A trip to Europe in early February gave me a chance to mend fences. But I would not abandon speaking out publicly about challenges facing the alliance, heartfelt concerns grounded in my belief in its importance. The day before my departure Mike Mullen and I testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee, where I warned that the Atlantic alliance risked becoming a two-tiered organization, divided between some allies who were willing to fight and die to protect people’s security, and others who were not, and that that put the organization at risk. Nearly simultaneously, Condi Rice made a surprise visit to Afghanistan, where she exhorted the allies to do more.
At the NATO defense ministers meeting in Vilnius, Lithuania, on February 7–8, recognizing that my stridency was becoming counterproductive, I softened my tone and my rhetoric but not my message. At the end of the meeting, several countries indicated they were considering increasing their troop commitments, including the French. On February 9, I returned to the Munich Security Conference and directed my remarks to the European people, not their governments. It was exceedingly unusual for an American defense secretary to address himself to foreign publics, but the president, Rice, Hadley, and I thought it would be useful to make the case for why success in Afghanistan mattered to the Europeans, especially since their own governments seemed loath to do so. I reminded the audience of the number of successful and attempted attacks by Islamic extremists in Europe and said the task facing the United States and its allies “is to fracture and destroy this movement… to permanently reduce its ability to strike globally and catastrophically, while deflating its ideology…. The best opportunity to do this is in Afghanistan.”
I felt the outcome on Afghanistan was good at the April NATO summit. The allies unanimously endorsed a Strategic Vision Statement that committed the alliance to remain in Afghanistan for an extended period and to improve governance through greater training of Afghan officials, especially the police. Despite growing concern in Washington about nation-building, the United States acquiesced in the statement’s expression of support for the “comprehensive approach,” including both combat and economic reconstruction. President Bush pledged that the United States would send substantial additional troops to Afghanistan in 2009 but, at my suggestion, kept the number vague. We hoped the commitment would lead other nations to add to their forces. In fact, a number of allies did promise additional forces; France committed to send at least another 700 troops. As a result of the summit and the statement, the risk of significant allied defections at the end of 2008 was much reduced. Amazing to me as an old cold warrior, the Russians even agreed in Bucharest to allow nonlethal alliance military equipment going to Afghanistan to cross Russia. All that said, new troop commitments were modest or vague or both. And the “comprehensive approach” committed us to broad, ambitious goals that I and other U.S. officials were increasingly coming to see as unachievable in wartime.
The level of U.S. troops in Afghanistan remained a major concern for me for the rest of 2008. During my first year on the job, the number of troops had grown from 21,000 to 31,000. General McNeill had been asking for months for more soldiers, but by the time we arrived at the April summit, his request had grown to 7,500 to 10,000 more troops. The United States was the only possible source. Despite broad support in Congress for the war in Afghanistan, some questioned how President Bush could commit the United States to send more troops in 2009, when a new U.S. president would be in office. “I think that no matter who is elected president, he would want to be successful in Afghanistan,” I said at one point. “So I think this was a very safe thing for him to say.” As I told colleagues, as we drew down in Iraq, the United States could consider sending an additional three to five brigades (15,000 to 30,000 troops) to Afghanistan in 2009, but for the rest of my tenure (which I expected to end in January 2009), “I can’t do jack-shit.”
For the rest of 2008, we had to play “small ball,” finding a few more helicopters in one place, a battalion we needed in another, ordnance disposal experts and ISR capabilities in yet another. The president told me he didn’t want a “surge” in Afghanistan, and I told him we couldn’t carry one out if we wanted to. In late July, as we worked the options for meeting commanders’ needs in Afghanistan through November, there were a number of leaks of Joint Staff recommendations. I called Mike Mullen to express my unhappiness about that. I also had to tell Mullen that, once again, he had infuriated the president: on a television news show he said, in effect, that Bush had told him to focus on Iraq and then on Afghanistan. The president also kept saying to me that we needed to get allies who would not contribute troops—Japan, for one—to do more to fund the training and equipping of the Afghan forces. The results were minimal.
General Dan McNeill’s assignment as commander of ISAF was to end in early June 2008. In anticipation of that change, Army chief of staff General Casey and Mike Mullen recommended that Army General David McKiernan be McNeill’s successor. In 2003, McKiernan had commanded all coalition and U.S. ground forces in the invasion of Iraq. He had been appointed in 2005 as the commander of U.S. Army forces in Europe and had done a good job there. He was a fine soldier. With Casey’s and Mullen’s support for McKiernan (Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Cartwright was opposed), I saw no reason to challenge his appointment. With benefit of hindsight, I should have questioned whether McKiernan’s conventional forces background was the right fit for Afghanistan. This was a mistake on my part.
McKiernan had been on the ground in Afghanistan less than three months when I met with him in Kabul. He told me that if he could take care of the safe havens in Pakistan, “we could secure Afghanistan in six months.” I asked him if he thought we were winning. “Some places have governance, others have prosperity, and some have security,” he said. “But few have all three. We are winning slower in some places than others.” He told me he needed three additional brigade combat teams in addition to the 10th Mountain Division brigade due to arrive in January 2009—with support elements, a total of probably 15,000 to 20,000 more troops. (He would soon add a requirement for a combat aviation brigade, a significant addition of helicopters.) McKiernan said he could help beat back the “sky-is-falling narrative.” He was making a not-so-subtle dig at Mullen’s statement to the House Armed Services Committee on September 10 that he couldn’t say we were winning in Afghanistan—again infuriating the White House and, apparently, the field commander.
By midsummer 2008, even before McKiernan’s request for a significant increase in troops, I began to have misgivings about whether the foreign military presence in Afghanistan was growing to the point where most Afghans would begin to see us as “occupiers” rather than allies. Up to that point, all indications—polling and the like—suggested that most Afghans still saw us as allies. But more than anyone else at senior levels in Bush 43’s administration, I had been involved with Afghanistan and Pakistan during the 1980s and had watched the Soviets fail despite having nearly 120,000 troops there: their large presence (and brutal tactics) turned Afghans against them.
Historically, Afghanistan has not been kind to foreign armies. I began to worry aloud about where the tipping point in terms of the number of foreign troops might be and to act on that worry. On July 29, I asked for an analysis of the political and security implications of further troop increases. Ten days later I asked for a review of Afghan airfields, roads, and other infrastructure to determine whether they could support the additional forces being considered, over 20,000 more troops.