Six days later, on November 29, President Obama conducted a VTC with just Karl and me. From our seats in the Kabul embassy’s secure conference room, the president appeared alone, and the feeling was strangely intimate. His tone was friendly but serious as he explained his decision to approve the deployment of thirty thousand additional U.S. troops, beginning in December, and to press our Coalition partners to provide the additional ten thousand I’d requested. He also stated his intent to begin withdrawing those surge forces in July 2011. The president then directly asked Karl and me if we could live with the decision as outlined, and we each said yes.
Among other things, the president seemed to be eliciting my reaction to an announced withrawal date. Earlier, Secretary Gates had asked what I thought about the idea. I cited concerns that it would give the Taliban a sense that if they survived until that date, they could prevail, and that it might decrease confidence in the strategic partnership we were trying to build on so many levels with the Afghans. But I also knew it would provide a clear impetus for Afghans to speed up efforts to assume full responsibility for their future.
I recognized there were political realities outside my view, and I judged that the combination of our ability to expand secured areas over the next eighteen months, and to increase Afghan security force capacity during that period, could allow us to reduce the force size with acceptable risk. If I’d felt like the decision to set a withdrawal date would have been fatal to the success of our mission, I’d have said so.
On December 1, the day before President Obama was to announce his decision publicly, I flew to Chaklala Airfield, the military part of Islamabad’s primary airport. Security was tighter than ever. Seven weeks earlier, on October 10, six terrorists had conducted a daring assault of the base, killing six Pakistani soldiers, including a brigadier general I’d known and a lieutenant colonel. It was the equivalent of an attack on the Pentagon to kill senior Defense Department officials and highlighted the serious nature of the threat the Pakistanis were facing.
The Taliban had, since their expulsion in 2001, used Pakistan’s undergoverned border areas as sanctuary from which to recruit, lead, and organize the fight in Afghanistan, often with Pakistani support. But their focus had always been primarily across the border, where they sought to reclaim Afghanistan, or parts of it. Parallel with their rise, however, was that of a Taliban movement focused not only on Afghanistan but also internally, on Pakistan. In December 2007, smaller, independent Pakistani militant groups that had existed in the border region organized themselves into a connected movement. They took the name Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP, but established themselves outside the formal command and domain of the Afghan Taliban’s leaders, such as Mullah Omar.
Instead, at the helm was Baitullah Mehsud, an uneducated thirty-four-year-old who controlled large swaths of South Waziristan. He brought his five-thousand-strong force under the TTP structure and sat atop a leadership council that drew from the agencies and districts along Pakistan’s border. At its inception, the group included a patchwork of various militant groups, some old, some new, with anti-Islamabad, anti-American, and anti-Indian leanings. Concretely, however, they aimed to expel ISAF forces from Afghanistan and, importantly, to contest Pakistani military incursions into the border areas.
At the time, I felt the growing threat from the TTP had the potential to cause a shift in Pakistan’s strategic calculus, aligning it more closely with NATO’s objectives for Afghanistan. The TTP was becoming increasingly effective and lethal. The previous twelve months had been the deadliest year yet for suicide bombings in Pakistan. A Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, once envisioned by Pakistan as a desirable northern neighbor, would more likely become a sanctuary for the TTP, bent on opposing Islamabad. I knew we would not get Pakistan to cooperate fully, which would have involved aggressive operations to root out all Afghan Taliban. We would seek as much cooperation as possible, but I felt we could succeed in Afghanistan even without Pakistan’s full partnership.
That day, General Ashfaq Kayani and I discussed President Obama’s upcoming speech. We also surveyed the current state of both ISAF and the Pakistani army’s ongoing campaigns against insurgents. Kayani was characteristically candid and clearly proud when describing Pakistani operations. I found his insights valuable. He expressed overall support for the ISAF strategy I outlined in this and earlier meetings. But he was openly skeptical that we would succeed. He stated quietly, in his low, sometimes inaudible voice, that while we had the correct approach, he felt we lacked the time to accomplish all that was necessary before support for our effort would fade. He particularly doubted our ability to create effective Afghan security forces to which we could later transfer control. I respected his perspective but felt our chances were better than he believed.