On Thursday, December 3, we continued. After briefing a meeting of Afghan ministers at ISAF headquarters, I went to the parliament to meet with selected representatives of the people. I explained our strategy and how the additional forces would be employed. I sensed general support. Not surprisingly, despite the exigencies of the situation in their country, some were more concerned with political maneuvering than with addressing the looming issues that threatened the survival of their government.
After parliment, we went to the airport and Brussels for a NATO foreign-ministerial conference scheduled for the following day. That venue provided an opportunity to explain the U.S. decision, and included a strong endorsement of the course of action by Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen. At the conclusion, we reboarded the aircraft and continued on to D.C., where Karl Eikenberry and I would testify before Congress on December 8 and 10.
That next week was a whirlwind. Saturday and Sunday were spent intensively preparing for our upcoming congressional testimony and included two full dress-rehearsal “murder boards,” exquisitely humbling experiences where several old “Washington hands” grilled Karl and me with seemingly sadistic pleasure. But as always, the preparation paid off and our testimony went smoothly.
There was time to visit the wounded at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, which was, as always, a difficult but uplifting experience. We gave a series of media interviews, attended a meeting of Army four-star generals, and took a couple of days off before redeploying.
As we often did, Annie and I drove to Gettysburg for the night. En route, we stopped at a used bookstore. Old books, carefully selected and inscribed to people I worked with, were my favorite gift to give. We arrived in town in the late afternoon and Shawn Lowery and I ran the battlefield to clear our heads after the week’s work. First making our way south from town into the heart of the battlefield, we turned north near Pennsylvania’s monument on Cemetery Ridge and ran the line where federal forces who had been rushed to the frontmost line had stood firm on the critical third day.
It was cold and the day was nearly done. After months of politics, the diplomacy of coalition warfare, and the scrutiny of the media, seeing the stone markers and the cannons in the frigid, fading light brought things into focus. The president’s decision was no longer a policy issue for pundit analysis. It was an order sending more Americans to war.
I wasn’t tortured by doubts that the president’s decision to deploy additional troops was the wrong one. Although our path to that point could be endlessly debated, by December 2009 reversing the rapid deterioration of Afghanistan demanded decisive action. The thirty thousand Americans soon to deploy were the first step of that reversal. The president’s speech did not signal success in Afghanistan, nor was it even a promise that we were on a road to it. It simply gave us the tools. It gave us an opportunity. I strongly believed we could succeed, and committed myself completely. As I ran that evening alongside the grass of the battlefield, gray and dry in the wintry early evening, I knew that despite all I’d done, all I’d learned, and all of myself that I was prepared to devote, in war, nothing was certain.
More important, I knew that regardless of victory or defeat, the costs would rise. Soldiers just then being alerted for deployment would die or be grievously wounded. Even in the best of outcomes, fighting would keep our field hospitals busy. Afghan families, long tossed about by the war, would suffer, as would families far away who would never see the country where their loved one died. On most evenings ahead, I would sit quietly at my place in our operations center and write letters to the next of kin. These were sincere but pitifully inadequate efforts to ease their devastating pain. We would use our forces judiciously, but they would go in harm’s way. And I was responsible.
| CHAPTER 20 |
Execute
January–June 2010
On the evening of Sunday, February 12, 2010, we gathered in the living room of Palace Number 2. The loftily named but modest two-story building lay on Kabul’s palace grounds but outside the historic walled-in compound where the kings and other rulers of Afghanistan had traditionally lived. It was now President Karzai’s residence, where he, his physician wife, and their young son, Mirwais, lived. The house was comfortable though hardly palatial. The living room where we waited for President Karzai had the feel of a prosperous but not wealthy American home, circa 1964.