Foreign travel, especially to war zones, by a secretary of defense is routinely tightly scripted, meticulously planned, and executed with military precision. Not this trip. In Afghanistan, I hoped to visit a Stryker brigade in the south that had lost thirty soldiers, but I was grounded in Kabul because of bad weather. I did have lunch with ten of our younger NCOs. I was struck both by the airmen’s positive attitude about the Afghans they were training and also by their observation that desertion was a problem because some Afghan trainees were disgusted by their officers stealing part of their salaries. I always learned real “ground truth” like this from our troops. And then, just hours before my private meeting with President Karzai, there had been another incident that allegedly involved our coalition operations and civilian casualties. Karzai never waited for the facts before drawing conclusions, so the atmosphere for my meeting wasn’t the best. Still, he and I got along well, and we had a good conversation. An important element of the strategy, I told him, was the need for Afghans to accelerate the recruitment of more young men into their security services. I played to his ego, saying he was the first president of a democratic Afghanistan—the father of his country—and he needed to be constantly encouraging young men to do their patriotic duty to defend their country. He vigorously nodded his agreement, although little came of the conversation.
As usual, he was more supportive in private than in public. He threw me a curve ball in our joint press appearance immediately afterward, saying that Afghanistan would not be able to support its own security forces financially for “fifteen to twenty years”—not a message any American wanted to hear. I tap-danced with the press to avoid the appearance of a major disconnect between us, saying that we could not abandon Afghanistan after our combat operations ended in 2014 and that I anticipated continued assistance. But it was apparent to all that Karzai had blindsided me. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd was traveling with us on that trip, and she wrote a few days later, in her typical sharp-edged style, “Puppets just aren’t what they used to be.” Karzai was no puppet, but the United States probably hadn’t had a more troublesome ally in war since Charles de Gaulle in World War II, perhaps because both were nearly totally dependent on the United States and both deeply resented it.
That evening I took my staff to the CIA’s equivalent of an officers’ club, which had much better food than the military provided—and adult beverages. One of the CIA officers who ate with us that night, a very bright young woman, was among the seven agency people killed in a Taliban ambush three weeks later, a tragic reminder that a lot of Americans not in uniform were also putting their lives on the line in this fight.
The next day, December 10, we were in Iraq, where our role in the war was beginning to wind down. There had been successful provincial elections in January 2009, with international election monitors present in every single constituency. In accordance with the Status of Forces Agreement signed by Bush and Maliki in December 2008, all U.S. combat forces had withdrawn from Iraqi towns and cities by the end of June. General Ray Odierno was well along with planning for the transition of our combat forces to “assistance and advisory” brigades and the withdrawal of some 70,000 U.S. troops and their equipment by the end of August 2010—all the while continuing to hunt down terrorists, train the Iraq security forces, and promote reconciliation among Iraqi politicians. It was a massive and complex undertaking, and the performance by Ray and his team was outstanding.
I was scheduled to meet with Maliki right after my arrival, but he was instead spending six hours of quality time getting scorched by the Council of Representatives—the Iraqi parliament—for his government’s failure to prevent several recent terrorist bombings. When our meeting was canceled, the reporters with us characterized it as Maliki “blowing me off.” I knew from personal experience that Maliki would much rather be meeting with me than getting shellacked by legislators.
The major topic of my meetings with Iraqi leaders was the national election to be held the following March. After a protracted stalemate, the Council of Representatives had passed an elections law in early November. The elections would determine 325 members of the council, which would then choose a president and prime minister. Politicking was well under way. In my meeting with the Presidency Council—President Jalal Talabani (Kurd), Vice President Adel Abdul Mahdi (Shia), and Vice President Tariq Al-Hashimi (Sunni)—I asked Talabani if Iraq’s neighbors were interfering in the elections. “Yes, everyone is interfering,” he said. “Iran, the Gulf States, Syria, Turkey. Only Kuwait is not.” Hashimi was his usual dour self, complaining that the violence was “no joke,” the government was unable to do anything about the attacks, the security team needed to be reshuffled, and the people were disappointed and angry. Hashimi was a habitual complainer, but inasmuch as he was the only senior Sunni official, he had legitimate gripes. When he said the Presidency Council was being marginalized by Maliki, I suspected there was a lot of truth to that.
Maliki rescheduled the meeting with me for early the next morning. We discussed the violence, and he assured me the security forces were working well together. He asserted that al Qaeda did not pose a “great danger to us” but did want to disrupt the elections—“their last opportunity.” We talked about the standoff between the central government in Baghdad and the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) over control of the city of Kirkuk. I told Maliki I was going to Irbil, the Kurdish capital, that afternoon and would urge President Masoud Barzani to play a constructive role.
I was struck in Irbil by the signs of prosperity, including a lot of foreign-financed construction. I thanked Barzani for his help in devising the compromises that allowed the election law to pass, and I assured him of continuing U.S. friendship. I pointedly told him we were committed to preserving Kurdish security and prosperity “within a unified Iraq.” Barzani replied that messages of support from Obama, Biden, and me had been the first such clearly conveyed to him (a statement I knew to be untrue from my Bush days) and had allayed longtime concerns about how the United States viewed the Kurds in Iraq. He said the KRG would always be “a part of the solution” and that “we are committed to national unity if the government in Baghdad is committed to the constitution.” I stressed to him, as I had to the Presidency Council, the need to form a unity government as soon as possible after the election. Delay would only aid the worst extremists in Iraq. I assured him that we would be happy to do anything we could do to help resolve internal differences among the political factions. I then returned to Washington, D.C., and its political factions.
The Iraqi elections took place on schedule on March 7, 2010. There was little violence and a good turnout, but no party even came close to a majority. Maliki’s coalition came in second with 89 seats in the Council of Representatives, while former interim prime minister Ayad Allawi’s party came in first with 91 seats. The new parliament convened on June 14, with its primary task to select a new prime minister to form a government, but no candidate could muster a majority of the votes. Maliki was determined to remain as prime minister and refused to support Allawi (also Shia) even though he had won more seats. The result was a stalemate, with Maliki remaining as prime minister until someone could muster a majority in the parliament. That stalemate would continue for six months, despite the best efforts of Biden, Odierno, and U.S. ambassador Chris Hill to broker a compromise. Finally, Maliki’s government was unanimously approved on December 21. The absence of a return to the kind of sectarian violence that followed the 2005 election was a mark of significant progress.