My Share of the Task(198)
“ISAF is temporary,” each stressed. “This must transition to an Afghan-led effort. Our army, police, and other parts of government must be up to the task.” Both also asked for international pressure to curtail Iranian and Pakistani interference in Afghanistan.
At the conclusion of our dinner, however, conversation turned to the looming event of the summer. Minister Atmar drove the point home with quiet, haunting power.
“If the elections fail,” he said in his characteristically soft voice, “I would recommend that the international community not waste any more blood or treasure here.”
* * *
With the August 20 presidential election fast approaching, blood and treasure were the uneasy topic of an important meeting that summer. On August 2, Dave Rodriguez, my command team, and I flew to Belgium to meet with Secretary Gates, Chairman Mullen, Under Secretary Michele Flournoy, and a few others. In a small conference room alongside the runway at a military air base we reviewed the initial points of the yet-to-be-submitted strategic assessment and discussed any potential force recommendations.
By then, we’d begun drafting the assessment. Chris Kolenda produced the initial draft containing the core ideas and conclusions. Jeff Eggers would ultimately become the primary “pen” for the final version, and he and I spent countless hours poring over every word. During the day, he and I exchanged drafts by e-mail—I often did my best writing and editing on helicopter rides—and when I returned to headquarters, we would meet well into the night in my office. Jeff was a good partner in this—a critical thinker about the war, and our prospects, he helped prod and challenge me.
The document we submitted was some sixty pages long, including a frank assessment of the war, and some thirty pages of appendices laying out a number of specific recommendations for remedy. Without making any requests, the assessment acknowledged that “continued under-resourcing will likely cause failure.” But this was “not the crux” of the problem and “focusing on force or resource requirements misses the point entirely.” Rather, “the key to take away from this assessment,” I wrote, “is the urgent need for a significant change to our strategy and the way that we think and operate.” Crucially, this would mean internalizing that “protecting the people means shielding them from all threats.” Those threats were not just from insurgent and collateral violence. They were also from the corruption and predation of the Afghans’ own government.
In addition to the structural changes to ISAF that I’d explained to Wardak and Atmar, the assessment set a full agenda for that fall. We would institutionalize a reintegration program to make it an avenue for insurgents off the battlefield. And, noting there were “more insurgents per square foot in corrections facilities than anywhere else in Afghanistan,” we’d continue our effort under way to revamp our own prisons while cleaning up Afghan-run centers, which were often under de facto insurgent control.
As directed, we kept the basic assessment separate from any recommendations for resources, namely additional troops. Those would be submitted in another document after the assessment. I agreed with that approach, especially because by the end of July it was clear to me that if provided together, any force recommendation would be what policy makers focused on.
Parallel to, and informed by, the work of the strategic assessment team, we’d had a team of planners working on a campaign plan, the key points of which we briefed that day. In the simplest sense, a campaign plan was nothing more than an outline of how a mission would be accomplished. Taking clearly defined objectives, a commander and staff would analyze and select the best course of action to accomplish them, including identifying the required resources, like forces and time. For complex missions, plans could run hundreds of pages and could include countless maps and matrices. Our goal was to identify, refine, and then coordinate the most effective and efficient way to succeed.
Although soldiers, we looked at Afghanistan like a case of electioneering: in our modified “ink spot” approach, we identified 80 of Afghanistan’s 364 key districts that we felt we, and then the Afghans, must control in order to ensure the Afghan state’s stability and survival. Some of these districts were safe; others we would have to reclaim from the insurgency and transfer to Afghan hands. To a large degree, the pattern made by the eighty key districts would have been unsurprising to students of Afghanistan. It largely overlaid the Ring Road, a highway still under construction that circled Afghanistan, and hewed close to key urban and agricultural areas. Choosing these districts was not merely a matter of numbers; we also weighed the country’s historically or culturally influenced sense of important locations. This meant some on-the-surface unimportant rural districts held special psychological or political significance to Afghans, and their fall, we feared, would do disproportionate damage to Afghan confidence.