The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat (5 page)

The night before General McChrystal was to release the report outlining what he needed to fight the war, Holbrooke gathered his team in his office. We asked him what he thought McChrystal would request. He said, “Watch! The military will give the president three choices. There will be a ‘high-risk’ option”—Holbrooke held his hand high in the air—“that is what they always call it, which will call for maybe very few troops. Low troops, high risk. Then there will be a ‘low-risk’ option”—Holbrooke lowered his hand—“which will ask for double the number
they are actually looking for. In the middle will be what they want,” which was between 30,000 and 40,000 more troops. And that is exactly what happened, along with the “high-risk” and “low-risk” vocabulary.

All along Vice President Biden had pushed for an altogether different approach. This was in effect option two. Biden noted that we had gone to Afghanistan to fight al-Qaeda, but that al-Qaeda was no longer in Afghanistan; it was in Pakistan. The CIA’s estimate was that there were as few as a hundred al-Qaeda operatives left in Afghanistan.
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Biden thought that over time there had been mission creep. Fighting terrorism (disrupting, dismantling, and destroying al-Qaeda and its affiliates, as the president defined the mission) had evolved into counterinsurgency and nation-building, and the Taliban had replaced al-Qaeda as the enemy we organized our strategic objectives against. We don’t need COIN, a functioning Afghan state, or the billions poured into rural development and local security, Biden argued, to allay America’s fear of al-Qaeda. In fact, for that we did not need Afghanistan at all. We could protect ourselves and advance our interests through a stepped-up counterterrorism effort—which was quickly dubbed “CT-Plus”—mostly directed at al-Qaeda’s sanctuary, the wild border region of Pakistan. We could use unmanned drones and Special Forces to check al-Qaeda activity from bases in Afghanistan, and achieve all the security we needed for a fraction of the money and manpower that COIN would require.

Biden’s argument favored using the resources of the CIA over those of the Pentagon, and was seen at first as an outlier, too far-fetched in assuming you could win without boots on the ground. But Biden’s view had its sincere supporters in Congress and pragmatic ones among White House domestic advisers who thought the American public was tired of the war. Holbrooke, too, thought COIN was pointless, but was not sold on CT-Plus. He thought you could not have a regional strategy built on “secret war.” Drones are no substitute for a political settlement.

There were other criticisms of COIN. In November 2009, America’s ambassador in Kabul, Karl Eikenberry, who had once led American forces in Afghanistan as a three-star army general, wrote in a cable titled “COIN Strategy: Civilian Concerns” that Afghans would have no incentive to take responsibility for government and security in their country if we kept putting more troops in. Karzai was not an “adequate
strategic partner,” wrote the ambassador, and “continues to shun responsibility for a sovereign burden.”
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A troop surge would only perpetuate that problem. Holbrooke thought Eikenberry had it right.

During the review, there was no discussion of diplomacy and a political settlement at all. A commitment to finding a political settlement to the war would have put diplomacy front and center and organized military and intelligence operations in Afghanistan to support it. Holbrooke wanted the president to consider this option, but the White House was not buying. The military wanted to stay in charge, and going against the military would make the president look weak.

CT-Plus, too, looked risky—too much like “cut and run”—and there was no guarantee that CT-Plus could work without COIN.
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In Iraq, Special Forces had taken “kill and capture” missions to industrial scale, decimating the ranks of al-Qaeda and the insurgency, and yet this did not turn the tide of that war. Counterterrorism, unlike COIN, did not win territory or win hearts and minds of the local population; CT merely amplified the impact of COIN on Iraq.

So President Obama chose the politically safe option that he did not like: he gave the military what they asked for. Months of White House hand-wringing ended up with the administration choosing the option that had been offered from day one: fully resourced COIN. But he added a deadline of July 2011 for the larger troop commitment to work; after that the surge would be rolled back. In effect, the president told both Karzai and the Taliban that our new strategy was good for a year.

Fully resourced COIN, however, failed to achieve its objective. There were ambitious pushes into Taliban territory, but gains were temporary. A much-ballyhooed counterinsurgency operation in the spring of 2010 failed to pacify Marjah.
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In mid-2010, six months after 30,000 troops were sent, an internal intelligence review presented the White House with a dire account of the security situation in Afghanistan. COIN was not bringing safety and security to Afghans as promised; more of them were dying.

COIN’s success requires expensive nation-building. To win you have to provide good government and ample social services to wean the population away from the enemy. The Obama administration did much more in this area than its predecessor, but it was not enough. The State
Department was put to work on civilian aid and assistance programs. Holbrooke the diplomat was turned into a development warrior, organizing development projects and deciding on budgets and personnel to support them. He was particularly keen on putting more agricultural workers on the ground, and became a veritable spokesman for Afghanistan’s pomegranate farmers. He would say that in a country where eight out of ten people depend on agriculture you are not going to get anywhere unless you revive the agricultural economy.

Unfortunately, economic logic would not drive American development assistance. Aid was used to serve COIN. The harder American troops had to fight to win territory, the more money they poured into development projects in the neighborhood—and not all of it wisely. Only 1 percent of Afghans live in the Helmand province, but in 2010 nearly all COIN efforts (both troops and aid money) went to Helmand.
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Or consider that in 2011, although only 6 percent of all Afghans had electricity, the United States spent $1 billion to provide electricity to mere parts of Kandahar.
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COIN was at best a game of whack-a-mole: when U.S. troops poured into a district, the Taliban packed up and went somewhere else. Security improved where Americans were posted, and deteriorated where the Taliban moved. There were not enough American soldiers to be everywhere at once, and the Afghan government did not have forces that could relieve them, so the insurgency stayed alive.

But the military told a different story. It focused on the favorable statistics for where American soldiers stood, and used that to tout COIN’s success. These claims of success gave Obama a basis for turning the tables on COIN. He was able to declare victory and ditch the policy that he did not like and that (more importantly) was not working. In June 2011, standing before the Corps of Cadets at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York, the president declared that the situation in Afghanistan had improved enough to talk of troop withdrawals. By 2014, the Afghan war would be no more. COIN had won, so we did not need it anymore.

It was a stunning shift. COIN was over, not just in Afghanistan, but also as America’s strategy of choice. America no longer needed to win counterinsurgencies or put its shoulder to nation-building, Obama
seemed to be saying; it just had to focus on decapitating terrorist organizations. CT-Plus was quietly supplanting COIN.

This was more than a shift in strategy. It announced a new set of American priorities. Fighting terrorists and fixing the failed states that they might use as bases were no longer an American priority. We had won not just in Afghanistan, but more broadly against terrorism. Now we could go back to addressing global issues. And our military strategy would reflect that.

Obama announced the new American stance in a January 5, 2012, speech on trimming the military budget. The president referred to “the end of long-term nation-building with large military footprints.” He announced that the U.S. military would be shifting gears and changing its focus to East Asia and the Pacific—a region where the higher-tech, lighter-manpower “blue” services (the navy and air force) will naturally take the lead as compared to the way boots-on-the-ground “green” services (the army and marines) bore the brunt of land combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. In a follow-up to that speech, the administration also announced an expansion of the Joint Special Operations Command (an endorsement of CT-Plus), and reiterated that America would not do any more nation-building of the kind that it had tried in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Switching strategies on the quick like this—announcing our imminent departure from Afghanistan—had a devastating impact within the region. Americans were not the president’s only audience. Power players all over the Middle East were watching carefully as America experimented with strategic plans and troop numbers, showed a will to fight, and then quickly tired of the whole affair. What they had seen had not impressed them. The dizzying pace of change in policy presented America as indecisive and unreliable. It also suggested that we really had no strategy or long-term goals. Our only goal seemed to be getting out, first of Afghanistan and then the whole region, under the cover of talk about a “strategic pivot” toward Asia.

The Norwegian historian Geir Lundestad writes that in the 1960s German leaders defended the Vietnam War before protesting German students because they thought America was doing the right thing by sticking with its strategy and its South Vietnamese ally. It sent the right message; when the time came, America would stick by them too. “It
came down unavoidably to the question if one could generally trust America.”
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From Obama’s arrival in power in 2009 through 2011, our only leverage with the Taliban, and also Pakistan, had been the sense that we would stand behind our strategy.
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It is arguable that we should never have embraced COIN, but once we did, we should not have ditched it so quickly. After the president announced our withdrawal we lost our leverage and with it our influence over the final outcome in Afghanistan. What is more, who will now believe in our intentions or our commitment? Can CT-Plus alone work in the long run without our troops, or cooperation, trust, and support from our friends and fear from our foes? Not likely. The Taliban know that once our troops are gone they will not come back—the cost would be too high. If they press us then we would more likely fold our CT-Plus operations rather than deploy more troops to protect them.

President Obama did not have good options during the strategic review, and ultimately decided that it would be better to reverse course and end COIN before its failings became evident and its costs mounted. Better to cut one’s losses, especially if one can claim some sort of victory by quoting the military. Had he had better options before him—had he
demanded
those options, as should be expected from the chief executive—then perhaps America could have avoided the costly COIN shuffle to start with.

The option that the president did not consider, and which could have spelled a very different outcome for the war and how it reflected on the United States, was the diplomatic one.

It was close to midnight on January 20, 2009, and I was about to go to sleep when my iPhone beeped. There was a new text message. It was from Richard Holbrooke. It said, “Are you up, can you talk?” I called him. He told me the president had asked him to serve as his envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. He would work out of the State Department and he wanted me to join his team. “No one knows this yet. Don’t tell anyone. Well, maybe your wife.” (It was on the
Washington Post
Web site the next day.) He continued, “Nothing is confirmed, but it is pretty much a done deal. If you get any other offers let me know right away.” Then he laughed and said, “If you work for anyone else, I will break your knees. This is going to be fun. We are going to do some good. Now get some sleep.” Before he hung up I thanked him for his offer, and said it would be a treat to work with him (which it was—the ride of a lifetime, as it turned out) and an honor to serve in government.

I met Richard Holbrooke for the first time in 2006 at a conference in Aspen. We sat together at one of the dinners and talked about Iran and Pakistan. Holbrooke ignored the keynote speech, the entertainment that followed, and the food that flowed in between to bombard me with questions. We had many more conversations over the course of the next three years. I met him for lunch or visited him at his office in New York; and after I joined him on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2007 we spoke frequently by phone.

Holbrooke was a brilliant strategic thinker in the same league as such giants of American diplomacy as Averell Harriman and Henry Kissinger. He looked at a problem from every angle and then planned how
best to tackle it. He knew what bureaucrats would say, how politicians would react, what headline would lead in the media, what the public reaction would be, and how history would render its judgment. He was a doer; that was his ambition—to
do
, not to
be
.