In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan (19 page)

A Marshall Plan for Afghanistan?

Despite the limited troop commitment, there were initial indications that the Bush administration might provide significant financial assis
tance to Afghanistan. In a speech on April 17, 2002, at Virginia Military Institute (VMI), President Bush invoked the Marshall Plan. The setting was highly symbolic. George C. Marshall graduated from VMI in 1901 as senior first captain of the Corps of Cadets. He served as secretary of state under President Truman and formulated an unprecedented program of economic and military aid to postwar Germany and other nations recovering from World War II. On June 5, 1947, Marshall addressed the graduating class of Harvard University, promising American aid to promote European recovery and reconstruction. While the speech itself contained virtually no details and no numbers, the United States under the Marshall Plan would go on to provide billions of dollars in aid to Western European countries between 1947 and 1951.
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Bush’s 2002 speech at VMI had similar overtones. He remarked, for example: “We know that true peace will only be achieved when we give the Afghan people the means to achieve their own aspirations.” He then invoked Marshall in describing the road ahead in Afghanistan:

As with Marshall’s address at Harvard, Bush’s speech was vague on details, and the president did not specifically say that the United States would provide comparable levels of aid to Afghanistan. But the repeated references to the Marshall Plan certainly gave that impression. In any case, that’s how senior Afghan officials saw it; they inter
preted the speech as a commitment to significant assistance.
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But the State Department, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and the NSC initiated no major efforts to assess the requirements for a successful reconstruction effort or to generate the funding that would be necessary. Not until the fall of 2002 was Congress asked for additional money for Afghanistan, and most of that went to the Defense Department.

Despite the hope engendered by Bush’s speech, U.S. military officials had several reasons for adopting a light footprint. They wanted to prevent large-scale popular resistance similar to what the Soviet Union had encountered in the 1980s; they did not want the U.S. military engaged in peacekeeping or nation-building operations; and they ultimately believed that small numbers of ground troops and airpower, working with Afghan forces, would be sufficient to establish security.
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General Tommy Franks, who remained head of U.S. Central Command until 2003, argued that “our footprint had to be small,” after major combat ended, “for both military and geopolitical reasons. I envisioned a total of about 10,000 American soldiers, airmen, special operators, and helicopter assault crews, along with robust in-country close air support.”
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Several of his key advisers agreed, including General Victor “Gene” Renuart, the director of operations, and Lieutenant General Paul T. Mikolashek, the ground component commander. In several video teleconference calls, Franks and Secretary Rumsfeld agreed that the United States should not flood Afghanistan with large formations of conventional troops. “We don’t want to repeat the Soviets’ mistakes,” he told Rumsfeld during one meeting. “There’s nothing to be gained by blundering around those mountains and gorges with armor battalions chasing a lightly armed enemy.”
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Instead, they sent in three brigades from the 10th Mountain and 101st Airborne (Air Assault) Divisions, as well as the Marine Expeditionary Unit already at Camp Rhino in Kandahar. As mentioned earlier, most senior U.S. officials—especially in the Defense Department and the White
House—did not support deploying a peacekeeping force outside of Kabul, preferring to spend the money on training an Afghan army.

U.S. military officials were also primarily interested in countering al Qa’ida, not in nation-building. One senior U.S. official explained to Afghanistan National Security Council staffer Daoud Yaqub: “Our objective in Afghanistan is to combat al Qa’ida. Everything else is incidental.
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The UN’s Lakhdar Brahimi also agreed on a light footprint. While he had advocated expanding NATO’s peacekeeping presence outside of Kabul, his vision of the international community’s role in Afghanistan was different. Brahimi felt that the guiding principle of international efforts in Afghanistan should be to bolster Afghan capacity—both official and nongovernmental—and to rely on as limited an international presence and as many Afghan staff as possible. This marked a significant departure from the expansive UN missions in Kosovo and East Timor. Both missions, which began in 1999, included a large international military and police presence per capita, and the United Nations temporarily took over governance in both cases. Afghanistan needed to be different, Brahimi argued, and a heavy international footprint was “not necessary and not possible.” Bolstering Afghanistan’s capacity to govern itself, he thought, required Afghans taking charge of their situation wherever possible, an end that could be compromised by throwing international staff into the mix.
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In practice, the light footprint translated into one of the lowest levels of troops, police, and financial assistance in any stabilization operation since the end of World War II.

International troops and police are critical to establish security after a major war. Often, in the immediate aftermath of civil or interstate conflict, states will undergo a period of anarchy in which groups and factions seek to arm themselves for protection.
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These groups and factions may have offensive intentions and want to impose their ideology on others, seize the property of rival factions, or exploit public resources for private gain. Large numbers of troops and police
are critical for defeating and deterring these groups, patrolling borders, securing roads, combating organized crime, and policing the streets. Many of these general law-enforcement functions are best performed by police and units specially trained for urban patrols and crowd control.
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There is no simple metric for determining how many troops are necessary to secure a population.
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As Figure 7.1 illustrates, 89.3 U.S. troops per thousand inhabitants were necessary to establish security in the American sector of Germany after World War II, 17.5 troops per thousand were used in Bosnia, 35.3 per thousand were used in Eastern Slavonia, 19.3 per thousand were used in Kosovo, and 9.8 per thousand were used in East Timor. None of those conflicts were resolved easily, even at those levels of troop involvement. But the U.S. and other international forces had only about 1.6 soldiers per thousand Afghans. In terms of historical troop levels, the Afghan mission ranks with some of the international community’s most notable failures: the UN mission to the Belgian Congo (1.3 troops per thousand); the American and international intervention in
Somalia (5.7); the U.S. rescue of Haiti (2.9); and the French operation in Cote d’Ivoire (0.2).

F
IGURE
7.1
Peak International Military Presence Per Capita
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There were also no international civilian police deployed to Afghanistan to conduct law-enforcement operations.
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As Figure 7.2 shows, this was in marked contrast to such operations as Bosnia and Kosovo, where international paramilitary police had been used effectively to help establish law and order. In Bosnia, Italy deployed a small battalion of its
carabinieri
as part of the Multinational Specialized Unit to assist with refugee return, help with crowd and riot control, and promote public security by acting as a strategic reserve force.
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In Kosovo, the
carabinieri
joined the French paramilitary
gendarmerie
as part of the Multinational Specialized Unit to engage in patrolling, riot control, criminal investigation, and other public-order tasks.
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These paramilitary police forces interacted with the UN’s International Police and Training Force, who worked with civilian police. In both Bosnia and Kosovo, international police were pivotal in establishing security.

The United States has traditionally lacked a national police force like the
carabinieri
and the
gendarmerie
that it could deploy abroad. Rather, it has approximately 20,000 state and local police forces in jurisdictions scattered across the United States.
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Policing and law-enforcement services have historically been under the jurisdiction of local government. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is involved in high-level investigations but has little experience in such policing tasks as patrols and riot control. International police training has been handled by two federal agencies: the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs and the Justice Department’s International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program. Neither, however, has a cadre of civilian police ready to be deployed abroad. Both have instead relied on private firms such as DynCorp International to recruit and deploy civilian police abroad. The Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of Defense have also been involved in police training, but policing is not a core mission of either of those organizations.
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F
IGURE
7.2
Peak International Police Presence Per Capita
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At $60 per Afghan, foreign assistance over the first two years of a
nation-building operation was lower than most operations since World War II (see Fig. 7.3). States emerging from interstate or civil war have generally suffered significant damage.
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High levels of funding are necessary to cover the costs of deploying military forces and police, train indigenous police and army officers, provide lethal and nonlethal equipment, and build infrastructure.
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Assistance generally comes from an amalgam of donor states and international organizations such as the IMF, the World Bank, and the European Union. Despite the fact that Afghanistan was a safe haven for al Qa’ida terrorists and that it was the first front in what the administration referred to as a “global war on terrorism,” a wide array of U.S. government officials from the beginning of the conflict strongly opposed providing more resources for reconstruction efforts.
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Despite promises of aid, many countries never delivered. In 2002, Rumsfeld appointed Dov Zakheim—who was already serving as the under secretary of defense (comptroller) and chief financial officer for the Department of Defense—as the Pentagon’s coordinator of civilian programs in Afghanistan. Zakheim had played a pivotal role as
Rumsfeld’s principal financial adviser, overseeing all aspects of the department’s accounting and auditing systems, and negotiating major defense agreements with U.S. allies and partners. Rumsfeld asked Zakheim to take the lead in getting nonmilitary equipment to Afghanistan, including trucks and potable water. Zakheim then began a tour of allied capitals with Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs John Taylor, asking for contributions from U.S. allies.