My briefings in Kabul from the various regional commanders were uniformly upbeat. They said the situation overall was “no worse” than before, “just different.” The commander in the south said that his forces there “had a better year than the media gives them credit for and than the European capitals think.” The west was described as in pretty good shape, and the north has “no insurgency—organized crime and warlords are the biggest threat to security.” In the east, “the counterinsurgency strategy continues to show progress.” Each commander expressed frustration that the growing violence—due to more aggressive coalition efforts to root out the Taliban—was viewed in Washington as evidence of failure. Every commander wanted more troops, and McNeill said he was about four battalions short, plus trainers, of what he needed.
I then met privately with Karzai. I said he’d probably had enough people beating up on him and that I was there to listen. He talked about how the Russians, the Iranians, and the Pakistanis were all meddling in Afghanistan (undoubtedly all true) and that they and the Afghan Northern Alliance were all working against him. In what was, even for him, a particularly conspiratorial frame of mind, he talked about how “inclusiveness” (meaning working with the Northern Alliance) had put the country at risk and that these guys—“Putin’s allies”—were now killing parliamentarians and even children. “This is not done by the Taliban or al Qaeda but by our own bad people,” and his government needed to “consult with the United States on how to handle this.” Because most of the Taliban operations were in southern Afghanistan, he said, the brunt of the war was being borne by the Pashtuns, and they felt we were targeting them. He said that to address this, we needed to work more closely with the tribes. It was classic Karzai—overdrawn and paranoid but not necessarily wrong.
I told the president on my return that there had been significant progress in Afghanistan, but the progress was too slow. The regional commanders were relatively upbeat, I said, but their briefings were discouraging in that they all were asking me to fill military capabilities or equipment needs NATO had not filled. I said we had to be prepared to continue to invest robustly in training and equipping the Afghan security forces, especially the army, and that more trainers and mentors were needed—areas where NATO was falling woefully short. I summarized: NATO didn’t know how to do counterinsurgency, the allied mentoring and liaison teams didn’t know what they were doing, the small Taliban presence in the north was being used by the warlords as a reason to rebuild their militias, in the west it would be better not to have the Italians there, and the south was a mess. My bottom line to Bush: Where we were in charge and Karzai had appointed competent, honest leaders, we were doing okay. Everything else was a holding action. We had to transition from European-favored comprehensive nation-building, toward a more focused counterinsurgency, no matter how much it upset the Europeans. If we had learned one lesson from the surge in Iraq, it was that we had to give the people a sense of security before anything else could work.
As we looked toward 2008, I was eager to have the NATO summit in April 2008 bless a longer-term strategy in Afghanistan, out of necessity. For more than a year, the defense ministers of the countries fighting in Regional Command–South (RC-South: the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, Denmark, the Netherlands, Estonia, and Romania) had been meeting by ourselves to coordinate our countries’ efforts better. We met again on December 13–14, 2007, in Edinburgh. This meeting included foreign ministers for the first time. Condi was represented by her undersecretary for policy, Nick Burns, who I had gotten to know when he worked on the NSC staff with Condi under Bush 41.
I proposed to ministers that the alliance prepare a three-to-five-year strategic plan comprehensively integrating both military operations and civilian development programs. I said such a plan would lift allies’ eyes above heading for the exits at the end of 2008 and focus on the reality that success in Afghanistan was going to take some time. The prologue to such a plan should make clear why we were in Afghanistan and what we had achieved, framing the cause in a way not done before in Europe and providing essential political cover, and political ammunition, for governments. I proposed establishing milestones and goals so we would know if we were making progress. I volunteered the United States to prepare an initial draft and submit it to RC-South partners, then to alliance headquarters, and finally to the NATO summit meeting in Bucharest in April for approval. I also suggested that the British prepare a similar three-to-five-year plan just for the south, to include Helmand, Uruzgan, and Kandahar provinces, which we should review at a meeting in Canada in late January. There was broad support for both initiatives, with a number of useful suggestions from Nick Burns and other ministers. The initiative would never have succeeded without a lot of help from my civilian and military colleagues at the Pentagon and State. We were on course for a positive and useful statement on Afghanistan at the summit.
While home for Christmas 2007, I reflected on the fact that, despite all our problems, we had gotten a free ride from Congress on Afghanistan. The Democrats in Congress had spent the year trumpeting failure in Iraq and trying to change President Bush’s strategy there; central to their approach was to contrast it with the war in Afghanistan, which they steadfastly supported—partly to demonstrate they weren’t weak on national security. In not one of my congressional hearings all year did I hear criticism, much less concern, about the U.S. role or actions in Afghanistan. I consistently heard support for the war from both Democrats and Republicans and calls for our allies to provide more troops and remove restrictions on their use. The irony was that by the end of 2007, the war in Iraq was going much better and the situation in Afghanistan was getting worse. Many in Congress failed to acknowledge either of those realities. Consistent with the approach of the Democrats, they were saying more and more about the need to accelerate the troop drawdowns in Iraq so we could send more to Afghanistan.
In mid-January 2008, I announced we would be sending 3,200 Marines on a “onetime deployment” to Afghanistan in April, bringing our total number of troops to about 31,000. At the same time, I sent a letter to my ministerial colleagues in countries that we thought could do more in Afghanistan. I told them that the Marines were a bridging force to get us to the fall, and that the allies’ failure to step up to the plate placed the entire alliance at risk.
I created a problem in the effort to get a summit statement of strong support for the Afghan mission by putting my foot in my mouth in an interview with Peter Spiegel of the Los Angeles Times, published on January 16. Spiegel asked about the counterinsurgency effort. I told him exactly what I thought: “I’m worried we’re deploying [military advisers] that are not properly trained and I’m worried we have some military forces that don’t know how to do counterinsurgency operations…. Most of the European forces, NATO forces, are not trained in counterinsurgency; they were trained for the Fulda Gap,” the area of Germany where a Soviet invasion of Western Europe was thought most likely to take place.
A favorite saying of mine is “Never miss a good chance to shut up,” but I blew that chance in this interview, and needless to say, all hell broke loose in the alliance. Edelman told me that the allies were very upset, that individual countries thought my criticisms had been aimed at them specifically. Eric called his counterparts in Britain, Canada, and the Netherlands, as well as the secretary general, all of whom were concerned about the impact of what I had said. The next day, at a press conference, I said my comments had been about an overall problem, that I was not drawing invidious comparisons between our troops and others, and that I hoped the allies would take advantage of counterinsurgency training opportunities. The United States had forgotten how to do counterinsurgency operations after Vietnam, I added, and had relearned at huge cost in Iraq and Afghanistan. The squall passed.