My Share of the Task(211)
His question got to a fundamental paradox military leaders face in communicating about the effort they are leading. The public deserves candor about the situation and prospects for success; politicians demand it. Anything less is deemed incompetence or equivocation. But once a decision has been made to conduct an operation, a commander has to believe it can be accomplished and has to communicate that confidence in countless ways to the soldiers he leads. Failure to do so can undermine the determination of the force and can risk a fear of failure becoming self-fulfilling.
The paradox was real. As I watched from the Pentagon during the year leading up to my assignment to Afghanistan, I thought I understood the political sensitivities that existed around America’s and NATO’s role in Afghanistan. I had assumed command believing we needed to reverse both the reality and perception of a deteriorating situation, and through the assessment had concluded that only with significant changes, energetically implemented, could we succeed. After three months of command that included extensive travel around Afghanistan and daily interaction with Afghans from Kabul to rural villages, I also believed the mission was worthy of the risks and sacrifices it would entail. But in the coming months I found myself in a balancing act between trying to aggressively accomplish the mission I believed I’d been given, and not corrupting a valid policy-review process that quickly came to question whether the mission itself was the correct one.
Like many soldiers of my generation, my ideal for how a military leader should advise and answer to civilian, democratic authority had been drawn from Samuel Huntington’s seminal treatise, The Soldier and the State. He argued a military commander should endeavor to operate as independently of political or even policy pressures as possible. And yet I found, as much as I wanted my role to be that described by Huntington, the demands of the job made this difficult. The process of formulating, negotiating, articulating, and then prosecuting even a largely military campaign involved politics at multiple levels that were impossible to ignore.
My position as director of the Joint Staff had offered a window into civil-military interaction that was at once disconcerting and instructive. Inevitably, as the Obama administration decided whether to increase our forces in Afghanistan, some drew comparisons between Afghanistan and Vietnam. As a student of history, I was sensitive to the Vietnam analogy. That summer, I reread Stanley Karnow’s Vietnam: A History, which portrayed the challenges of that war. During a memorable night in Kabul, Richard Holbrooke and I spoke on the phone with Karnow. But the lessons to be drawn were anything but incontrovertible. Civilians looking back on Vietnam had cause for wariness when reading of the military’s propensity for unrealistic assessments of the probability of success, exemplified by Westmoreland’s famous “light at the end of the tunnel” phrase.
I also thought of Daniel Ellsberg’s book Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, which I’d listened to on audiobook while in Iraq commanding TF 714. Ellsberg’s story, intensely controversial in my youth, now offered me more nuanced lessons. His outrage stemmed from his conclusion that many of the failures in Vietnam owed not to flawed analysis but to politically driven decisions to ignore the difficult conclusions the analysis offered. The Pentagon Papers, which he famously leaked, convinced him that decision makers had not been misled into disaster by ignorance or bad advice. Rather, faced with two politically toxic but militarily sound options—withdrawal or full escalation—they chose to pursue other policies for political reasons, even though analysis told them these policies were likely to fail. It was a chilling thought.
At one point, a story arose that I was considering resigning if not provided the forty thousand troops I’d recommended. That was simply not true. As a professional soldier I was committed to implementing to the best of my ability any policy selected by civilian leadership.
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The following week, on October 8, a version of the “What is our mission?” question surfaced during one of the early National Security Council–sponsored video teleconferences, organized to review America’s policy. Beamed into the White House Situation Room from our headquarters in Kabul, I began the briefing by explaining the mission as I understood it: “Defeat the Taliban. Secure the Population.” It prompted a participant on the other screen to ask why I interpreted our mission as requiring the destruction or eradication of the Taliban. I said I wasn’t. The word we’d used was “defeat,” which in military doctrine was defined as rendering an enemy incapable of accomplishing its mission. As Sun Tzu had advised, if that could be accomplished cheaply, with little actual fighting, so much the better. I was then asked why we’d defined our mission as defeat, and not some lesser objective, like “degrade.”