations”—that is, sending political messages—should always play a key role in their military planning.

Between the rising Taliban insurgency, the epidemic of attacks by suicide bombers, and spiraling criminal activity fueled by the drug trade, by the time Obama took office Afghanistan looked something like Iraq in the summer of 2003, when the descent into violent conflict had begun. According to a
threat assessment map
provided by the Afghan National Security Forces to the United Nations in April 2009, 40 percent of Afghanistan was now either under direct Taliban control or a high-risk area for insurgent attacks. These high-risk and Taliban-controlled areas were located primarily in the troubled south and east of the country, along the fifteen-hundred-mile border with Pakistan. As a former senior Afghan cabinet member explained, “If international forces leave, the Taliban will
take over in one hour
.” A
U.S. military slide
of “security incidents” in Afghanistan, running the gamut from small-arms attacks to ambushes, showed that while there had been some 30 a week in 2004, that number had risen to 300 a week during the summer of 2008.

By then the Taliban had largely re-created the command structure they had before the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in fall 2001. The new structure was headed by the “
inner shura
” (inner council), an eighteen-member group led by Taliban leader Mullah Omar that arrived at decisions based on consensus, but “within Omar’s guidance.” Those decisions were then communicated to regional shuras of up to twenty members, then to provincial shuras and the Taliban’s shadow provincial governors. The Taliban had effectively created a
parallel government, in competition with the Kabul government. Eleven of the thirty-four Afghan provinces had a Taliban shadow governor in 2005. By 2009 there were thirty-three.

A couple of weeks before he was inaugurated, Obama had sent his running mate, Joe Biden, to Afghanistan to get a feel for the deteriorating situation. Biden was already quite skeptical about what could be achieved there. A year earlier, in late February 2008, then-Senator Biden sat down to a formal dinner with Afghan President Hamid Karzai at the presidential place in Kabul. The subject of corruption in Afghanistan, among the worst in the world, was discussed. According to one of the dinner guests, the discussion “was just
going around and around in circles
and Karzai not really acknowledging the corruption issue and just sort of saying, you know, we’re working on things.” Biden said, “Look, I think we’ve come to the point where we’re not getting much more out of this discussion,” threw down his napkin and declared, “This dinner is over.” And he and his delegation walked out of the dinner early.

A year later, in early January 2009, Biden and his top aide, Antony J. “Tony” Blinken, visited Karzai again, this time as emissaries of Obama. On their return to the States, Biden briefed Obama at their transition headquarters in Washington. Blinken recalls, “The vice president said if there’s one thing I bring back to you, in terms of Afghanistan—and it’s obviously intimately related to Pakistan—it’s that if you ask ten of our people in Afghanistan what we’re trying to accomplish, what the mission is, you’ll get
ten different answers
. And we need strategic clarity on what we’re trying to accomplish. And the president said, ‘That’s exactly the first thing I want to come out of this review that I’ll order when we get in.’”

Tapped to do that review was Bruce Riedel, a three-decade veteran of the CIA who had played a critical role in helping to formulate South Asia policy in the Clinton administration. In 1999, Clinton, advised by Riedel,
had helped to pull Pakistan and India back
from the brink of what could have turned into a nuclear war over the disputed territory of Kashmir. Riedel was now retired and had no desire to go back into government: “And they asked me if I wanted to be considered for various things, and I said, ‘No, I really
don’t
want to go back in.’ So I’m minding my own business on the thirtieth of January, and the phone rings. ‘Please hold for the president.’ And ten seconds later, ‘
Hi, Bruce, it’s Barack
.’”

The president asked Riedel if he would chair the Afghan review, which,
given Obama’s election campaign rhetoric about the importance of the war in Afghanistan, was the most predictable foreign policy challenge of his young presidency. Riedel remembers asking, “Can I talk to my wife?” The president replied, “Smart move.” “And I immediately knew I was cornered,” Riedel recalls. “But he came up with this idea of a sixty-day review. And there was logic to the sixty days; it wasn’t arbitrary. He had to be in Strasbourg on the third of April for the NATO Sixtieth Anniversary Summit, and he had to have an Afghanistan/Pakistan strategy by then.” Also driving the pace of the review was the upcoming Afghan presidential election scheduled for the summer of 2009, which necessitated the deployment of more troops to protect polling stations. At the same time the Taliban were also gaining momentum, which needed to be blunted if that election were to be held safely.

Key members of Riedel’s team on the review included Holbrooke; General David Petraeus; Michèle Flournoy, the number-three official at the Pentagon and the highest ranking female ever at the Defense Department; Lieutenant General Douglas Lute, the Afghan “war czar” in the Bush administration who had been held over in that job; and Tony Blinken. Riedel recalls there was largely a consensus in the group: “People agreed on the threat: al-Qaeda; that al-Qaeda and the Taliban are
closely linked; not a monolith
, but closely linked, and unlikely to delink when they think they’re winning; delinkable if they think they’re losing, maybe, but not when they think they’re winning; that the war in Afghanistan is going very, very poorly.”

But most of the participants in the review also believed that Afghanistan could be turned around because the marked deterioration in security was largely confined to the south and east of the country, home to most of the country’s
Pashtun ethnic group
, which makes up about half of the Afghan population. Riedel said that provided an important basis for hope: “Because not all Pashtuns are Taliban, either. So the population the Taliban can work with is probably less than a quarter, maybe less than a fifth of the population. Now, they can intimidate and terrorize more, but they’re
not going to recruit
from a broader audience.”

This calculation had an important impact on the discussion of overall troop numbers in Afghanistan. Classic counterinsurgency doctrine indicated that to stabilize Afghanistan you needed a ratio of one member of the security forces to every twenty of the population, and that would dictate you needed some 600,000 soldiers and policemen given the Afghan population of 30 million. But an insurgency largely confined to the south and east of the country
suggested a lower number of security forces could work. Petraeus, the leading American practitioner and theorist of counterinsurgency, made the point that the number of forces needed to stabilize Afghanistan was in fact closer to 300,000, a figure that seemed relatively doable given that at the time the
Afghan army and police
numbered some 150,000 men and the U.S./NATO contingent was already around 50,000 strong, supplemented by a force of around 12,000 additional American soldiers that Bush had ordered deployed there in the last months of his second term.