The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor (66 page)

Lieutenant Colonel Brad Brown was also concerned. That Porter didn’t seem to get along with his lieutenants—not an uncommon complaint—didn’t bother him; the issue was that the captain just didn’t appear to be mentally up for another tour as a commander in a war zone. Porter had been considered a good commander in Iraq, but to Brown he now seemed, well, tired. But when Brown brought up the subject with his boss, Colonel Randy George, they realized they didn’t have a lot of options: they were already short-staffed when it came to troop commanders, and replacing an even weaker captain in their battalion was a higher priority. There were two captains who could have replaced Porter, but one had a foot injury and was physically limited, while the other was not confident in his tactical ability to take over the position. Brown and George decided that they would send Porter to Afghanistan to command Combat Outpost Keating, and then replace him after ninety days with an up-and-comer named Stoney Portis. Porter had had a good track record in Iraq; Brown knew he was exhausted—they were all exhausted—but he had faith that the captain could keep it together for three months.

Brown had a number of discussions with Porter himself about this plan. This wasn’t unusual; company-level commands were routinely changed during deployments, particularly once they passed the two-year mark in that demanding job. Porter had mixed feelings—he was reluctant to give up command, even though he was worn out and ready to move on to another challenge. But orders were orders—though these were ones that Brown would ultimately regret having given.

There was no question that the enemy had been growing more effective: 2008 was the most dangerous year in Afghanistan since the war began, with the frequency of attacks up by as much as 60 percent in some areas. Confronted by this threat, ISAF commander General David McKiernan hadn’t demonstrated either the nimbleness or the creativity they needed, in the view of Defense Secretary Robert Gates, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, and Central Command’s General David Petraeus.

As Gates saw it, if the U.S. government was going to surge forces in Afghanistan and ask more young men and women to put their lives on the line, the least he could do was put the very best leadership in charge. And with McKiernan continuing as ISAF commander, Gates didn’t feel he could look a soldier’s anxious mother in the eye and tell her he’d done just that. The best men he had, Gates thought, were Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal and Major General David Rodriguez, who were both now at the Pentagon after having served abroad.

While McKiernan, Gates thought, was old-school Army, a throwback to the first Gulf War, McChrystal was a more innovative, progressive “New Army” type. Like Petraeus, he was regarded as a “thinking man’s soldier,” someone who had the flexibility to use all the tools at his disposal, including development and diplomacy. The need for such efforts went well beyond the borders of Afghanistan: media and political dynamics were critical in a long war, as were strong relationships with policymakers in Washington, D.C.

On May 6, 2009, Gates arrived in Afghanistan. He had many public tasks to accomplish, among them visiting surgical facilities on the front lines in Helmand Province and hearing firsthand from troops about the impact of the mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles he’d sent there to help curtail American deaths and injuries caused by IEDs.

Gates also had one private mission: to ask General McKiernan to retire early. But McKiernan wouldn’t do it. “You’re going to have to fire me,” he said. So Gates did.

On May 11, back at the Pentagon, Gates spoke at a hastily convened press conference, talking about President Obama’s decision to draw down the war in Iraq and instead focus on Afghanistan, where, the defense secretary declared, “we must do better.” Gates insisted that McKiernan had done nothing wrong; it was just that “a fresh approach, a fresh look in the context of the new strategy, probably was in our best interest.” Added Mullen, “I just didn’t think that we could wait until 2010”—when McKiernan’s rotation was scheduled to end—to make the change. Gates said he would recommend to President Obama that McKiernan be replaced by McChrystal, the former commander of Joint Special Operations Command and currently serving as director of the Joint Staff—the three-star officer who assists the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

In addition to having supervised some highly successful commando special operations in Iraq—including the capture of Saddam Hussein and the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq—McChrystal was considered by some of his colleagues to be a shrewd and canny political operator. Some of his contemporaries thought he was manipulative, and some officers from conventional forces viewed him as being typical of the “unaccountable” Special Forces ilk, not used to playing nice with other branches of the military, accustomed solely to getting his own way. Others saw him as brilliant. The president deferred to Gates.

President Obama had already ordered twenty-one thousand more troops to Afghanistan, fulfilling a campaign promise and bringing the total number of U.S. troops in that country to sixty-eight thousand. On June 2, during his Senate confirmation hearings, McChrystal suggested in his prepared remarks that President Obama might need to send even more. He was then asked by Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina if he would feel “constrained at all” about asking for even more troops if he thought them necessary.

“Sir, I’m not on the job yet, so I—you know, I’m speculating on that,” McChrystal said. “Yesterday, in a meeting, Admiral Mullen said that if I was confirmed to ask for what I need—almost quote, unquote. He looked me in the eye said that. So, I believe that if I have a requirement, I can look Mullen in the eye and tell him that’s what I need.”

“Do you think that’s true of the administration also?” Graham inquired.

“Sir, I don’t know,” McChrystal replied. At the White House, the general’s comments were perceived as an announcement to the world that he didn’t know whether the president would support him if he needed more troops—and even a suggestion that the commander in chief might not want him to speak candidly about what he thought was necessary to succeed in Afghanistan. Senior White House officials believed that McChrystal—and, they assumed, the Pentagon—were trying to roll them, putting the president in an untenable situation wherein he would have no defensible way to refuse the military when it publicly requested more troops.

McChrystal would later say that his remarks were not aimed at the White House in any way, that he had intended merely to convey that he was trying to stay in his own lane and answer only to his chain of command—in this case, Gates and Mullen.

The broader view from the Pentagon was more complex. From the beginning, generals thought, President Bush had not provided sufficient troops to do the job effectively in Afghanistan. As a result, Americans were dying, and the mission wasn’t succeeding. As to the new president, the generals had been infuriated by a series of leaks, seemingly coming from Vice President Biden’s office since March 2009, suggesting that the United States should actually start
withdrawing
troops from Afghanistan, abandoning the counterinsurgency program and pursuing a strategy that was being called CT-plus—consisting of a smaller counterterrorism force focused primarily on taking out bad guys, with some training of Afghan security forces but otherwise not much of an emphasis on nation building. Right or wrong, the generals considered the proposals that were being fed to reporters ill informed and counterproductive. In particular, this notion that their troops could conduct counterterrorist strikes against the enemy without enough troops on the ground to win the support of the Afghan people, and thus help gather intelligence, stirred deep ire. So, yes, the generals were willing to put a little pressure on the suits in D.C.

Such behavior was predictable to senior officials inside the White House—it was common to the Pentagon/White House dynamic—but that didn’t mean they were happy about it. President Obama’s national security adviser, James Jones, called Gates to make it clear that the generals ought to back off. Jones, a retired Marine Corps general, had been brought in to the administration in part to serve as a liaison between the White House and the Pentagon. Gates assured him that the generals weren’t trying to jam the president in any way; they were just being candid, he said.

On June 8, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell announced that Secretary Gates had asked McChrystal, should he be confirmed (as he indeed would be, on June 30), to “go over to Afghanistan to undertake a sixty-day review of the situation on the ground there,” and to report on “what changes in the strategy should be made, and particularly from a personnel standpoint, from a manpower standpoint.”

This review, too, became something of a controversy. McChrystal saw himself as approaching the task modestly. He would later insist that he hadn’t gone in to Afghanistan thinking that more troops were needed; he said he was in fact initially inclined to believe that what was necessary was a new strategy and more talented officers, not more bodies. He attempted deference: to try to understand his brief, he scrutinized the president’s campaign pledges and the remarks he had made upon sending in the new surge of troops. He knew there was concern in the White House over the direction of U.S. policy in Afghanistan, but he didn’t think there was absolute clarity as to the president’s concerns versus his goals.

In Kabul, on June 15, McChrystal was interviewed by the
Washington Post
’s Greg Jaffe, and he described in detail the broad assessment of the war that he was about to begin, suggesting that he wanted to focus troops on Afghan population centers and pull them from more remote areas such as the Korangal Valley. The general’s informal sixty-day survey was rapidly morphing into something more significant—and more public. Besides doing boots-on-the-ground research, McChrystal invited a number of think-tank folks, such as the conservative Fred Kagan, one of Petraeus’s advisers on the Iraq surge, to offer him advice; Kagan began publicly pushing for additional troops to be sent to Afghanistan.

The McChrystal report was much anticipated and, when it was completed, made a momentous impression—which came as something of a surprise to the general himself, he would later say. A number of other assessments had already been done—by Central Command, by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and by the White House—and McChrystal’s had started out as an informal evaluation of the situation. McChrystal didn’t think it was the
Washington Post
story or even the Pentagon-versus–White House angle that created the hype so much as it was the way events just happened to play out: as he arrived in Kabul, the United States’ position in the war was deteriorating rapidly, so his report came to be seen as something of an emergency prescription for the illness.

Storm clouds began forming when Jaffe’s colleague Bob Woodward, traveling with Jones in Afghanistan, reported on the front page of their newspaper that a conflict was brewing over troop levels, with the Pentagon pushing for more and the White House pushing back. An issue that President Obama thought he had temporarily put to rest with twenty-one thousand new troops and a completed assessment—finished weeks earlier by a team that included one of America’s foremost experts on Al Qaeda—now seemed anything but settled. From the White House’s point of view, McChrystal had managed to place himself in a position where he would be telling the president what he needed, and the world would see how this new, untested president would respond. While the sniping and suspicions and rhetorical missives fired within the newsprint of the
Washington Post
might have seemed, to the men of 3-61 Cav, to be taking place in another dimension altogether, all of these machinations would have a tremendous impact on them.

In early 2009, as Colonel George and Lieutenant Colonel Brown prepared to deploy to Afghanistan, they refined their plan to close Camp Keating and the other small outposts. Brown was committed to counterinsurgency, which he viewed as a process of creating a series of security bubbles at the local level—connecting Afghans in hamlets and villages to their government through security and economic opportunity—and then expanding those individual bubbles until they merged with others. But the security bubbles at Combat Outposts Keating and Lowell were isolated, and they were not expanding. George and Brown were convinced, in fact, that the various security bubbles in Nuristan were never going to “spread” and link up—there just weren’t enough forces to make that happen, and the mountainous land in between was too easy for the enemy to control. Most of the communities in Nuristan Province were separated from one another and from the provincial and national governments by chasms of instability and Taliban violence.

Brown believed there were areas in the region where counterinsurgency was working—from Naray north to Barikot, for example. With more troops—the ones from the remote outposts they wanted to close—they could link the Naray–Barikot security bubble to other security bubbles in the south of Kunar Province. His and George’s realignment plan was all about this kind of focus: the idea was to stop spending scarce resources on things that weren’t working and start reinforcing success.

Brown and George worried in particular about Combat Outpost Lowell, which they thought most vulnerable. Observation Post Mace, located near Gawardesh and manned by only twenty-four U.S. troops who shared space with a dubious crew of ANA soldiers, was next on their list of concerns. Combat Outpost Keating ranked third.

So they would pull out. But how? And when? George pushed his staff to think hard about what the enemy would do if the United States did pull out. What groundwork would the Americans have to lay beforehand? What would be the most appropriate timeline for leaving? The team concluded that the withdrawal wouldn’t greatly increase the overall flow of men and materials over the Pakistan border into Afghanistan, since the U.S. presence wasn’t affecting that very much anyway. A withdrawal would have a moderate impact on the estimated two thousand residents of Kamdesh Village, some of whom—most likely those who had been working with the Americans—would relocate farther south to be closer to the remaining U.S. troops, at great expense to themselves. They anticipated there might be a slight increase in the number of attacks against Forward Operating Base Bostick and a nearby CIA camp.