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My Share of the Task(181)



                “General McChrystal, you are most welcome to Afghanistan,” the president said in fluent English with a slight British accent. I nodded my thanks.

                “I know you have been to Afghanistan many times before, and all you did commanding special forces in Iraq is most impressive,” he said. “But welcome in your new position.” He’d done his homework.

                President Karzai was familiar with my background, and was clearly trying to determine what it meant for his country now that I would command. After five American ambassadors, eleven other ISAF commanders, and a number of other interlocutors since 9/11, Karzai found himself unsure how to deal with the United States. Back in 2001 and 2002, following the Taliban’s demise, both Afghans and the West viewed Afghanistan as a place of promise. The liberation of Afghanistan was proof positive of both our military might and the justness of our cause against terror—and Karzai was lauded for his part in this project. He was honored with state dinners at the White House, and given ready audience with all the top American officials. But as the military shifted to Iraq, and Afghanistan quickly proved more obdurate than fixable, the spotlight dimmed. Late in his term, President Bush had maintained weekly video teleconferences with Karzai, something President Obama’s administration opted not to continue. Now, in the summer of 2009, as Karzai ran for reelection, I sensed he was almost desperate to figure out how to balance maintaining a firm relationship with the United States while reinforcing Afghanistan’s sovereignty. I also guessed he was still gauging how influential I was, and how relevant I would be to his job as the nation’s leader.

                While President Karzai was curious, I was, more than anything, anxious to begin defining our relationship, which I wanted to be based on candor and trust. I don’t know if wearing my dress uniform that day made any difference—though Afghan confidants told me it did—but as time passed I learned to place great importance on gestures of respect, large and small, for the Afghan people and their leaders.

                The need for effective, productive relationships went far beyond President Karzai. Before deploying, I had sat down with Dave Rodriguez, who began as my deputy before moving over to lead the daily battle as the commander of IJC. We’d mapped out the important Afghans and Pakistanis, and divided responsibilities for establishing relationships with them. We needed functional ties, but we aimed for durable, genuine friendships. In these early weeks, we bonded with them over small dinners in my office, battlefield circulation trips, and regular meetings. Over time those relationships proved invaluable in addressing sensitive or fast-moving situations without being slowed by formality and bureaucracy.

                The effort was not without setbacks, some self-inflicted. One day that summer, we’d invited Afghan partners to a meeting at ISAF headquarters. Then–Lieutenant General Sher Mohammad Karimi, the army operations chief, was asked to come. As a young lieutenant, Karimi had won a coveted spot at Britain’s Sandhurst military academy, and later had gone to Fort Benning to earn American parachute wings and slither through the chilled mud pit at Ranger School. Following the 1978 coup, that Western training made him suspect, and the communists jailed him. In prison—dead for all his family knew—Karimi lived in the same pair of clothes for eight months, and endured relentless interrogations. Just as prison was about to leave his back crippled, he was released.

                Under Dr. Najibullah’s rule, Karimi found work in construction, and rejoined the military amid the communist regime’s decline. But he refused to join any of the ethnic factions jostling for power in the civil war, and eventually he left the army and his country and lived out Taliban rule in Peshawar, Pakistan. There, while at home translating a newsletter for the U.S. consulate, his wife called him to the television where he watched, again and again, planes colliding with the World Trade Center. Not long after, he returned to Afghanistan. He’d spent the intermittent years working to rebuild an Afghan army few in the international community seemed truly interested in.

                Karimi was a critical partner, but when the soft-spoken, sixty-four-year-old general arrived at our compound that summer day, just weeks after I’d directed a closer ISAF partnership with Afghans, our guards turned him away. Though an invariably gracious man and the ultimate team player, he was humiliated, and naturally livid. After years of hearing that we were partners with Afghans, and my recent renewal of that promise, the senior Afghan planner couldn’t enter a base in his own country—one that had been an Afghan military club at the beginning of his career. We had habits to break.