I returned from the January 2007 trip determined to provide more American troops, to try to persuade our NATO allies to provide more troops, and to see if we could get better cooperation from the Pakistanis on the border. I wasn’t optimistic about my chances for success.
Getting more American troops was a challenge. With the surge in Iraq, our ground forces were stretched very thin. The expression I most often heard from senior officers when discussing this was “We are out of Schlitz”—meaning there was nothing more available. Thinking it very important to blunt the Taliban offensive in the spring of 2007, within days of my return to Washington I recommended, and the president approved, extending the deployment of the 10th Mountain Division battalion for another 120 days, as Eikenberry had requested. I also asked the president to approve accelerating the deployment of units of the 82nd Airborne Division. All together this provided roughly another 3,200 U.S. combat troops, bringing our number to about 25,000, the highest level yet in the war. I could send no more troops for the rest of 2007, given our commitments in Iraq. The commanders still had an outstanding request to NATO for 3,500 additional trainers for the Afghan army and police.
President Bush was sensitive to the charge that the war in Iraq—and the surge—were holding us back or distracting us in Afghanistan. This was an ongoing source of his irritation with Mike Mullen, whose public commentary suggested just that. In late September, the president expressed his displeasure to me over a statement Mullen had made in an interview to the effect that Iraq was “a distraction.” And he also disliked Mullen’s later repeated characterization to Congress that “in Iraq, we do what we must. In Afghanistan, we do what we can.” Mike was describing reality, however politically uncomfortable, but it was public statements like these that I think led the president to question whether Mullen would continue to support the effort in Iraq under a new commander in chief.
We needed to persuade our NATO allies to do more. As I said earlier, I attended my first NATO defense ministers meeting in Seville in early February 2007, where I asked the Europeans to deliver the combat troops, trainers, and helicopters they had promised. I pressed them to lift restrictions on the kinds of missions their forces could undertake. I told them it was important for the spring offensive in Afghanistan to be an “alliance offensive.” Several ministers, including my German colleague, Franz Josef Jung, countered that a more “balanced, comprehensive” approach was needed in Afghanistan and that the alliance should be focusing more on economic and reconstruction efforts than on boosting force levels. This was a refrain I would hear constantly in the future. The approach favored by the Europeans, however, looked a lot like nation-building, the work of decades in Afghanistan and not the kind of mission accomplished in the middle of a war. The Europeans—especially those deployed in the more peaceful west and north of Afghanistan—wanted to focus on a very broad long-term mission, just as there was growing sentiment in the Bush and then the Obama administration that we had to narrow our objectives to those that could be realistically achieved in the time that an increasingly impatient and war-weary American people would give us. No one ever focused explicitly on this divergence of views between the United States and our NATO allies either in our meetings or publicly, but it was an important underlying source of friction and frustration.
When the Europeans agreed to take on Afghanistan as a NATO mission in 2006, they had thought they were signing up to something akin to armed peacekeeping, as NATO had undertaken in Bosnia, not a full-fledged counterinsurgency. Their publics did not want to be in a war and had very low tolerance for casualties, and most governments faced significant political opposition at home to their military commitment. While I would pester and nag the Europeans for years to do more, I actually was surprised they were so steadfast in supporting the mission, given their domestic politics, especially in the several countries where coalition governments held on to power by a thread. The hardest fighting, and greatest sacrifices, fell to those countries deployed in the south and east (the United States, Britain, Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands, Australia, Estonia, and Romania), but the French, Germans, Italians, and Spanish contributed thousands of troops elsewhere in Afghanistan. Getting many of those troops to venture outside their fortified base camps, however, was a continuing challenge. Over time national caveats would diminish, the numbers of allied troops would gradually increase, and no one would bail out.
I wanted to get the Pakistanis to do more to end safe havens and to stop Taliban infiltration from their side of the border. As important to the United States as Pakistan is, both in Afghanistan and in the region, I would travel there only twice because I quickly realized my civilian counterpart had zero clout in defense matters (dominated by the chief of the army staff). My first and only significant visit was on February 12, 2007, about three weeks after my initial trip to Afghanistan. The purpose was to meet with President Musharraf, who was then also still chief of the army staff, to see if he would step up Pakistan’s military efforts along the Afghan border, especially in anticipation of the Taliban’s spring offensive. I talked about the need for the United States, NATO, Afghanistan, and Pakistan to do more. His response was one that we would hear ad nauseam. The international media and some foreign leaders portray all problems in Afghanistan as coming from Pakistan, he said, but we needed to take on the Taliban where they come from and operate, which was in Afghanistan. He went on to say that only the Pakistani intelligence services seemed to catch high-ranking Taliban and al Qaeda and that “Pakistan is the victim of the export of the Afghan Taliban.” After he reviewed his plans for border control, the refugee camps, and military action in Waziristan (in northwestern Pakistan, on the Afghan border), we retired to a small room for a private meeting. I gave him a list of specific actions we wanted Pakistan to take, actions we could take together, and actions the United States was prepared to take alone. In private, Musharraf acknowledged Pakistani failures and problems on the border, but he asked me what a lone Pakistani border sentry could do if he saw thirty to forty Taliban moving toward the Afghan border. I responded, You should permit the sentry to warn us, and we will ambush the Taliban. He said, “I like ambushes, we ought to be setting them daily.” If only, I thought.
I went through our very specific list of requests: capture three named Taliban and extremist leaders; give the United States expanded authority to take action against specific Taliban and al Qaeda leaders and targets in Pakistan; dismantle insurgent and terrorist camps; shut down the Taliban headquarters in Quetta and Peshawar; disrupt certain major infiltration routes across the border; enhance intelligence cooperation and streamline Pakistani decision making on targeting; allow expanded ISR flights over Pakistan; establish joint border security monitoring centers manned by Pakistanis, Afghans, and coalition forces; and improve cooperation for military planning and operations in Pakistan. Musharraf kept a straight face and pretended to take all this seriously. While the Pakistanis would eventually deploy some 140,000 troops on their border with Afghanistan and endure heavy losses in fighting there, and while there was some modest progress on joint operations centers and border security stations, we’d still be asking for virtually all these same actions years later.
The real power in Pakistan is the military, and in November 2007 Musharraf handed over leadership of the army to General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. At that point, I turned the Pakistani account over to Mike Mullen, who would travel to Pakistan regularly to talk with Kayani.