Killing Machine (31 page)

As the Libyan campaign extended from weeks to months, a somewhat surprising coalition in Congress of Republicans and antiwar Democrats challenged Obama on the grounds that he had violated the 1973 War Powers Resolution Congress had passed to keep Richard Nixon—and future presidents—from waging war without legislative sanctions. House Speaker John A. Boehner wrote the president that a divisive debate had originated in Obama’s “lack of genuine consultation . . . and by the lack of visibility and leadership from you and your administration.” White House press secretary Jay Carney noted how Boehner and some of his colleagues were expressing views “inconsistent” with past comments “about the constitutionality of the War Powers Resolution.”
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Tweaking the Republicans did not answer the direct question about whether the administration was in violation of the War Powers Resolution. For that, White House lawyers drafted a thirty-two-page response that centered on the point that there were no
American soldiers fighting in Libya, so the resolution did not apply. It was hard not to feel that something more was at stake here than simply an argument about the kind of intervention Libya represented, something that Boehner alluded to with his comment about “the lack of visibility.” During the summer of 2011, while the argument about aiding NATO forces engaged in Libya continued in Congress, there were seemingly conflicting desires expressed for the United States to become more engaged in Syria by helping the rebel cause as it attempted to overthrow another longtime dictator, Bashar al-Assad. There were complaints that the president had let the UN dictate policy and that it was America’s duty to intervene by supplying arms, at the very least. In August Obama declared that Assad must resign in favor of a democratic transition, but he shied away from any hint that the United States would put boots on the ground in the country. “The Syrian people have had forty years of induced political coma,” said an anonymous official. “People are getting confident, they’re engaged politically and they’re not afraid anymore. The United States will support their movement but will respect their desire to chart a new course for themselves but without international interference.”
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The principal reason for not extending military aid to the rebels over the next eighteen months was the fear that al Qaeda had penetrated their ranks and, if they did triumph, it would open up yet another front in the war on terror—one where it would not be easy to eliminate the leaders using drones. But there was absolutely no inclination to try applying counterinsurgency lessons there over the course of many years, either. John Nagl, author of
Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife
(2005) and one of the godfathers of Field Manual 3-24 from his Fort Leavenworth days with David Petraeus, had left the army to become president of the Center for a New American Security, a rendezvous spot for counterinsurgency-oriented researchers and advocates. In a National Public Radio interview at the end of 2011, he was asked what changes he had seen in the decade since 9/11.

Trying to blend the old with the new, Nagl said, the nation now had a military that could confront “non-state actors, terrorists and
insurgents, on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, and inside a half a dozen or a dozen other countries around the globe, where terrorists are plotting, continuing to work their nefarious deeds.” Nagl was close to going off message here, because the official narrative fashioned by John Brennan in his September 2011 speech was that drones were the proper weapons
only
to take out terrorists whose activities posed an imminent threat to American lives or interests. The debate was over how one defined
imminent
. Fighting insurgencies was supposedly a different matter altogether, and there was the rub. But Nagl continued with his discussion of how the military special ops forces had come together with the CIA, and how the goal of the air force in using drones was to establish absolute superiority around the globe. “So that we’re seeing big, big changes, I think, in how we think about war, the advance of robots, not just in the air but on the sea, under the sea and on the ground, is going to be, I think, one of the big stories of the next decade.”
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Already at the time of the interview more than half of those polled thought the United States should not be at war in Afghanistan; less than four months later, that number had grown to nearly 70 percent of respondents. Perhaps more tellingly, almost the same percentage believed the fighting was going “somewhat” or “very” badly.
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As these facts were soaking into the political landscape surrounding the election year playing fields, however, much worse was to come.

A previously unheralded lieutenant colonel named Daniel L. Davis had been sent to Afghanistan to patrol with American troops, covering nine thousand miles in all. Davis wrote a report for his superiors in the Pentagon on the “true” situation he found there, a report that disputed nearly every detail of the upbeat handouts that had been stuffed into media outlets since the march on Marja. After talking with his minister at the McLean Bible Church, Colonel Davis caused a stir by going public with his views in an article in the
Armed Forces Journal
titled “Truth, Lies and Afghanistan: How Military Leaders Have Let Us Down.” His experience, he told reporters, had caused him to doubt reports of progress from everyone, including the new head of the CIA, David H. Petraeus.
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The eighty-four-page report he gave to his superiors began, “Senior ranking US military leaders have so distorted the truth when communicating with the US Congress and American people in regards to conditions on the ground in Afghanistan that the truth has become unrecognizable.” Within a week
Rolling Stone
had obtained a copy of the unclassified version, and the article Davis wrote for the
Armed Forces Journal
was viewed more than 800,000 times, making it one of the periodical’s most widely read articles in a decade. Davis won the Ridenhour Prize for Truth-Telling, awarded by the progressive Nation Institute and the Fertel Foundation. It also made him a pariah in the Pentagon; he told an interviewer he did not know if he could hold on for the two more years needed to qualify for a military pension.
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Newsweek
’s veteran correspondent Leslie Gelb asked Vice President Biden straight out: “What are our vital interests in continuing to fight a major war in Afghanistan?” Al Qaeda had been decimated, Biden began, and was not likely to stage a comeback. So, interrupted Gelb, the United States no longer needed to fight there? Wrong, replied Biden; Americans still had to fight to make sure Pakistan, a country that was home to tens of millions of people and was the possessor of nuclear weapons, did not somehow begin to disintegrate or fall apart. Making Kabul strong enough to negotiate reconciliation would allow the emergence of a government that could resist an al Qaeda resurgence and that would not harbor “any other organization” intending “to do damage to us and our allies.”
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Getting a firm grasp on such circular arguments was difficult. At the center of the American problem was, as former policy makers saw it, “war fatigue.” “Yes,” said former defense secretary William Cohen, “the American people are suffering from a tremendous recession in this country, a jobless recovery—if there is such a thing as a recovery taking place—and knowing that we have invested over a trillion and a half dollars in Iraq and Afghanistan, they see no end in sight.” Former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft concurred: the Afghan War was “so long, it’s so expensive in terms of fatalities and dollars. Yes—we’re exhausted.”
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Real offshore balancing could not come soon enough. The former policy makers agreed that somehow the administration would have to make a better case for sticking it out—whatever the strategy. “The U.S.,” said Cohen, “is not going to do it on a scale that we have done in the past.”

Exiting the Labyrinth

The early months of 2012 brought a series of events that only increased the demands for lifting the boots out of Afghanistan. On January 30 in an “online town hall” sponsored by Google, Obama took a question from Evan in Brooklyn, who said that the president had “ordered more drone attacks in your first year than your predecessor did in his entire term.” Given the persistent reports of civilian casualties, Evan was “curious to know how you feel they help the nation and whether you think they are worth it.”

“I want to make sure that people understand that drones have not caused a huge number of civilian casualties,” Obama replied. “For the most part, they have been very precise, precision strikes against al-Qaeda and their affiliates.” The United States was not just sending in a “whole bunch of strikes willy-nilly.” The drone strikes were a “focused effort at people who are on a list of active terrorists, who are trying to go in and harm Americans, hit American facilities, American bases and so on. . . . I think we have to be judicious in how we use drones,” he added.
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The next day White House press secretary Jay Carney was asked if the president really meant to break the doctrine of silence about drone warfare. Were his statements to Evan purposeful or something of a slip? The dialogue with reporters went this way:

       
Q:
Jay, in the President’s Google+ video chat he acknowledged for the first time the classified drone program. Why did he do that?

       
CARNEY:
I’m sorry, can you be more specific?

       
Q:
He acknowledged the drone program for the first time.

       
CARNEY:
Well, I’ll tell you, since his first day in office, President Obama has directed that we use all tools of national power in
an aggressive campaign to thwart the terrorist threat posed by al Qaeda and to degrade and ultimately destroy that organization. While al Qaeda has been significantly degraded as a result of our counterterrorism operations, the group continues to pose a serious threat to U.S. interests, including to the homeland. That is why we remain relentless in taking the fight to al Qaeda wherever they seek safe haven and support. And I will also note that a hallmark of our counterterrorism efforts has been our ability to be exceptionally precise, exceptionally surgical and exceptionally targeted in the implementation of our counterterrorism operations. That was the point the President was making. This is something that President Obama has demanded. And all of our efforts, counterterrorism efforts, are designed with precision as an essential component.

       
Q:
Was it purposeful, what he said?

       
CARNEY:
Look, I would just refer you to what the President said and to note that the point he was making is that our counterterrorism efforts, by his order, include very concerted efforts to be targeted and surgical.

       
Q:
He doesn’t address whether it was purposeful or not. I mean, that’s what I’m asking, if he made a mistake.

       
CARNEY:
He’s the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces of the United States. He’s the President of the United States. I would point you to his comments. I’m not going to discuss broadly or specifically supposed covert programs. I would just point you to what he said.
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In the weeks after Obama’s “revelation,” there was a cascade of news about the American ground role in Afghanistan. First Panetta, now secretary of defense, announced that NATO hoped to end its combat mission by the middle of 2013. Then he amended that to say that there might be some troops in active combat roles later. “It’s still a pretty robust role that we’ll be engaged in,” he went on; it wouldn’t be a formal combat role, but the troops there would always be combat ready. “We will be because we always have to be in order to defend ourselves.” Did this mean that it had been
decided to stop seeking out Taliban strongholds inside Afghanistan after mid-to late 2013? No, that was apparently not what he meant. Panetta clarified, “We’re committed to an enduring presence there.”
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Yet the “commitment” was as lacking in specifics as the administration’s revelations about drone lists and justifications had been.

The news from Afghanistan, on the other hand, was both specific and unwelcome. First there was the accidental burning of Korans by American troops at Bagram Air Base that set off protests and riots. Members of the Afghan parliament called on their countrymen to take up arms and fight. “Americans are invaders, and jihad against Americans is an obligation,” said one member of the parliament who represented the district where four demonstrators were killed. President Karzai used the situation to demand that the prison at Bagram, which housed three thousand suspected insurgents, be turned over to his government. Protesters filled the streets around parliament. One man who joined the crowds said the protests were not just about burning Korans but also were about an episode in Helmand where American Marines urinated on dead bodies of insurgents, and a recent air strike in another province that killed eight young Afghans. “They always admit their mistakes,” he said. “They burn our Koran and then they apologize. You can’t just disrespect our holy book and kill our innocent children and make a small apology.”
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A few days later a spate of “green on blue” attacks—attacks by Afghan soldiers on American soldiers—apparently provided a warning signal that the Taliban had infiltrated the new defense force the United States was building to take over the combat role in less than two years. At first Secretary Panetta insisted that the “brutal attacks . . . will not alter our commitment to get this job done.” The strategy of working closely with Afghan forces would not change, he asserted. Later in the year, as the attacks continued, Panetta claimed they were signs of Taliban desperation. “The reality is, the Taliban has not been able to regain any territory lost. So they’re resorting to these kinds of attacks to create havoc.” Havoc was a real threat to the American mission, but by the Pentagon’s
own estimate, only about 10 percent of green-on-blue attacks involve Taliban infiltration.
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