CHAPTER 8
Leave
In the summer of 2013, I stood at the entrance to the Gaza Strip, the Middle East’s political leper colony. Gaza is a rectangular parcel of land lodged between Egypt and Israel, with 1.7 million Palestinians crammed into 140 square miles. The Gazans are impoverished outcasts, ruled by the Islamist group Hamas, and living under an Israeli and Egyptian quarantine.
The Israeli-controlled crossing point of Kerem Shalom sits at the southern edge of the Gaza Strip where Egypt, Israel, and Gaza meet. It’s one of the main freight routes into Gaza. With great piles of boxed goods surrounded by concrete blast walls, barbed wire, and drifting observation balloons, Kerem Shalom looks like a cross between IKEA and Guantanamo Bay. The entry point is periodically under attack by Palestinian militants. I nearly stepped in a pothole—which turned out to be a mortar bomb crater. Here, in 2006, Hamas kidnapped the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. His release became a cause célèbre in Israel and took five years to negotiate.
A mortar bomb crater at Kerem Shalom (Author’s collection)
Israel has devised an elaborate system to deliver goods into Gaza and avoid contact with the Hamas regime. Essentially, Israelis drop the stuff and run. Several hundred trucks rumble into Kerem Shalom every day, carrying everything from water and food to air conditioners and forty-two-inch flat screen televisions. The contents are first unloaded and inspected by Israeli forces. Then the goods are put onto a second set of vehicles, which transports them a few yards past concrete barriers, where they’re unloaded for a second time. Finally, a third set of Palestinian trucks appears and takes the shipment into Gaza. Israel says these elaborate controls are vital for its security. The Palestinians see it as a humiliating siege.
How did we end up here? In 1994, Israel partially withdrew from Gaza in line with the Oslo Peace Accords. A decade later, in 2005, Ariel Sharon’s Israeli government decided to unilaterally remove all Israeli troops and settlers from Gaza—while retaining control (with Egypt) of Gaza’s borders, power, and airspace.
Sharon’s motives are hotly debated. His supporters depict the move as a bold bid for peace and the first step in a broader strategy of disengaging from Palestinian territory, including most of the West Bank. Critics see a more Machiavellian calculation to reduce international pressure on Israel and strengthen Israel’s long-term hold over major settlements in the West Bank. Sharon certainly sold the disengagement to the Israeli right as a hawkish policy—either because it was politically necessary to do so or because he meant what he said.1 In the end, Sharon’s strategy may never be fully understood. He slipped into a coma in 2006 and passed away in 2014.
For many Israelis and Palestinians, the exit from Gaza ended in regret. The withdrawal was a wrenching experience for Israeli society. Around eight thousand Israeli settlers were uprooted. Some of the settlers threatened to set themselves on fire, or symbolically wore the Star of David badge to draw a parallel with Nazi persecution.
The Israeli disengagement didn’t end the violence in Gaza. Within weeks of the withdrawal, dozens of rockets were being fired from the territory. In 2006, Israel responded with a large-scale intervention, in which hundreds of Palestinians and a handful of Israelis were killed.
In 2007, Hamas launched a bloody coup that purged its rival Fatah from Gaza. Hamas fighters physically threw a senior Fatah member from the top of the tallest building in Gaza—a fifteen-story apartment complex. Fatah fighters then threw a Hamas militant from a twelve-story building. The Palestinian people were now cleaved into two, with Hamas ruling in Gaza and Fatah governing in the West Bank.
The following years were punctuated by three major Israeli incursions into Gaza to suppress rocket fire: Operation Cast Lead in 2008, Operation Pillar of Defense in 2012, and the longest and bloodiest of all, Operation Protective Edge in 2014. These interventions led to the deaths of dozens of Israelis, as well as over three thousand Palestinians.
Some hoped that the Israeli departure might invigorate the Gazan economy and create a “Dubai on the Mediterranean.” But today, youth unemployment in Gaza runs at over 50 percent. The Gazan people survive on goods delivered through a handful of crossing points or smuggled through an elaborate network of illicit tunnels. (A twelve-piece bucket of KFC chicken can be delivered from Egypt to Gaza in four hours at a cost of about $27 via multiple taxi drivers, couriers, and underground traffickers.)
The Black Arrow memorial overlooks Gaza and commemorates the Israeli soldiers who died in raids against Egypt in the 1950s. Here, I asked a colonel from the Israeli Defense Force’s southern command about the exit strategy from Gaza. The withdrawal, he said, was the most difficult operation he had been involved in. “We ruined people’s lives”—by which he meant the lives of Israeli settlers. As a result, “a terror organization is the government.” Hamas chose the path of violence and would now reap the consequences of Israeli firepower. “They had their chance,” he said.
The elegant majesty of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem is barely fifty miles away from Gaza but it feels like another universe. The hotel wasn’t always an oasis from the fighting. In 1946, when the King David was the British headquarters in Palestine, the militant Zionist Irgun group set off a massive bomb in the hotel that killed ninety people. But as I sipped coffee in the Jaffa Room at the hotel, the Kerem Shalom crossing point may as well have been in Somalia.
Here I met Brigadier General Udi Dekel, the former head of the Israeli Defense Force’s strategic planning division and a former chief of the Israeli negotiating team with the Palestinians. Was the exit strategy from Gaza a success? Yes, he said, in one sense: Almost no Israeli wants to go back to the days of controlling over 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza.
But the forcible removal of the settlers, and the subsequent Hamas takeover, cast a shadow over the withdrawal. Gilead Sher, a former Israeli negotiator, told me the disengagement was an “excellent strategic decision, lousily managed.” There was little dialogue with the settlers. The Israeli government failed to plan for their relocation and compensation. Some of the former settlers are still struggling to find work. And the simultaneous departure of the Israeli military and Israeli civilians created a dangerous security vacuum.
Many Palestinians aren’t happy with the withdrawal either. In Ramallah I met with Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator. Erekat is an effervescent performer—the kind of man who laughs heartily and then suddenly turns deadly serious. He earned his PhD in negotiation. “That was my mistake. Now I’m stuck with this job.”
What was the lesson of Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza? His answer: “Unilateralism fails.” In 2005, Israel maintained minimal contact with the Palestinians during the pullout. As Erekat saw it, unilateral withdrawals like Gaza (or the Israeli pullout from southern Lebanon in 2000) triggered more bloodshed, whereas the negotiated Israeli departure from Egyptian territory in the 1970s created stability. An exit strategy needs to be bilateral—a lesson the Israelis should “get through their thick heads.”
Saeb Erekat explaining to my group the dangers of unilateral Israeli withdrawal. (Author’s collection)
In the wake of the Gaza withdrawal and a stalled peace process, the Palestinians “don’t have a partner.” Israel controls all aspects of the Palestinians’ lives, down to whether Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas can take two or three cars into Israel. “Time is running out on me” to negotiate a peace, said Erekat. “I’m looking for my exit strategy.”
Mohammed Shtayyeh, the president of the Palestinian Economic Council for Development and Reconstruction, also felt that time was not on the Palestinians’ side. The Israeli settlements in the West Bank are growing. And unable to deliver peace, “the authority of the Authority is shrinking.” But time may not be working for the Israelis either. The situation is drifting toward a one-state reality, with a minority of Jews governing a majority of Arabs, threatening Israel’s existence as a Jewish democracy.
Back at the King David Hotel, Israel’s former negotiators said that everyone knows what the political endgame looks like—but we can’t get there. This fatalism might be hard for Americans to understand. Tal Becker, the deputy legal advisor for the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told me that Americans are naturally optimistic with a can-do spirit, whereas Israelis tend to be more pessimistic. American movies are upbeat stories with a positive narrative arc. By contrast, Israeli movies are about complex and dysfunctional families—and the audience argues about the meaning of the film on the way home.
The Israelis and Palestinians do agree on one thing: They’re not going anywhere. Erekat said the Israelis are “stuck with me as a neighbor.” The Israeli guide at Kerem Shalom also told me, “At the end of the movie, we’ll still be neighbors.”2
The Israeli withdrawal from Gaza reveals some of the challenges with the third phase of our exit strategy: leaving. This refers to the departure of most U.S. soldiers from the military theater and the shifting of responsibility to local troops, allies, or an international peacekeeping force. Leaving doesn’t mean the end of American involvement in the war. A residual force of U.S. troops may remain and Washington can also continue to provide aid and other forms of assistance.
Leaving is a necessary step following a military fiasco. Since the campaign involves limited U.S. interests, we can’t justify an endless war effort. Ultimately, we need to wind down the mission and pass the baton over to the local people. The goal is to withdraw while ensuring a smooth handover to a successor regime and continuing to exercise some influence at a reduced cost.
Leaving is a campaign all by itself. “Retrograde,” or shipping out the little America of bases, airfields, and fast-food restaurants, is a logistical nightmare—especially under fire. After all, the information age “has not suspended the laws of physics,” as H. R. McMaster told me.3 Equipment must be boxed up, handed over to allies, or destroyed. Exit routes must be plotted. Great convoys must set out for the border. It can take weeks to remove a single brigade from a combat zone. A large-scale presence may take months or years to extricate.
During the endgame in Iraq, the United States shipped out over two million items from ninety-two bases in around twenty thousand truckloads. But Iraq was relatively easy because of an extensive road system and a nearby port in Kuwait. In Afghanistan, the terrain is forbidding and there’s no Kuwait next door. The enormous inventory of Humvees, mine-resistant vehicles, Blackhawk helicopters, air conditioners, TGI Fridays, and other flotsam and jetsam of war must be sent by plane, train, and automobile, south through Pakistan or north via the former Soviet Union, in a vast operation costing around $5–7 billion.
Leaving is also a performance. As American soldiers depart, the United States and its opponents compete to control the storyline. Washington must choreograph the optics of withdrawal and avoid a narrative of surrender.
What practical steps can we follow?
Deadline Pressure
After World War I, the British Empire reached its apogee. With territory seized from the collapsed German and Ottoman empires, London controlled almost one quarter of the globe’s land surface. But like a distant dying star, the empire’s bright luster represented a long lost glory. Weakened by four years of debilitating conflict, Britain governed more territory than it could handle.
One of the newly acquired colonies—or mandates, as they were termed—was Iraq. In 1921, Britain installed Faisal I as king of Iraq and hoped to set the country on a path toward stable rule and independence. London created ambitious benchmarks to measure progress toward “a healthy body politic, guided and controlled by healthy public opinion.”4
The coronation of Faisal I as king of Iraq in 1921
Over time, however, there was increasing domestic pressure to withdraw from Iraq, or Quit Mesopotamia, as the campaign was known. The British public was weary of committing scarce resources to a backwater in the Middle East. London therefore scaled back its goals and sought indirect control over Iraq through local allies. High Commissioner Henry Dobbs hoped that Iraq “may be able to rub along in a corrupt, inefficient, oriental sort of way.”5 Britain relied on the air force as a punitive tool; the biplane was the drone of its day. In one of his un-finest hours, Winston Churchill suggested dropping mustard gas to “inflict punishment upon recalcitrant natives without inflicting grave injury upon them.”6
The benchmarks for stabilizing Iraq proved difficult to achieve, and the pressure to leave only grew stronger. London decided to fudge the issue by exaggerating the degree of progress, and then announced a fixed deadline in 1932 for British withdrawal and Iraq’s entry into the League of Nations as an independent state.
By setting a firm exit date, London abandoned any hope of creating a modern liberal country. Iraq was left as a quasi state, unable to maintain its territorial integrity or protect domestic order, and dependent on British finance and airplanes. After British forces left, Iraq succumbed to a series of military coups. Finally, in 1941, the Golden Square movement seized power in Baghdad. The new regime espoused virulent nationalism and anti-Semitism and sought an alliance with Hitler. Britain was forced to reoccupy Iraq from 1941 to 1947.
During a power vacuum before British troops reentered Baghdad in 1941, anti-Semitic Iraqis launched a pogrom against the country’s Jewish community—which was 130,000 strong and had been present in Babylon for over 2,500 years. In an echo of the European Holocaust, hundreds of Jews were murdered. Over the subsequent years, almost the entire Jewish community left Iraq. By 2008, there were only about half a dozen mostly elderly Jews still in the country—too few to read the Torah in public. Soon there will be none.7
London’s decision to depart in 1932, come hell or high water, allowed Britain to exit the Iraqi quagmire. But a decade later it was back. This experience suggests a fundamental dilemma for the United States today. How quickly can we withdraw without seeing the entire military campaign crumble into ashes? We want to achieve our goals and get out—but which takes priority? In other words, should the exit be guided by benchmarks or deadlines?
Benchmarks are tests that must be passed before Washington can exit. Therefore, the timetable for withdrawal depends on the ambition of the aims. Achieving the benchmarks for a beacon of freedom will typically mean a prolonged intervention. According to one RAND study, for example, creating an enduring transition to stable democracy usually takes a minimum of five years, “while staying long does not guarantee success, leaving early ensures failure.”8 Add guerrillas to the mix, and the vision of a beacon of freedom may recede even further into the distance. A counterinsurgency campaign can take a decade or more to suppress the enemy.9 By contrast, with more modest goals like a surgical strike or ugly stability, the benchmarks may be easier to achieve and the timescale could be measured in months rather than years.
Benchmarks have one major attraction: They maximize the chance of achieving our goals. We can verify the degree of progress, make sure the new strategy is proceeding on schedule, and take necessary steps if we fall behind.
But as the British discovered in Iraq, benchmarks can slow or prevent an exit. If they’re not achieved, we’re looking at an open-ended commitment. It can also be hard to know whether the benchmarks have been accomplished, especially with ambiguous goals like establishing the rule of law or overseeing free and fair elections. Set the bar too high and we stay indefinitely. Set the bar too low and we end up fudging the issue to allow an escape.
Benchmarks are appropriate when the war impacts vital American security needs, and Washington is confident the goals can be achieved. “If you feel that the mission is worthy enough to make the commitment,” said Senator William Cohen, “then you shouldn’t put a time frame to it.”10 Benchmarks can also work when an operation is inherently open-ended—such as a peacekeeping mission—and the likely costs of staying a little longer than planned are modest.
The alternative option is to withdraw based on a fixed deadline. In other words, we pick a date when the United States will depart—whether or not our goals have been achieved. Setting a deadline has one huge advantage: There’s no prolonged quagmire. The United States really will leave, come what may. Our allies on the ground have a window of opportunity to create a better future. If they fall short, we exit stage right.
But deadlines can raise the odds of failure. Time pressure may produce a shoddy job. Deadlines are also rigid and difficult to alter if conditions change. And local spoilers will be tempted to bide their time, knowing that U.S. troops will soon be gone. Setting a deadline means that American soldiers can become an army of lame ducks, constantly looking at their watches.11
Deadlines are best if the campaign involves few U.S. interests and there’s considerable risk in staying indefinitely. A fixed time horizon may also be necessary if American public support collapses, or if the local regime insists on a quicker exit. Deadlines rarely work if the goal is a beacon of freedom. If we’re tempted to set an alarm clock on such a grandiose endeavor, it’s best to scale down the objectives and shoot for ugly stability.
Was it smart to announce a 2014 deadline for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan? During the 2012 election campaign, Vice President Joe Biden said, “We are leaving [Afghanistan] in 2014. Period.”12
There was logic to the deadline. The war was increasingly unpopular among Americans and allies alike. Stanley McChrystal told me that a fixed date in Afghanistan could provide a “forcing function” and give “impetus” to the local actors.
But according to McChrystal, the 2014 date didn’t need to be “so declarative.”13 Once an exit is set in stone, we may stop pushing as hard to achieve our goals—and start hoping things are good enough by the time we leave. The fixed timetable was also inflexible. What if hell or high water actually happened—like terrorists threatening to seize Pakistani nuclear weapons? Would we still leave? And crucially, if we had started negotiating with the insurgents earlier, we might have received something in return for an exit date. The Taliban’s major goal is the withdrawal of foreign troops. But we gave away this bargaining chip for free.
It Is Their War
In 2012, Mahmoud was a twenty-two-year-old Afghan government soldier. Hearing stories of Americans killing Afghans and insulting Muhammad “strengthened my desire to kill Americans with my own fingers.” Mahmoud contacted the Taliban and told them about his plan to attack U.S. troops. The insurgents doubted he would follow through. But Mahmoud killed one American and wounded two, before escaping to join the rebels.14
Insider strikes by Afghan soldiers and police against U.S. and allied troops—“green-on-blue” attacks—became one of the Taliban’s signature moves. “I urge all Afghans who perform duties in the ranks of the enemy,” said Mullah Omar in an Eid message, “to turn barrels of their guns against the infidel invaders and their allies instead of martyring their Muslim Afghans.”15 In 2012, fifty-seven coalition troops died in green-on-blue incidents.16
Insider attacks reveal some of the challenges with training local soldiers. Creating indigenous security forces is often seen as the ticket out of war. We can leave without losing by equipping local military units and letting them handle the insurgency. Nixon tried Vietnamization, or the expansion and modernization of South Vietnam’s military, to the point where we handed out more than one million M16 rifles. Bush pursued what we might call “Iraqization,” saying, “As the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down.”17 And today, what could be termed “Afghanization,” or the training of four hundred thousand Afghan soldiers and police, is central to America’s withdrawal plan. In 2013, Afghan security forces took the lead in providing security across the whole country.18
As part of an exit strategy, the logic of training and advising is compelling. American boys shouldn’t be doing what South Vietnamese boys—or Iraqi boys or Afghan boys—can do. Handing over responsibility may dramatically reduce America’s outlay in blood and treasure. We can pay for fifty or more Afghan troops for the price of a single American service-member (Afghan soldiers cost $10,000 to $20,000 per year, whereas U.S. soldiers cost $1,000,000 per year).19 Local troops may have stronger language skills and cultural knowledge. De-Americanizing the war effort also respects local sovereignty and averts the impression of U.S. imperialism. According to the official U.S. counterinsurgency manual, “the host nation doing something tolerably is normally better than us doing it well.”20
George Casey, the U.S. commander in Iraq from 2004 to 2007, told me that the only responsible exit strategy “is to train indigenous forces to the point where they can maintain domestic order and keep terrorists out.” Building up allied capabilities means, “you can look yourself in the mirror and say you gave these guys a fighting chance.”21
Unfortunately, training and mentoring is not a magic solution in a military fiasco. For one thing, training and advising doesn’t always work. North Vietnam’s chief negotiator once cut right to the chase. If Washington couldn’t win the Vietnam War with half a million Americans soldiers on the ground, “how can you expect to succeed when you let your puppet troops do the fighting?” Kissinger admitted the question “torments me.”22 Vietnamization turned South Vietnam’s air force into the fourth largest in the world—and the country still lost the war. Poor leadership and high desertion rates plagued Saigon’s military. In 1975, a North Vietnamese assault routed South Vietnam’s forces in fifty-five days.
During the early years of the Iraq War, David Petraeus oversaw a crash program to train thousands of Iraqi security forces in the midst of a deteriorating security situation. Petraeus said it was like constructing an aircraft in flight while under fire. The recruits weren’t properly vetted. Iraqi soldiers sometimes refused to fight or defected to the insurgency. Shiite troops moonlighted as death squads that targeted Sunnis.23 A decade later, in the summer of 2014, Iraqi security forces crumbled in the face of the Islamic State’s advance into northern Iraq, and left behind hundreds of millions of dollars of U.S-supplied equipment as spoils of war for the extremists.
Meanwhile, Afghan troops have improved since 2009 and oversaw security for the 2014 elections quite effectively. But many critics predict disaster once American troops depart. “You will fail,” said Pakistani general Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. “Then you will leave and that half-trained army will break into militias that will be a problem for Pakistan.”24
Training and advising is a highly vulnerable process. It can break down for reasons largely beyond our control, such as sectarian tensions, endemic corruption, or the poor quality of available recruits. Some U.S. military capabilities are highly technical and difficult for poor countries to replicate, including intelligence gathering, medical evacuations, and air support. The allied regime also has to want to learn and change. But the local government may view a strong army trained by the United States as a threat to its rule more than a national salvation, and seek to “coup-proof” the military through political appointments rather than create an effective fighting force.
Furthermore, green-on-blue attacks, like the one carried out by Mahmoud, can drive a wedge between the United States and the host country, slow the growth of indigenous forces, and imperil combined operations. In 2012, Washington temporarily suspended joint combat missions between Americans and Afghans.
In communal civil wars, training government forces may actually worsen the violence. If the fighting is between ethnic groups and the regime is identified with one particular faction, boosting regime capabilities can throw “gasoline on the fire,” in Stephen Biddle’s words, and provoke rival factions to step up resistance.25
Another problem is that we often get serious about training indigenous forces far too late in the game. The U.S. military traditionally sees advising as a low-status occupation—not something for an ambitious officer to touch. And Washington has also repeatedly failed to devote the necessary resources to training programs.
In Afghanistan after 2001 we decided to rely on local warlords rather than create an effective national military—losing valuable time. In 2006, after five years of limited U.S. and allied training programs, the Afghan National Army numbered fewer than twenty thousand deployable men. The failure to develop capable indigenous forces aided the Taliban’s resurgence and produced today’s desperate efforts to catch up.26
In Iraq, there was overoptimism about the speed with which we could prepare local forces. “The first lesson from Iraq,” George Casey told me, “is that everything is going to take longer than you think. People honestly believed we could get all this done in eighteen months.”27 In truth, it would take more like five years.
Given their central importance to America’s exit strategy, training and advising programs require an appropriate degree of investment. We should start early. We can’t wait until we’re already halfway offstage before trying to patch together an indigenous military. We need some of our best men and women on the job—which means improving the career incentives for U.S. officers to become educators.
We should focus on getting the basics right. It’s less about teaching allies how to fly F-16s and more about creating infantry units that can fight and resupply at the company and battalion levels (80–1,200 troops). We should prioritize the sharing of intelligence between the United States and indigenous troops. We should create communally mixed forces with significant representation from all ethnic groups.
To minimize the risk of green-on-blue attacks, we must intensify the screening of local security forces. Setting up a system for anonymous reporting of suspicious behavior can flag potential threats. And controlling the supply and distribution of army uniforms makes it harder for infiltrators to strike from within.
Passing the Baton
Next up is a critical issue: planning for the successor regime. The nature of the new government hinges on the war aims. If the goal is a beacon of freedom, the bar is set pretty high. The successor regime should be stable and democratic. With ugly stability as the objective, we’re looking for a workable order based on an accommodation between the regime and insurgents. And in a surgical strike operation, we don’t particularly care about the makeup of the regime, so long as the specific threat—terrorism, piracy, or humanitarian disaster—doesn’t reemerge.
If the fighting is ongoing when U.S. forces withdraw, Washington may leave in place a follow-on force of American troops for a transitional period. This requires negotiating a status of forces agreement (SOFA) to regulate the legal position of U.S. soldiers—covering everything from the use of radio frequencies to the distribution of driver’s licenses.
The size of an American successor force will vary greatly depending on the ambition of the objectives, the capacity of the regime, and the extent of the threat. Compared to the main wartime deployment, it will likely include proportionately more trainers and Special Operations Forces and fewer regular soldiers. We may also need to leave in place highly technical capabilities like airpower that the allied regime can’t easily replicate.
Obama stated that U.S. forces would remain engaged in Afghanistan after 2014 in “two long-term tasks,” which were “very specific and very narrow.” The first was “training and assisting Afghan forces,” and the second was “targeted counterterrorism missions against Al Qaeda and its affiliates.”28 The follow-on troops would number around ten thousand in early 2015 and then be steadily withdrawn over the subsequent two years.
McChrystal told me that the effectiveness of a successor force in Afghanistan depends on establishing “in clear terms our objectives,” or, in other words, “what we’re willing to live with.” The Afghan security forces can fight, he said. What they need is a “guarantee they have an ally.” This doesn’t necessarily mean a large number of American troops but instead a “confidence building guarantee.”29
What if there’s a negotiated peace deal when we leave? Here, any settlement requires trust—and also verification. As Ronald Neumann told me, “we talk about agreements in the West as if they mean closure, but agreements in Afghanistan often hold until one side is strong enough to break them. Any deal needs validation and enforcement.”30
One option is to hand the reins over to an international peacekeeping force. Peacekeeping operations certainly have their share of problems. Participating countries may pursue their own private agendas. And Blue Helmets have limited capabilities. They can handle a small number of spoilers but will struggle against any major opposition.
In recent years, however, peacekeeping has a fairly successful record at preventing civil wars from restarting in places like Bosnia and Kosovo—if, crucially, there’s actually a peace to keep and the combatants consent to the arrival of international troops. One of the major barriers to ending a civil war is mutual distrust and the fear that the other side will renege on any deal. A third-party force can help overcome this hurdle by providing security guarantees. It’s also easier for armed groups to hand weapons over to a neutral party like the United Nations rather than the hated enemy. In addition, an international peacekeeping force can inject a lot of money into the local economy and offer juicy contracts to keep key players in line.31
Different international organizations bring varying assets to the peacekeeping table. The United Nations offers the most legitimacy as well as extensive experience at peacekeeping—but is sometimes hobbled by political gridlock. NATO has the greatest military capability, but its troops are more expensive and it doesn’t carry the same degree of legitimacy in much of the world. The European Union is effective in civilian areas like election monitoring and setting up court systems—but it’s far less proficient militarily. In some situations, an African Union force may be more politically acceptable than the alternatives, but it’s the least capable organization and often depends on rich Western countries to pay the bills.32
If a negotiated deal is brokered with the Taliban in Afghanistan, a United Nations peacekeeping force could oversee a new transitional regime, with the troops probably coming from relatively distant Islamic countries.33
Prisoner Dilemmas
Francis Dodd may be the most naïve brigadier general in American history. In May 1952, Dodd commanded the POW camp on Koje-do Island in South Korea. One day, the Communist prisoners invited him to visit their compound and discuss their grievances. Dodd graciously agreed, whereupon the prisoners seized him and threatened his safety if their demands were not met.
U.S. general Mark Clark had a suggestion: “Let them keep that dumb son of a bitch Dodd, and then go in and level the place.”34 But the ranking U.S. officer at Koje-do chose a more tactful line. He secured Dodd’s release by signing a statement admitting that the United States had committed atrocities, which the Communists then gleefully distributed for propaganda purposes. U.S. reinforcements eventually restored order on Koje-do, but not before bloody clashes killed and injured dozens of POWs and a handful of American soldiers. The prison camps were another front in the war.
In Korea, the fate of captives was a central part of the exit strategy equation. By early 1952, truce negotiations had resolved almost every question, including the borders between North and South Korea. Only one major issue remained: the future of the POWs. The Communists demanded an “all for all” swap of prisoners, in line with the customs of war and the Geneva Conventions.
But U.S. president Harry Truman decided that Communist prisoners must be allowed to defect. There were powerful humanitarian reasons to resist forcible repatriation. Many POWs were South Koreans who had been impressed into service when the Communists marched down the Peninsula. Some of the Chinese POWs claimed to be Nationalists and wanted to go to Taiwan. There was also considerable guilt in the United States over the forcible return of liberated Soviet prisoners back to Stalin’s mercies at the end of World War II. Many of these men disappeared into the Gulag archipelago, never to be seen again.
In his diary, Truman suggested that American negotiators take the ethical high road with the Communists. “Read Confucius on morals to them. Read Buddha’s code to them. Read the Declaration of Independence to them. Read the French declaration, Liberty & Fraternity. Read the Bill of Rights to them. Read the 5th, 6th, & 7th Chapters of St. Matthew to them.”35
But Washington’s resistance to forcible repatriation wasn’t just about morals. The Truman administration also saw the propaganda value of thousands of North Koreans and Chinese preferring to stay in the “free world.”
At first, the issue seemed resolvable. The United States thought that around 16,000 of the 132,000 Communist POWs might reject repatriation. North Korea and China hinted they could live with this. The screening process, however, produced a shocking result. Almost half the prisoners refused to be repatriated.
This figure was inflated by systematic violence and coercion. Anti-Communist prisoners controlled many of the prison barracks and ran the repatriation screenings. At one mock screening, the POWs were asked who wanted to return to mainland China. Those who stepped forward were beaten or killed. When they were asked the question again, terrified prisoners kept repeating the same word: “Taiwan.”36
Communist negotiators were outraged by the idea of half their men defecting to the West. It was now an issue of national honor and ideological prestige. For Truman, there was no going back. “To agree to forced repatriation would be unthinkable,” he told the American people. “We will not buy an armistice by turning over human beings for slaughter or slavery.”37 Truman had drawn a line in the sand. Voluntary repatriation was the hill on which American soldiers would die. It was not until Stalin’s death in the spring of 1953 that the Communists conceded on the issue of voluntary repatriation, and a neutral commission was created to process the prisoners.
What was the balance sheet from Truman’s repatriation policy? On the positive side of the ledger, 22,600 Communist prisoners ultimately chose to defect. (And 23 American POWs decided to stay in the Communist world, producing allegations of brainwashing that inspired the novel and movie The Manchurian Candidate.)
On the negative side of the ledger, the single issue of repatriation prolonged the war for an extra fifteen months. During this time, over 100,000 allied troops were killed, including 9,000 Americans, billions of dollars were spent, and every major North Korean city was carpet-bombed, with hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths. Fighting for voluntary repatriation also lengthened the brutal captivity of 3,600 American prisoners.38
Truman’s hard-line policy on POWs was a trap. He decided on voluntary repatriation without thinking through the consequences and elevated a single ethical principle over a broader calculus about the moral effects of the war. Less high-minded rhetoric, and more dexterous diplomacy, might have produced a compromise.39
During the Vietnam War, the fate of prisoners also became a highly emotive issue that overshadowed broader U.S. war aims. In this case, public attention was focused on the five hundred American captives. The families of American prisoners and of those missing in action (POW/MIA) began an unprecedented public campaign to heighten awareness of the men by organizing petitions and setting up public displays of North Vietnamese prison cages. In a grim war, Americans saw the prisoners as sanctified martyrs. For many Americans, the fate of the POWs was more important than the future of South Vietnam.
Nixon encouraged the POW/MIA campaign, partly because of genuine concern for the men and partly as a way to boost support for the war. The White House began talking as if the United States had intervened in Vietnam to rescue the POWs—or “hostages,” as Vice President Spiro Agnew described them. Washington would fight, said Nixon, “as long as there is one American prisoner being held prisoner by North Vietnam.”40
Unfortunately, Washington’s fixation on the prisoners weakened its leverage in negotiations by handing North Vietnam a powerful bargaining chip. Hanoi had an obvious solution: Leave and the men will be released.41
Captives also loom large in Afghanistan. Kabul and Washington hold hundreds of Taliban prisoners. Meanwhile, in 2009, the Taliban captured their sole American POW, Bowe Bergdahl, who wandered off his base in circumstances that remain mysterious.
American POWs cheer as they return home from North Vietnam in 1973. (U.S. Navy, Department of Defense, National Archives, ARC identifier: 532510)
One of the insurgency’s major objectives is to free their detainees. In a statement announcing the creation of a political office in Qatar, the Taliban “asked for the release of its prisoners from the Guantanamo prison in exchange basis.”42 In 2014, after months of negotiations, Obama announced that a handful of senior Taliban leaders would be transferred from Guantanamo Bay to Qatar in return for Bergdahl.
The trade was politically explosive. Critics alleged that Washington had violated its policy of not negotiating with terrorists. The swap might encourage America’s enemies to capture more soldiers. And the former Taliban captives could rejoin the struggle. Was all this worth it to return a soldier who some see as a deserter? John McCain said the swap “poses a great threat to the lives and well-being of American servicemen and women in the future.”43
The trade may be morally troubling, but this is what ending an unwinnable war looks like. Even if Bergdahl was partly responsible for his own capture, we still needed to try to free him. It’s true, of course, that the Taliban have committed many evil acts, including harboring Al Qaeda terrorists. But the State Department does not officially designate the Taliban as a terrorist organization. Rather, they are an organized insurgency and a political faction—and one we’ve been negotiating with for years. The prisoner exchange could help pave the way for more expansive peace talks down the line. The Taliban’s political office in Qatar coordinated the trade, demonstrating that the office does indeed speak for the rebels.
Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan all reveal the centrality of prisoners to the conflict endgame. Indeed, the fate of POWs can easily derail an entire exit strategy. The POW issue is emotional and symbolic dynamite and can become bound up with national reputation and honor. Washington should avoid moralistic rhetoric or publicly fixating on captives—and instead use careful and quiet diplomacy to secure a rapid and safe exchange of prisoners.
The Last Rites
When the United States toppled the leftist government of Grenada in 1983, the American public and Congress weren’t initially sure what to make of it. Was Grenada really a grave Communist threat that required regime change? During the mission, 19 U.S. troops were killed and 116 were wounded. The UN General Assembly condemned the invasion by a vote of 108 to 9.
And then, for Americans at least, one image changed everything. The media showed pictures of rescued American medical students returning home from Grenada and joyfully kissing American soil. “With that simple gesture,” noted the attorney general, “the debate over Grenada was effectively over.” Ronald Reagan’s press secretary said, “When we saw how happy they were to be home, we started cheering and pounding the table. ‘That’s it! We won!’ ”44
An American student kisses the ground after being evacuated from Grenada. (Department of Defense, American Forces Information Service, Defense Visual Information Center, National Archives, ARC identifier: 6376109)
Grenada shows the power of the final act in shaping the overall story of war. Psychologists have found that people evaluate painful experiences based on how they end and whether they improved or not—even marginally. In one experiment, for example, subjects placed their hand in ice water for sixty seconds. (It’s quite painful and I wouldn’t recommend it.) The subjects then repeated the same experience, but this time followed by an additional thirty seconds of holding their hand in water that was slightly warmed up—but still cold and unpleasant. Interestingly, when the subjects were given the choice of which experiment to repeat (for money), they preferred the second experiment. It may have produced more overall pain, but it got better at the end.45
In the same vein, when people judge a military campaign, they don’t always assess the overall costs and benefits. Instead, they’re strongly influenced by the final act and whether things improved.
The Korean War ended in a symbolically dismal manner. In 1953, the armistice was signed in a specially constructed bamboo-and-wood structure. The negotiators barely registered each other’s presence. The London Times noted: “There was no pretense at an exchange of courtesies, or even of civility.”46 The armistice allowed twelve hours of further warfare, so the two sides blasted away at each other for another half a day. The New York Times reported from the truce site. “Outside the thin wooden walls there was the mutter of artillery fire—a grim reminder that even as the truce was being signed men were still dying on near-by hills.”47
Among the most searing images of Vietnam are the desperate scenes in 1975 when Americans and South Vietnamese escaped in helicopters from the rooftops of Saigon. (The famous staircase that stood atop the American embassy is now on display at the Gerald R. Ford Museum in Grand Rapids, Michigan.) Ironically, the rescue mission was one of the more successful American undertakings in the Vietnam War. Improvising in tough circumstances, U.S. pilots saved 1,373 Americans and 5,595 Vietnamese.48 But it looked like the capstone of catastrophe.
We remember the U.S. intervention in Somalia in 1992–94 as a failure in large part because of the closing act. Almost no one recalls the first phase (1992–93), known as Operation Restore Hope, when American troops delivered humanitarian supplies and saved one hundred thousand Somali lives. Instead, people recollect the Black Hawk Down battle in Mogadishu in October 1993, pictures of American corpses being dragged through the streets, and Clinton’s decision to effectively cut and run.49
In 2004, Paul Bremer’s tenure as the chief administrator in Iraq didn’t end well. To avoid being blown up by terrorists, Bremer created an elaborate ruse for his departure. He seemed to leave on one aircraft but was secretly whisked by helicopter to a different plane. “This was embarrassing,” said one member of the Coalition Provisional Authority. “He left Iraq in such an appropriate way, running out of town.”50
A helicopter is pushed over the side of the USS Okinawa to allow more helicopters to land during the evacuation of Saigon in April 1975. (U.S. Marine Corps)
U.S. policymakers should pay close attention to the optics of the final withdrawal. The last days and hours have an outsized impact on how domestic and international audiences perceive the war. When the United States withdrew from Iraq in December 2011, Washington wisely chose a low-key approach. There was minimal fanfare or public attention. Coffee shops, bowling alleys, and movie theaters were quietly disassembled. American bases were shut down or handed over to the Iraqis. Armored trucks rumbled back into Kuwait. Where there had once been shock and awe, now there was only a subdued procession of ghosts. It was no triumph—but at least people weren’t desperately clambering onto helicopters.
At this point, we have laid the groundwork for the U.S. exit, sent additional surge forces, negotiated with the opponent, and withdrawn the bulk of American troops. Now we must handle the aftermath of a difficult war.