I slammed the table.
“What is it that we don’t understand? We’re going to lose this fucking war if we don’t stop killing civilians,” I said, looking at the staff and at the commanders on the screen. It was uncharacteristic for me to swear during the morning update. I took a second, and began again. “I apologize for losing my temper, but we cannot continue to do this.”
This was a conclusion that the listening tour had strongly reinforced. I’d watched as a focus on the enemy in Afghanistan had made little dent in the insurgency’s strength over the past eight years and, conversely, had served to antagonize Afghans. Not only was Afghans’ allegiance critical, but I did not think we would defeat the Taliban solely by depleting their ranks. We would win by making them irrelevant by limiting their ability to influence the lives of Afghans, positively or negatively. We needed to choke off their access—physical, psychological, economic—to the population.
In the year before my arrival General McKiernan had pursued a counterinsurgency approach. But he had faced a shortage of Afghan and ISAF manpower, as well as limited infrastructure, like roads, that would have enabled effective operations. Additionally, NATO had no doctrine for counterinsurgency, and ISAF forces on the ground had offered a fair amount of institutional resistance to adopting the tactics and interaction with Afghans essential to an effective counterinsurgency campaign.
As Secretary Gates had stressed, protecting the Afghan population was paramount to the counterinsurgency we had to wage. This included reducing Coalition-caused civilian casualties. The year before I had arrived at ISAF, I’d watched from afar as two high-profile incidents had raised tensions between Afghans and the international mission. On August 22, 2008, a Coalition air strike near the village of Azizabad in Herat Province killed scores of noncombatants. More recently, following the May 4, 2009, air strike in Farah Province that set off riots, I’d sat with Chairman Mullen to listen to my old comrade Brigadier General T.T., who had been assigned to investigate. His chillingly detailed analysis of a series of mistakes and Byzantine command structure that had led to tragedy had stayed with me. One of my early moves after arriving to ISAF was to clean up the lines of command.
The listening tour confirmed my conclusion that Afghans’ perception of our airpower had largely formed during the opening salvo of the war, in the fall of 2001, when the precision of American bombs had awed them. Lore grew that our bombers, tens of thousands of feet up in the sky, could read the label of a cigarette pack on a car dashboard. This perception of our exacting omnipotence made it difficult for Afghans to believe that when we killed civilians accidentally, we did so truly unintentionally. “We didn’t mean to” often elicited squinted, skeptical looks from Afghans. So, over time, as Coalition air strikes continued to hit misidentified targets like wedding celebrations, Afghan tolerance grew brittle. These stray bombs reminded some Afghans of the Soviets’ periodic, murderous carpet bombing against the mujahideen and innocent civilians. President Karzai had been complaining for years about civilian casualties, but over time many in the international community viewed his protests as political rhetoric for domestic consumption. Though doubtlessly motivated in part by politics, Karzai apparently believed that his responsibility to represent his citizens required that he provide a loud voice in their protection. While never completely ignored, his protests to Coalition forces appeared largely discounted. I decided it was important to reverse that impression.
The instinctive way we reacted to alleged incidents made it worse. Americans frequently responded defensively to charges of misguided strikes. Afghans viewed our skepticism about the validity of their claims as obfuscation, even if we followed our comments with thorough investigations. They thought our hesitation to quickly, publicly apologize for Afghan deaths was an indicator of callousness. Americans cared, of course, but perceptions mattered. Even when an apology was forthcoming, Afghans would rarely, if ever, see any change in our behavior. “Afghans hear with their eyes, not just with their ears,” a group of elders had reminded members of my staff on the listening tour.