Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War (37 page)

I visited Afghanistan again in mid-September, primarily to publicly offer my “sincere condolences and personal regrets for the recent loss of innocent life as a result of coalition air strikes.” The press conference at which I spoke those words was televised all across Afghanistan, and I was told by our commanders that the message had a beneficial effect—though, I suspected, a temporary one. I told McKiernan to change our approach: if we thought there was a chance we were responsible for civilian casualties, I wanted us to offer the condolence payments up front and then investigate to determine the facts. Some of our officers disagreed with my approach, but I believed that even if we overpaid, it would be a pittance compared to the bad publicity we were getting. I agreed with the Afghan defense minister to establish a Joint Investigative Group to meet continuously on this issue. I also invited the Afghan (as well as U.S.) media to a briefing I received on the procedures our pilots went through to avoid civilian casualties. Despite our best efforts and repeated directives
from McKiernan, McChrystal, and Petraeus to our forces to avoid civilian casualties, the problem would continue to bedevil us.

In my private meeting with President Karzai, I filled him in on the measures we were taking to minimize civilian casualties. I told him that his penchant for going public with information—often inaccurate—was putting his allies in the worst possible light and doing real harm. I urged him to hold off speaking out about civilian casualty incidents until he learned the facts. I also reminded him that the Taliban were intentionally killing large numbers of Afghan civilians, not to mention deliberately placing them in harm’s way, and that he should speak out about that. I was not optimistic I had made any impact.

There were other aspects of our operations that created problems with civilians, and thus with Karzai. Night raids to capture or kill Taliban leaders (and avoid civilian casualties), while militarily very effective, greatly antagonized ordinary Afghans. So did the use of dogs on patrols and especially in searching houses, as I mentioned earlier, which was culturally offensive to the Afghans and about which Karzai complained to me routinely. Our troops were not always as respectful of Afghans as they should have been, including our vehicles barreling down the roads scattering pedestrians and animals. I heard, anecdotally, about an Afghan elder who showed up at the gate of the main coalition base in Kandahar to complain about some insult to his family by troops. He was ignored for three days, returned home—and his three sons then joined the Taliban. While I did not have to deal with incidents as inflammatory as troops urinating on dead Taliban or posing with body parts or burning Korans, there were enough incidents to increase my misgivings about a dramatic increase in foreign forces in the country. No matter how skilled and professional the U.S. military was, I knew that some abusive and insulting behavior by troops was inevitable. Given Afghanistan’s history, if the people came to see us as invaders or occupiers, or even as disrespectful, I believed the war would be lost.

All my overseas trips took a physical toll. Younger by a few years than my predecessor and my successor, I was nonetheless in my late sixties, and it usually took a week or so for me to recover from jet lag—and then I was off again. But the trips to Iraq and Afghanistan took a heavy emotional toll as well. I insisted on meeting and eating with troops on
every trip, as I’ve said, and all too often I could see in their faces the cost of their deployments. There weren’t many smiles. The troops all carried weapons, and I would later learn, to my chagrin, that they had to remove the ammunition before meeting with me. I suppose I understood the security precaution—there had to be more than a few who were resentful that I had sent them to such dangerous and godforsaken places—but I still didn’t like the message of mistrust.

The troop visits got harder over time because, as I looked into each face, I increasingly would wonder to myself which of these kids I would next see in the hospital at Landstuhl or Walter Reed or Bethesda—or listed for burial at Arlington cemetery. For those on the front line who ate with me, I realized it might well be the occasion for the first hot meal or shower in days if not weeks. Each forward unit I visited seemed to have its own makeshift memorial in a small tent or lean- to dedicated to those who had been killed—pictures of them, mementos of each, challenge coins. I always went in alone. Although the morale of the troops and their NCOs and officers invariably seemed high, on each visit I was enveloped by a sense of misery and danger and loss. I would fly home with my heart aching for the troops and their distant families. With each visit, I grew increasingly impatient and angry as I compared their selflessness and sacrifice with the self-promotion and selfishness of power-hungry politicians and others—in Baghdad, Kabul, and Washington. One young soldier in Afghanistan asked what kept me awake at night. I said, “You do.” With each trip to the war zones and with each passing day at home, maintaining my outward calm and discipline, and suppressing my anger and contempt for the many petty power players, became a greater challenge. Images of the troops weighed on me constantly.

I didn’t socialize in Washington. Every day I had a fight of one kind or another—usually several—and every evening I could not wait to get home, get my office homework out of the way, write condolence letters to the families of the fallen, pour a stiff drink, wolf down a frozen dinner or carry-out (when Becky was in the Northwest), read something totally unrelated to my work life, and turn out the light.

I got up at five every morning to run two miles around the Mall in Washington, past the World War II, Korean, and Vietnam memorials, and in front of the Lincoln Memorial. And every morning before dawn, I would ritually look up at that stunning white statue of Lincoln, say good morning, and sadly ask him,
How did you do it?

I first publicly discussed my concerns about Afghanistan at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on September 22, 2008, five days after a visit to the country. I was accompanied by General Cartwright. I—and everyone else—thought it would be my last hearing as secretary of defense, and so most senators preceded their questioning with very kind words about my time in office. The eulogies complete, we got down to business. Levin asked me why we weren’t responding promptly to the commander’s request for more troops in Afghanistan. I replied that the requirements had been changing, and I mentioned McKiernan’s request just the previous week when I’d been in Afghanistan. But, I continued, “We need to think about how heavy a military footprint the United States ought to have in Afghanistan, and are we better off channeling resources to build Afghan capacity?” I added that without extending tours and deployment schedules again, we didn’t have the forces available, though we might be able to meet the force needs in the spring or summer of 2009.

Levin then asked a politically loaded question: Could we meet the Afghan needs more quickly by reducing forces in Iraq faster? General Cartwright said we would need additional support structure in Afghanistan, and we would need to restructure deployment and training cycles for Afghanistan because currently both were strongly weighted toward the heavy brigade combat teams in Iraq, and the forces needed in Afghanistan would be different. Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama asked if we needed to be more humble “than we have been” in Afghanistan about how much we could change that country. The question went to the heart of many of my concerns. I told him, “We need to listen better to what the Afghan leadership is saying. If the Afghan people view foreigners as occupiers, it will never work—we need to make sure our interests are aligned with those of the Afghan people.”

By fall 2008 the president also concluded that the war in Afghanistan was not going well and directed an NSC-led review of the war, directed by Doug Lute. On September 24, I met with Cartwright (Mullen was out of town); Edelman; the assistant secretary for special operations and low-intensity conflict, Mike Vickers (a former CIA officer I had worked with on Afghanistan in the 1980s, made famous by the book and movie
Charlie Wilson’s War
), and others to go over the Defense Department
contribution to the review. Central Command had advised us that they would not be able to flow the forces requested by McKiernan until June through October 2009. Lighter forces than the brigades coming up next in the rotation for deployment were required (fewer tanks and armor, among other things); facilities needed to be constructed—barracks, air fields, and parking areas for aircraft and helicopters; the infrastructure to support thousands of additional troops.

The intelligence community was nearing completion of a national intelligence estimate—the most authoritative level of analysis—that would portray the situation in Afghanistan as very bleak. Even before publication of the estimate, the view was becoming commonplace in Washington that Afghanistan had a “feckless, incompetent, corrupt government”; the coalition was treading water; Taliban assaults on towns, even when beaten back, were undermining a sense of security and confidence in the coalition and the government; and the insurgents were getting closer to Kabul. As concerned as I was about the course of the Afghan campaign, I complained at that September meeting about the bandwagon effect of pessimism, observing that in terms of perceptions, “this situation has gone from twilight to dark in six to eight weeks.”

To change both the direction of events on the ground in Afghanistan and perceptions at home, we reviewed a number of options: a dramatic acceleration of the growth of the Afghan army; the pursuit of tribal engagement while avoiding the creation of warlords and militias and undermining the central government and army; leveraging competent local governors; providing development aid on the Pakistani side of the border; building commerce and other connections between Pashtuns on both sides of the border; concentrating our forces in those areas strategically most important—the south and east; and planning for a larger and longer-term U.S. troop commitment.

Just as in 2006, when the president decided things weren’t working in Iraq, we ended up with reviews by at least three different organizations inside the administration on what to do in Afghanistan—one at State requested by Condi, several in Defense (the Joint Staff for the military, Eric Edelman’s civilian policy unit in my office, Central Command, and probably others I didn’t even know about), and the NSC review led by Doug Lute. The key effort was at the NSC, and the recommendations looked a lot like what I had discussed with my Defense colleagues in late September: President Bush described the outcome in his memoir as “a
more robust counterinsurgency effort, including more troops and civilian resources in Afghanistan and closer cooperation with Pakistan to go after the extremists.” Lute would lead a similar review a year later under Obama and come to very different conclusions.

Given that the administration literally had only weeks more in office, we debated whether to make the review public. Based on past experience, I thought anything publicly identified with the outgoing Bush administration would immediately be junked by a new administration. Everyone agreed that it was better to pass it along quietly. And so, with some 33,000 U.S. troops in-country, several thousand more en route, almost 31,000 coalition troops there, and the commander’s pending request for another 20,000 troops or so, a troubled war in Afghanistan would be handed off to a new president. In December, Bush was prepared to approve the additional 20,000 troops, and Steve Hadley asked Obama’s national security adviser–designate Jim Jones whether the new administration preferred that Bush make the troop decision (and take the heat) or hold off. The new team opted for the second course.

I made what was originally planned to be a farewell visit to the troops in Afghanistan on December 11, 2008. In comments to the press on the trip, I warned the incoming administration to be careful in carrying out a significant buildup in a country where the experience of foreign militaries “has not been a happy one.… I think there is a concern on the part of the Afghans that we sort of tell them what we’re going to do, instead of taking proposals to them, and getting their input, and then working out with them what we’re going to do.… This is their country, their fight, and their future.” We too often lost sight of that and would suffer the consequences.

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Although several different Democratic legislative efforts to change Bush’s strategy in Iraq failed in September 2007, their criticism of the war did not flag; nor did their efforts to find new ways to get us out of there faster. There was now constant pressure to accelerate the troop drawdowns, and accusations that, despite the obviously improving security situation, the war was still a failure because the Iraqis weren’t enacting laws necessary to advance political reconciliation. As our own economic crisis began, there were growing demands in Congress that the Iraqis pay more of the
cost of the war. In September, Congress gave us only enough money to run the war for two months. In October, Senators Levin and Reid began an effort to have the Senate Appropriations Committee include language in our next funding bill calling for the withdrawal of most U.S. combat troops from Iraq within nine months of enactment of the legislation—and to give us only six months of funding. Such legislative maneuvering would continue for much of the following year, but I felt increasingly confident no legislation inhibiting our strategy would pass Congress while Bush was president.

During the fall months after the president’s surge withdrawal announcement in September, even as the security situation continued to improve, we faced a number of Iraq-related problems both in Baghdad and in Washington. One was a blow-up over private security contractors (PSCs). As the contractor presence developed in Iraq after the original invasion, there was no plan, no structure, no oversight, and no coordination. The contractors’ role grew willy-nilly as each U.S. department or agency contracted with them independently, their number eventually climbing to some 150,000. Out of some 7,300 security contractors Defense hired, nearly 6,000 did some kind of stationary guard duty.