The U.S. senior military leadership had pledged to the president that they should be able to clear, hold, and transition to Afghan security forces places where our troops had been deployed within two years. By the fall of 2010, about a third of the country and an even higher percentage of the population had in fact already been transitioned to Afghan security responsibility. Our two years would expire in Helmand the following July. Although these deadlines grated on the military, that was the deal we had made with the president. I could understand Obama’s insistence on keeping to the commitment. If we couldn’t get the job done in two years, how many years would it take? Down that path lay an open-ended conflict with potentially many more years of fighting. We had agreed on a strategy, and we were going to stick to it. The president would fulfill his part of the bargain despite his reservations, but he would make sure we did too.
The NATO summit in Lisbon on November 20–21 was a milestone in the alliance’s involvement in Afghanistan. Karzai, who attended the Afghan part of the meeting, had proposed at his inaugural a year earlier that foreign forces end their combat role by the end of 2014, transitioning security responsibility for the entire country to the Afghans—not coincidentally, at the end of Karzai’s last year in office. Obama had embraced that date two weeks later in his December 2009 announcement, and the member nations of the alliance did so as well in Lisbon in November 2010. At the same time, they promised to continue helping Afghanistan with military training and equipment, as well as civilian assistance, after 2014.
The president made a surprise visit to Afghanistan just over a week later on December 3. Weather prevented him from helicoptering from Bagram Air Base into Kabul to have a working dinner with Karzai, but the two talked on the telephone. The president spent several hours chatting with U.S. troops, visiting wounded at the medical facility on the base, and meeting with Petraeus and Eikenberry. There was grumbling among the Afghans about the president not making the dinner with Karzai, and some as well among our military about him not getting off the air base and visiting a forward operating base, where the fighting troops were. I thought both criticisms unwarranted, particularly in the latter case. Had I been asked, I would have recommended against him going to a FOB because of the risk; secretaries of defense are expendable, but presidents are not.
I arrived in Afghanistan four days later, partly to get a last personal update before the review concluded, and partly to visit the troops before the holidays. Major General J. F. Campbell, commander of the 101st Airborne and Karzai’s and my host the previous May at Fort Campbell, provided a realistic picture of the tough fight in the east. There were some areas, like the Pesh River Valley, he said, where a long-term U.S. troop presence was actually destabilizing. The locals hated both us and the Taliban, and we were better off leaving them alone. He told me he needed more intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance and more firepower to go after fighters coming across the border from Pakistan. He said he saw progress every day, “but it’s gonna take time.”
I spent two full days with the troops on this trip, the first in Regional Command–East and the second in the south. At Forward Operating Base Joyce, near the Pakistani border, I presented six silver stars, testimony not only to the bravery of the recipients but to the intensity of the fight in eastern Afghanistan.
We helicoptered next to Forward Operating Base Connolly, southwest of Jalalabad, still in the east. This was probably the most emotional troop visit I made as secretary. The week before, six soldiers in one platoon at this FOB had been killed by a rogue Afghan policeman, and I met alone with eighteen soldiers of that platoon. We sat on folding chairs in a tent, and I quietly told them we would do everything humanly possible for the families of those who had been killed, that I had some idea how hard this was for them, and that they had to keep focused on the mission. We talked for about fifteen minutes. I thanked them for their service and signed memory books they had for each of the six. After some briefings, I then spoke to 275 soldiers. I was barely holding it together. I told them I was the guy who signed the orders that sent them here, “and so I feel a personal responsibility for each and every one of you.” I said that to all the troops I talked to, but after my meeting with the platoon, I felt the need to go further. “I feel the sacrifice and hardship and losses more than you’ll ever imagine. You doing what you do is what keeps me doing what I do.” Choking up, I then said something I had never said before and, embarrassed, never said again: “I just want to thank you and tell you how much I love you.”
I returned to Washington to yet another fight over Afghan policy. As I’ve said, the president had made it clear both publicly and privately that the December review was intended simply to examine progress and to identify where adjustments were needed. His intent was then for a small group, early in 2011, to examine the way forward more fundamentally. Unfortunately, the Lute-directed NSS paper prepared for the December review basically questioned whether any progress had been made at all, as he attempted to relitigate the president’s decisions of a year earlier. Clinton and I were furious. Lute had told our representatives that the NSS “had the pen” for the report and resisted attempts by State and Defense to include dissenting views. I told Donilon the NSS might have the pen, but it couldn’t have its own foreign policy. The analytical papers prepared by the interagency group were pretty balanced and included a number of positive developments in Afghanistan. But it was the NSS overview paper, which everyone outside the NSS thought was too negative, that would dominate the process. Some of the “adjustments” it proposed appeared to question the strategy itself rather than identify how to make it work better.
I regretted that the Defense leadership and Lute had come to have such an adversarial relationship. As I wrote earlier, Pete Pace and I had twisted Lute’s arm to get him to take on the newly created job of NSC war czar at the White House in 2007, charged with coordinating the military and civilian components of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama had asked him to remain in the same role. The relationship between him and the senior military leadership began to deteriorate, though, early in the new administration, as he was increasingly viewed as an advocate for views contrary to those of the Joint Chiefs, the field commanders, and me. His disparaging comments to Bob Woodward, for Obama’s Wars, about senior military leaders and me didn’t exactly win him friends in the Pentagon either. The longer he stayed at the White House, and the more senior officers and Defense civilians saw him as an adversary, the more difficult it became for him to return to a promising future in uniform. I got along personally with Doug, always believed he served both Bush and Obama loyally, and felt badly that his bridge back to the Pentagon burned.
The day after I returned from Afghanistan, Saturday, December 11, the principals met for two hours on the draft review. I accused the NSS of trying to “hijack” the policy with its overview paper, which, I said, was not balanced. In fact, it wasn’t even consistent with the topic-specific papers prepared by the NSS itself, based on contributions from other departments and agencies. I argued that the NSS could not just override the views of Defense, State, and CIA. Rather, where there was disagreement on progress, I contended, it should be made explicit—“we shouldn’t have to fight for a week to get our views included.” I took issue with the NSS assertion that “the pace of the strategy is generally insufficient” and said that the paper fundamentally mischaracterized certain elements of Petraeus’s strategy. Panetta disagreed with the NSS assessment of the al Qaeda effort, as did Hillary on the civilian component of the strategy.