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On September 11, 2001, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center fell. Just two months later Kabul—the capital of a country where the deadliest terrorist attack in history had originated—was on the verge of falling.
On September 26, the first CIA team, code-named Jawbreaker, had landed in the Panjshir Valley, a Northern Alliance redoubt within striking distance of Kabul, to link up with the indigenous forces fighting the Taliban and their al-Qaeda allies. Aboard their Russian-built, CIA-operated Mi-17 helicopter, the Jawbreaker team led by Gary Schroen, an old hand from the clandestine service, brought with them millions of dollars in cash to pay off rebel commanders and enable them to equip their forces for a renewed offensive. A few weeks later, on October 19, Jawbreaker was joined by Team 555, a 12-man Special Forces unit that arrived aboard two U.S. Air Force MH-53J Pave Low helicopters. The “Triple Nickel” men, under the command of Chief Warrant Officer David Diaz, brought with them advanced radios, global positioning system (GPS) locators, and laser designators that would enable them to call in air strikes. At the same time another Special Operations detachment, Team 595, similarly equipped, landed far to the north, in the Daria-Souf Valley, within striking distance of the city of Mazar-e-Sharif.
Employing American air power in close coordination with Northern Alliance ground attacks, these Special Forces troops vastly increased the capabilities of rebel forces which hitherto had been on the verge of defeat. Once Mazar-e-Sharif fell on November 10, the focus shifted to Kabul. Operating from a series of observation posts in and around the old Russian air base at Bagram, only 35 miles north of the capital, the Green Berets called in devastating air strikes on Taliban troops arrayed before them on the Shomali Plain. The ground shook from the impact of 2,000-pound bombs dropped from B-52 and B-1B bombers with pinpoint accuracy. “We were dropping some serious ordnance,” recalled Technical Sergeant Calvin Markham, an air force combat controller attached to Team 555. “Not only are we breaking the enemy’s back, we are totally annihilating them and their war-making effort.”
So great was the punishment the Taliban received that by November 12 Northern Alliance commanders were confident that Kabul was theirs for the taking. Policymakers in Washington counseled the rebels to stay out, fearing a bloodbath when these warlords from the north entered the capital. But there was no stopping the Northern Alliance commanders, who after years of struggle were eager to secure victory before the onset of winter. The Special Forces and CIA operatives embedded with the Northern Alliance had no choice but to follow behind as Northern Alliance fighters raced pell-mell for Kabul through collapsing opposition.
“They drove in Toyota pickup trucks and an SUV, staying for the most part on the highway,” Schroen wrote of the Americans. “The roadside was littered with the debris of battle—smoking tank hulks, their heavy steel bodies blasted and twisted, the corpses of their crews scattered in grotesque poses around the wreckage. Mud-walled buildings that had been turned into defensive bunkers were smashed open, dust and smoke still rising from their interiors, dead bodies draped in twisted clumps here and there in the rubble.”
As they entered the outskirts of the capital on November 13, the scenery changed from the detritus of combat to the exhilaration of liberation. Green Berets observed people by the side of the road, “cheering and laughing.” Men were playing music and children flying kites, two of the many activities forbidden under the puritanical Taliban. One resident of Kabul told a foreign reporter, “All of the people are happy because they are free. All of the people are congratulating each other.”
It was not just the people of Afghanistan who were happy. So, too, were the people of the United States. Only a few weeks before they had been reading dire predictions that Afghanistan was turning into another Vietnam. Instead of a quagmire, they now learned of a victory delivered with miraculous dispatch and minimal force—fewer than 500 CIA and Special Operations operatives on the ground turned the tide against the Taliban.
On December 6, nearly a month after the fall of the capital, the biggest city in southern Afghanistan, Kandahar, was captured by rebel fighters. The Taliban no longer controlled any substantial territory. Their leaders were on the run, heading to Pakistan, along with their allies in al-Qaeda. By the end of December a new, internationally supported government would be inaugurated in Kabul under the leadership of the suave, English-speaking Hamid Karzai, a well-connected figure from a prominent Pashtun tribe who had previously served in the Taliban foreign ministry. Not even the failure to trap Osama bin Laden in the Tora Bora mountains could detract from the sense of vindication and even glee among Americans still shaken by the 9/11 attacks.
Just 16 months later, in April 2003, a similar giddiness would take hold when American soldiers and marines completed a three-week sprint from Kuwait to capture Baghdad. After the fall of Afghanistan, the public was captivated by photos showing Green Berets riding horses and carrying laser-designators—a strange and wonderful amalgam of new and old ways of warfare. The fall of Baghdad produced another iconic image: U.S. Marines on April 9 helping jubilant Iraqis topple a statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square.
Two wars, two victories. Or so it appeared at the time. Ending these conflicts, however, proved harder than starting them. The fall of enemy capitals did not end enemy resistance. Far from it. As fighting dragged on in both Iraq and Afghanistan, year after year, with thousands of American troops falling in battle against the Taliban, al-Qaeda in Iraq, and other shadowy foes, the easy triumphs of the early years evaporated like a mirage in the desert. Both conflicts turned out to be considerably costlier and lengthier than President George W. Bush and his senior aides, both civilian and military, had anticipated.
How did these wars transmogrify from triumph to tragedy? Much of the answer has to do with the tenacious fighting spirit of irregular warriors inflamed by religious and nationalist passions. But American generals and policymakers inadvertently aided the enemy by ignoring the lessons of small wars past. Neglecting the experience of Vietnam—let alone of the Philippines, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Russia, and Nicaragua—they had forgotten how hard it was to secure victory against guerrilla foes or what methods should be used to combat their attacks. Conventional war-fighting methods had seldom if ever prevailed against unconventional adversaries, yet those were precisely the tactics that most American soldiers first employed in Afghanistan and Iraq. To escape from the resulting morass, they would have to relearn at great cost the lessons of small wars past fought by Frederick Funston, Smedley Butler, Chesty Puller, and other long-forgotten heroes.
Iraq: The Making of a Quagmire
The learning process was most dramatic—both for its heavy cost and its eventual results—in Iraq. The early woes of the occupation have been amply chronicled in such books as Tom Ricks’s Fiasco: the American Military Adventure in Iraq, George Packer’s The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq, and Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone, and need not be extensively recounted here. In brief, there was a puzzling lack of preparation at the White House, Defense Department, Central Command, and other agencies for running Iraq after Saddam Hussein’s downfall. The job of overseeing “Phase IV,” as the postconflict phase of the operation was dubbed by military planners, fell initially to a retired general named Jay Garner who was given little in the way of staff or support. When he predictably proved ineffectual, he was removed and replaced as the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority by L. Paul “Jerry” Bremer III, a former ambassador to the Netherlands who had no experience in the Middle East and had never run a large organization before. Bremer’s military counterpart, with whom he often sparred, was Lieutenant General Ricardo “Rick” Sanchez, the most junior three-star general in the entire army, who knew little about nation building or counterinsurgency and even less about Iraq itself.
Within days of his arrival in Baghdad on May 12, wearing his trademark dark suit and hiking boots, Bremer was to make two fateful decisions that would haunt Iraq for years: He disbanded the Iraqi security forces and he banned even relatively junior members of the Baathist Party from holding government office. Bremer subsequently was to argue that the army had disbanded itself, and there is some truth to this claim, but there is ample evidence that many officers and men could have been recalled to the colors. No such effort was made, however. Even worse, little energy was devoted to reconstituting a new Iraqi army and police force, thereby ensuring a security vacuum for years to come. As for de-Baathification, there was a need to remove Saddam’s top henchmen, who had been guilty of heinous human-rights violations, but the process went too far and became politicized when it fell under the control of sectarian Shiites. The combined effect of Bremer’s first two orders was to embitter tens of thousands of men, mostly Sunnis, who had benefitted from the old order and now took up arms against the new regime.
The emerging insurgency would make a mockery of President George W. Bush’s premature declaration on May 1, 2003, delivered in front of a Mission Accomplished banner, that “major hostilities” were at an end. The first suicide bombings began in the summer of 2003. A devastating blast on August 12 leveled the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad and killed special envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello. An even deadlier explosion struck the holy city of Najaf on August 29, killing more than 80 people, including a leading Shiite cleric. U.S. troops, who initially had been greeted as liberators, soon had to run a gauntlet of roadside bombs—IEDs, or improvised explosive devices, in military parlance—which took a heavy toll in lives lost and limbs mangled.
There was little that U.S. forces could do to stop the breakdown of law and order because there were so few of them present. Total U.S. troop strength fell from a peak of 150,000 at the start of the invasion to just 115,000 by February 2004, hardly enough to police a country of more than 25 million people.
The problem was compounded by how the troops were employed. Some commanders, such as Major General David Petraeus of the 101st Airborne Division, who had written his PhD dissertation on the Vietnam War, were aware of the need to win over the population. In his headquarters in Mosul, Petraeus posted a sign that read, “We are in a race to win over the people. What have you and your element done to contribute to that goal today?” Petraeus stressed “nonkinetic” (that is, nonshooting) lines of operation such as electing local leaders and importing electricity from Syria. But other commanders, such as Major General Ray Odierno of the Fourth Infantry Division in Anbar Province, took a more heavy-handed approach. The shootings and large-scale roundups of young men carried out by their troops only added further fuel to the flames of insurgency. As did the shocking instances of abuse uncovered at the Abu Ghraib prison in April 2004. General Sanchez and his senior staff, overstretched and overwhelmed, had not focused on detainee operations as a critical endeavor, and their neglect had sullied the entire war effort.
There were a few scattered successes in 2003 following the fall of Baghdad, principally the killing (by Petraeus’s men) of Saddam Hussein’s sons, Uday and Qusay, on July 31 and the capture of Saddam Hussein himself (by the elite Delta Force) on December 13. But on the whole Phase IV had backfired, giving rise to a potent insurgency that might have been averted by more concerted attention to security.
Initially, resistance to the occupation was led by former Baathists, but even before Saddam’s capture the focus of the uprising was shifting toward Sunni and Shiite religious extremists. The two most prominent organizations to emerge out of this maelstrom were al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), led by a Jordanian-born jihadist who called himself Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and the Jaish al-Mahdi (JAM), led by a minor young Shiite cleric named Moqtada al-Sadr. There is no more important indicator of an insurgency’s prospects of success than the degree to which it receives outside support, and both Zarqawi and Sadr had access to external backing: Sadr from Iran, whose Quds Force operated an extensive clandestine network in Iraq; Zarqawi from Syria and from Sunni sympathizers in the Persian Gulf who were eager to challenge the emerging Shiite ascendancy in Baghdad.
Both AQI and JAM came to the fore, simultaneously if coincidentally, in April 2004. On March 31, four Blackwater contractors drove into the city of Fallujah, in Anbar Province, where they were killed and their mutilated corpses hung from a bridge. At virtually the same moment the Coalition Provisional Authority decided to close Sadr’s newspaper and to arrest one of his senior advisers. This sparked an uprising by the Sadrists in southern and central Iraq. They seized control of important cities such as Karbala and Najaf and managed temporarily to close the major coalition supply line, Route Tampa, running from Kuwait to Baghdad. This crisis, which some likened to a mini-Tet, was met by a muddled combination of military skill and political irresolution.
The First Marine Division was ordered by the Bush administration, against the advice of its commander, Major General James Mattis, to stage a hurried assault into Fallujah, only to have the offensive stopped short of its objectives because of pressure from leading Iraqi politicians. Thus al-Qaeda in Iraq was allowed to consolidate its hold on a major city. Meanwhile the First Armored Division, which had been on its way home, was redirected to regain control of Najaf, Karbala, and nearby areas. This the division did, only to have Bremer offer Sadr a ceasefire, which allowed the Shiite firebrand to fight another day. In both cases political blundering on the part of Bremer and his superiors in Washington undermined the skill and resolution shown by the U.S. armed forces.
Fallujah finally would fall to a costly and determined marine assault in November 2004, but by then al-Qaeda in Iraq had spread across the entire “Sunni Triangle,” an area the size of New England stretching from Mosul in the north to Ramadi in the west and Baghdad in the east. Its signature tactic was the car bomb, often driven into crowds of Shiites (whom Zarqawi viewed as rats, infidels, and devils) with devastating consequences. Iraq witnessed the worst spate of suicide bombings in history, with more than 10,000 people killed in such attacks between 2003 and 2008. JAM and other Shiite extremists retaliated by torturing and killing innocent Sunnis and driving them out of their historic neighborhoods in Baghdad.
President Bush hoped that a rapid devolution of authority to elected Iraqis would stem the violence. On June 28, 2004, Bremer turned over power to an interim administration headed by Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite and one of many Saddam opponents who had recently returned from exile. On January 30, 2005, Iraq held its first elections for an interim national assembly that would be tasked with writing a new constitution. On October 15, Iraqis voted again, this time to approve a constitution. On December 15, they voted for a third time to choose a permanent Council of Representatives, which wound up selecting Nouri al-Maliki, another former exile, as prime minister. “I hoped the formation of the Maliki government would provide a break in the violence,” Bush wrote in his memoirs. “It didn’t.”
Violence actually worsened after Sunni insurgents bombed the Shiite mosque in Samarra on February 22, 2006. The situation did not improve even after the ultrasecretive Joint Special Operations Command tracked down and blew up Zarqawi on June 7, 2006. The number of Iraqi civilians killed soared to 34,500 in 2006 from 20,200 in 2005.
The senior American military commanders—General George Casey, head of Multi-National Forces–Iraq, and General John Abizaid, head of Central Command—and their boss in Washington, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, had no answer to the worsening violence. Or rather they had the wrong answer. All three men subscribed to Abizaid’s theory that American troops were an “antibody” in Iraq and the sooner they left the better so that Iraqis could take over their own affairs. As Casey later wrote, “The longer we remained there in force, the more the Iraqis relied on us to solve their problems, and the less they moved forward on their own.” Accordingly Casey’s strategy focused first on concentrating U.S. troops on major bases outside of population centers and then on withdrawing them altogether as the size of the Iraqi security forces grew. However, while the paper strength of the Iraqi army and police continued to increase, their capabilities lagged behind. Given the widespread infiltration of the security forces by Shiite sectarians, their deployment in Sunni population centers often ignited, rather than extinguished, conflict. Yet in spite of the manifest failure of their strategy, Rumsfeld, Abizaid, and Casey refused to change course. They continued to advocate a U.S. drawdown in 2006 even as Iraq literally went up in flames.
Iraq: Turnaround and Aftermath
President Bush, who came into office inexperienced in military affairs, had hitherto proved reluctant to second-guess his commanders. But by the end of 2006 he realized that the war was being lost and with it his presidency. Drastic action was needed to turn around a dire situation and that is just what Bush delivered. He pushed out Rumsfeld, Abizaid, and Casey (with the latter being kicked upstairs to become army chief of staff), and installed a new leadership team under Secretary of Defense Bob Gates in Washington and General David Petraeus in Baghdad. Petraeus was to work closely with Lieutenant General Ray Odierno, who in December 2006 had taken over as the number two commander in Iraq, having learned a great deal about how to conduct counterinsurgency operations since his unfortunate first tour in Anbar Province. Odierno had clashed with Casey over the need for more troops—Casey didn’t see the need, Odierno did. So did Petraeus.
To give Petraeus and Odierno the resources they needed, Bush decided to send five more combat brigades to Iraq—a move that was greeted with almost universal opposition in Washington, where the prevailing sentiment, even at the Pentagon, was that war was already lost and the only prudent course was to withdraw. In the boldest move of his presidency, Bush gambled that there was still a chance to salvage a decent outcome. He was proven right. At first, as opponents of the surge had predicted, American casualties spiked; the period from February to June 2007 saw the heaviest fighting of the entire war. But by the summer of 2007, contrary to expectations, violence began to decline like a fever breaking. By 2008 the number of Iraqi civilians killed had declined by more than 90 percent, and both AQI and JAM had suffered serious setbacks. This was an outcome few if any analysts had anticipated, and there has been much debate ever since about what the surge accomplished and why.
There was no doubt that the increase in troop strength was a major part of the turnaround but more important, Petraeus argues, was “the ‘surge of ideas’—the changes in our overall strategy and operational plans.” The most important change of all was to transform the military’s mission from “transition”—handing over control to the Iraqis at all costs—to victory over the insurgency. Accomplishing this audacious goal required a change in the deployment of forces. Previously U.S. troops had been isolated from the population on giant forward operating bases, which they left only in heavily armored convoys that were subject to frequent IED attacks as they cruised through an alien landscape that could be glimpsed only faintly through tiny portholes. Petraeus and Odierno pushed troops to establish smaller outposts in the middle of urban areas where they would not have to “commute” to work but rather could patrol on foot and thus gain a vast improvement in “situational awareness.” Troops also erected miles of blast barriers in Baghdad to control access in and out of neighborhoods, making it harder for Sunni suicide bombers and Shiite death squads to strike. With American troops deployed in their midst, Iraqi civilians would now become more willing to inform on terrorists, confident that they would be protected from retaliation.
Similar tactics had been employed in isolated instances in the past—for instance, by Marine Lieutenant Colonel Julian “Dale” Alford in Al-Qaim and by Army Colonel H. R. McMaster in Tal Afar in 2005–6. But for all of General Casey’s lip service to the concept of “population-centric counterinsurgency,” he had never consistently implemented this strategy across the country. Petraeus did.
The surge was tremendously assisted by the Sunni “Awakening” in which Anbar’s tribes turned against al-Qaeda in Iraq. The movement began in Ramadi, where it was midwifed in late 2006 by Army Colonel Sean MacFarland. By 2008 100,000 men had joined a militia known as the Sons of Iraq to fight against al-Qaeda. It has been suggested that it was the Awakening that truly transformed the situation—not the surge. But, as Petraeus notes, “the spread of the Awakening beyond Ramadi was not serendipity; rather it was the result of a conscious decision and a deliberate effort.” Previous American commanders had turned their backs on the tribes of Anbar, which they saw as an outdated relic of a feudal Iraq. Petraeus, by contrast, embraced the tribes and pressed Prime Minister Maliki to do so as well, despite his deep-seated suspicions of the Sunnis. Among the controversial steps that Petraeus took to nurture the Awakening was the release of “reconcilable” insurgents from American custody to earn the goodwill of their tribesmen. Were it not for this campaign of outreach, the Awakening might have been as stillborn as previous anti-AQI revolts had been. Of crucial importance was that coalition forces were no longer telling tribal leaders, as they had done in the days of Casey, that they were leaving and that Iraqis would soon be on their own. “As long as they perceived us as mere interlopers, they dared not throw in their lot with ours,” MacFarland later explained. “When they began to think of us as reliable partners, their attitudes began to change.”
There were many other critical aspects of the surge as well. These included an increase in targeted raids on “high value targets” by the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which became a finely honed “kill or capture” machine under Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal; a covert campaign by JSOC and the CIA, National Security Agency (NSA), and other intelligence agencies to uproot and expose Iranian support for the Shiite insurgency; an ambitious train-and-equip program to increase the size and competence of the Iraqi security forces led first by Lieutenant General Martin Dempsey and then by Lieutenant General James Dubik; efforts to improve civilian governance spearheaded by Ambassador Ryan Crocker, who developed a close and cordial relationship with Petraeus; and a significant improvement in detainee operations under Marine Major General Doug Stone, who inaugurated “COIN inside the wire” to rehabilitate captured insurgents.
The overall effect of this complex and multifaceted campaign was to increase the number of insurgents killed or captured (the number of detainees alone surged from 15,000 to 26,000 between 2006 and 2008) without engendering the same sort of backlash that had been caused by clumsy offensives earlier in the war. The difference was that in 2007–8 U.S. operations were based on accurate intelligence and an improved understanding of Iraq’s political and cultural landscape. As important as anything else in the surge’s success was the fact that so many soldiers, including Petraeus and Odierno, had served in Iraq before and understood it better than they had on their initial tour. Counterinsurgency is the most context-specific form of warfare and this knowledge of the local terrain, both geographic and human, was of incalculable value.
Petraeus’s gamble was that, by first attacking the Sunni insurgency, he would relieve the sense of fear that had led many Shiites to align themselves with the extremists of JAM. This theory was borne out in 2008 when Prime Minister Maliki, emboldened by the surge’s success, ordered an Iraqi army offensive to break JAM’s stranglehold on Basra, the major city of southern Iraq, and on the Sadr City slums of Baghdad. These operations were undertaken initially by the Iraqis with little planning or consultation with coalition forces, and they got off to a rocky start but ultimately succeeded because Petraeus committed American personnel and resources to assist the Iraqis. The fact that Maliki, a sectarian Shiite himself, was now willing to take on extremists among the Shiites boded well for Iraq’s future. So did his willingness to sign a Status of Forces Agreement that allowed U.S. troops to remain in Iraq at least until the end of 2011. The presence of these outside troops, which were more trusted by many Iraqis than their own corrupt and sectarian security forces, was a vital stabilizing element in Iraq’s tentative, halting, and uncertain progress away from the abyss of civil war.
Iraq was thrown into turmoil once again when President Barack Obama failed to renew the U.S.-Iraq Status of Forces Agreement before it was due to expire at the end of 2011. Obama blamed this failure on Maliki’s reluctance to grant U.S. troops immunity from prosecution in Iraqi courts—a nonnegotiable demand from the Pentagon. But Obama did not try all that hard to overcome Maliki’s opposition. The Obama administration did not begin negotiations until relatively late—in the summer of 2011—even though concluding the previous status of forces agreement had consumed most of 2008; it insisted that any agreement obtain the approval of Iraq’s parliament, which many Iraqi political leaders judged overly difficult and unnecessary; and the president did not make a personal pitch to clear away the final obstacles to an agreement. Obama was not even willing to leave very many troops in Iraq—only 3,500, far fewer than the 10,000 to 15,000 that military commanders deemed prudent. He seemed to think that the lower figure would be an easier sell to the Iraqis, but in fact many Iraqi politicians decided that the U.S. commitment was so insignificant that it was not worth risking a political fight for. It is hard to escape the conclusion that, as the best history of the war to date notes, the status of forces negotiations were hindered by the administration’s “own ambivalence toward prolonging a military mission that Obama had very publicly pledged to end during the campaign.”
The parlous consequences of pulling all U.S. troops out quickly became apparent. Without the American presence to balance it out, Iran’s influence soared. After the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011, Iran used Iraqi airspace to move supplies to Damascus. With virtually no air force of his own, Maliki could not have stopped these flights even if he had wanted to.
While cooperating closely with Iran, Maliki augmented his internal authority in increasingly authoritarian fashion. Just days after the departure of U.S. troops, he sent security forces to the compound of the Sunni Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi. Hashemi fled the country, but Maliki’s men allegedly tortured his bodyguards to implicate him in various acts of terrorism for which he was sentenced to death in absentia. Whatever the truth of the charges against Hashemi, similar accusations could have been made against many Iraqi figures, including Shiite supporters of the government, yet Maliki was only interested in prosecuting Sunnis. A year after arresting Hashemi’s bodyguards, Maliki’s security forces arrested the bodyguards of Sunni Finance Minister Rafi Issawi, who was forced to resign office and only narrowly avoided arrest himself. Former leaders of the Anbar Awakening were also targeted for assassination or arrest.
Enraged Sunnis began to fight back with street demonstrations that the Iraqi security forces put down with force. Even more ominously, al-Qaeda in Iraq, which had been all but defeated in 2007–8, crawled back out of its grave. Terrorist attacks across Iraq, which had been falling since 2007, increased in 2012 and again in 2013, reaching a level not seen since 2008. AQI even extended its reach into Syria where it helped Sunni fighters attack the Alawite regime of Bashar Assad.
Iraq could yet stabilize, but on its present trajectory many of the gains of the surge appear likely to be undone and the ambitious goals proclaimed by President Bush for the initial invasion—namely to create a functioning democracy in the middle of the Middle East—appear unlikely to be achieved. That does not mean the surge was a failure or that the invasion itself was doomed to fail. It does mean that there were numerous missed opportunities between 2003 and 2011 when better political and military choices by the United States could have produced a better outcome. The biggest mistakes were disbanding the Iraqi army, going too far with de-Baathification, not sending enough troops to control the country, failing to pursue a population-centric counterinsurgency strategy from the beginning, not engaging with the tribes earlier on, and, finally, not concluding a treaty that would have allowed U.S. troops to remain after 2011. All but the last mistake was made by Bush, yet the most lasting mistake of all may have been the one that Obama committed—to leave Iraq on its own to deal with sectarian tensions.
If a number of these decisions had been made differently, the war in Iraq conceivably could have been shorter, less costly, and more successful. But for that to have occurred, senior American soldiers and policymakers would have to have been more familiar with Iraq and with the lessons of small wars past than was the case at the beginning of the conflict.
Afghanistan: the Failure to Nation Build
Initially, at least, the war in Afghanistan seemed to go much better than the one in Iraq. There were few U.S. troops in Afghanistan from 2002 to 2005 and few attacks by the Taliban. These fundamentalist fanatics were flat on their backs, and the people of Afghanistan welcomed the creation of an internationally supported, democratic government. But just as in Iraq, so too in Afghanistan the Bush administration was not interested in nation building, which it mistakenly viewed as a failed legacy of the Clinton administration. (In point of fact, nation-building efforts in Kosovo and Bosnia had shown considerable success.) Even counterinsurgency was not on the agenda—the small number of U.S. troops in the country, who never numbered more than 30,000 personnel until 2007, were largely limited to counterterrorism operations, meaning hunting down the remnants of al-Qaeda. By 2003, if not earlier, the administration was also distracted by the war in Iraq, which drained away experienced personnel—soldiers, diplomats, spies—and invaluable assets such as surveillance aircraft. Even Zalmay Khalilzad, an Afghan-American who was the most effective ambassador Washington ever sent to Kabul, was moved to Baghdad in 2005 to become America’s representative in a land whose language he did not speak.
The lack of American support proved crippling for Hamid Karzai. He may have been inaugurated as Afghanistan’s new president, but he had virtually no men with guns with which to enforce his will. The U.S. and its allies did little in the war’s early years to train or equip indigenous security forces. When Karzai asked for American help to bring recalcitrant warlords to bay, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld refused. “I was convinced Karzai needed to learn to govern the Chicago way, . . . ” the Illinois-born defense secretary later wrote. “My point was that instead of giving Karzai the freedom to throw around the weight of the U.S. military, he should learn to use patronage and political incentives and disincentives to get the local Afghan warlords, governors, and cabinet officials in line.”
This was a lesson Karzai learned all too well. He became dependent on disreputable powerbrokers such as Gul Agha Sherzai, Mohammad Fahim, Abdul Rashid Dostum, Ismail Khan, and his own half brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, who until his assassination in 2012 was the boss of Helmand Province. These were mostly the same men whose abusive misrule in the early 1990s had given rise to the Taliban in the first place, and their ascendance a decade later provided an opening for the Taliban to stage a resurgence from their sanctuaries in Pakistan. The hopes of Afghans for a new golden age, reminiscent of the peace they had enjoyed prior to the Soviet invasion in 1979, were quickly dashed. Abdullah Abdullah, Afghanistan’s former foreign minister (and later an opposition politician), put his finger on the problem when he said in 2007: “Where are the state institutions? There aren’t any.”
The Taliban, along with warlords, were happy to fill this vacuum. They appointed shadow governors in many provinces and set up night courts to provide justice without benefit of bribes—or due process. Afghanistan’s flourishing opium trade, along with donations from rich Gulf Arabs and criminal rackets such as extortion of cell phone companies and smuggling of gems and lumber, provided a steady stream of financing for the insurgency. The warlords affiliated with the government also benefited from the drug trade: Afghanistan was becoming a narco-state.
Coalition efforts to fight back too often resulted in needless civilian casualties because bombs were being dropped without enough troops on the ground to monitor where they fell or to grasp the larger context. This collateral damage created still more recruits for the insurgency among the relatives of those mistakenly slain. Between 2002 and 2006, enemy-initiated attacks increased by 400 percent and the number of deaths by 800 percent. The situation was not helped by a presidential election in August 2009 that returned Karzai to power but was widely seen as illegitimate due to widespread voter fraud and ballot stuffing.
At the end of the month, the recently arrived U.S. and NATO commander in Kabul, General Stanley McChrystal, submitted a strategic assessment to the secretary of defense, Bob Gates, that warned: “Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near-term (next 12 months)—while Afghan security capacity matures—risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible.”
McChrystal offered the president three troop-increase options—11,000, 40,000, or 85,000 troops—to prevent a Taliban victory. At the end of a months-long policy review, an obviously ambivalent Obama decided to send 30,000 extra troops, or two-thirds of the middle option, while also publicly pledging that the “surge” would last no more than 18 months and that the troops would start coming home in July 2011. Together with earlier decisions to send additional reinforcements, Obama brought the overall U.S. troop total to 100,000 personnel, triple the number when he was inaugurated. There were also some 40,000 other foreign troops, but many of them were bound by national caveats that severely limited their fighting effectiveness. There were still not enough troops to launch “clear and hold” operations in all of the areas where the Taliban operated, much less to shut a long and porous border with Pakistan.
In addition to promising more troops, Obama pledged to send more civilian experts who could help improve Afghanistan’s meager governmental capacity. Unfortunately the civilian surge never came close to meeting Obama’s ambitious expectations. The Department of State and other civilian agencies were simply not equipped to send large numbers of governance experts into a conflict zone. Many of those who were sent had little relevant knowledge, and by the time they had acquired the lay of the land they were on their way out after a one-year tour. (A notable exception was a history PhD named Carter Malkasian who had previously advised marines in Anbar Province: He learned Pashto and became an exceptionally effective adviser during a two-year stint in the Garmser district of Helmand Province.) To make the situation even worse, Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, himself a former general, and General McChrystal had a poisonous relationship that prevented the kind of smooth civil-military integration that had occurred in Iraq during the surge. All of these defects made it hard to improve the performance of Afghanistan’s government—arguably the main factor driving the insurgency.
The 18-month deadline for withdrawing newly sent brigades further hindered the effectiveness of the surge by encouraging the insurgents to wait out the coming offensive. The timeline’s announcement seemed to fly in the face of the lesson of the Iraq surge, when only the determination of President Bush to stay as long as necessary convinced skeptical Sunni sheikhs to side with the Americans. In Afghanistan, by contrast, many tribal leaders remained on the fence, afraid to commit to what could be a losing cause.
Yet another significant obstacle lay across the border in Pakistan. Administration officials promised to redouble efforts to cut off the assistance provided to the insurgency by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency—perhaps the Taliban’s most important trump card—but their efforts never made any appreciable progress. Instead U.S.-Pakistan relations plummeted to a new low in 2011 after Obama ordered a SEAL Team Six raid to kill Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad without notifying Pakistan’s leaders.
Making the best of the hand he had been dealt, McChrystal decided he could not simultaneously launch pacification operations in both eastern and southern Afghanistan, even though both areas had been significantly infiltrated by the Taliban. He put his focus in the south, on Helmand and Kandahar provinces. The latter was the birthplace of the Taliban and it held the south’s largest city, Kandahar City, while the former was the center of the opium trade that helped to finance the Taliban. During the fighting seasons of 2010 and 2011, U.S. and allied troops, in cooperation with the Afghan National Army, made significant progress in hard fighting to clear the Taliban out of many of their sanctuaries in districts such as Kandahar’s Arghandab, Panjwai, and Zhari, and Helmand’s Marjah, Nad Ali, Nawa, and Sangin. Even a critic of the war effort, Rajiv Chandrasekaran of the Washington Post, was forced to concede that “by mid-2011, the security improvements across the south because of the troop surge were profound.”
But the improvements were decidedly limited—they did not extend to eastern Afghanistan, where the Taliban and the Haqqani Network, a related insurgent group, continued to maintain strongholds an hour’s drive from Kabul. And, unlike in Iraq in 2007, there was no substantial defection of insurgents and no mass uprising among Pashtuns willing to fight the Taliban. Peace talks with the Taliban were unlikely to succeed, because the Taliban’s senior leadership, based in the Pakistani city of Quetta, remained convinced that they could wait out the Americans. Even as U.S. troop numbers began to fall in 2012 and 2013, and as the remaining U.S. troops stepped back from direct combat, the war continued unabated.
The big question hanging over the future of Afghanistan will be the sustainability of security improvements once American combat troops pull out by the end of 2014. The insurgency will continue to enjoy sanctuaries in Pakistan, while the government of Afghanistan will still be hindered by pervasive corruption and ineffectiveness—and by the loss of much of the foreign aid on which it has depended. The ultimate burden of stopping the Taliban will then fall on the Afghan National Security Forces. Thanks to Western training and equipment, the army and police have increased in size and effectiveness over the course of a decade, reaching in 2013 a peak strength of 350,000 men. But it remains unclear how effectively they will operate with reduced, perhaps even nonexistent, assistance in air support, logistics, intelligence, planning, and other areas where they have come to depend on foreign, primarily American, help. It is not even clear whether they will have the financial resources to maintain their peak strength, since the government of Afghanistan is too poor to foot an estimated annual bill of $5 billion.
The history of America’s previous involvement in small wars in countries such as Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua does not offer much cause for hope: In all those places the benefits of American intervention had worn off almost immediately after the last marines had departed. Interventions in the 1990s in Somalia and Haiti likewise did not deliver results that could withstand the departure of American troops. The U.S. had been more successful at nation building in the Philippines but only because its colonial presence lasted more than 40 years—far longer than anyone envisioned the U.S. staying in Afghanistan.
The Post 9/11 Wars in Perspective
In one sense the U.S. government was singularly and impressively successful in the decade-plus since the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon: While the U.S. homeland has seen some terrorist attacks since (for example, the bombing of the Boston Marathon in 2013), there has not been another 9/11, as so many feared would happen. This was due primarily to the success of law enforcement and intelligence agencies working in cooperation with foreign partners, but the armed forces also had a role to play—most spectacularly in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Whatever agency of government gets to claim credit, the war on terror declared by President Bush and continued by President Obama has been largely, if not completely, successful. The conflict, however, is far from over: Al-Qaeda has shown a dismaying ability to survive the loss of its leader, and it has since spread to new lands, from Mali to Syria, where it was not particularly active in years past.
Needless to say, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are not over yet, either, and they will not end with the pullout of American troops. As the experience of post-2011 Iraq shows, the premature withdrawal of U.S. troops can actually restart a quiescent conflict. The interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo—to say nothing of postwar Germany, South Korea, Japan, and Italy—have been more successful precisely because foreign troops made a long-term commitment to the stability and security of those states.
While there is little that the U.S. armed forces can do to determine the length of time they will be granted to complete a mission, there is much they can do to prepare for small wars—and they failed to do what was necessary before the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Notwithstanding all of the small wars they were dispatched to fight in the 1990s, from Somalia to Kosovo, the American officer class remained relentlessly focused on conventional conflict. Their emphasis was on “network-centric warfare,” based on the conceit that information technology could dispel the fog of war and grant commanders perfect “situational awareness.” Few studied the lessons of small wars past until they became embroiled in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those conflicts, soldiers soon learned, could not be won with precision munitions, drones, or other high-tech gadgets. Progress could come only from the acquisition and application of historical knowledge about counterinsurgency techniques and, even more importantly, case-specific knowledge about local culture and politics.
The learning curve was steep. A turning point came at the end of 2006 when Lieutenant General David Petraeus and Marine Lieutenant General James Amos released the US Army/Marine Counterinsurgency Field Manual, which drew on the Marine Corps’ Small Wars Manual and many other classics of the genre. The practical application of those lessons made possible a dramatic turnaround in Iraq and a less dramatic but still noticeable improvement in Afghanistan. The U.S. armed forces emerged from more than a decade of conflict licking their wounds, and dealing with a troubling spike in suicides and posttraumatic stress disorder. But they could take pride in their ability to learn on the fly. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, the U.S. military had become arguably the finest small-war force in history.
As of 2013, however, there were already many signs that training and education were shifting back toward conventional operations—the military’s comfort zone—amid budget cuts and a growing assumption that the armed forces would not be fighting another major irregular conflict, certainly not on the scale of Iraq or Afghanistan, anytime in the foreseeable future. That certitude, alas, is at odds with two centuries of experience that demonstrate that the U.S. armed forces, like it or not, will indeed be forced to fight small wars in the future. They will not be allowed to pick and choose which wars to fight. They will only get to choose whether they will be better prepared for such conflicts in the future or as badly prepared as they were going into Iraq and Afghanistan.