My Share of the Task(178)
In addition to the strategic assessment, Secretary Gates had directed me to establish the ISAF Joint Command (IJC). As a three-star-level command, the IJC would run the day-to-day operations of the war and directly supervise the five regional commands that divided the country among the capital, north, west, south, and east. Although we’d operated with both three-star-level and four-star-level commands in Iraq beginning in 2004, in Afghanistan, ISAF had been required to operate both at the strategic level in Kabul, and also direct operations of the regional commands. The secretary was convinced we needed an intermediate level of command, and I agreed.
Additionally, he’d instructed me to review how our forces were currently employed to look for ways to reduce requirements or gain efficiencies. The U.S. military was stretched thin between Afghanistan and Iraq. We needed to look for ways to remove unnecessary positions and make every person count.
Finally, the secretary was deeply troubled by Afghan civilian casualties. He asked that I take all possible steps both to reduce them and to improve how we handled those we did cause. Like me, the secretary sensed an urgent need to mitigate Afghan resentment. This would be an ongoing effort.
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My first imperative, then, was to develop the best possible understanding of the war. This was always tricky, particularly for senior leaders in a complex, politically charged environment. My own ignorance, combined with agenda-laden opinions and flawed, incomplete information, challenged me to gather, evaluate, contest, and finally synthesize a mountain of information into a clear sense of reality. I had to be humble about my ability to truly comprehend all that was happening, and why.
Not only did I need a grasp of the war raging beyond Kabul, I also needed to understand the situation within our own walls. The ISAF compound was a crowded hodgepodge of buildings and trailers connected by twisting, casbah-like alleyways. In its way, the headquarters’ plot reflected the amalgam of forty-two nations—from Turkey to Sweden, Australia to Bulgaria—that comprised our war-fighting coalition.
Across from the yellow headquarters building, I found a landscaped garden area with picnic tables and gazebos, where ISAF staff relaxed with coffee. It seemed blatantly inappropriate given the austere and dangerous conditions our troops faced only a few miles away. So too did the fourteen bars inside the compound that served alcohol to non-Americans (U.S. forces were forbidden by policy to drink anywhere in Afghanistan or Iraq). The garden gave me a chill of frustration and worry that I’d experienced vicariously before—over the pages of Bernard Fall’s Street Without Joy, a searing chronicle of the French war in Indochina that I’d read in high school and many times since. While in Siem Reap, Cambodia, in 1953, Fall found himself watching two French officers play tennis and sip drinks at an officers’ club mess. When the sun fell and a nearby bugle played “lower the flag,” they ignored it. Only a nearby master sergeant—a Cambodian member of the French Marines—snapped to attention and saluted the French flag. “And in one single blinding flash,” Fall wrote, “I knew that we were going to lose the war.” I didn’t draw as abrupt a conclusion from the symbolism in the quiet garden. But given my intent to reenergize and refocus our war coalition, the garden and bars were relevant pieces of terrain. It took some time, but in early September I banned alcohol in the ISAF compound. When I visited in November 2011, the coffee garden remained.
As I continued walking along packed gravel paths, the myriad uniforms reminded me anew that this would be a Coalition war. Most common were the familiar grayish green digitized camouflage of the Americans, varying only slightly in hue among the branches. Elsewhere, the sand-colored desert print of the Dutch stood apart from the Norwegians’ lime-green highlights. I saw the familiar caramel-streaked fatigues of the Brits and brown-spotted shirts of the Australians, as well as the unfamiliar, dark, lizardlike print of the South Koreans. Ubiquitous were the beige boonie hats and wood-stocked weapons of the Macedonian guards who protected the headquarters. Rarer were the neo-British uniforms of Pakistani liaisons. Conspicuously absent, to my eyes, were any uniforms of our Afghan National Army partners. There were stars on some, epaulets on others, NATO patches on most. But beside some common markings, each uniform represented a different culture, set of marching orders, tour length, work ethic, language, experience level, and historical perspective. At the time, forty-two different nations contributed troops to make up a 61,000-strong ISAF force, of which 28,850 were American. The rest of the United States’ 57,600 troops in country that month served under U.S. forces–Afghanistan, as part of Operation Enduring Freedom, which I also commanded.