My Share of the Task(174)
Finally, there was Annie. I’d left her in 2003 for what had turned out to be most of five years. Now, for the past year, she’d been paralleling my job as director of the Joint Staff by helping to bring together the Joint Staff team. She held regular Friday-night dinners at our quarters for small groups of younger staff officers and their wives, functions that competed for any time we had away from work. But being together again was magic. On weekend mornings we’d both run separately and then meet somewhere for coffee. There, for a precious hour or sometimes two we’d talk. As I thought of those moments, I knew they were finite. We were no longer young and I had told myself that to do this job right, I needed, and planned, to commit to commanding ISAF for at least three years.
It was a lot to ask of Annie, but I never had to. There was no cautious conversation in which I broke the news to her, or asked her permission—I didn’t need to. I knew that for as long as I wore the uniform, whatever I had to do, Annie would support me.
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On May 19, 2009, I was taken to the White House to meet President Obama. We’d met once before when he’d visited the Pentagon during his first week in office, but as DJS I’d been in a collection of other civilian and military leaders, so it was unlikely he remembered the man who would soon command his military effort in Afghanistan.
I’d been in the Oval Office before with President George W. Bush, but the atmosphere in the West Wing in the final and opening months of administrations differed perceptibly. Although it was four months into Obama’s term, there was still a feeling of newness to the people, who moved with an air of excited purpose through the hallways. When the president was available, the door opened and Obama walked to the entrance to greet me into the room. The meeting was short, but cordial. The president offered no specific guidance but locked his eyes with mine and thanked me for accepting the responsibility.
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Senate confirmation was required and it was easier than it had been coming out of TF 714 the year before, although I again addressed questions surrounding Corporal Tillman’s death. I appreciated concerns raised by the Tillman family and others, but after multiple investigations and testimony the year prior, I knew I had already provided full and forthright insights on my role and all I had observed.
On June 2, 2009, I testified in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee. I knew the hearing, while focused on the nominees, was also a venue for the senators to voice their own opinions on the war and the administration’s handling of it. In the background was General McKiernan’s still outstanding request for ten thousand additional troops. But it also offered a chance for me to offer my own statement of the war as I saw it.
“In Afghanistan, despite impressive progress in many areas since 2001, the situation is serious,” I began. “Afghans face a combination of challenges: a resilient Taliban insurgency, increasing levels of violence, lack of governance capacity, persistent corruption, lack of development in key areas, illicit narcotics, and malign influences from other countries. Together, these challenges threaten the future of Afghanistan and regional stability.”
To prevent Al Qaeda’s reemergence, to maintain stability in a region where Pakistan’s fate was linked to Afghanistan’s, and to provide Afghans, “battered by thirty years of almost unbroken violence, an opportunity to shape their future,” I told the committee, “we must succeed.”
I also stressed the importance of NATO protecting the Afghan population. Despite NATO’s efforts, the previous year, 2008, had been the deadliest yet for Afghan civilians. The Taliban killed the vast majority of Afghans—largely through their IEDs—but the NATO Coalition was also responsible for a troubling number of those civilian deaths.
Fresh in my mind was an air strike that had occurred a few days before it was announced I’d take over in Afghanistan. On May 4, in Farah, western Afghanistan, insurgents had attacked Afghan troops and the American trainers embedded with them. After air support from F-16s, the gunfight subsided. While Afghan and American ground troops held their ground, waiting for helicopters to evacuate two wounded, a B-1 bomber pursued Taliban who were maneuvering from the fight and dropped 8,500 pounds of bombs on compounds in a small rural village.