I stand before you as someone who is not opposed to war in all circumstances. … What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. … A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.
—SENATOR BARACK OBAMA
The insurgency in Afghanistan didn’t just happen overnight and we won’t defeat it overnight. This will not be quick, nor easy. But we must never forget: This is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity.
—PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA
BORROWING THE FORMULATION USED BY Richard Haass to distinguish wise from unwise decisions to go to war, Barack Obama regarded the war to prevent the Taliban from providing a safe haven to al-Qaeda terrorists as a war of “necessity” and therefore a just war. By contrast, the war to throw Saddam out of power in Baghdad was a war of “choice”—not Obama’s choice; he opposed it from the start—and not worth the expenditure of material resources and human lives it would entail. Yet for the fiscal year when he assumed the presidency, the United States would be spending $95 billion on the war of choice in Iraq as compared with $55 billion on the war of necessity in Afghanistan. And cumulatively, over the eight years of the Bush administration, by the end of fiscal year 2009, of the nearly $1 trillion already spent on both wars, the nation would have spent three times as much prosecuting the Iraq War as the Afghanistan War. Also, by the time Obama was sworn in as president, more than 4,000 U.S soldiers had lost their lives in Iraq as compared with fewer than 600 in Afghanistan.
Obama was determined to bring both wars to an end during his presidency; but clearly this misallocation of material cost and human sacrifice as between the two wars had to be urgently changed. Accordingly, Secretary of Defense Gates’ budget request for fiscal year 2010 projected for the first time in eight years that U.S. expenditures for Afghanistan (some $73 billion for the year) would be more than for Iraq (just over $65 billion). These estimates reflected projected reallocations of troop deployments between Iraq and Afghanistan then being intensively discussed in the administration.
THE IRAQ WAR: CHOOSING TO END IT
Five weeks after his inauguration, President Obama, addressing an audience of U.S. Marines at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, said he needed to talk with them and the nation about the “simple reality that America can no longer afford to see Iraq in isolation from other priorities: … the challenge of refocusing on Afghanistan and Pakistan; of relieving the burden on our military; and of rebuilding our economy.” The war would be brought to an end by transferring full responsibility to the Iraqis for their own security. United States’ combat brigades would be withdrawn from Iraq over the next eighteen months. And consistent with the status of forces agreement negotiated between the U.S. and Iraqi governments near the end of the Bush administration, Obama reaffirmed Bush’s commitment to remove all U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of 2011 and promised they would come home “with the honor that they have earned.”1
This plan, the president reiterated, was part of the larger agenda he was initiating to refocus on al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, and to actively seek a lasting peace between Israel and the Arab world. The end of the war in Iraq, he predicted, “will enable a new era of American leadership and engagement in the Middle East.”2
The pullout plan, which in advance of its public announcement Obama had briefed to the political leadership of both parties in the Congress as well as to foreign leaders, was generally well received. Senator John McCain called it “reasonable,” but not surprisingly, he and former members of the Bush administration attributed the improved situation in Iraq that made the projected U.S. pullout possible to the success of the troop-augmentation/surge strategy that Obama had initially opposed. No matter. More important to Obama now was his ability—admittedly because of the success of the surge—to implement his campaign promise to rapidly wind down the war in Iraq.
Aware that the situation in Iraq was far from stabilized, that the Sunnis were still very dissatisfied at the exclusionary policies the Shia-dominated government had not yet rescinded, and that the withdrawal of U.S. forces—even on a phased basis—could result in a power vacuum the various extremist sectarians would fill with their violent encounters, Obama continued to emphasize that the long-term solutions in Iraq would have to be political—not military. And he was adamant that the most important decisions for dealing with their political predicaments would now have to be made by the Iraqis.
In the last half of 2011, as the remaining U.S. troops prepared to depart and sectarian violence again began to intensify, the U.S. and Iraqi military entered into exploration of some formula by which some U.S. forces could remain as “trainers” or be redeployed to Iraq to assist Iraqi forces in the continuing tasks of pacification. But the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki balked at allowing the remaining U.S. military the standard immunity from prosecution by legal authorities of the countries in which U.S. military are deployed; without the immunity proviso, no U.S. government would countenance continuing to station U.S. forces in Iraq. Neither government, however, ruled out the possibility of the Iraqis contracting with U.S. private security firms (whose employees are mostly veterans with combat experience) to assist in the training (and perhaps supplemental support) of the Iraqi forces.
After 8 years, the death of some 4,500 U.S. soldiers and more than 32,000 returning home severely wounded, and U.S. expenditures for the war topping $1 trillion, the United States was leaving Iraq with a democracy of sorts, but hardly a model for the rest of the Middle East. While in theory the political situation in Iraq was best left to the Iraqis themselves to deal with, there were persisting worries in the White House that a political collapse there, with Iran and al-Qaeda groups picking up the pieces, could have serious negative consequences for U.S. global interests and national security.
Cognizant of the problems, Obama made Vice President Biden—who as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had developed considerable expertise on Iraq—the administration’s de facto diplomat in chief for dealing with the Iraqi government and politicians. In numerous consultations with the Iraqis, Biden, in an effort to contain the recrudescence of sectarian violence, tried to get the Shia-dominated regime in Baghdad run by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to rectify its discriminatory and exclusionary policies against Sunnis, especially when it came to government jobs. But the parliamentary coalition that sustained al-Maliki’s prime ministership depended on the support of the radical Islamist party led by the fiery Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who was adamantly opposed to making amends with the Sunnis. Frustrated, Sunni communities proved susceptible to calls for a resumed insurrection from their radical wings who, prior to the 2007 “Sunni Awakening,” were willing to ally with al-Qaeda groups. The interethnic strife was also escalating at the political level between Kurdish and Arab Iraqis over the distribution of revenues from the petroleum-rich Kurdish region, where the Kurds were entering into their own deals with multinational oil companies and demanding greater political autonomy. On the ground too, violent incidents were increasing in multiethnic Kirkuk and at the border areas among local Arabs and Kurdish refugees from Turkey and Syria.
On December 15, 2011, the United States formally terminated its military mission in Iraq, with mutual expressions of enduring common interests and pledges of cooperation. The White House was disturbed at reports, however, that the al-Maliki government was resuming arrests of prominent Sunnis and Kurds on grounds of attempts to subvert the regime. Throughout 2012, as incidents of renewed sectarian violence flared, Vice President Biden intensified his effort to persuade al-Maliki to seriously provide Sunnis opportunities to participate in a national unity government so as to avoid an implosion and disintegration of the country a some what ironic role for Biden who as senator and then early in the administration was the most prominent champion of a confederal system for Iraq with considerable autonomy for Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish regions. The main worry in Washington now was that in a full-blown inter-sectarian civil war, the country most likely to exploit the chaos and resulting power vacuum to its own advantage was Iran.
What the intelligence reports of 2012 through early 2014 for the president neglected (or did not sufficiently flag) was that there was neither a vacuum nor a major resurgence of al-Qaeda militancy in the Sunni-dominant areas, but rather a steadily advancing insurgency and consolidation of control by a Sunni extremist movement calling itself the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The shock of recognition that an entirely new phase of the post-Saddam struggle for control of Iraq was in store reverberated around the world in the first week of July 2014 with the news that only in a matter of days the major northern city of Mosul had been rampaged and taken over by the well-armed and disciplined ISIS militants. As Iraqi soldiers in panic fled the city, the ISIS group summarily executed local government officials and police and immediately issued edicts promulgating the fundamentalist version of Islam by which Mosul (and other communities ISIS was taking over) would henceforth be governed.
Updated intelligence and journalistic reports on the “new” insurgency showed ISIS to be a political-religious movement with global ambitions—if not yet global reach—to be (as it was already proclaiming itself) the caliphate: the world’s center of Islamic righteousness, law, and power. Already dominant in the Sunni-majority sections of Iraq and Syria (where it had eclipsed al-Qaeda as the most militant, and ruthless, of the anti-Assad insurgents), the movement’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, claiming it was a universal state without borders, announced that henceforth it would be called simply IS—the Islamic State. The most urgent imperative, from Washington’s perspective, was to keep this radical movement contained within the Sunni-majority areas, and away from Baghdad.
The Obama administration would help by providing equipment and training assistance to the Iraqi military, conditioned on the government’s becoming a credible regime of national unity under a prime minister other than al-Maliki. A more direct role by the United States, using its airpower to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the IS, was provoked by a series of on-camera beheadings of IS-held British and U.S. hostages. But Obama was adamant that the Iraqis themselves would have to provide the military muscle and political control to keep the country from disintegrating into Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish states.
AFGHANISTAN: COUNTERINSURGENCY’S FINAL SURGE?
Afghanistan—the war of necessity—presumably would be different. At the outset of his administration, President Obama had reaffirmed the Bush administration’s principal vital-interest rationale for defeating the intensifyingTaliban insurgency in Afghanistan: the Taliban, the ruling regime in Afghanistan at the time of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, DC, had harbored the perpetrators of that carnage, al-Qaeda, led by Osama bin Laden. Now, eight years after the initial U.S. military success in driving the Taliban from power in Kabul, that extremist Muslim movement, aided by allies in Pakistan, was struggling to regain control of Afghanistan.
Early in 2009 there was still solid bipartisan support in Washington for doing whatever was necessary to decisively smash the Taliban insurgency. The assumption was that where the Taliban held sway they would continue to provide al-Qaeda with a hospitable venue for conducting their violent jihad against the West and especially against the United States. Moreover, Taliban and al-Qaeda success in Afghanistan would presumably energize and embolden violent jihadists around the world to persist in their efforts to terrorize and overthrow regimes friendly to the United States and its Western allies. A nightmare scenario was that this energizing effect would be felt in Pakistan, where Islamic extremists would be able to recruit more followers not only from the border areas where Afghan Taliban insurgents had established bases, but throughout Pakistan, enabling the jihadists to eventually take over the state, thus putting them in control of the country’s nuclear arsenal.
Insofar as the incoming Obama administration was postured to effect a change in U.S. policy toward Afghanistan, it would be largely in the form of an increased deployment of troops to defeat the Taliban—whose resurgence was widely attributed by strategic experts to the premature diversion of military resources by the Bush administration to Operation Iraqi Freedom. This was consistent with Obama’s repeated charge, both as a U.S. senator and as a presidential candidate, that the Bush administration had its priorities wrong in giving primacy to the counterinsurgency effort in Iraq over the counterinsurgency/counterterrorism effort in Afghanistan.
President Obama announced his new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan on March 27, 2009. The product of a sixty-day effort led by former CIA official and Obama campaign adviser Bruce Riedel—an authority on Afghanistan and Pakistan—the new strategy was not all that new in its basic objective, which President Obama defined as “to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future.” Nor was the president’s statement new in contending that in order to do so it was essential to escalate the war against the Taliban insurgency; for “if the Afghan government falls to the Taliban—or allows al Qaeda to go unchallenged—that country will again be a base for terrorists who want to kill as many of our people as possible.”3 What was new was the premise that the means for accomplishing even the counterterrorism mission would have to include much broader and multifaceted military operations within Afghanistan, including substantially more U.S. boots on the ground (at least for the near term), than had characterized the Bush administration’s “light footprint” strategy.
The conduct of the military dimensions of the enhanced counterinsurgency operations would supposedly reflect the ideas of General Petraeus and his coauthors in the new U.S. Army–Marine Corps counterinsurgency manual published in 2006, which (borrowing from British counterguerilla strategies in Malaya) gave greater emphasis to protecting the population from the insurgency and winning their hearts and minds than to killing the enemy.4 Already applied by General Petraeus in the Iraq surge in the last year and a half of the Bush administration, the focus on protecting people was made specific to the situation in Afghanistan and elaborated in rules of engagement by the Obama administration’s new commander of U.S. Forces–Afghanistan/International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), General Stanley McChrystal.
The president portrayed the enhanced counterinsurgency approach as part of a comprehensive, multifaceted effort designed not only to reverse the Taliban’s gains but to deal with the problem, which he candidly pointed to, of a government “undermined by corruption” that “has difficulty delivering basic services to its people” and an economy “undercut by a booming narcotics trade that encourages criminality and funds the insurgency.” Accordingly, he said he was ordering a dramatic increase in the civilian dimensions of the counterinsurgency effort, refraining, however, from associating it with the politically unpopular concept of “nation-building.”5
Still, the enhanced priority given to Afghanistan and such claimed revisions in strategy could not themselves avoid profound dilemmas or produce high prospects of success. By the summer of 2009, embarrassing military difficulties on the ground in Afghanistan and Pakistan, growing divisions among the U.S. policy elite, opinion polls showing increasing public opposition to the war (especially its financial costs), and persisting ineptitude and corruption in the government in Kabul were beginning to assault the president’s public posture of doing whatever was necessary in Afghanistan. Obama was already facing deep divisions within his administration over a range of issues: the numbers of troops that were required and could be sustained; the emphasis to be placed on counterterrorism as distinct from counterinsurgency missions and the rules of engagement for both; the prospects for substantial and effective Afghanization of the counterinsurgency, particularly in the wake of the fraud-saturated reelection of President Hamid Karzai; how to deal with the notorious corruption of the Karzai government without further diminishing its authority; the means of weaning Afghanistan from its opium poppy dependency (which was providing one-third to one-half of the country’s GDP) and putting it on the road to self-sustaining economic development; and finally, whether and under what terms to negotiate with the Taliban to wind down the war.
THE TROOP-LEVEL ISSUE
In an early move to implement his pledge to rectify the underallocation of resources to the Afghanistan campaign, the president, even before the completion of the Riedel study, had ordered a troop increment of 17,000 plus 4,000 trainers for the campaign in Afghanistan. This would bring the U.S. military presence up to 68,000, in addition to the 40,000 troops deployed there by other NATO countries. But as early as midsummer 2009, the secretary of defense, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the commander of the U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan were expressing uncertainty about whether that number would be sufficient for conducting the three essential missions of the forces prescribed by the new strategy: protecting the population from the Taliban insurgents; physically destroying Taliban and al-Qaeda units operating in Afghanistan and western Pakistan; and training Afghanistan government forces to themselves effectively perform the population protection and offensive counterinsurgency missions. And there was growing skepticism in the Pentagon as to whether the U.S. military, already stretched thin, could also assume a major share of the burden of reconstruction and institution building in areas freed from Taliban control or harassment.
At the end of August 2009, in the midst of growing popular and allied skepticism about the war and its prospects for success, Secretary of Defense Gates received a comprehensive assessment from the U.S. and ISAF commander McChrystal of the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan—which the general admitted to be much more serious than he had anticipated before taking up his post—and what it would take to reverse it. “The mission can be accomplished, but this will require … fundamental changes,” he warned. These would entail “significant near-term cost and risk” and substantially augmented resources, including a larger deployment of U.S. troops than the president had ordered and was planning to authorize.6 General McChrystal’s follow-up report to JCS chairman Mike Mullen estimated that the best chance of prosecuting the necessary missions effectively was an additional 85,000 troops. The minimum necessary to avoid failure would be 40,000. His lower option of 11,000 implied giving up on the strategy the president had selected.7
Accordingly, the White House let it be known that the March strategy was being reviewed again, taking subsequent assessments (including McChrystal’s) into account, and was being compared with various alternatives. When prodded in interviews during the ensuing months to reveal what those strategic alternatives and their troop numbers were, the president and administration officials refused to discuss the numbers, while insisting that the basic purpose of the strategy remained to defeat al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan and to prevent its return to either country in the future. The question was how best to accomplish this purpose.
On December 1, 2009, President Obama, addressing the nation from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, announced his decision: he was sending an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan. The president then dropped the other shoe (or boot): “After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home. These are the resources that we need to seize the initiative, while building the Afghan capacity that can allow for a responsible transition of our forces out of Afghanistan.”8 The president’s case for the summer 2011 deadline to start removing U.S. troops, his aides explained in background briefings, was that it was important to make clear to the Afghans that they had to seriously get ready to assume the responsibility for their own security; but Secretaries Gates and Clinton, as well as the U.S. military, thought it was a mistake to go public with such a deadline, especially as it would allow the Taliban to adapt by lying low and then relaunching a full-blown effort when, following the withdrawal of U.S. troops, the balance of fighting power was in their favor.9 Responsive to this concern, Obama allowed Gates and Clinton to qualify the June 2011 deadline, explaining in Sunday talk-show interviews that the magnitude and pace of the removal of the U.S. troops would of course depend on the conditions on the ground in Afghanistan at the time.
The 30,000 “surge” was 25 percent lower than General McChrystal’s estimated minimum requirement of additional troops for moderate success in the counterinsurgency campaign. White House spokespersons maintained, however, that when new pledges being obtained from NATO allies were added in, the McChrystal target would be roughly approximated. But when linked with the promise to begin drawing down the troops in June 2011 and the confident statement of an increased Afghan military capacity, it reflected a more basic move on Obama’s part toward revising—apparently downward—the objectives of the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan from those he had articulated in March. As now formulated, those objectives had to serve first and foremost the irreducible U.S. national interest—America’s own security and its own economic health, which was in a precarious condition due to the ongoing financial crisis. Our economic strength here at home needs to be rebuilt, the president told the global audience for his December 2009 West Point address. “That’s why our troop commitment to Afghanistan cannot be open-ended—because the nation that I’m most interested in building is our own.”10
COUNTERTERRORISM VERSUS COUNTERINSURGENCY
In back of President Obama’s West Point announcement on the number of troops and when they could start coming home there had been intensive, often acrimonious, debate in the administration over the priority to be given to counterterrorism missions as distinct from counterinsurgency missions. On the one side were those (led by Vice President Joe Biden) who argued that if the objective was to destroy al-Qaeda’s leadership and terrorist network, intelligence and offensive operations could and should be concentrated on knocking out the remaining al-Qaeda enclaves that were predominantly located in the eastern Afghanistan and western Pakistan border areas. The strategies and capabilities needed for this effort, labelled “counterterrorism-plus” were quite different than those for the counterinsurgency mission, argued its proponents: the counterterrorism efforts would rely principally on drones and special ops forces for attacks on the al-Qaeda leadership and involve much lower numbers of troops than would be required to defeat the Taliban across the length and breadth of Afghanistan. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, however, contended that there was considerable linkage between Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda and the Taliban; and they warned that the Taliban’s successes in Afghanistan were reverberating throughout the Islamic world, from Pakistan to Egypt to Yemen and Somalia and to Muslim communities in Western countries, energizing al-Qaeda and other violent jihadists and weakening progressive moderates. Moreover, Generals Petraeus and McChrystal and Admiral Mullen argued that, even if the basic mission were narrowed to destroying the terrorist enclaves in Afghanistan, special ops forays plus offshore and drone-delivered attacks would be woefully insufficient for preventing al-Qaeda’s return unless integrated with substantial U.S. ground-force operations to clear out, hold, and transfer such areas to sustainable control by government forces and anti-Taliban populations.11
Yes, the president approved 30,000 additional troops for the Petraeus-McChrystal counterinsurgency mission. But his public announcement and internal insistence that the departure of troops from Afghanistan would start in the summer of 2011 meant that he had already, by the end of 2009, moved considerably toward the Biden position that countering terrorists who could attack the United States—not defeating the Taliban insurgency—was the primary justification for further expenditures of U.S. blood and treasure in Afghanistan. Moreover, the White House push for very rapidly devolving the counterinsurgency functions to the Afghan military were consistent with the plan to get the U.S. military substantially out of the active counterinsurgency business in Afghanistan as soon as possible. Obama still talked of the “fundamental connection” between the U.S. anti-Taliban effort in Afghanistan and going after al-Qaeda in Pakistan; and his aides pointed to the juxtaposition of the two objectives in the president’s West Point speech: “We must deny al Qaeda a safe haven. We must reverse the Taliban’s momentum and deny it the ability to overthrow the government.” 12 Yet reversing the Taliban’s momentum and preventing it from again overthrowing the government in Kabul were considerably scaled-down objectives from defeating it. The counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan was to be regarded as mainly, if not entirely, an instrument of the global counterterrorism campaign. Meanwhile, Obama had become more interested in strategies for decapitating the leadership of al-Qaeda and other violent jihadist movements around the world than in having the United States preside over the political and economic development of Afghanistan.13
Problems with Afghanization
Similar to the Vietnam War, where Vietnamization had been a cover for U.S. disengagement, the devolution of the responsibility to the Afghans for countering the Taliban became the basic U.S. strategy prior to solid indications that the Afghan forces were up to the task, politically as well as militarily. General Petraeus and his military colleagues, however, were adamantly against a fundamental transference of responsibility to the Afghan security forces before the surge in U.S. troop and equipment levels authorized by the president in December 2009 had time to materialize on the battlefield, and the new population-centered strategy of clear/hold/build was allowed to demonstrate its effectiveness. Henceforth much of the debate in the Obama administration, the deliberations in NATO, and the bilateral Washington-Kabul discussions had to do with the parameters of the Afghanization of the counterinsurgency—its speed; the stages in which various aspects of the mission were to be handed off; and the kinds of support, training, and limited combat participation the United States and other countries would continue to provide.
The basic goal endorsed by the November 2010 NATO summit in Lisbon was for the Afghan forces to be fully “in the lead” by the end of 2014. As explained by NATO secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen, starting in early 2011 “Afghan forces will begin taking the lead for security operations … in certain provinces and, based on conditions, will gradually expand throughout the country.” He insisted, however, that “NATO is in this for the long-term. We will not transition until our Afghan partners are ready. We will stay, after transition, in a supporting role.”14
Meeting with President Karzai on May 20, 2012, in conjunction with the Chicago summit, President Obama proclaimed, “The war in Afghanistan as we know it is over, but our commitment to friendship and partnership continues.” 15 White House and Pentagon spokespersons, pressed to defend what seemed to be an earlier end-of-the-war announcement than was warranted by the transition process being endorsed at the NATO meeting, emphasized the “as we know it” phrase in Obama’s statement. The president, they claimed, was referring to the turn in U.S. and ISAF strategy toward handing over by the end of 2014 the prime responsibility to the Afghans for their own security and the changes in battlefield operations that were already underway.16 The media, they said, should read the Chicago summit’s declaration reaffirming the “irreversible transition to full security responsibility from the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) to the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) … by the end of 2014.” It was then that “the NATO-led combat mission will end.”17
But did the end of combat mission mean the end of all combat operations by U.S. forces in support of the war against the Taliban now led by the Afghans? Could the U.S. “support” and “assistance” at times involve, at the request of the Afghans, attacks by U.S. special ops units or some air-delivered strikes or at least targeting information acquired by drones? And what of U.S. counterterrorism actions, particularly attacks against al-Qaeda or Haqqani enclaves on Afghan soil or from Afghanistan at their bases in Pakistan? The journalists kept asking such questions, and administration spokespersons kept responding with “it all depends”—which was in fact a truthful reflection of the work in progress situation on the battlefield and in negotiations between the Obama administration and President Karzai.
Related complicated questions revolved around various initiatives to induce Taliban fighters to defect—promising amnesty, offering them better-paying and less dangerous alternative employment—simultaneously with Karzai holding out an olive branch to the Taliban, including offers of participation in the country’s governance to elements of the movement who were regarded as “moderate.” Could ostensible defectors play games of deception to infiltrate even the Afghan military (which did in fact emerge as a major problem in the so-called green-on-blue attacks by uniformed Afghan soldiers against ISAF soldiers) and also civilian agencies to subvert the ongoing reconstruction of governance? Would negotiating with the moderate Taliban confer political legitimacy on their movement and undermine the efforts in Afghanistan and on the part of the United States and its allies to continue to expend blood and treasure fighting the Taliban and al-Qaeda extremists?
Negotiating a Truce
As the reality sank in that the U.S. and ISAF forces could not expect to decisively degrade Taliban capabilities before the scheduled start of troop reductions in the summer of 2011, nor could the Afghans do so largely on their own after 2014, the objective of the Obama administration shifted from ensuring the Afghan government forces could defeat the Taliban to preventing the Taliban from again becoming the dominant power in the country. This appeared to require, however, some kind of a negotiated settlement, or at least a cease-fire, with the Taliban. And indeed a flurry of semi-official preliminary discussions were undertaken by President Karzai, Taliban and ISAF commanders, and U.S. diplomats to determine whether negotiations would be anything more than a propaganda contest among the involved parties or could lead to at least a sustainable truce.
President Karzai’s on-again, off-again support for the idea of negotiations with the Taliban, plus his insistence on keeping control of the process in his hands, made for wariness in the Obama administration that negotiations once begun would produce an outcome consistent with U.S. geostrategic interests in the region. Moreover, the prelude to serious negotiations exposed serious rifts among the countries and political movements that would have a stake in the postwar arrangements.
But even if these preliminaries came to naught, it was transparent that the Obama administration—with some objections from the military—was willing to countenance and eventually participate in negotiations that apparently would give the Taliban a legitimate role in the country’s governance as an alternative to continuing the war.
These various complications in the good war—the war of necessity—in Afghanistan soured many people in the Obama administration as well as in the Congress on continuing to sustain the ten-year-old military effort beyond the summer of 2011 when U.S. troop convoys were slated to begin heading for the off-ramp. The official position of the Defense Department, publically backed by Obama, continued to be that conditions on the ground, not the calendar, would determine the timetable and quantity and quality of the troop drawdowns.
“Afghan Good Enough?”
With the 2012 U.S. presidential election looming, the gap between the administration’s basic policy for Afghanistan and the public’s low tolerance for continuing the human and financial sacrifices was closing.18 The president had moved very substantially in the direction of the strategy Vice President Biden had been advocating all along. In this he was supported especially by his younger aides and a self-named “Afghan Good Enough Group” that U.S. deputy national security adviser Denis McDonough had been convening weekly during 2011 to brainstorm problems with the Petraeus-McChrystal strategy and to examine alternatives. The revised strategy in essence would provide that “the objective of having the Afghan government regain control throughout the country would be supplanted by the minimal objective of preventing the Taliban’s resumption of dominant power in Kabul.” It would be good enough if the government could secure its control in particular designated regions. The U.S. counterterrorism objective, however, would continue to be, as stated by Obama in 2009, “to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat, al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future.” (Secretary of Defense Gates confesses in his memoir to being the author of the embarrassing “Afghan good enough” phrase, which he used in conversations with President Bush in support of “a combination of selective counterinsurgency and counterterrorism—to degrade the Taliban’s capabilities to the point where larger and better trained Afghan security forces could maintain control of the country and prevent the return of al Qaeda.”19)
Obama did, in fact, adopt the essence of the Good Enough Group’s preferred strategy: The United States and its ISAF partners would by the end of 2014 have turned over to the Afghans full responsibility for conducting the counterinsurgency campaign and providing law and order. The U.S.-ISAF counterinsurgency operations would therefore totally terminate by then and their troops would be withdrawn by, except for some training and “enabler” contingents and possibly a few counterterrorism special ops units and bases (for attacking al-Qaeda and other violent jihadists in eastern Afghanistan and Pakistan) to be approved by the Afghan government. In the meantime, the United States would work with the government of Afghanistan to persuade the Taliban to call off its insurgency. This could include negotiations between the government and the Taliban (with the U.S. a negotiating party if that would facilitate agreement) to allocate respective spheres of control across the country. The negotiations could also include agreements on Taliban participation in the central structures and processes of the country’s governance. (However, to the chagrin of human rights groups, any federal system that might result would not be able to guarantee the continuation, at least not in the Taliban-controlled areas, of the considerable progress in women’s rights that had been achieved under the U.S. occupation. Obama administration spokespersons insisted they would not countenance such an outcome; but it was becoming clear that war termination would have priority over democracy and human rights.)
The United States would make substantial long-term commitments of funds and technical assistance to the reconstruction and economic development of Afghanistan, subject to credible efforts by the governing authorities to rout out the country’s notorious corruption. The Obama administration granted that security was the precondition for good governance; it also recognized that security could not be sustained if the governing authorities were riddled with corruption. Yet the pervasive culture of impunity (enjoyed by national officials and the military in addition to local officials and police and militias) for misuse of international aid and rewarding one’s family and tribal members with cushy jobs and contracts, whenever it was raised by U.S. officials, was reacted to with anger by president Karzai as an invasion of Afghanistan’s sovereignty.
Obama could not be confident, however, that the revised strategy could indeed be “good enough” to prevent the Taliban from again becoming the dominant force in the country and—of highest importance to the Americans—to ensure the United States could continue to strike at al-Qaeda strongholds from Afghan territory. There was a substantial risk that the Afghans would see the revised strategy as an indication of abandonment by the Americans and would simply concede to living under a system of deals among power brokers and corrupt officials, with “security” provided by local militias or the Taliban, letting political reform and human rights, including the Western concerns for women’s rights, be damned.
Despite these uncertainties as to its implementation and results, the “good enough” exit strategy (but not its name) was essentially adopted by Obama as a way of sloughing off the albatross that the erstwhile “war of necessity” in Afghanistan had become for him. The stabilization and reconstruction of the country, as with Iraq after the U.S. forces departed, although yet important, would no longer be regarded as a vital security interest of the United States.
The Assassination of Osama bin Laden
Obama’s political advisers—concerned that the decisive move to counterterrorism and away from counterinsurgency could be exploited politically by the Republicans in the 2012 elections—were wary of an explicit public disclosure by the administration of the assumptions underlying the shift. Fortuitously, however, the counterterrorism rationale for getting involved in Afghanistan in the first place was again brought front and center in the form of a dramatic target of opportunity: Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of 9/11 and hero and head of al-Qaeda, now, in the spring of 2011, was apparently in the gun-sights of the CIA and the U.S. military. Obama could at least fulfill his 2008 campaign promise that “if we have Osama bin Laden [and other al-Qaeda leaders] in our sights … we will take them out. We will kill bin Laden; we will crush al Qaeda. That has to be our biggest national security priority.”20
The U.S. intelligence community, on the basis of leads obtained through its interrogations of al-Qaeda prisoners and clandestine operations in Pakistan, had been intensively watching the comings and goings into and out of a walled-off three-story compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The compound, surrounded by a concrete wall some fifteen feet high and topped with barbed wire, had evidently been built during the past few years and—curiously—was located a bare 0.8 miles from the Pakistan Military Academy; but soundings of the Pakistani military indicated they had no connection with the compound nor did anyone from the surrounding community admit to any knowledge of what was going on inside its walls. U.S. surveillance of the compound, however, did observe a particular individual periodically carrying what were assumed to be supplies and messages into the compound who fit the profile of a courier CIA informants had identified as serving bin Laden. The fact that there were no electronic messages of any kind sent from or received by persons within the compound was a giveaway that it must have been the site of some supersensitive command center. But if the commander inside was indeed bin Laden, the six-foot, four-inch wiry jihadist could not be observed moving around behind the high walls.
On May 1, 2011, the raid on the Abbottabad compound was undertaken—without the knowledge of either the Afghan or the Pakistani government. President Obama and his national security team assembled in the White House situation room to witness its progress, as the helicopter-transported attack group, directed by the CIA and employing U.S. Navy SEALs and the U.S. Army’s airborne regiment of its Special Operations Command, breached the Abbottabad compound’s walls with explosives and charged into the main building, where the SEALs encountered bin Laden and shot him to death. Four other people were killed in the raid: bin Laden’s son Khalid; bin Laden’s courier; and the courier’s brother and the brother’s wife.
In the president’s May 2 public statement about the event he recalled that “shortly after taking office, I directed Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, to make the killing or capture of bin Laden the top priority of our war against al Qaeda, even as we continued our broader efforts to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat his network.” And he affirmed that “the death of bin Laden marks the most significant achievement to date in our nation’s effort to defeat al Qaeda.” He felt it also necessary to remind everyone that this was an act of war against that terrorist organization and that the United States was not—and never would be—at war with Islam: “I’ve made clear, just as President Bush did shortly after 9/11, that our war is not against Islam. Bin Laden was not a Muslim leader; he was a mass murderer of Muslims. Indeed, al Qaeda has slaughtered scores of Muslims in many countries, including our own. So his demise should be welcomed by all who believe in peace and human dignity.”
The president knew, however, that the Pakistanis were outraged that the raid into their territory was undertaken without their prior knowledge; that the Americans felt they could not be trusted with that information; and that, indeed, the U.S. officials suspected that at least some higher-ups in the Pakistan military and intelligence service knew where bin Laden was hiding. The severe aggravation of U.S.-Pakistani mutual mistrust was an unfortunate cost of the operation, but, from the perspective of the White house, definitely worth incurring in order to preserve absolute secrecy of the operation. Relations between the United States and Pakistan had already deteriorated during the past decades, with Islamabad increasingly angry at the U.S. courtship of India as a counterweight to China, and Washington, obsessed with Pakistan’s continuing support for the Taliban. The U.S. Ambassador, Cameron Munter, in an effort to avoid a severe breakdown of the strategically crucial relationship tried to get the Obama administration to focus the interchanges more on Pakistan’s internal security and economic development needs, but to no avail. Now, however, to avoid further exacerbating the deeply frayed relationship, Obama included the following words in his public remarks:
Over the years, I’ve repeatedly made clear that we would take action within Pakistan if we knew where bin Laden was. That is what we’ve done. But it’s important to note that our counterterrorism cooperation with Pakistan helped lead us to bin Laden and the compound where he was hiding. Indeed, bin Laden had declared war against Pakistan as well, and ordered attacks against the Pakistani people.
Tonight, I called President Zardari, and my team has also spoken with their Pakistani counterparts. They agree that this is a good and historic day for both of our nations. And going forward, it is essential that Pakistan continue to join us in the fight against al Qaeda and its affiliates.21
The administration’s presentation to the public of the details of the raid, first conveyed in a press briefing by Obama’s chief counterterrorism advisor John Brennan, were incomplete (deliberately so, to protect the supersensitive modes of operation of the special ops forces) and somewhat embarrassingly ragged with respect to exactly how the three individuals plus bin Laden met their deaths.22 Immediately, administration officials were peppered with questions concerning the “capture or kill” orders under which the SEALs were operating; and the answers that were given could be and were interpreted variously by commentators—ranging from the supposition that Obama wanted the terrorist leader dead rather than alive to the belief that the SEALs were instructed to kill bin Laden only in self-defense. Obama himself, in praising the SEALs for their heroism, did nothing to resolve the controversy. But the legal justification developed by Attorney General Eric Holder for this and other targeted killings of terrorists leaders (see chap. 38)—namely, that the targets were our enemies in war, the war on terrorism—gave credence to the suspicion that Obama just as soon wanted bin Laden executed on the spot rather than captured and brought to trial for crimes against humanity.
Crushing al-Qaeda, as Obama put it, was his “biggest national security priority,” but did this require the decapitation of the terrorist movement and would eliminating its head essentially destroy the capacity of the movement to function? The intelligence on al-Qaeda gave no clear answers to these questions. Terrorism experts in the administration and think tanks were divided over the extent to which the attacks on al-Qaeda units in Afghanistan and Pakistan had broken the back of the movement or only caused it to disperse throughout the wider South Asia, Middle East, and North Africa regions. And there was no consensus on the role of Osama bin Laden himself in the context of the U.S. and international community’s concerted effort to decimate al-Qaeda in reaction to 9/11. Some analysts believed the movement had become largely decentralized and autonomously directed by leaders with localized priorities; others saw bin Laden and his immediate lieutenants as maintaining basic direction even over the dispersed cadres and continuing to design projects for them. But when the opportunity arose to do away with the world’s most notorious terrorist, Obama did not need to consider either of these evaluations; he knew what the American people overwhelmingly wanted him to do. Whether or not the assassination of bin Laden would be a large operational plus in the continuing war on terrorism was less important from the perspective of the White House than its symbolic value in that war and the catharsis its accomplishment provided the nation.
Lingering Troops and Lingering Doubts
The killing of Osama bin Laden might have made it easier for the United States to extricate itself from Afghanistan without conceding ineffectiveness in the fight against al-Qaeda. Yet the Obama administration was not about to replicate the endgame of the Vietnam War, in which under the guise of successful Vietnamization, Nixon and Kissinger negotiated a peace treaty providing for a complete withdrawal of U.S. forces from the country and requiring the government of South Vietnam to share power with the insurgents—the result being a total collapse of the ability of the government to stave off Saigon becoming Ho Chi Minh City in 1975.
Thus, Obama began his second term with the issue of just how many U.S. counterinsurgency troops would remain in Afghanistan after 2014 and what precisely would be their mission still not fully resolved within the administration although the expectation was that their role would be primarily, if not exclusively, confined to training the Afghan military. Whether or not some of the residual U.S. forces would also be asked and be willing to provide air support and other “enablers” to the Afghan military operations was a matter of controversy, and the answers might yet be affected by assessments of what it would take to prevent the Taliban from making further gains. With respect to the counterterrorism campaign, however, Obama was eager to get agreement from Karzai or his successor that specialized U.S forces could continue to operate from Afghan territory for directing and conducting air strikes and commando-type raids against al Qaeda and other terrorist enclaves in Pakistan as well as in Afghanistan. But Obama was adamant that there would be no U.S. forces remaining—zero, it was emphasized—if Kabul and Washington failed to resolve their controversy over the terms in the Bilateral Security Agreement regarding the immunity of U.S military personnel from Afghan legal proceedings. Also still in the closet was the question of the terms of any disposition of territorial control and shared governance that might be negotiated by the Afghan government and the Taliban, for these—even in anticipation—could moot virtually all of the other questions or at least fundamentally change their parameters.
Midway in what he had previously announced was to be the final year—2014—of the U.S. combat mission in Afghanistan—President Obama, on May 27, provided his most candid and detailed public statement yet on what that meant: “We will no longer patrol Afghan cities or towns, mountains or valleys. That is a task for the Afghan people.” However, at the start of 2015 there would still be 9,800 U.S. service members in various parts of the country; they would have “two narrow missions: training Afghan forces and supporting counterterrorism operations against the remnants of al Qaeda.” By the end of 2015, these troops will have been reduced by roughly half, located in Kabul and on Bagram airfield. And by the end of 2016, the only U.S. military personnel left in the country would be the those assigned to guard the U.S. embassy, and, possibly, depending on arrangements to be worked out with the Afghan government (which Obama did not discuss in this public statement), some special counterterrorism contingents for conducting commando-type raids and implementing drone strikes. This graduated force-reduction scenario, the president now warned publicly, would materialize only if the Afghan government finally signed the already-negotiated Bilateral Security Agreement that preserved U.S. legal authority over all actions of U.S. military personnel. (At the end of September 2014, the new Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani, did sign the BSA.) Obama was confident that the American people, weary of more than a decade of war, would support this complicated exit strategy. “I think Americans have learned that it is harder to end wars than to begin them. Yet this is how wars end in the 21st century.”23
LEGACIES OF THE IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN WARS
The president could not escape the realization, and need to adapt to the reality, that the United States would be burdened for decades with the consequences of its military response to 9/11—two wars which cumulatively lasted longer and cost more financially than any period of war in the country’s history. (The U.S. combat fatalities, over 6,800 by 2014, were substantially less than in the Korean or Vietnam wars; but there were more than 50,000 wounded, at least one-third of them severely.) The total bill exceeded a trillion dollars, and this at a time of great national concern over the soaring federal debt and irresponsible practices of private lending institutions that triggered the 2008–2011 recession. The country simply could not financially afford another war of the magnitude of the Iraq or Afghanistan counterinsurgencies; and as the withdrawing U.S. military left a rather precarious security environment in both—especially in Iraq, which Obama had considered the good war of necessity—the mood of most Americans was epitomized in the comment of the departing secretary of defense, Robert Gates, that “any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his mind examined’ as General MacArthur so delicately put it.”24
Moreover, to avoid falling over the deficit “cliff” (the metaphoric cliché of the day), the Obama administration and the Republican-controlled House of Representatives had bound themselves with a “sequestration” agreement requiring budgetary cuts in the trillions of dollars over the forthcoming decade (if the Congress year by year did not deliver these mandated cuts, comparable, if not larger, gross cuts would be made automatically in the budgets of particular agencies). Whereas in the past, neither the executive nor the Congress was ready to severely reduce the Pentagon’s budget for fiscal reasons, now the Defense Department was no longer immune. It was required to achieve nearly $500 billion in reduced expenditures via annual cuts over a ten-year period; but failing that, the automatic sequestered cuts it would suffer would approximately double the decade’s cuts to over a trillion dollars.
In anticipation of such a constriction of the Pentagon’s resources, Gates’s successor as secretary of defense, Leon Panetta, worked out with the White House a fresh statement of the country’s basic national security policy, titled Defense Strategic Guidance and Budget Issues. Putting the best face on it in his January 2012 briefings, Panetta forecast that the military will be smaller and leaner, but it will be agile, flexible, rapidly deployable and technologically advanced—a “cutting-edge force.”25 Ironically, the concept substantially replicated the military “transformation” ideas incorporating the “revolution in military affairs” championed a decade earlier by George W. Bush’s secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, which turned out to be a rather poor match with the requirements for the counterinsurgency wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the irony was consonant with the Gates-Panetta-Biden determination—apparently fully shared by the president and featured in the January 2012 defense guidance—to drastically scale back the military’s counterinsurgency and “stability” (nation-building) functions. The Asia-Pacific “rebalancing” of U.S. military planning and deployments, although driven largely by the objective of being able to counter China’s increased strategic and power-projection capabilities, reinforced this shift away from forces trained primarily for intervening in underdeveloped or failing states. So did the prospect of once-again having to actively contain an imperialistically-expansive Russia—a preoccupation of the Pentagon strategists under Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel in the wake of Putin’s imperial move against Ukraine.
As prescribed in the 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review, a “full spectrum” (but somehow less expensive) force posture would be retained as a planning imperative, with emphasis now, however, on certain segments of the spectrum—namely: operations and technologies for drone-type or “light-footprint” actions against terrorists; capabilities for “offshore” sea and air battle operations against major-power enemies; residually, a modernized nuclear arsenal to deter WMD aggression; and, most ambitiously, “command of the commons,” that is, superiority in the oceans, outerspace, and cyberspace.26 Capabilities for heavy-footprint ground-force interventions (conventional or counterinsurgency)—the most expensive components of the military budget—would be downgraded and defunded.
It was not only the trillion-dollar costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, however, and congressionally-imposed limitations on future military spending that were the sources of the Obama administration’s determination to reallocate the defense budget away from the degree of emphasis on counterinsurgency it had featured since 9/11. It was time to “turn the page,” to “begin a new chapter” (Obama’s words) in the foreign policy that drew the United States into the hubristic military occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq—countries that, like Vietnam a generation ago, turned out to have more complex societies than the best-educated commanders and diplomats knew how to manage. Boots on the ground, even though worn by soldiers trained in population-protection “hearts-and-minds” techniques of countering insurgencies, would not have the pride of place in the Pentagon’s full-spectrum of military instruments that General Petraeus and his colleagues had been championing. Indeed, no U.S. boots on the ground would be the oft-reiterated mantra of the commander-in-chief, even as he ordered U.S. forces into action in Libya and against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.