West Point Academy, New York, 1 December 2009
The Obama campaign had been the most media-savvy anyone could remember, and for his first big war speech as President, broadcast live at prime time, he had chosen one of America’s most iconic military backdrops. The imposing grey granite towers of the country’s most prestigious military academy sit on a hilly bend in the Hudson River where during the American Revolution George Washington’s army placed a 150-ton iron chain supported by huge logs to block British naval advances. In 1779 the General moved his headquarters there, calling it ‘the key to America’.
What was then a fortress became the elite West Point academy, alma mater to many of America’s top generals, including Eisenhower, Patton and MacArthur. The campus was dotted with monuments to the greatest battles in US history, and a large stone plaque inscribed with the words ‘In War There is No Substitute for Victory’ from an address by MacArthur to cadets in 1962.
Yet the young Democratic President who flew in to West Point on Marine One helicopter on Tuesday, 1 December 2009 had been elected not to win wars, but to get out of them. That, it turned out, was not so easy. One of Obama’s first announcements in office was the withdrawal of all American troops from Iraq by the end of 2011. But in Afghanistan he had already sent one batch, and was about to announce a whole lot more.
At exactly one minute past 8 p.m., Obama strode onto the stage of the Eisenhower Hall and looked out at a sea of more than 4,000 cadets in grey uniforms, their young faces staring up intently. What he was about to announce would put many of them in combat.
Yet the former constitutional-law professor and community organiser could not have been a less warlike President. The following week he would fly to Oslo to collect the Nobel Peace Prize. There he would say, ‘I’m responsible for the deployment of thousands of young Americans to battle in a distant land. Some will kill and some will be killed. And so I come here … filled with difficult questions about the relationship between war and peace.’
Perhaps as moral support the President had taken with him some heavyweight Ministers from what he called his ‘team of rivals’. In the front row sat Hillary Clinton, against whom he had fought a bitter campaign for the presidency, yet who had been his surprise choice for Secretary of State, and Robert Gates, whom he had kept on as Defense Secretary from the Bush administration.
The President started by reminding the audience of 9/11 – the reason America had gone into Afghanistan. ‘We did not ask for this fight,’ he said. He also reminded them of the almost unanimous support there had been in Congress for the AUMF authorising action against al Qaeda, and how for the first time in history NATO had invoked its Article 5, which states that an attack on one member nation is an attack on all.
‘Afghanistan is not lost,’ he said, ‘but for several years it has moved backwards.’ He talked of how while US resources and attention had been diverted to Iraq, the situation in Afghanistan had ‘deteriorated’ and the Taliban had ‘gained momentum’. He also spoke of how Pakistan was part of the problem: ‘There have been those in Pakistan who have argued that the struggle against extremism is not their fight and that Pakistan is better off doing little or seeking accommodation with those who use violence. We have made it clear that we cannot tolerate a safe haven for terrorists whose location is known.’
Earlier that year I had interviewed David Cameron, then British opposition leader, and he told me he envied what he called Obama’s ‘soaring oratory’. Yet for all that I had heard of Obama’s incredible eloquence during the election campaign, there was little passion in this thirty-three-minute speech, for this was a President with no appetite for war. When he talked of how more than any other nation the US had ‘underwritten global security for over six decades’, it was with a sense of weariness.
Robert Gates would later remark on this in his autobiography: ‘One quality I missed in Obama was passion, especially when it came to the two wars.’ While President Bush would often shed tears when meeting families of dead soldiers, he wrote, ‘I worked for Obama longer than Bush and I never saw his eyes well up.’1
Obama pointed out at West Point that by the time he took office the wars had cost America $1 trillion. He had inherited 161,000 troops in Iraq and 38,000 in Afghanistan. He did not mention that he had already sent 21,000 more to Afghanistan. Yet now he was sending another 30,000 for a surge similar to that in Iraq in 2007, which he had opposed at the time, but which was believed to have turned the war round there. ‘Our security is at stake,’ he stressed. The decision wasn’t a surprise – there had been leaks and speculation in the press for months. But then he added something that made me start: ‘After eighteen months our troops will begin to come home.’
The rapid surge would be followed by rapid withdrawal. ‘Hard and fast’ were his instructions to the military command. In practice he was telling his enemies that if they just hung on another two years, the Americans would be gone. For people fighting on as long a timescale as the Taliban, that was nothing.
This made no military sense. It was all about domestic politics, which as I was starting to understand, determined everything in the US. In 2012 Obama would be facing re-election, and he wanted all the troops back home by then. ‘I can’t let this be a war without end, and I can’t lose the whole Democratic Party,’ he later told the Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, who had expressed concern at the idea of being locked into a fixed withdrawal date.
David Kilcullen, the counter-insurgency expert at the State Department, was one of a number of Afghanistan experts invited to a meeting at the White House before the speech, along with Antony Cordesman and John Nagl. ‘I thought it was to get our advice on Afghanistan so was surprised it was being held in the communications office. When I walked in there were people there from Code Pink, Green organisations and the Lesbian Coalition. I realised this was all about the speech, not the strategy – it was a kind of focus group. So a lot of the things added late to the speech like the timeline of withdrawal were added by White House comms people.’
The resultant mix of retreat and advance made for a half-hearted surge. Nor was there any explanation of strategy, of how this would work. Obama did not talk of winning the war, but of ‘a transition to Afghan responsibility’. Indeed, in a meeting in the Oval Office with his national security staff the previous Wednesday, at which he’d told them he was ‘inclined to go with the 30,000’, he added, ‘This needs to be a plan about how we’re going to hand it off and get out of Afghanistan.’2
After the speech cadets clambered over chairs to reach him and shake hands, but the officers looked grim-faced. The headline in the next day’s New York Times read ‘Obama Adds Troops But Maps Exit Plan’.
It reminded me of what Gorbachev had done when he came to power in 1985 as a reformist President six years into the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Determined to extricate his nation from the quagmire and to put an end to the mounting casualties and the letters from parents of dead soldiers, he gave his generals extra forces and one year to win the war. Throughout that year they launched a number of major offensives, but they failed to defeat the resistance. Calling Afghanistan ‘a bleeding wound’, by 1987 Gorbachev was negotiating a political settlement for withdrawal. Meanwhile he took steps to strengthen the Afghan government, replacing President Babrak Karmal with the more dynamic Mohammad Najibullah, who had headed the secret police, and giving the Afghan army and police better weapons. The Russians also paid off insurgents to stop fighting, set up tribal militias and paid them to defend their villages against the mujaheddin.
To me, Obama’s surge seemed too little too late. The former commander in Afghanistan, General Dan McNeill, had told Sherard Cowper-Coles the previous year, ‘I could do this if I had 500,000 troops.’ Cowper-Coles was tempted to add, ‘And fifty years.’3
At this point another 30,000 troops was never going to be enough. We had ended up locked into a war with the Taliban, who weren’t our enemy and were nothing to do with 9/11, and what’s more we were doing it with one hand tied behind our backs, because our supposed ally Pakistan was swinging both ways.
Having once thought there weren’t enough troops, in my last few trips to Afghanistan before moving to Washington I had become convinced that the more troops we sent, the worse we made the situation. This was particularly the case in the south, where we had failed to explain to people why we were there, and lost the narrative to the Taliban with their mobilisation of the mullahs and evocative talk of foreign occupiers.
In a dinner with two Afghan Ministers at the British Ambassador’s residence in Kabul in November 2009, Britain’s Foreign Secretary David Miliband asked how long they thought Afghan government authorities would stay in the Helmand capital of Lashkar Gah after Western forces left. ‘Twenty-four hours,’ came the reply.4
We had lost the propaganda war at home too. By summer 2009, 184 British soldiers had been killed in Afghanistan, overtaking the 179 lost in Iraq. Yet Prime Minister Gordon Brown insisted we were winning. On 11 July, after eight soldiers had been killed within twenty-four hours, he had written a letter to senior MPs assuring them that ‘current operations [against the Taliban] are succeeding in their objectives’.
At the end of that week I saw Hamid Karzai in Kabul to say goodbye before I moved to Washington. As usual I went through five security checks, at which everything from my lipstick to a packet of paracetamol was confiscated. He wanted once again to talk about civilian casualties. ‘We need a new contract with the international community where the sanctity of Afghan homes and families is respected,’ he said. ‘We don’t accept bombardment any more. I never wanted bad relations with the British and Americans but I had to speak my mind about issues that were not right. They knew very well that the war on Taliban was not in Afghan villages but it was elsewhere. To go and bomb an Afghan village for an unknown Talib and cause so many casualties was totally out of the mind. To enter a home, blast doors and fight with families – that was not a partnership. This is what’s wrong with the international community – they want us to behave like robots. We’re not, this is our country.’
He ranted into my tape recorder about how the British had made things worse. ‘When Mullah Sher Akhundzada was Governor of Helmand there were 180,000 boys and girls going to school. Today what do we have? With all those troops, there is more than four times as much drug production and no boy going to school there!’5
The previous ten days had been Britain’s worst in Helmand, with fifteen soldiers killed. I could see that Karzai’s comments would make it onto the British front pages and outrage a nation already tired of the war. His spokesman, who had sat in on the interview, could see the same thing. Afterwards he called me and put Karzai on the line, who begged me not to use those quotes ‘in respect of our long friendship’. I did not use them, though I pointed out that it had been an on-the-record interview.
However, there were already stirrings back home. That September saw the resignation of Eric Joyce MP, a former army major, from his position as a Parliamentary Private Secretary in protest at Afghan strategy. ‘I do not think the public will accept for much longer that our losses can be justified by simply referring to the risk of greater terrorism on our streets,’ he wrote.
British troops had already been in Helmand far longer than the three years originally planned. Horrified by the casualties and the lack of progress, public support was clearly waning. Unexpectedly, a small market town in Wiltshire called Wootton Bassett came to symbolise the nation’s anguish. The bodies of soldiers killed in Afghanistan were flown back to nearby base RAF Lyneham and driven through the town, and parades of townspeople were turning out to solemnly salute them. It had all started in 2007 with a man called Percy Miles, a former Mayor, who was out shopping with his wife when someone mentioned that there was a cortège coming through. He ran home to put on his mayoral robes and stood to attention as it passed. That small act of respect started something. Soon hundreds of people were lining the streets. By 2009 the whole town was turning out, standing by the town hall singing, and stopping as the tenor church bell rang. When I went there I found people from outside the town too, including a group of leather-clad Hell’s Angels.6 It was a moving sight. When I told people I had been to Helmand they all had the same question: ‘What are we actually achieving?’
Brown agreed to increase the troop strength to 10,000, but the public was turning against a war which no politician could or would explain. On Remembrance Sunday I went to London to look at the poppy wreaths on the Cenotaph, and far more people had turned out than usual. As we all went quiet to recall the moment when the guns of Europe fell silent, I wondered how many more would die.
The war remained more popular in the US. America is a remarkably patriotic nation, where people stand hand on heart and belt out the national anthem at sporting events and political rallies, and I often saw the Stars and Stripes flying in people’s gardens, and ‘Support Our Troops’ banners and bumper stickers. There was no Wootton Bassett, and the Pentagon had long banned photographs of flag-draped caskets arriving at Dover Airbase, as such images were thought to have helped turn US public opinion against the Vietnam War. Obama decided to lift this ban as part of greater transparency, leaving it up to families to choose if they gave permission.
However, something had happened to fundamentally change the situation in both countries. Anger against the wars might have created the anti-Bush wave which propelled Obama to the limelight (Obama was not a Senator at the time of the vote on Iraq, and called it ‘a dumb war’), but it was the financial meltdown, starting with the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, which had sealed his election victory. Taxpayer-funded bailouts saved the banking industry, but the resulting credit crunch meant that as President he had inherited the worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
The government budget deficit was soaring – by the time of Obama’s West Point speech the national-debt clock in New York’s Times Square had passed $12 trillion. The loss of millions of jobs and the closures of many companies meant that one in eight Americans were on food stamps – a record number. In such a situation it was not easy to justify sending more men to an expensive war. It cost a staggering $1 million per year per soldier in Afghanistan, what with all the kit and logistics. Obama put a $30 billion additional price tag on the first year of his 30,000 surge – the overall cost for the year would be $120 billion. As for nation-building, building schools in Afghanistan was hard to justify when people were hungry and jobless at home.
Sending more troops, then, had not been an easy decision. As a presidential candidate Obama had called Afghanistan ‘the good war’, in contrast to the war in Iraq, which he told a rally in Pennsylvania in April 2008 ‘has not made us more safe but has distracted us from the task in hand in Afghanistan’. One of his first acts as President, in February 2009, was to announce that all US combat troops would be withdrawn from Iraq by the end of 2011. At the same time he agreed 4,000 more troops for Afghanistan, on top of 17,000 already earmarked by Bush. Shortly after that he told the Sunday-morning CBS show Face the Nation that he thought the previous seven years had been lost: ‘What we want to do now is refocus attention on al Qaeda.’ He also spoke of Pakistan, emphasising, ‘We have to hold them much more accountable.’7 That same morning Secretary Gates went on Fox News Sunday and said that ISI had had links with extremists ‘for a long time as a hedge against what might happen in Afghanistan’. He added, ‘They can count on us and don’t need that hedge.’
It was clear that if the situation was going to turn around the war needed a new direction. Indeed, the Bush administration had realised that, and ordered a group of twenty-four public servants from across government to work on a review of AfPak to brief the incoming President. One of them was David Kilcullen. ‘From September to November 2008 we worked day and night and came up with our best guess on what needed to be done. The Obama people came in and totally ignored that.’
Instead Obama commissioned his own review, headed by former CIA analyst Bruce Riedel. He also appointed a new commander. McNeill had been replaced in Kabul by General Dave McKiernan, and Gates told Obama he felt he was the wrong man. When McKiernan refused to step down, Obama sacked him. The military was shocked. It was the first time a wartime commander had been sacked since President Truman fired MacArthur in 1951, during the Korean War.
In June Obama announced as his new commander in Afghanistan General Stanley McChrystal, from the shadowy world of special operations. He had spent the previous five years heading Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC (pronounced Jay-sock), a unit so clandestine that for years the Pentagon even refused to acknowledge its existence, and had led hunter-killer teams in Iraq, including that which killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq.
McChrystal was a fitness obsessive, so lean that his skin seemed tightly pulled across his skeleton. He slept little and lived on just one meal a day, snacking for the rest from a Tupperware box of salted German pretzels. Work was his life, and his social skills so lacking that when Obama cracked a joke on their first meeting he remained rigid and unsmiling. Afterwards Obama told Gates, ‘He’s very … focused.’
The sense of disconnect was mutual. Like many American generals McChrystal had his close team who moved with him, and one of these would later describe that first meeting to a Rolling Stone reporter as ‘a ten-minute photo-op … Obama clearly didn’t know anything about him. Here’s the guy who’s going to run his fucking war but he didn’t seem very engaged.’
Obama told his new commander to carry out a sixty-day assessment and come up with a plan. When McChrystal came back from Afghanistan his assessment was bleak. The situation, he said, was much worse than they had realised, and if they did not halt Taliban momentum within a year the war would be unwinnable. This, he believed, would need at least 40,000 more troops. Gates was incredulous. ‘I nearly fell off my chair,’ he wrote. ‘Did he really believe the President would approve that massive an increase so soon after agreeing an additional 21,000?’8
Gates was the only senior official who had also been in the administration during the Soviet occupation, and he worried that with so many troops, the Americans would also be regarded as occupiers rather than allies. Polling commissioned by the US Embassy in Kabul showed that the number of Afghans who saw the US as partners had fallen from 80 per cent to 60 per cent over the previous three years.
Obama had kept on Admiral Mike Mullen as the nation’s top military commander, and hired General Jim Jones as his National Security Adviser. However, by far the most influential military figure at the time was General David Petraeus, who had come back from leading the surge in Iraq to be commander of US Central Command, which oversees the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
He had returned as a hero, credited for turning the situation around, using counter-insurgency doctrine, or COIN as it was known, that he had developed for the US Army. This meant focusing on securing the local population rather than focusing on the enemy you want to kill. In Iraq he dispersed troops in small outposts in local neighbourhoods, instead of holing them up far away on large bases, and also helped form a local militia dubbed ‘Sons of Iraq’ which put 100,000 gunmen, mostly former Sunni insurgents, on the payroll. For the first three months this had seemed a disaster – April to June 2007 were the bloodiest three months of the war. Then the mayhem subsided, and by the end of the year the violence had dropped 60 per cent, and former enemies were working together.
The turnaround made Petraeus a household name in the US. Intrigued, when I moved to Washington I went to hear him give a lecture at the Wilson Center for International Relations. I’d never seen such an awed reception for a general – back home in Britain, I doubted most people even knew the name of our army chief. People called him ‘St David’, and asked him if he was planning to run for President. He was undoubtedly impressive. Often referred to as a warrior-scholar, he had a doctorate in international relations from Princeton. Like McChrystal he was superfit, starting each day with a five-mile run after just four hours’ sleep, and challenging his favourite reporters to run alongside, for he was a shameless self-promoter.
Frankly, I was a bit confused by all the hero-worship. I had gone to Iraq in 2008 and seen for myself how the situation had improved with the surge. However, it seemed to me it had succeeded because of other factors, principally the so-called ‘Anbar Awakening’, when local Sunni sheikhs disillusioned with the insurgency that was tearing their country apart signed a series of truces with the government against whom they had been fighting, and the American occupiers. That left the Americans free to turn their guns on the Shiite militias.
Napoleon is said to have remarked, ‘I have plenty of clever generals. Just give me a lucky one.’ If Petraeus was a lucky general, well, Afghanistan needed some luck.
Petraeus thought he could replicate the success of Iraq in Afghanistan. He argued that what was needed was his new counter-insurgency strategy rather than counter-terrorism. The plan was to send in thousands of troops to the south and east to try to reverse the Taliban tide. He believed that if American and Afghan troops could establish themselves in villages the Taliban would fade away.
Gates called the new commander for Afghanistan, Stan McChrystal, ‘the most lethal and successful practitioner of counter-terrorism in the world’. Yet, obviously under the influence of Petraeus, the plan he drew up for Afghanistan was based on counter-insurgency. He submitted it to Petraeus, Mullen and Gates in August, then to Obama on 2 September. It presented Obama with three options – 85,000 new troops, which was clearly impossible; 40,000, which was what he hoped to get; and 11,000, which he said would not be enough. As Obama said, really they had given him only one option.
Then the lobbying began. Two days after Obama received the plan Petraeus gave an interview to the Washington Post in which he made clear where he stood. While there was no guarantee that sending more troops would fix Afghanistan, he warned, ‘It won’t work out if we don’t.’ Less than three weeks later another story appeared in the Washington Post, this time under America’s most renowned byline: Bob Woodward, of Watergate fame. It was a leak of the McChrystal plan under the headline ‘More Forces or Mission Failure’, and it came with the General’s entire sixty-six-page secret assessment online.9
Rumours started surfacing that McChrystal would quit if he did not get his way. Obama and his political team, concerned at the financial and political cost, wanted to send as few troops as possible, but they felt the military was trying to force their hand. Vice President Joe Biden questioned whether the Taliban were actually a threat to American national security at all, and argued that dealing with Pakistan should be the priority, as that after all was where al Qaeda was based. He advocated a strategy using 20,000 extra troops (half for special forces raids and half for training), which became known as ‘counter-terrorism plus’.
Over the next three months, starting on Sunday, 13 September, Obama would spend twenty-five hours in meetings about the plan. To the military these often felt like academic seminars, looking at CIA maps showing the march of the Taliban, and interminably discussing pros and cons. A book Obama mentioned on the Vietnam War called Lessons in Disaster became a must-read in the West Wing.
Obama questioned McChrystal’s numbers, suggesting a compromise of 20,000 new troops. Petraeus insisted that this was not a serious option, as it would only provide enough men to move through the country trying to capture bad guys, and they would then leave, alienating the population without inflicting serious damage on the enemy. He told Obama he had war-gamed the scenario, and it had failed. Bob Woodward later claimed that the war game Petraeus had referred to, codenamed ‘Poignant Vision’, had been designed for conventional warfare, and had actually been inconclusive.10
In the end Obama agreed a revised second option of 30,000 troops, with a 3,000 reserve which Gates could send if there were exceptional circumstances. He also approved a CIA request to greatly expand operations in Pakistan.
The military had got almost all they wanted, but it had been a painful process. The rift with the White House, where both sides had marshalled information against the other, left a bad taste on both sides, hardly an ideal base for expanding a war.
When Obama announced his final decision in the Oval Office, he and Biden shocked the military by describing it as ‘an order’. This, said Gates, ‘demonstrated the complete unfamiliarity of both men with the American military culture’. It was ‘unnecessary and insulting, proof positive of the depth of the Obama White House’s distrust of the nation’s military leadership’.
The decision would dramatically scale up the war. Over thirteen months Obama sent more than 50,000 extra troops – by 2010 there would be more than 100,000 in Afghanistan, almost as many as the Soviets had had. That would inevitably mean more casualties, something that was brought home to Obama on a bitterly cold Veterans’ Day when he drove across the Potomac River from the White House to visit Section 60 of Arlington National Cemetery, the final resting place of many of those killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Under a steely grey sky dribbling with rain, new graves were being dug to add to line after line of chalky white stones at which people had left beads, flowers, balloons and, most poignantly, children’s drawings for their lost fathers. Obama left looking sombre.
He also visited wounded soldiers at Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, many of whom had lost arms, legs or both to IEDs. Afterwards he told his staff, ‘I don’t want to be going to Walter Reed for another eight years.’