President Obama simply wanted the “bad” war in Iraq to be ended and, once in office, the U.S. role in Afghanistan—the so-called good war—to be limited in scope and duration. His fundamental problem in Afghanistan was that his political and philosophical preferences (not surprisingly shared by his White House advisers) conflicted with his own pro-war public rhetoric (especially during the presidential campaign and even in papers prepared during his presidential transition), the nearly unanimous recommendations of his senior civilian and military advisers at State and Defense, and the realities on the ground in Afghanistan.
One positive result of the continuing fight over Afghan strategy in the Obama administration was that the debate and resulting presidential decisions led to a steady narrowing of our objectives—our ambitions—there. I had believed this necessary as early as my job interview with Bush in November 2006.
Obama’s decision to dramatically increase the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan in late 2009 was, as we have seen, based on a number of assumptions agreed upon by his top advisers: that the Pakistanis could be induced to change their hedging strategy, Karzai could be coached to become a more effective president, Afghan corruption could be reduced, and the Afghan central government’s reputation among the people and its capabilities could be improved. The challenges to achieving those goals were fully debated leading up to the president’s major troop escalation in the fall of 2009. Still, I think there was a good deal of wishful thinking in the Obama administration that we might see some improvements with enough dialogue (with Pakistan) and civilian assistance to the Afghan government and people. When real improvements in those nonmilitary areas failed to materialize, too many—especially in the White House and the NSS—concluded the president’s entire strategy, including the military component, was a failure and were eager to reverse course.
On the other hand, I pushed hard for the troops requested by McChrystal because I became convinced that my own minimalist objectives could be achieved without significant improvements in those other, nonmilitary arenas. If our troops, combined with larger and more capable Afghan forces, could provide security for much of the population, then the other improvements could follow over time. If there was one useful lesson from Iraq, I thought, it was that security for much of the population could, indeed must, precede other progress. This was why I could not sign on to Biden’s counterterrorism strategy: “whack-a-mole” hits on Taliban leaders were not a long-term strategy. By the same token, the blended counterterrorism-counterinsurgency strategy to provide security for population centers like Kandahar probably should have been implemented with a tighter focus geographically, paying less attention to sparsely populated areas, such as parts of Helmand.
Many argue today that the strategy shift and associated troop increase that Obama approved in late 2009 was a big mistake. I continue to believe it was the right decision. By 2008, the Taliban had regained the momentum in Afghanistan as the United States applied what was essentially a “counterterrorism-plus” strategy that allowed large swaths of the country (particularly in the south and east), including some key population and economic centers, to fall under Taliban domination if not outright control. Despite a near-doubling of the international troop presence in Afghanistan during the Bush administration after I became defense secretary, we were not winning. Our approach was a formula for stalemate, or worse.
The deployment of 21,000 more U.S. troops in February–March 2009 was in response to a request toward the end of the Bush administration from commanders and was intended to blunt the Taliban 2009 offensive and, secondarily, as I’ve said, to help provide some protection for the elections later that year. It was a request Bush was prepared to approve, but he held off at the request of the incoming Obama team. That force was not sized by the military to accomplish the strategy—the mission—Obama decided upon in February. In February and March, the president, I, and virtually all the senior leaders in Washington, including in the Pentagon, thought we were finished adding forces in Afghanistan. But McChrystal’s summer assessment for the first time put a true military price tag on achieving the broad objectives Obama had decided upon.
What was clear by fall was that the alternative paths forward in Afghanistan were either a significant increase in forces or a dramatic scaling back of our presence and our mission, the alternatives I proposed to Obama in my October 2009 memo. Despite all the arguments I heard then and all the commentary I have read since, I have not seen critics of Obama’s decision spell out precisely what would have been the consequences of standing pat in a losing posture, or the consequences of turning to a quite different strategy with a significantly smaller U.S. military presence. In the latter case, no one has spelled out how that approach would have been able to prevent a Taliban return to power throughout much, if not all, of Afghanistan and the reestablishment of al Qaeda there. The December 2009 decisions and related troop surge provided sufficient military forces to break the stalemate by rooting the Taliban out of their strongholds and keeping them out while training a much larger and more capable Afghan army.
Obama was much criticized by conservatives and hawkish commentators for announcing that the troop surge in Afghanistan would begin to be drawn down in July 2011, and that all U.S. combat troops would be withdrawn and all responsibility for security transferred to the Afghans by the end of 2014. Inside the military, there was also much grumbling about the numerical limits he placed on troops. I believe Obama was right in each of these decisions.
After eight years of war in Afghanistan, Congress, the American people, and the troops could not abide the idea of a conflict there stretching into the indefinite future. The “war of necessity” to punish and root out those responsible for 9/11 had become an albatross around the nation’s neck, just as the war in Iraq had, and by 2009 public and congressional patience was nearly gone. By adopting Karzai’s deadline of full transfer of security responsibility from foreign forces to Afghans by the end of 2014, the president made clear to Americans—and to our troops—that this was not an endless war. Just as I had bought more time for the surge in Iraq by foreshadowing troop withdrawals, with the deadlines Obama politically bought our military—and civilians—five more years to achieve our mission in Afghanistan.
The timelines also finally forced a narrowing of our objectives to those attainable in that time frame. I was convinced that we could dramatically weaken the Taliban and strengthen the Afghan army during that period—and if not, then we probably never could. The deadline put the Afghan government and security forces on notice that they had to step up their game, for their own survival if nothing else. To the argument that the 2014 deadline signaled to the Taliban how long they had to wait before taking over, I said at the time that they had at least five years of hard fighting ahead of them, including against advanced Western armies, and that every day the Taliban chose to “wait us out,” they would grow weaker as the Afghan forces grew stronger.
In deciding to begin drawing down the surge in July 2011, the president transformed our commanders’ estimate that they could transfer places they had seized from the Taliban to Afghan security within two years into a mandate. I had hoped that the drawdowns in the last six months of 2011 would have been smaller than the president decided. Still, overall U.S. troop strength in Afghanistan did not fall below pre-surge levels until September 2012, more than three years after the first Marine surge arrived in Helmand. The surge was sustained in Afghanistan twice as long as in Iraq.