America At War - Concise Histories Of U.S. Military Conflicts From Lexington To Afghanistan (43 page)

Within the city, firefights took place as well. For two days the Iraqis and the fedayeen tried to kill the Americans, who, having been resupplied, were able to respond in kind. The violence of the combat within Baghdad and at the three intersections, indeed throughout the campaign, can be seen in the following account of one incident as told by David Zucchino in his book about Thunder Run. Captain Stephen Barry was an American officer in Baghdad during the fighting. At one point, his unit sees a white sedan moving directly at it. Barry then gives the order to fire.

Three tanks opened up. . . . The sedan caught fire and crashed. Two men climbed out and both went down, killed instantly. . . . Thirty seconds later, a white Jeep Cherokee sped down the bridge span. . . . 50 caliber rounds shattered the windshield. The Cherokee exploded. The fireball was huge—so big that Barry was certain the vehicle had been loaded with explosives. He knew the difference between a burning car and the detonation of explosives. This was a suicide car.

And they kept coming—sedans, pickups, a Chevy Caprice, three cars in the first ten minutes, six more right after that. The tanks destroyed them all. It was incomprehensible. Barry kept thinking:
What the hell is wrong with these people?
They were trying to ram cars into tanks. It was futile—absolutely senseless. It was like they
wanted
to die. . . . Barry hated slaughtering them. And that’s what it was—slaughter.

They were the enemy . . . but it gave Barry no pleasure to kill them.

On April 10, just five days from when U.S. armored units had made their first foray into Baghdad, organized resistance ended. Within the city, the fighting had produced casualties—most of them Iraqi and fedayeen—but McKiernan’s troops now controlled the capital. Saddam had fled and his government had collapsed. Four days later, on April 14, the United States declared major combat operations to have ended.

“Mission Accomplished” read a banner on the USS
Abraham Lincoln
, one of the aircraft carriers that had participated in Operation Iraqi Freedom. In just twenty-six days the Americans had taken control of Iraq. Little did they expect that the hard part was just beginning.

***

The war against Saddam and his army had been a success. The occupation that followed was not. Throughout Iraq, especially in the cities, American troops first hailed as liberators soon came to be seen as foreigners occupying a country in which they did not belong and governing a people they did not understand.

The immediate problem was one of looting. Once Saddam’s regime collapsed, law and order disappeared. Iraqis responded by breaking into stores and office buildings, and walking off with whatever they could take. U.S. soldiers and marines just looked on, unwilling to stop the thefts. “We did not come to Iraq,” said one American commander, “to shoot some fellow making off with a rug.”

The looting foreshadowed the violence that was to permeate postwar Iraq. Once Saddam’s hold on power ceased, Iraqis chose to seek vengeance on other Iraqis. Shiites killed Sunnis. Sunnis murdered Shiites. Revenge was sweet. Baghdad became a bloody city whose inhabitants were at war with one another. American troops were the only force potentially capable of freeing Iraq from violence. But they were too few in number. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld had mandated a small military presence in Iraq, expecting the Iraqi army and police force to maintain order once the combat was over. Yet the army had disappeared. Soldiers simply had taken off their uniforms and gone home, while the police were incompetent, capable of little more than traffic control. So as spring turned to summer and summer gave way to fall, Iraq was home to a rampage of killings that the Americans were unable to prevent.

Only in time and when President Bush ordered a surge in the number of troops stationed in Iraq did the violence recede. But for several years following the ouster of Saddam, Iraqis targeted American soldiers and workers. U.S. casualties were many, and constant. Extremists wanted either to destabilize the governing authorities or force the Americans to leave. Not surprisingly, back in the United States, the country’s citizens were angered by what they saw happening in Iraq. Bombs were exploding and people were dying. Opposition to the American presence in Iraq grew as many Americans came to believe that the war had been wrong and the occupation a failure.

As the killing continued—often by suicide bombers—the United States was attempting to rebuild Iraq. Funneling literally billions and billions of dollars into the country, America hoped to create an infrastructure equal to that of any modern country. In this effort the success would be limited.

The difficulties were threefold. The first was the task itself, which was much larger than the U.S. had expected. The second was the corruption that seemed to permeate Iraqi society. The third difficulty, and the most serious, was the lack of security. Workers attempting to rebuild the country’s infrastructure were the target of attack by Iraqis attempting to foil America’s reconstruction efforts.

The result was that the rebuilding of Iraq was less successful, took longer, and cost more than the Americans expected. Iraqis, at least those without blood on their hands, were frustrated. While during the days of Saddam electric power had been limited, those in Baghdad could not now understand why it remained so. How, they asked, could a nation that had landed men on the moon not be able to provide ample electricity to Iraq’s capital?

Despite the violence and the slow pace of rebuilding, the United States did enjoy a few successes in postwar Iraq. Preparations had been made in case food shortages emerged. They did not, but nonetheless, no Iraqi went hungry once American troops controlled the country. Iraqi currency, festooned with images of Saddam, was swiftly and successfully replaced. Much later, in 2005, the United States prodded the Iraqis into drafting a new constitution and holding free and open elections, activities then rarely seen in the Arab world.

At first, the American effort to rebuild Iraq was given to the newly established Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance. This was led by Jay Garner, a retired senior American army officer. One of his key staff members, David Nummy, wrote that Garner

struck me as one of those people who had successfully made the transition from warrior to statesman. He was a natural leader and understood the differences between waging war and establishing peace. From my perspective, he had the correct vision for post-invasion Iraq—to get life back to normal as quickly as possible and turn the country back to the Iraqis.

However, with insufficient resources and an environment marred by violence, Garner had no chance of succeeding and did not. He was replaced by Ambassador L. Paul Bremer, who, reporting to Rumsfeld, essentially ruled the country. Bremer inherited an extremely difficult situation, made worse by two of his early decisions. He chose not to immediately reconstitute the Iraqi army, and he forbade most of Saddam’s Baathist Party members from participating in the rebuilding efforts. The former meant security forces were insufficient to keep order, while the latter deprived the effort of individuals capable of carrying it out.

The occupation of Iraq can be said to have ended on August 18, 2010, when, at the direction of President Barack Obama, the last U.S. combat troops left the country. For the United States, the experience had been a painful one. After nearly nine years in Iraq, more than 4,480 American soldiers and marines were dead.

During the time when U.S. soldiers and marines were on patrol in a postwar Iraq, when combat with Iraqi army units had ended, many Americans questioned the wisdom of the war itself, especially as body bags kept arriving at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. These Americans viewed the conflict as a grave mistake. After all, they pointed out, no nuclear weapons were ever discovered. And Saddam’s alleged possession of such devices had been a primary justification for the invasion.

Others disagreed. They noted that Iraq became, if slowly, a land with a much reduced level of violence. And they pointed out that the country’s leaders had come to power via free and open elections. Regardless of how history judges Operation Iraqi Freedom, there is no doubt that the United States military, spearheaded by American armored forces, performed extremely well. George Patton would have approved.

Did Saddam have any realistic hope of defeating the American and British forces that invaded Iraq?

No, he did not. In equipment, training, tactics, and leadership, the British and Americans outclassed the Iraqis, who, at times, fought courageously, but never in a manner that would result in victory.

Did President Bush rush into war with Iraq?

His critics certainly think so. But Mr. Bush gave Saddam ample opportunity to comply with the United Nations resolutions and thus to avoid armed conflict. Moreover, well before the March 2003 invasion, the American president went to the U.N. and secured a resolution that he and others believed authorized the use of force.

Did Saddam’s government possess nuclear weapons?

American and other intelligence services had told President Bush that a very strong case could be made that Iraq had nuclear weapons. However, postwar searches failed to discover any. To be sure, Iraq had the capability to develop such devices. But, in fact, Saddam did not have these weapons in his military arsenal.

In what other way did the American government miscalculate?

Incredibly, the Department of Defense, having made and executed extensive plans for the defeat of the Iraqi military, made few plans for the administration of Iraq once combat had ended. Secretary Rumsfeld and his colleagues
incorrectly assumed that American troops would be able to leave Iraq soon after Saddam’s regime had been ousted. “There is no plan,” said Richard Perle, one of these colleagues, “for an extended occupation in Iraq.” But Secretary of State Colin Powell had warned President Bush that once the United States “broke” Iraq, it would “own” the country. Having done the former, America became responsible for Iraq, at least for maintaining order and for helping to rebuild the country. In the event, both tasks proved difficult and expensive. The U.S. Treasury would send bundles of dollars to Iraq. More importantly, coffins containing the bodies of dead American soldiers would be flown home from Iraq for years after the fall of Saddam.

What happened to Saddam Hussein?

As American armored units entered Baghdad, Saddam went into hiding. Not until December of that year, 2003, was he found, in an underground hole near Tikrit, north of the capital. The Americans who located him interrogated the former ruler and then turned him over to the Iraqis. They brought him to trial and, not surprisingly, found him guilty. On December 30, 2006, they hung Saddam Hussein.

12

AFGHANISTAN

2001–2014

On Christmas Eve of 1979, the Soviet Union, intent on establishing a more pliable regime, invaded Afghanistan, its neighbor to the south. Ten years later Soviet forces departed. Their efforts to subjugate this strategically located country had failed. Wrecked Soviet tanks and helicopters littered the countryside, while more than fourteen thousand dead Russian soldiers testified to the fiasco. Native Afghan forces, financed by the Saudis and armed by both the Americans and the Pakistanis, had defeated a much larger, more powerful invader.

What followed was a period of political instability and armed conflict. Afghanistan was (and is) a hyperbolic mixture of tribal loyalties, religious fervor, and incompetent central governments. Yet, by 1996, when the capital city of Kabul fell, a new political-religious movement had gained control. This was the Taliban. They were Islamic fundamentalists full of hatred for anyone who did not share their beliefs. By Western standards, their values were primitive. They forbade women to work or to be educated. They closed movie theaters and banned music. They forced men to grow beards and punished theft by amputating hands. In general, they created a civic society few admired. Among the Taliban’s more reprehensible actions was the deliberate destruction of one of the world’s great archaeological treasures, two 115-foot-high sandstone statues of Buddha in the city of Bamiyan. At least this action killed no one, unlike the massacre of the ethnic Hazaras who died by the thousands.

Not surprisingly the Taliban enjoyed little support outside their own country. However, one nation aided the fanatics. Pakistan supplied the Taliban with weapons and financial aid. Other entities also supporting the Taliban were wealthy Islamic extremists. One of these was an individual who would play a key role in American military history.

His name was Osama Bin Laden.

Bin Laden was a Saudi who loathed the United States. The founder of the terrorist group al-Qaeda, Bin Laden dedicated his life—and his fortune—to killing Americans. Their coarse behavior and presence in the Middle East, as well as their support of Israel, made them, Bin Laden believed, enemies of Islam.

In 1992 al-Qaeda conducted its first operation against the United States, a bombing of a hotel in Yemen that on occasion housed American troops. Ten months later, in February 1993, one of its disciples attempted to bring down the World Trade Center in New York by exploding a bomb that killed six people and injured more than a thousand. More successful, at least judging by the number of dead, was the subsequent attack upon the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, which killed 224 individuals, not all of them Americans. And in October 2000, Bin Laden’s group struck an American naval vessel, the USS
Cole
, in the harbor of Aden, in Yemen. Seventeen sailors were killed.

By then, U.S. intelligence was aware of Bin Laden and his al-Qaeda organization. In response to the earlier attacks, the United States, at the direction of President Bill Clinton, had conducted a missile strike against an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan. But this attack, and what Bin Laden had so far done, were but minor preludes to what would follow.

At 8:42
A.M.
on September 11, 2001, a commercial airliner, hijacked by al-Qaeda operatives, deliberately flew into the north tower of New York’s World Trade Center. On board the American Airlines Boeing 767 were ninety-two individuals, including the hijackers. Eighteen minutes later, a second plane flew into the south tower. The two crashes soon brought down the Twin Towers and, in total, caused the death of 2,752 people. But al-Qaeda was not finished. At 9:43
A.M.
another hijacked airliner, again in kamikaze style, struck the Pentagon, home to America’s military, located across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. A fourth airliner, United Airlines flight 93 heading for San Francisco, also was hijacked. But its passengers, aware of what had occurred in New York and Washington, stormed the hijackers. This caused the plane to crash in a field southeast of Pittsburgh. Most likely, the plane was targeting the White House or the Capitol. All aboard were killed.

September 11, 2001, became, as December 7, 1941, was, a date that for the United States will live in infamy.

Al-Qaeda seemed to have triumphed. It successfully struck the American homeland. And by destroying the World Trade Center and damaging the Pentagon, al-Qaeda had hit two major symbols of American power. While most people around the world were appalled by the events of September 11, many in Islamic countries rejoiced. They believed that the United States and its citizens had gotten what they deserved.

Most certainly, Bin Laden believed that. In 1998 he had published an edict that called on Muslims everywhere to kill Americans wherever and whenever possible. For the al-Qaeda leader, September 11, 2001, was a great victory. He had planned and executed a mighty blow against the infidels.

America’s response was swift. Within two weeks U.S. Special Forces and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) personnel landed in Afghanistan, where al-Qaeda was based and where its leader lived, courtesy of the Taliban. Arming Afghans opposed to the Taliban and simply bribing others, these U.S. forces and their Afghan allies, augmented by high-tech American air assets, overthrew the Taliban, killing many and causing Bin Laden and his people to retreat into the caves of Tora Bora in the mountains that line Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan. Despite extensive efforts to find him, efforts that included B-52 air strikes, Bin Laden escaped. He took up residence in Pakistan, from where, often with the complicity of Pakistanis, he would remain for more than ten more years, plotting to kill Americans.

In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, President George W. Bush vowed that the United States would bring the al-Qaeda leader to justice. Vast American resources, both human and financial, were allocated to this task. For many years, Osama Bin Laden survived, managing his cohorts, hoping to repeat the success of September 11. The latter he was unable to achieve, though not for lack of effort.

Then, on the night of May 2, 2011, U.S. Navy commandos raided a compound in Abbottabad, a town in Pakistan that is home to that nation’s military academy. American intelligence officials suspected the compound to be housing Osama Bin Laden. Their suspicions proved correct. He was there. The Americans shot him dead and took his body with them as they departed. Shortly thereafter, his remains, having been placed aboard an American warship, were deposited into the sea.

The raid was daring in the extreme, especially given that the Pakistanis were not told of the incursion. This time it was Americans who rejoiced.

***

While the Taliban was overthrown in 2001, they had not been eliminated. Many found sanctuary in Pakistan. They would hide—and thrive—in the country’s western mountains. Known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, these were lands in which Pakistani control was limited. Other Taliban dispersed to the Afghan countryside. There, by coercion or camaraderie, they would rally Afghans to their cause and become a threat to the government that had replaced them.

This government was led by Hamid Karzai. He enjoyed the strong support of the United States and many in Afghanistan as well, including regional warlords whom he constantly would need either to appease or intimidate, or simply bribe.

For Karzai, governing Afghanistan was not possible without massive aid from external sources. This meant primarily the United States, although other nations were called upon to contribute. The United States, in particular its secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, did not believe in “nation building,” the phrase that came into use to describe the efforts required to transform Afghanistan into a modern state, one capable of delivering services and security to its citizens. Rumsfeld argued that rebuilding Afghanistan would require huge sums of money (and he was correct) and that it simply was not the task of the United States to construct a nation in Southeast Asia. That responsibility, he believed, belonged to the Afghans themselves.

The result was that, at least initially, America exercised in Afghanistan what scholar Seth G. Jones called “a light footprint.” Withdrawals from the U.S. Treasury for the Karzai government were limited, as was assistance from the Pentagon. While eight thousand American soldiers were stationed in Afghanistan in 2002, their role was limited. They were there to kill al-Qaeda operatives and, if necessary, to do the same to the Taliban. They were not there to rebuild the country.

Assisting these troops were soldiers from Britain, Canada, France, the Netherlands, and other countries. They belonged to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and, together with forces from other countries as well as the United States, comprised the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). Why NATO? Because one of its members, the United States of America, had been attacked. Article V of the treaty states that an attack against one of its member states shall be considered an attack on them all.

The problem was that while the British, Dutch, and Canadians were willing to fight, and did, several other NATO states—Germany and Italy among them—refused to place their soldiers in harm’s way. They were unwilling to incur casualties for the sake of Afghanistan. This made ISAF less effective than it might have been.

There was another problem as well. The focus of American leaders, both in the military and at the White House, was shifting. In Washington, Iraq was claiming center stage. Interest in Afghanistan waned as that in Iraq increased. In his fine book
In the Graveyard of Empires
, Professor Seth G. Jones quotes Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: “It is simply a matter of resources, of capacity. In Afghanistan, we do what we can. In Iraq, we do what we must.”

By 2005, the situation in Afghanistan had deteriorated. While there had been successes—schools had been built, elections had been held—the failure of the Karzai government to provide security and services to much of the population led to the resurgence of the Taliban. Many people outside Kabul had little use for the central government. They saw it as incompetent and corrupt.

One sign of how bad things had become was the departure from Afghanistan of the French organization Doctors Without Borders. Held in high esteem throughout the world, it had served in Afghanistan for more than twenty years. When four of its workers were shot in the head, the group concluded that Afghanistan was no longer a safe place to provide medical services.

In opposing the Karzai government and the ISAF, the Taliban were ruthless. They kidnapped journalists, threatened schoolteachers, killed civilian aid workers, and assassinated government officials. Confronted by such tactics, American-led forces and their Afghan cohorts were overmatched. Nowhere was this more evident than in the Afghan army and the national police force. Each of these organizations was too small, ill-equipped, and poorly trained. In 2005 and 2006 neither could function effectively.

Recognizing that a fundamental change in America’s approach to Afghanistan was necessary, the Bush administration acted. It began to send large numbers of troops to Afghanistan. So did its successor. In March 2008, President Barack Obama ordered twenty-two thousand additional soldiers to be deployed. Late in 2009, he directed that a “surge” in troops take place, which caused thirty thousand more troops to arrive in Afghanistan. By October 2011, after ten years of fighting, the number of U.S. troops in the country had reached ninety-eight thousand.

As commander in chief of the armed forces (a role given to the president by Article II, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution), President Obama did more than increase troop levels. He fired the troops’ commanding officer, General David McKiernan. Advised by the secretary of defense, Robert Gates, Obama believed the general’s tactics would not lead to success. McKiernan focused on killing the enemy. Gates wanted a more counterinsurgency effort that aimed at protecting Afghan citizens. The approach was advocated by McKiernan’s successor, General Stanley A. McChrystal (who himself was sacked when his indiscreet remarks to a popular newspaper were made public). McKiernan’s relief highlighted a fundamental issue confronting the American military in Afghanistan. Should the emphasis be on safeguarding the people of Afghanistan or should the Americans concentrate on taking the fight to the Taliban and al-Qaeda?