Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War (80 page)

I was then flown to Combat Outpost Caferetta in northeastern Helmand province to see the 3rd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment. Captain Andy Terrell led me on a walk through the town of Now Zad, once home to 30,000 people and a former Taliban stronghold so laced with IEDs as to render it uninhabitable. The Marines had taken Now Zad the previous December and cleared most of the mines, at a great cost in double amputations. I was told that about a thousand residents had returned, and economic life was reviving. As I walked down the dusty main street,
a few shops were open with a handful of men and boys standing around. I wondered, as I saw the significant number of Marines throughout the town and noted the paucity of open shops and the absence of livestock, whether this was a show for my benefit, or whether my visit and the presence of so many Marines to guard me had simply led people to hide. There was no question about the courage and grit the Marines had shown in taking this town or of the sacrifices they had endured. The question in the back of my mind was simply whether it had been worth what it cost them.

Before leaving Afghanistan the next day, I visited Camp Blackhorse, outside Kabul, one of the largest training camps for the Afghan army. Afghan defense minister Abdul Rahim Wardak met me there wearing a three-piece suit. He escorted me to various training demonstrations. I took a few minutes to thank the U.S. soldiers who were trainers there and then spoke to several hundred Afghan trainees through an interpreter. Wardak insisted that I end my remarks with a few encouraging words in Pashto. He wrote them out phonetically for me on a card. I gave it my best shot, which I suspected was none too good, and to this day I don’t know what I actually said to them. Presumably it was nothing too insulting because they didn’t appear offended.

My comments to the press on this trip weren’t exactly brimming with optimism. I told those traveling with me to Now Zad that my visit there had reinforced my belief that we were on the right path, “but it will take a long time.” “People need to understand there is some very hard fighting, very hard days ahead.… The early signs are encouraging, but I worry that people will get too impatient and think things are better than they actually are.” No one could accuse me of looking at Afghanistan through rose-colored glasses. I’d seen our soldiers and Marines and what they’d accomplished, but I also understood what lay ahead for them.

Obama made his first trip as president to Afghanistan on March 28, 2010. He was on the ground for six hours, meeting with Karzai and with American troops at Bagram Air Base. His appearance gave a boost to Karzai, even as the U.S. president delivered some tough messages on corruption, drug trafficking, and governance. They also discussed reconciliation with the Taliban. The troops gave him a tumultuous welcome. Jones later told me angrily that a senior embassy official had told the Afghans prematurely about the visit and that not long after the president’s
plane departed Kabul, a rocket hit the tarmac less than a quarter mile from where it had been parked.

The divide over Afghanistan between State and Defense on one side and the White House and the NSS on the other, smoldering since December, flamed again at the beginning of April. Mullen and Michèle Flournoy returned to Washington from separate trips to Afghanistan, both deeply disturbed by what they had seen. Flournoy came to see me on April 2 to express her concerns about Ambassador Eikenberry’s skepticism regarding the president’s strategy, his treatment of Karzai, and State-NSS wrangling over who was in charge of the civilian side of the war effort. Mullen shared those concerns. A few days later I told Hillary I wanted to use my regularly scheduled time with the president that week to discuss these issues and asked if she would join me. She said yes. Jim Jones asked if the three of us could meet first without the president to come up with some ways forward. I said okay.

The next day I was discussing a sensitive personnel matter in private with the president when he asked me about Afghanistan. I told him I had agreed with Jones not to discuss my concerns with him—Obama—until Jones, Clinton, and I met. Obama said, “Consider that overruled.” So I said that Eikenberry seemed convinced the strategy Obama had approved would fail. I said the ambassador, and others, had to deal more positively with Karzai, especially in public statements. It was a matter of Afghan sovereignty and pride. The Department of State and the White House/NSS were wrestling for the steering wheel on the civilian side, I continued, and this was going to take the entire effort into a ditch. Obama was quite reserved in his response, commenting only that the principals needed to work out the turf issue.

A few minutes later Clinton, Mullen, Donilon, and I met with Jones in his office. I repeated my concerns with added vigor and details. I said Eikenberry’s pervasive negativity radiated throughout the embassy and was like a general telling troops going into a fight that the campaign would fail. I was very critical of his, and the White House’s, treatment of Karzai, reminding all that Karzai knew we had interfered in the election the previous fall and noting that press secretary Robert Gibbs’s public statement that very morning—that the United States might withdraw the invitation for Karzai to visit Washington in May—had been a horrible mistake. (Gibbs was reacting to Karzai’s public statement that if foreigners
didn’t stop meddling in Afghanistan, he might join the Taliban—yet another of his many impulsive public statements that caused all of us heartburn.) I then described the White House–State problem as we saw it from Defense. Mullen endorsed what I had said, adding that we would be looking at rule of law, corruption, and governance issues in a few months, and yet there were no plans. “The civilian side is not happening,” he said.

Hillary had come to the meeting loaded for bear. She gave a number of specific examples of Eikenberry’s insubordination to herself and her deputy, Jack Lew, including refusals to provide information and plans. She said, “He’s a huge problem.” She agreed with me on the administration’s treatment of Karzai. Then she went after the NSS and the White House staff, expressing anger at their direct dealings with Eikenberry and offering a number of examples of what she termed their arrogance, their efforts to control the civilian side of the war effort, their refusal to accommodate requests for meetings, and their refusal to work with Holbrooke and his team. As she talked, she became more forceful. “I’ve had it,” she said. “You want it [control of the civilian side of the war], I’ll turn it all over to you and wash my hands of it. I’ll not be held accountable for something I cannot manage because of White House and NSS interference.”

At that point, I asked Jones how many people Doug Lute had working for him on the NSS. About twenty-five, Jones said. I angrily said that the entire professional NSC staff under Bush 41 had been about fifty people. “When you have that big an operation at the NSS,” I told him, “you’re doing the wrong things and looking for ways to stay busy.” The National Security Staff had, in effect, become an operational body with its own policy agenda, as opposed to a coordination mechanism. And this, in turn, led to micromanagement far beyond what was appropriate. Indeed, on one visit to Afghanistan, I spotted a direct phone line to Lute in the special operations command center at Bagram Air Base. I ordered it removed. On another occasion, I told General Jim Mattis at Central Command that if Lute ever called him again to question anything, Mattis was to tell him to go to hell. I was fed up with the NSS’s micromanagement.

Both Donilon and Jones were generally quiet in the face of Hillary’s and my criticism, though Donilon said that Holbrooke’s team refused to work within the interagency process. Jones said, “You want a meeting,
you get one.” Further, he said, if the secretaries of state and defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs thought Eikenberry should go, “then he should go.”

It was a real air clearing. I called Jones the next day to ask if we would discuss all this with the president. He said yes. But it had become clear that Eikenberry and Lute, whatever their shortcomings, were under an umbrella of protection at the White House. With Hillary and me so adamant that the two should leave, that protection could come only from the president. Because I could not imagine any previous president tolerating someone in a senior position openly working against policies he had approved, the most likely explanation was that the president himself did not really believe the strategy he had approved would work.

I could understand the president’s skepticism even if I didn’t agree with it. I did not believe that Karzai would change his stripes, Pakistan would stop hedging, corruption would appreciably diminish, or the U.S. civilian surge would actually materialize. Just the same, if I had ever come to believe the military part of the strategy would not lead to success as I defined it, I could not have continued signing the deployment orders.

The consistent irony of our NSC meetings, I thought, was that we spent most of our time dissecting the one part of the strategy that actually was working pretty well—the military operations and training of Afghan security forces—while neglecting the same kind of searching examination of those elements that weren’t working. Obama’s skepticism toward McChrystal’s implementation of the strategy was apparent in virtually every meeting that spring. In a videoconference with Mullen and me in early May, Stan expressed his frustration with an NSC meeting the preceding day. He told us he was struck by the negativity and confusion over counterinsurgency expressed there. He said he intended to go through his operational plans for the Kandahar offensive again “so that they better understand it.… I am concerned the president doesn’t understand the campaign plan” for Kandahar. I replied that those advising him at the White House were looking at our operations “through a soda straw” and seemed to have a hard time grasping the larger picture. That said, I knew that if the president didn’t understand the campaign plan, that was our fault at Defense. I told McChrystal I would try to get him some time with the president to talk about the plan.

Meanwhile Hillary’s and my complaints about how Eikenberry as well as White House officials were treating Karzai (especially in public)
began to have some effect. Karzai had no use for Eikenberry, Holbrooke, or Biden, and his relationship with Obama was a distant one. McChrystal got along best with him, with Clinton and me coming next. In any event, the White House began to soft-pedal the public criticism of our “ally” in April.

On May 10, 2010, Karzai and a number of his ministers arrived in Washington for a “strategic dialogue.” It began with a dinner that night hosted by Hillary, where everyone was on their best behavior. The next morning a number of cabinet ministers from both sides met for two hours at the State Department to discuss every aspect of our bilateral relationship. I spent another ninety minutes with the Afghan ministers of defense and interior at the Pentagon. I had developed a strong partnership with Defense Minister Wardak, a Pashtun who had been a national leader in the anti-Soviet mujahideen resistance in the 1980s. He was often eloquent, in an old-fashioned way, in expressing gratitude for our efforts in Afghanistan, and he was easy to work with—once I convinced him his forces did not need F-22s, just one of which would have consumed his entire budget. The president met with Karzai on the twelfth, and after they made statements to the press, the two delegations had lunch at the White House.

Those at the White House involved in orchestrating the visit, including NSS chief of staff Denis McDonough and Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes, were on pins and needles worrying about an outburst from Karzai. He had expressed a desire to visit our wounded soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, to go to Arlington National Cemetery, and then to visit Fort Campbell, Kentucky, to thank deploying soldiers and their families. White House officials opposed the visit to Fort Campbell, saying they wanted attention to revert to domestic affairs after three days of nonstop Karzai and Afghanistan. I think they were mainly nervous about what Karzai might say at Fort Campbell. I objected, and they relented. Karzai was at his very best at Walter Reed and at Arlington. I met him in Section 60 at Arlington, where many of those killed in Iraq and Afghanistan are buried, and he was deeply moved as we walked amid the headstones.

The next day I met him at Fort Campbell. Escorted by Major General J. F. Campbell, commander of the 101st Airborne Division, we went to a hangar where some 1,300 soldiers and their families were waiting. From a raised dais surrounded by three-foot-high metal crowd control
fences, Karzai expressed his gratitude for all the United States had done to help Afghanistan since 2001. He told the audience that there were “many miles to go, but we are already better thanks to you,” and promised that someday Afghan families would come to Fort Campbell “to thank you.” The crowd of soldiers and family members exploded into a remarkable cheering standing ovation. Karzai was stunned and, energized, stepped off the dais, shook hands along the fence, and then leaped over the fence—nearly falling—to mingle in the crowd and get photos with families. It was an amazing sight. We eventually dragged him away to another building, where he spoke quietly to about 200 soldiers deploying to Afghanistan that day. He thanked them “for what you are doing for me and my country” and then shook every hand. As Karzai’s plane lifted off from Fort Campbell and his visit to America ended, I could only hope the positive feelings on both sides would last awhile. I thought his visit had been a triumph, and I told him so.

In Afghanistan, McChrystal continued executing his plan to devastate the Taliban on their home turf in southern Afghanistan, first in Helmand and then in Kandahar province. After focusing his efforts in the south, he would swing the main effort to the eastern part of the country along the Pakistani border. The surge forces were just beginning to arrive in Afghanistan in May and June, but the pessimists were in full cry. They had plenty of ammunition. The operation to clear Marjah and surrounding areas of Taliban had taken longer than planned (and touted) by the military, and the campaign to clear Kandahar was also unfolding more slowly than expected. (McChrystal was moving more slowly in the Kandahar campaign than originally planned to ensure that more Afghan troops would be working with us and that local authorities were better prepared to offer services when security improved—lessons learned from Marjah.) There had been no real improvement in the standing of the Afghan government outside Kabul, with little or no central government presence in the provinces and villages and continuing corruption at every level—perhaps most harmfully by local officials and police, who routinely shook down ordinary Afghans. Adjudication of local and family disputes, an essential role for Afghan officials, was the occasion for yet more bribes. There were still too few Afghan soldiers and police for real partnering. Obama’s announcement that the United States would begin withdrawing our forces in July 2011 was widely interpreted as an end date, so many Afghans just hunkered down to wait for our departure.