The moment carried implications for the conduct of the war beyond the operation set to begin that night. Asking President Karzai to assume a genuine role as commander-in-chief meant that we would necessarily surrender some of the independence ISAF had enjoyed—at the cost of developing a capable Afghan partner. We couldn’t ask Karzai to assume responsibility and then constrain his authority. And he clearly held different views from ours on many aspects of how the war should be fought. But I knew that ISAF could never win the war; the Afghans must do that. And they couldn’t win it until they owned it. That ownership started at the top.
As the launch deadline grew nearer, President Karzai asked his ministers some pointed questions, then gave his approval. Whatever doubts he had weren’t obvious in the firm tone in which he directed Moshtarak to begin. The president never asked me if I would have gone forward with the operation if he had not sanctioned it. I would not have done so.
* * *
The operation President Karzai set in motion had been eight months in the works. The previous summer, Dutch Major General Mart de Kruif, then the RC-South commander, first discussed with me the concept of retaking Marjah as an essential step in expanding our initial security zones in Helmand. Securing Marjah, we all recognized, would require a special effort because of the stronghold the Taliban and drug traffickers had maintained since it fell in September 2008. Doing so, however, would consolidate hard-won improvements in the rest of the province, and remove a staging perch from which the Taliban could dispatch assassins and suicide car bombs into Lashkar Gah, to frighten the population and attrit its political elite and governing class. The operation would also continue to show our desire and ability to reestablish Afghan government sovereignty over the most Taliban-controlled areas.
The effort to retake Marjah may have appeared to begin on that night. In reality it had been ongoing for weeks with a series of “shaping” actions designed to force out, or isolate, the Taliban in the district; refine our intelligence picture; and increase the confidence of the population in their decision to support us.
A key component of our strategy, as it had been in several locations in Afghanistan, was to use our ISAF special operations forces, and also an expanded TF 714 force, in intelligence-driven raids against identified Taliban leadership. From my experience in Iraq, I’d come to believe that for counterinsurgency to work in Afghanistan, an aggressive but carefully orchestrated campaign of precision strike operations was essential to degrading insurgents’ strength and undermining their confidence.
Soon after arriving in June 2009, I reviewed the existing TF 714 force structure—distributed in the east and south of Afghanistan—and confirmed we needed more capacity. But because TF 714 assets, particularly helicopters and surveillance aircraft, were limited, increasing capability in Afghanistan was a zero-sum game. Any additional TF 714 forces for Afghanistan would have to come from Iraq.
The issue was made easier that summer in a VTC with Ray Odierno, then commanding in Iraq; Bill McRaven, commander of TF 714; and Dave Petraeus, who commanded CENTCOM, the command in charge of both Iraq and Afghanistan. Dave stated unequivocally that for CENTCOM, Afghanistan had become the main effort. This meant that the campaign enjoyed priority for the distribution of limited resources, including TF 714 forces. Armed with his decision, I requested he quickly shift as much of TF 714’s intelligence capacity and as many of its strike teams as possible to Afghanistan.
This was not a move I took lightly. My classmate and friend Ray Odierno was employing Bill McRaven’s forces with a deft touch to maintain progress. Removing TF 714’s forces would increase his risk. Because I had invested so much of myself in the mission in Iraq, I was loath to endanger the outcome there. But if we were going to turn things around in Afghanistan, we’d need to maintain pressure on the insurgents while we executed the slow process of counterinsurgency.
As it played out, Ray was gracious in losing combat power in a way that I suspect only a seasoned commander and old friend could be. In his position I would have desperately wanted to maintain as many of Bill’s specialized forces as possible, but Ray said he knew we needed them more. This from the formidable center of our Naval War College basketball team, who I knew could be hard to move if he wanted to be.