My Share of the Task(177)
Intuitively I knew that the key to success lay in getting people to believe. Afghans of every ethnicity, Pakistani leaders, donor nations, U.N. agencies, the media, and ISAF soldiers, had to believe that we could win, and that we would. So too did our insurgent enemies.
Believing would require changing our strategy, our structure, and our relationship with Afghans. The undertaking would ask much of Coalition nations frustrated by limited progress after eight years of contributions and sacrifice. It would ask the most of Afghans, our most important audience. Afghans, after three decades of war, were smart, discriminating, and wary survivors. They had to be. And after years of unmet expectations, even the most hopeful had become cynics. They were safer that way. Their government would have to show them progress, show them a future that they wanted and believed was possible and worth fighting for. But in the minds of many, both Afghans and others, the onus was on us.
As the aircraft slowed on the tarmac, I reached into my backpack and pulled out the Velcro-backed cloth insignia that my enlisted aide, Sergeant Major Rudy Valentine, had passed to me earlier in the flight. I looked for a few moments at the three-star rank on my chest, which I’d worn since February 2006, four months before we killed Zarqawi. I thought of all the memories of those years, then pulled it off and replaced it with the other strip of cloth bearing four stars.
Charlie and Mike Flynn were both sitting across from me in the aircraft and chuckled at the lack of formality. I’d promoted Charlie three different times during his career, the last time to colonel. I’d promoted Mike twice, most recently to major general. Each occasion had featured their big Irish family, a ceremony, and then a party. This promotion was different. Although I wished Annie and my father could have been there, the four stars simply felt like a new task looming before me. But it was a task I shared with a team of people I trusted, and it was time to get on with it.
* * *
After touching down in Kabul, we drove through quiet streets to ISAF headquarters, which lay about a half mile north of the presidential palace and across the street from the American embassy. The walled compound had been the site of a pre-Soviet-era Afghan military club, and the yellow building that now housed ISAF’s headquarters offices had been the main facility. The compound also fell within the footprint of the British army’s 1842 cantonment site. It was from there that General William Elphinstone’s force, encumbered with baggage and thousands of families and other noncombatants, began a tragic winter retreat that left a single British army surgeon alive after a gauntlet of ambushes and freezing temperatures to reach the gates of Jalalabad. Later, I had a replica of a period map of Kabul, complete with the route tracing Elphinstone’s ghastly march, placed under the Plexiglas top of our dining table as a backdrop to warn against hubris.
As I entered the headquarters, briefly greeting the young guard at the entrance, I reminded myself that the command was still dealing with the trauma of the unexpected departure of a respected commander. There would be some resentment and much uncertainty. But I was aided by the fact that Dave McKiernan, to his great credit and my benefit, had epitomized professionalism throughout.
After a quick visit to headquarters, we moved to the prefab modules used for housing. In the small, convenient quarters I unpacked and arranged my gear as I had so many times before in other places, and then returned to the headquarters. As rapidly as possible, I needed to pursue two objectives. First, I had to understand as fully as possible how the war was going, and how prepared our Coalition was to win it. Second, I had to make the changes necessary to make ISAF ready for the challenge ahead.
In one of our conversations before I left D.C., Secretary Gates had given me four specific tasks. He asked me to conduct a strategic assessment of the war and to determine any necessary changes to the mission, strategy, or how our forces were organized. He told me to take sixty days, and specifically asked me to make no resource requests before its completion. Before flying into Kabul, I had visited the NATO headquarters in Brussels en route to Afghanistan. While there, at my recommendation, NATO secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen also asked me for an assessment. By combining the two assessments, I hoped to reduce any perceived gaps between my dual-hatted role as a NATO commander and that as commander of all U.S. forces in Afghanistan.