Killing Machine (11 page)

But I am concerned that we underestimate the risks of this expansion of our mission and that we have not fully studied every alternative. The proposed troop increase will bring vastly increased costs and an indefinite, large-scale U.S. military role in Afghanistan, generating the need for yet more civilians. An increased U.S. and foreign role in security and governance will increase Afghan dependency, at least in the near-term, and it will deepen the military involvement in a mission that most agree cannot be won solely by military means. Further, it will run counter to our strategic purposes of Afghanizing and civilianizing government functions here.

Perhaps the charts we have all seen showing the U.S. presence rising and then dropping off in coming years in a bell curve will prove accurate. It is more likely, however, that these forecasts are imprecise and optimistic. In that case, sending additional forces
will delay the day when Afghans will take over, and make it difficult, if not impossible, to bring our people home on a reasonable timetable. Moreover, none of these charts displays dollar costs. Acknowledgement of the astronomical costs might illustrate the greater desirability of civilian alternatives now dismissed as too costly or not feasible.

Here are my reasons for this assessment:

1) President Karzai is not an adequate strategic partner. The proposed counterinsurgency strategy assumes an Afghan political leadership that is both able to take responsibility and to exert sovereignty in the furtherance of our goal—a secure, peaceful, minimally self-sufficient Afghanistan hardened against transnational groups. Yet Karzai continues to shun responsibility for any sovereign burden, whether defense, governance, or development. He and much of his circle do not want the U.S. to leave and are only too happy to see us invest further. They assume we covet their territory for a never-ending “war on terror” and for military bases to use against surrounding powers.
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From the outset, the top pro-surge participant in the debate was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who appeared to refer to Vice President Biden’s position in an interview on PBS: “Some people say, ‘Well, Al Qaeda’s no longer in Afghanistan.’ If Afghanistan were taken over by the Taliban, I can’t tell you how fast Al Qaeda would be back in Afghanistan.”
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No sooner had such reports filtered out of the initial discussion than Bob Woodward’s article “McChrystal: More Forces or ‘Mission Failure,’” along with the leak of McChrystal’s report, appeared in the
Washington Post
. McChrystal rejected any inference that a rift had developed between the military and the White House. He welcomed the “fierce debate,” he said. “A policy debate is warranted,” he said in a telephone interview. “We should not have any ambiguities, as a nation or a coalition.” It had been “whispered around the Pentagon” that he would resign if his recommendations were not accepted. No, he said, he was committed to whatever mission “Mr. Obama ultimately approved.”
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Despite the general’s assurances that he was committed to whatever mission was approved, he intervened from afar. After a speech in London he was asked if Vice President Biden’s alternative could succeed. “The short answer is no,” McChrystal replied. This brusque exchange set off another round of speculation, prompting Gates, who had held his own counsel during the early White House debates, to tell a gathering of army officers that the Pentagon would follow any strategy the president ordered: “Speaking for the Department of Defense, once the commander in chief makes his decisions, we will salute and execute those decisions faithfully and to the best of our ability.” In addition to this pledge, the secretary warned that military and civilian advisers should provide “our best advice to the president candidly—but privately.”
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Gates had played his cards exactly right, promising absolute loyalty, then shifting his position to the pro-surge side in the debate. Obama looked around for some way of limiting the mission before it became his albatross and weighed down both his domestic agenda and his legacy. Outside the White House, some of the original backers of the Iraq surge urged that the only way the United States could gain leverage over Karzai and force him to change his ways was by sending more troops.

If the Afghan government were fully legitimate, there would be no insurgency. U.S. and international actions must aim to improve the Afghan government’s ability to provide basic services such as security and dispute resolution nationwide, building the legitimacy of the government in Kabul sufficiently to dampen a large-scale insurgency. They must persuade and even compel Afghan leaders to stop activities that alienate the people and create fertile ground for insurgents.
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A more perfect definition of “social imperialism” could hardly be coined. Meanwhile, Gates had taken charge of the effort to find a way to satisfy both the president and his generals. Eventually he came up with a paper that the National Security Council fiddled with so as to be able to call it a “consensus” memo. The memo concluded
that the United States should focus on diminishing the Taliban insurgency (but not attempting the more difficult task of completely destroy it), building up certain critical ministries, and transferring authority to Afghan security forces. Instead of forty thousand U.S. troops—McChrystal’s magic number halfway between failure and success—he would get thirty thousand Americans and another ten thousand to be picked up from the NATO allies. Obama was not yet satisfied and declared that he wanted the whole process of the entrance and exit of U.S. troops speeded up. “I want this pushed to the left,” he said referring to the bell curve on charts he had been shown. Turning to Petraeus, he said, “What I’m looking for is a surge. This has to be a surge.”
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According to Jonathan Alter, author of
The Promise
, an insider’s account of the first year of the Obama presidency, Hillary Clinton had a strong belief that the “reluctant Democratic Party should be dragged along into an expanded commitment,” something that Biden’s counterterrorism proposals specifically sought to avoid. She was, in many ways, a worthy successor to Madeleine Albright, with her conviction that America was the indispensable nation. Obama, meanwhile, had apparently changed the most. He had opposed the surge in Iraq, but now he knew he had been wrong. As he told Petraeus, “it was time to see if [the surge] could be applied in Afghanistan.”
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What was it particularly that had given the Iraq surge a special place in American military, along with boosting Petraeus’s reputation to the heights? Perhaps it was also a legend out of Vietnam: that if the enemy could be forced to fight a set-piece battle, the war could be won. Of course, that was not precisely counterinsurgency’s way, but it was certainly part of the mystique attaching itself to successful generals—the “Ike” factor, going back to World War II. The French had tried the set piece once at Dien Bien Phu—with terrible results. An increase of American troops by thirty thousand in a country the size of Afghanistan with its very difficult terrain was hardly a likely testing place for either the set-piece scenario or, especially, the new and improved counterinsurgency strategy, as it came without a long-term commitment that would have implied constant
mission creep and more troops—a situation Obama was desperate to avoid. And yet what most bothered the surge advocates about Biden’s alternative strategy, when it came right down to it, was that Biden’s proposal would not really extend or maintain America’s influence in the region. The protection of Afghan women was highlighted, of course, as it always had been, going back to the March announcement of the new strategy and even earlier. Opposition to Biden was also expressed as a fear that if the Taliban triumphed in Afghanistan, that would somehow lead to the fall of the Pakistani government and let al Qaeda gain control of that country’s nuclear arsenal. Here was a domino thesis for the Middle East to rival the Southeast Asian original.

Obama made his intentions clear when he announced that any alternative for leaving Afghanistan was off the table. His advisers took that to mean that military force as defined by counterinsurgency theories would lead the way, providing leverage to change Afghanistan in fundamental ways. National security adviser James Jones, a retired Marine general, had warned that counterinsurgency in rural areas would require large numbers of troops and cost a fortune, but—like Biden’s concern that the end would never be in sight—Jones’s fears went unaddressed except in Obama’s effort to put a time limit of eighteen months on the commitment of new troops. Still, this new deadline was really only about “beginning” the transition to Afghan control.
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In a final go-round at the White House before he went to West Point, Obama confronted the major players in the discussion, extracting promises to the effect that a drawdown of American forces could be achieved in eighteen months. Biden came out of the final meeting to say that there would be an actual drawdown in July 2011. And the story grew that Obama’s conversation with the military side justified the vice president’s feeling that instead of being boxed in by the military, Obama had actually turned the tables. With these assurances in his pocket, the president addressed the cadets at West Point in a long speech during which many appeared to nod off. But, of course, they were not his real audience. His key point was that the Afghan front against terrorism had been underresourced
because of the war in Iraq—the wrong war—and hence there was a real danger the entire region would slide backward because of Taliban control, offering a space in which al Qaeda could once again “operate with impunity.” Then the threat of terrorists reaching American shores would increase. This assertion was not really different from President Bush’s insistence that Iraq had become the central front in the war on terror; only the name of the country had changed. Having built up the threat, Obama went off on a different tack: that the military had promised him it could all be brought under control within a few months.

The 30,000 additional troops that I’m announcing tonight will deploy in the first part of 2010—the fastest possible pace—so that they can target the insurgency and secure key population centers. They’ll increase our ability to train competent Afghan security forces, and to partner with them so that more Afghans can get into the fight. And they will help create the conditions for the United States to transfer responsibility to the Afghans.

In a strange sort of way, the speech echoed Richard Nixon’s Vietnamization hopes for the survival of South Vietnam. That was not what Obama meant, obviously, but the idea that what had taken years to reach this point—years of Russian occupation, years of violent guerrilla war, followed by more years of civil war and the ruination of much of Afghanistan’s infrastructure—could be put on the right road in eighteen months defied all serious reflection.

Not surprisingly, Obama aides rushed to media outlets to deny what most observers could see with one eye closed. Almost immediately, there were qualifications forthcoming in congressional testimony, with Gates and Petraeus given chances to “correct” impressions about “deadlines.” The general asserted that withdrawals would be conditions-based—the usual code words for ignoring presidential rhetoric. “There’s no timeline, no ramp, nothing like that,” he said. “This doesn’t trigger a rush to the exits. It triggers a beginning of transition to Afghan security forces and, over time, a beginning of transition to Afghan government elements as well.”
The purpose of the president’s stipulating a date for pulling out troops was to send a message of “resolve” along with a message of “urgency” to officials in both Afghanistan and the United States. A doubter might reply, “So what if the Taliban lies low and bides its time?” And there were plenty of doubters. Secretary Gates also responded to an inquiry from Senator Joseph Lieberman about the deadline “meaning an all at once withdrawal of our forces from Afghanistan” by denying the deadline was a deadline at all: “We’re not just going to throw these guys into the swimming pool and walk away.” Secretary Hillary Clinton threw in her two cents, echoing Gates: “I do not believe we have locked ourselves into leaving.”
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The congressional postscript was a fitting conclusion to a debate that had actually begun in 2002 when Barack Obama first challenged the rationale for a war in Iraq and embraced Afghanistan as the “good war.” Another way of putting it would be to say that participants in the final deliberations claimed only that this was the day of the lesser evil. “There are no silver bullets,” said Michele Flournoy, undersecretary of defense for policy. “We looked for them.”
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But the Suez-obsessed David Kilcullen now predicted that if Obama set deadlines on a planned new troop increase in that country, he risked a major defeat: “I think this is a recipe for Dien Bien Phu in the Hindu Kush.” Withdrawing American forces in July 2011, he added, would leave Afghanistan up for grabs. “People are clearing the decks for renewed civil war.”
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Kilcullen’s conjuring up the French debacle at Dien Bien Phu was only one of several references to Vietnam ghosts that returned to walk in the Afghan mountains in recent years, stirring deep anxieties. Seizing on an even more disturbing Vietnam memory, McChrystal warned President Obama that the only alternative to sending more troops to Afghanistan was the dreaded “helicopter on the roof of the embassy.”
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Obama’s first year saw no outright disasters such as those Kennedy suffered with the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and there would be no second-year crisis to match anything like the Cuban missile crisis. But looming ahead were tests that, if less immediately dramatic,
would be every bit as fateful. When McChrystal fell from grace less than a year later, the tortured process that had produced the Afghan surge became a desperate embrace of drone warfare with its unresolved implications—all put aside in the persistent belief Americans have in technological “breakthroughs” that eliminate political obstacles.