The natural eagerness in Washington and Brussels to see tangible results following the announcement of more troops created expectations difficult to satisfy with the often glacial speed of counterinsurgency. The drumbeat ahead of the operation, and the dramatic kickoff on February 13, made matters worse. I should have worked harder to tamp down unrealistic expectations of how quickly and dramatically we’d see progress.
That spring there was talk of my returning to Washington, D.C., later that year, as Dave Petraeus had in September 2007 to show progress in Iraq. I remembered his convincing presentation to Congress wherein he showed graphs with steep downward lines and dramatic metrics. Afghanistan, I thought, would never yield anything that clean, or clear. Only over time—a span of months, then years—would we cumulatively be able to produce convincing change.
Indeed, as the first operations of 2010 began, we asked what psychic effect among Afghans we could produce through material gains. Would Afghanistan feel the addition of troops and the benefits of security they brought? Would such turns in feeling be large enough, and happen fast enough?
Inevitably, some came to label the decision to increase forces in Afghanistan a surge, and drew comparisons with events in Iraq during 2007 and 2008. The situation we faced in Afghanistan, however, was much different. In Iraq, violence reverberated and was animated along sectarian lines. The 2006 bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra set off sectarian purges hundreds of miles away. Our strategy in Iraq reflected that reality, and that of the insurgents: The U.S. campaign began by focusing on sixteen key cities, then narrowed to twelve, then to nine, until we eventually came to realize that the war’s center of gravity was one city, Baghdad. Whoever controlled the capital controlled the country, and American planners designed the surge to lock down Baghdad.
More rural and significantly less developed than Iraq, Afghanistan could absorb the effects of violence, and the swings of power between the diffuse insurgency and the NATO-backed government, more than could a country of highly connected urban centers. Unlike infusing the majority of surge troops into Baghdad, in Afghanistan we would spread our troops across the eighty districts whose control we judged could be decisive. We hoped gains made in the coming year would bring about the critical mass of confidence that we thought necessary to keep Afghans from perceiving the cause lost. If they felt the effort was a failure, they would act accordingly by siding with the Taliban, or arming themselves for the civil war that they thought would follow America’s departure.
In Iraq, perceptions had a very real ability to be self-fulfilling. Matt Sherman was a State Department official who joined my strategic advisory team that January after a yearlong tour advising a U.S. brigade in Logar and Wardak provinces. Matt noted that when he was in Iraq during the winter of 2006, he’d seen that as the American debate over whether to surge grew louder, it seemed to affect Baghdad’s security prospects: Muqtada al-Sadr fled to Iran, sectarian designs on Sadr City quieted, and political calculations among Iraqi leaders altered. We hoped something similar might nudge Afghanistan, though we knew we could not rely on it.
Though no single center of gravity existed in Afghanistan, if the south had a nerve center, it was Kandahar. And the citizens there reflected all the very human contradictions of a people long under the duress of war’s whim. Thirty years of it had made them both more stoic and more conspiratorial. They wanted better security, yet many had made a perhaps necessary peace with their plight that made them skittish about any operations there.
This anxiety we would now have to confront: Kandahar was next.
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In truth, the fight to secure Kandahar had begun in Helmand. Our effort to expand contiguous areas of security between them was meant to stitch together key districts of what was known as Greater Kandahar, and before that Zabulistan—a subregion formed by the provinces of Helmand, Kandahar, Zabul, and Oruzgan whose economies, tribes, and politics were interlinked. The key node was Kandahar City itself, which sat at the juncture of immemorial trade routes between Kabul in the east, Herat and Persia in the west, and India to the south. The modern Afghan Ring Road that circles the nation, connecting Kabul, Kandahar, Herat, Mazar-e-Sharif, and Kunduz, added to the city’s economic importance, as did its proximity to the agricultural breadbaskets along the Helmand and Arghandab rivers and the import lanes from Pakistan.