Killing Machine (9 page)

We’ll consistently assess our efforts to train Afghan Security Forces, and our progress in combating insurgents. We will measure the growth of Afghanistan’s economy, and its illicit narcotics production. And we will review whether we are using the right tools and tactics to make progress towards accomplishing our goals.
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Strikingly absent was any significant reference to what role the Karzai government—or a potential successor regime—would have in these assessments. The United States might claim not to be interested in dictating the future of the country, but Obama’s list of American initiatives left very little to Afghan self-determination in the present—and for some time to come. The review the president promised to undertake in the next few months was only about the “right tools and tactics to make progress towards accomplishing our goals.” Despite the counterinsurgency rhetoric employed here, Obama had left his military options open, and was cautiously preparing the way for greater use of, and justification for, drones inside Pakistan and other countries. Foreign policy in the new administration seemed to be determined to cover all bets, in the hope that one or more would pay off big.

A Brief Season of Optimism

On March 29, 2009, Secretary of Defense Gates went on the Sunday morning news show hosted by Fox News’ Chris Wallace. Although this was enemy territory for Obama administration figures, Wallace had also asked difficult questions of Bush’s vice president, Dick Cheney, and his insights were often like pointed daggers. This time he began with a question about the differences between Bush’s policy and the new Obama policy. After all was said and done, were there any real differences about the expected outcome in Afghanistan? Had Obama narrowed the mission or not? Gates stumbled a bit at the outset: “I think the—the near-term objectives have been narrowed. I think our long-term objective still would be to see a flourishing democracy in Afghanistan.” But for the immediate future the focus was making headway against the Taliban, reversing its momentum, really going after al Qaeda.
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Would seventeen thousand additional troops really be enough, Wallace asked, to mount an effective counterinsurgency strategy? Gates’s response was a study in ambiguity.

We have fulfilled all of the requirements that General McKiernan has put down for 2009, and my view is there’s no need to ask for more troops, ask the president to approve more troops, until we see how the troops we—he already has approved are in there, how they are doing, what the Europeans have done. And we will be reviewing that come the end of the year . . . About a year from now we need to reevaluate this strategy and see if we’re making progress.

Wallace zeroed in on the ambiguity in the message Obama had delivered two days earlier and in what Gates was now saying.

       
WALLACE:
The commitment to defeat the Taliban and al Qaeda—is that subject to review?

       
GATES:
I don’t think so.

       
WALLACE:
That is the commitment.

       
GATES:
Certainly, to defeat al Qaeda and—and make sure that Afghanistan and western Pakistan are not safe havens for them.

Wallace zeroed in on another crucial matter: what about reports that Pakistani intelligence had provided the Taliban and other extremists with money, supplies, and even tips on what the coalition planned to do next? Gates did not deny the accusation, and indeed elaborated on his personal contact with Pakistani agents who had had contacts with “these groups” during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. His mission then had been to see that weapons got sent to the right people to use against the Russians, he told Wallace. Pakistani eagerness to cooperate always had much to do with the long-term question of which country would have a dominant influence in Afghanistan: Pakistan or India, or possibly Iran. So Pakistani behavior was partly a hedge against what would happen if the Americans walked away. The United States needed to convince Islamabad that it would be there as a steadfast ally and “that they don’t need the hedge.”

Were America’s allies willing to support all these goals? Obama had alluded to the sacrifices the allies were making, but he could not hide the truth that the “coalition,” as it was called, was largely an Anglo-American affair, with token contributions from others—just enough to portray such support on Capitol Hill as an international consensus for the war. But Wallace was not having any of that feel-good stuff: “Have we given up on the idea of getting our allies to send more combat troops to fight alongside the U.S. in Afghanistan?”

“No, we haven’t,” Gates protested. “I think some of our allies will send additional forces there to provide security before the August elections in Afghanistan.” He realized, of course, that such an answer was unlikely to impress Wallace or any of his viewers, and added, “I think what we’re really interested in for the longer term from our partners and the allies is helping us with this civilian surge in terms of experts in agriculture, and finance, and governance and so on to help us improve the situation inside Afghanistan, give a sense of forward progress on the part of the Afghan people.”

If there was one word American policy makers could never stop repeating, it was “progress.” Just like their predecessors in the Bush administration, Obama administration officials constantly talked about “progress,” or used the phrase “metrics of progress.” After the Wallace interview with Gates, there was the equally important session
Philadelphia Inquirer
columnist and foreign policy expert Trudy Rubin had with General David Petraeus, then head of Central Command, whose oversight stretches from Lebanon to Pakistan’s border with India. She began with a tough question about the new policy: why should Americans support it? It had to do with al Qaeda, the general replied, which had established itself in the border areas between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Al Qaeda and its extremist Islamist allies, including the Taliban, posed “an ever-more-serious threat to Pakistan’s very existence.” What stands out in the general’s answers is the indeterminate nature of the enemy.
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Sending seventeen thousand troops, said Rubin, did not constitute a surge. Replied Petraeus, “You don’t have a raging insurgency in every part of Afghanistan. Seventy percent of the violence is in 10 percent of the districts.” Hence it was not necessary to have the ratio of troops to population called for by counterinsurgency rules of thumb. But, insisted Rubin, hadn’t the commander in Afghanistan, General David McKiernan, asked for ten thousand more troops over and above the seventeen thousand? Petraeus asserted that more were not needed, adding that there should be assessments made over time. “What struck me most about my conversation with Petraeus,” commented Rubin, “was the complexity of the AfPak project he described.”

Petraeus’s prediction about troop needs could have proven embarrassing, though few would recall his words later, when Obama called for an additional thirty thousand soldiers to complete the job. What did arise, again, was the troubling matter of defining the enemy. The issue was neatly framed during a question-and-answer session with Secretary Gates some weeks afterward, where the first question was about the new president’s first hundred days, the Franklin D. Roosevelt New Deal standard by which all later presidents were judged by the press. “I think he’s doing very well” given
all the challenges that he faced when he took the oath of office, Gates replied. The subject quickly turned to Afghanistan and rumors about possible negotiations with Taliban leaders. A reporter noted that Gates had said that “perhaps even the majority of people fighting, though not the leadership, might be reconcilable.” There were also stories of American military officers making such approaches. Was there an effort being made to draw away parts of the Taliban from the central leadership? Gates replied, “Based on the information available to us, some considerable proportion of the Taliban essentially do this as a job. They get paid for it. And if alternative means of employment can be found, they probably could be fairly easily drawn away. And there is really no political agenda associated with it at all.”
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Within a few weeks the American commander in Afghanistan, General David McKiernan, was out—a change that Petraeus wanted—and had been replaced by Petraeus’s candidate, General Stanley McChrystal, who was given a fourth star and put in charge of turning things around. This was definitely not an Obama “take-charge” moment, in which the president showed the Pentagon who was boss. It had been rumored for some time that McKiernan would be replaced, as observers noted that Gates had little tolerance for what he considered inadequate performance by subordinates. When Gates traveled to Kabul to tell McKiernan the bad news personally, the secretary said to reporters without further elaboration, “It’s time for new leadership and fresh eyes.” Behind the scenes, however, Pentagon officials talked about how McKiernan had gotten stuck in old thinking as the military moved to the new counterinsurgency paradigm.

One of the marks against McKiernan was that he had asked for more troops than the seventeen thousand Obama approved upon announcing the new policy. Apparently it was what McKiernan might do with those troops that mattered, not the request itself. He was accused of not paying enough attention to training an Afghan army—presumably the backbone of the new Afghanistan state to be built to counterinsurgency specifications. In another sign of the times, a principal backer of McChrystal was retired general Jack
Keane—sometimes called the godfather of the Iraq surge. Keane had gotten to know Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during her Senate years, and they got along famously. Meeting her early in the Obama administration, Keane bear-hugged his friend and then got straight to the point. Clinton had been saying that there was no use trying to build up a first-class army, but Keane frowned on such talk: “Don’t let people tell you we can’t do this.” And as for whom he had in mind for such a task? McChrystal, who was, “without a doubt, the best candidate.”
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McChrystal’s reputation was built as a commander of the special forces team in Iraq, which used interrogations of prisoners to hunt down and kill al Qaeda leaders such as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in 2006. Zarqawi was killed by a five-hundred-pound bomb in an air attack after McChrystal’s unit discovered his hiding place. Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, joined by others such as British prime minister Tony Blair, had exulted in this achievement. The killing of Zarqawi, said Rumsfeld, eliminated “the leading terrorist in Iraq and one of the three senior al-Qaeda leaders worldwide.” In a news conference after a NATO meeting, he said, “I think arguably over the last several years, no single person on this planet has had the blood of more innocent men, women and children on his hands than Zarqawi.” For once, however, President Bush did not rush in with a “mission accomplished” moment, but greeted the news with a somber mien. “We can expect the terrorists and insurgents to carry on without him,” Bush said in a Rose Garden statement, with several top aides standing by, including Vice President Cheney, national security adviser Stephen Hadley, and deputy chief of staff Karl Rove. “Yet the ideology of terror has lost one of its most visible and aggressive leaders.”
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Bush’s comment raised, however indirectly, the question of why McChrystal, “a renowned manhunter,” was put “in charge of a population-centric counterinsurgency strategy.”
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For security reasons, little was known of McChrystal’s previous history as commander of special operations in charge of units from all the services. That history was filled with shadowy doings, including black ops connected with a notorious interrogation center in Iraq known as Camp
Nama, where the military held suspected terrorists and refused to allow the Red Cross access. His most criticized action, however, resulted from the case of Corporal Pat Tillman. He was accused of abetting a cover-up of Tillman’s death from “friendly fire” in order to create a heroic legend around the feel-good story of a National Football League player who volunteered in the aftermath of 9/11. Through perseverance the Tillman family ultimately discovered the truth, and McChrystal was reprimanded for his part in the deception. But getting Zarqawi was more important to the war effort, it was clear, and the general got his fourth star and sailed through congressional hearings on the Afghan command.
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According to one analysis of the firing of McKiernan and McChrystal’s appointment, there were two main reasons—beyond the personal intervention of his sponsor, Petraeus—this was so easily accomplished. The first was his reputation for getting things done with the resources at hand. A retired Army officer and military commentator, Ralph Peters, said, “McChrystal will ask for more authority, not more troops.” The second reason was that the Joint Chiefs of Staff expected McChrystal to take a firm stand with Afghan president Hamid Karzai about drug-running operations that funded the Taliban and about the thick atmosphere of corruption that hung over Kabul. Gates’s press secretary, Geoff Morrell, enthused in an interview that McChrystal and his deputy commander were “champing at the bit” to get back on the front lines. “They’re rested and raring to go,” he said. “They understand the strategy. They’re determined to win. They will do what is necessary to win.”
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Gates had declared in an interview that the pace of the war had to change; now it would for certain. After Iraq, nobody was prepared for a long slog, “where it is not apparent we are making headway.” “The troops are tired; the American people are pretty tired.” Americans would have the patience to continue only if the new military approach began to move the conflict out of deadlock. “If we can show progress, and we are headed in the right direction, and we are not in a stalemate where we are taking significant casualties, then you can put more time on the Washington clock.”
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