In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan

CHAPTER SEVEN Light Footprint

“PANAMA WAS a good model for stabilizing Afghanistan,” Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage observed, echoing the views of Secretary of State Colin Powell. “We believed an international force outside of Kabul was important. And it didn’t necessarily have to be a U.S.-led force.” Armitage thought that an international force would be helpful in tracking events outside of Kabul. “If you’re not out there, you don’t know what is going on.”¹ In 1989, while Powell was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the U.S. military had launched an invasion of Panama, code-named Operation Just Cause, to remove dictator Manuel Noriega from power. The operation, which began on December 20, lasted for two weeks and culminated in Noriega’s capture by U.S. forces on January 3, 1990. To secure Panama, Powell pointed out, the United States military had deployed an additional division to patrol streets and establish order.²

But even with Panama as a model, there were massive differences in 2001 within the U.S. government—and among key allies—about how to stabilize Afghanistan. Perhaps the most acrimonious debate was between senior State Department officials, who favored a peacekeeping force in Afghanistan that could stabilize key urban areas, and Pentagon officials, who vehemently opposed any pretense of nation-building.

Naïve and Irresponsible

There were two main camps. The first included those who believed that a peacekeeping force was necessary to ensure security across the country over the long run. One proponent was Powell, who argued that the U.S. strategy needed to involve taking “charge of the whole country by military force, police or other means.”³ Another proponent was James Dobbins, the Bush administration’s special envoy to the Afghan opposition. According to Dobbins, it was “naïve and irresponsible” to believe that “Afghanistan could be adequately secured by Afghans in the immediate aftermath of a twenty-three-year civil war.”⁴ A small NATO presence in Kabul, Dobbins believed, would be helpful for establishing security and luring Afghan leaders back to their national capital. Kabul was peaceful, and there was no large-scale looting, as would occur in April 2003 in Baghdad after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s government. However, Dobbins argued that international forces were necessary in key Afghan cities to ensure security across the country. He was supported by Zalmay Khalilzad, then serving on President Bush’s National Security Council (NSC) staff.⁵

Other proponents included Hamid Karzai, the interim Afghan leader, as well as such Afghan officials as Muhammad Qasim Fahim and Abdul Rashid Dostum. Fahim, the defense minister of the Northern Alliance, worked with the CIA and U.S. Special Operations Forces to liberate the Afghan capital from the Taliban. Dostum had returned from exile in Turkey in April 2001 and had worked with CIA and U.S. Special Operations Forces to overthrow the Taliban from Mazar-e-Sharif.

Lakhdar Brahimi, former Algerian foreign minister and longtime confidant of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, also supported an international peacekeeping force outside of the capital. Brahimi served as the special representative of the UN Secretary-General for Afghanistan and played a leading role during the Bonn negotiations in 2001. The Bonn Agreement called for an international security force in Kabul with the explicit possibility of expansion:

Conscious that some time may be required for the new Afghan security and armed forces to be fully constituted and functioning, the participants in the UN talks on Afghanistan request the United Nations Security Council to consider authorizing the early deployment to Afghanistan of a United Nations mandated force. This force will assist in the maintenance of security for Kabul and its surrounding areas. Such a force could, as appropriate, be progressively expanded to other urban centers and other areas.⁶

On February 6, 2002, when briefing the UN Security Council on factional clashes in the countryside and the relative safety of the capital, Brahimi appealed for extending the force beyond Kabul: “This has led to increasingly vocal demands by ordinary Afghans, as well as by members of the Interim Administration and even warlords, for the expansion of ISAF [International Security Assistance Force] to the rest of the country,” he argued. “We tend to agree with these demands, and we hope that these will receive favorable and urgent consideration by the Security Council.”⁷

There were also supporters in the United Kingdom, such as Robert Cooper, the British representative at the Bonn negotiations who was assigned to Prime Minister Tony Blair’s staff in the Cabinet Office. Cooper argued that a NATO peacekeeping presence outside of Kabul was critical for establishing security. One possibility he suggested was a British-led force. Other than the United States, Great Britain was the only country able to deploy the needed force quickly enough. British troops were already operating in Afghanistan in small numbers, and the United Kingdom had begun to establish the logistics network necessary to sustain them. How many international troops were necessary? U.S., British, and Afghan officials had discussed the possibility of perhaps 25,000 peacekeeping forces deployed to Kabul and key Afghan cities. In December 2001, for example, Dobbins met with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. Rumsfeld asked what to expect in his upcoming meetings with Afghan officials.

“They will ask that ISAF be deployed beyond Kabul to cover the country’s other major population centers,” Dobbins noted.

“How many men would that take?” Rumsfeld asked.

“The British believe a force of five thousand adequate to secure Kabul. Given that the next four or five cities are all considerably smaller, perhaps another 20,000 men might suffice,” Dobbins responded.⁸

The second camp included those who supported a peacekeeping force in Kabul but generally opposed extending its reach outside of the capital. They included many in the U.S. and British militaries, as well as key individuals in their political establishments. Pentagon officials, such as Secretary Rumsfeld and General Tommy Franks, head of U.S. Central Command, were particularly adamant that there should be no international peacekeeping force outside of Kabul, especially one involving U.S. forces. Some, like Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, were not necessarily averse to sending peacekeeping forces outside of Kabul, but they were strongly opposed to having U.S. forces involved in peacekeeping. “We couldn’t put U.S. forces in ISAF,” said Feith, “because other countries might conclude that the United States would bail them out if they got into trouble. The State Department answer to stabilizing Afghanistan was to expand ISAF. We wanted to allow the Afghans to establish their own security.” In a series of NSC meetings, for example, Rumsfeld made it clear that he wanted U.S. forces out of Afghanistan as quickly as possible.⁹ The logic, one senior U.S. official told me, was that “the U.S. military was already thinking about moving on to Iraq.” He added that the military was primarily intent on “targeting bad guys and cleaning up after the overthrow of the Taliban regime. Ultimately, they believed that cleaning up Afghanistan was not the U.S.’s responsibility—it was Afghanistan’s responsibility.”¹⁰

“Nation-building is not our key strategic goal,” Feith told Rumsfeld in a classified memo in late 2001. “The term ‘nation-building’ had baggage,” he noted, since the Clinton administration’s policies “in Bosnia in 1996 and in Kosovo in 1999” had “effectively turned those areas into long-term wards of the international community. Large numbers of U.S. and other outside forces were involved for many years in both places.” The implication was clear, Feith felt: “We did not want the Afghans to think we intended to take the same approach to their country.”¹¹

In fact, during the 2000 presidential campaign, George W. Bush had repeatedly made the bold statement that nation-building and peacekeeping were not roles for American troops.¹² Key U.S. officials, starting with the president, did not want American troops involved in nation-building in Afghanistan, and they did not want to bail out other countries if they ran into trouble. As President Bush put it: “Better yet than peacekeepers…let’s have Afghanistan have her own military.”¹³ White House spokesman Ari Fleischer reiterated this view several weeks later: “The President’s position is unchanged about the use of the United States combat forces. The President continues to believe the purpose of the military is to be used to fight and win wars, and not to engage in peacekeeping of that nature.”¹⁴ U.S. policymakers argued that what the Bonn Agreement had called an “international security force” for Afghanistan should be renamed the “International Security Assistance Force” ISAF. The word assistance was inserted to eliminate any suggestion that international soldiers might provide security for the Afghan population. As far as Washington was concerned, public safety was an Afghan responsibility.

Within the U.S. government, the most notable fissure existed between the State and Defense Departments. The national media picked up on this almost immediately. Michael Gordon of the New York Times asked Rumsfeld whether there was any truth to reports that peacekeepers might be dispatched to other cities in Afghanistan. Rumsfeld argued that deploying a peacekeeping force outside of Kabul would be unnecessary and would divert resources from the broader American campaign against terrorism. He preferred to spend the money on training an Afghan national army.

“The question is, do you want to put your time and effort and money into the International Security Assistance Force—take it from, say, 5,000 to 20,000 people?…Why put all the time and money and effort in that? Why not put it into helping them develop a national army so that they can look out for themselves over time?”

Gordon then called James Dobbins, who said: “What the State Department is suggesting is that there are a few other places outside of Kabul where the international force could assist the Afghans in providing security. As a result the Afghans would do a better job and would be less likely to fall into conflict with each other in doing so.”¹⁵ Dobbins would later be chastised by National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice for going public with his comments and for exposing divisions between the State and Defense Departments. She had one of her deputies, General Wayne Downey, call Dobbins to complain.

Eventually the issue came to a head. In February 2002, a meeting of National Security Council principals was called to decide whether or not to expand the NATO mission outside of Kabul. In preparation for the meeting, NSC staffer Elliott Abrams had circulated a paper arguing that peacekeeping was a concept that never worked in practice, as demonstrated by the Clinton administration’s forays into Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo. The principals met in the White House Situation Room. Powell and Dobbins attended for State. Rice chaired. Others present included Rumsfeld, CIA Director George Tenet, and Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff. Powell and Rumsfeld were at loggerheads. Tenet argued that there had been some skirmishing among commanders who were theoretically under Karzai’s authority, and there was some possibility that this fighting could escalate. A peacekeeping force might not be a bad idea. In theory, the CIA was supposed to provide intelligence and analysis, not policy advice. But it had played such an unusually direct role in overthrowing the Taliban regime that Tenet sometimes offered advice rather than just intelligence.

After several inconclusive exchanges between Powell and Rumsfeld, Rice asked all the backbenchers to leave the room. This allowed the principals to discuss the matter in private, which they did for another fifteen minutes. In the end, everyone agreed that Afghanistan’s warlords were likely to resume fighting if left to their own devices. But Rumsfeld was adamantly opposed to the deployment of peacekeepers. Rather, he proposed that U.S. military teams working with Afghan commanders should use their influence to ensure peace among them. Powell relented and Rice agreed. So there would be no call for more international troops or peacekeepers, no additional forces, and no public-security duties for American soldiers. But an effort would be made to discourage fighting among Afghan commanders. Powell told Dobbins after the meeting: “It’s the best I could do. Rumsfeld said he would take care of the problem. What more could I say?”¹⁶ Armitage summarized it more bluntly: “Rumsfeld simply steamrolled the decision through.”¹⁷ In the end, the United States deployed 8,000 troops to Afghanistan in 2002, with orders to hunt Taliban and al Qa’ida members, and did not engage in peacekeeping. The 4,000-member international peacekeeping force in Kabul did not venture outside the capital.

Out of this debate emerged the watchword of American and international involvement in Afghanistan: a “light footprint.” In hindsight, this would prove to be a serious misstep that contributed to the collapse of governance in Afghanistan. Low troop levels made it extremely difficult to establish law and order throughout the country. And there was almost no chance to revisit the decision. Once the United States began planning the war in Iraq, the light-footprint plan was virtually impossible to alter; the United States could not deploy additional forces to Afghanistan because they were committed elsewhere. Under the light footprint, U.S. and other NATO forces could clear territory occupied by Taliban or other insurgent groups but could not hold it. This was especially true in the south, the traditional heartland of the Taliban. In addition, the U.S. and other countries could not provide sufficient development assistance in rural areas of Afghanistan, where the bulk of the fighting occurred.¹⁸

A Marshall Plan for Afghanistan?

Despite the limited troop commitment, there were initial indications that the Bush administration might provide significant financial assistance to Afghanistan. In a speech on April 17, 2002, at Virginia Military Institute (VMI), President Bush invoked the Marshall Plan. The setting was highly symbolic. George C. Marshall graduated from VMI in 1901 as senior first captain of the Corps of Cadets. He served as secretary of state under President Truman and formulated an unprecedented program of economic and military aid to postwar Germany and other nations recovering from World War II. On June 5, 1947, Marshall addressed the graduating class of Harvard University, promising American aid to promote European recovery and reconstruction. While the speech itself contained virtually no details and no numbers, the United States under the Marshall Plan would go on to provide billions of dollars in aid to Western European countries between 1947 and 1951.¹⁹

Bush’s 2002 speech at VMI had similar overtones. He remarked, for example: “We know that true peace will only be achieved when we give the Afghan people the means to achieve their own aspirations.” He then invoked Marshall in describing the road ahead in Afghanistan:

By helping to build an Afghanistan that is free from this evil and is a better place in which to live, we are working in the best traditions of George Marshall. Marshall knew that our military victory against enemies in World War II had to be followed by a moral victory that resulted in better lives for individual human beings. After 1945, the United States of America was the only nation in the world strong enough to help rebuild a Europe and a Japan that had been decimated by World War II. Today, our former enemies are our friends. And Europe and Japan are strong partners in the rebuilding of Afghanistan.²⁰

As with Marshall’s address at Harvard, Bush’s speech was vague on details, and the president did not specifically say that the United States would provide comparable levels of aid to Afghanistan. But the repeated references to the Marshall Plan certainly gave that impression. In any case, that’s how senior Afghan officials saw it; they interpreted the speech as a commitment to significant assistance.²¹ But the State Department, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and the NSC initiated no major efforts to assess the requirements for a successful reconstruction effort or to generate the funding that would be necessary. Not until the fall of 2002 was Congress asked for additional money for Afghanistan, and most of that went to the Defense Department.

Despite the hope engendered by Bush’s speech, U.S. military officials had several reasons for adopting a light footprint. They wanted to prevent large-scale popular resistance similar to what the Soviet Union had encountered in the 1980s; they did not want the U.S. military engaged in peacekeeping or nation-building operations; and they ultimately believed that small numbers of ground troops and airpower, working with Afghan forces, would be sufficient to establish security.²²

General Tommy Franks, who remained head of U.S. Central Command until 2003, argued that “our footprint had to be small,” after major combat ended, “for both military and geopolitical reasons. I envisioned a total of about 10,000 American soldiers, airmen, special operators, and helicopter assault crews, along with robust in-country close air support.”²³ Several of his key advisers agreed, including General Victor “Gene” Renuart, the director of operations, and Lieutenant General Paul T. Mikolashek, the ground component commander. In several video teleconference calls, Franks and Secretary Rumsfeld agreed that the United States should not flood Afghanistan with large formations of conventional troops. “We don’t want to repeat the Soviets’ mistakes,” he told Rumsfeld during one meeting. “There’s nothing to be gained by blundering around those mountains and gorges with armor battalions chasing a lightly armed enemy.”²⁴ Instead, they sent in three brigades from the 10th Mountain and 101st Airborne (Air Assault) Divisions, as well as the Marine Expeditionary Unit already at Camp Rhino in Kandahar. As mentioned earlier, most senior U.S. officials—especially in the Defense Department and the White House—did not support deploying a peacekeeping force outside of Kabul, preferring to spend the money on training an Afghan army.

U.S. military officials were also primarily interested in countering al Qa’ida, not in nation-building. One senior U.S. official explained to Afghanistan National Security Council staffer Daoud Yaqub: “Our objective in Afghanistan is to combat al Qa’ida. Everything else is incidental.²⁵

The UN’s Lakhdar Brahimi also agreed on a light footprint. While he had advocated expanding NATO’s peacekeeping presence outside of Kabul, his vision of the international community’s role in Afghanistan was different. Brahimi felt that the guiding principle of international efforts in Afghanistan should be to bolster Afghan capacity—both official and nongovernmental—and to rely on as limited an international presence and as many Afghan staff as possible. This marked a significant departure from the expansive UN missions in Kosovo and East Timor. Both missions, which began in 1999, included a large international military and police presence per capita, and the United Nations temporarily took over governance in both cases. Afghanistan needed to be different, Brahimi argued, and a heavy international footprint was “not necessary and not possible.” Bolstering Afghanistan’s capacity to govern itself, he thought, required Afghans taking charge of their situation wherever possible, an end that could be compromised by throwing international staff into the mix.²⁶

In practice, the light footprint translated into one of the lowest levels of troops, police, and financial assistance in any stabilization operation since the end of World War II.

International troops and police are critical to establish security after a major war. Often, in the immediate aftermath of civil or interstate conflict, states will undergo a period of anarchy in which groups and factions seek to arm themselves for protection.²⁷ These groups and factions may have offensive intentions and want to impose their ideology on others, seize the property of rival factions, or exploit public resources for private gain. Large numbers of troops and police are critical for defeating and deterring these groups, patrolling borders, securing roads, combating organized crime, and policing the streets. Many of these general law-enforcement functions are best performed by police and units specially trained for urban patrols and crowd control.²⁸

There is no simple metric for determining how many troops are necessary to secure a population.²⁹ As Figure 7.1 illustrates, 89.3 U.S. troops per thousand inhabitants were necessary to establish security in the American sector of Germany after World War II, 17.5 troops per thousand were used in Bosnia, 35.3 per thousand were used in Eastern Slavonia, 19.3 per thousand were used in Kosovo, and 9.8 per thousand were used in East Timor. None of those conflicts were resolved easily, even at those levels of troop involvement. But the U.S. and other international forces had only about 1.6 soldiers per thousand Afghans. In terms of historical troop levels, the Afghan mission ranks with some of the international community’s most notable failures: the UN mission to the Belgian Congo (1.3 troops per thousand); the American and international intervention in Somalia (5.7); the U.S. rescue of Haiti (2.9); and the French operation in Cote d’Ivoire (0.2).

FIGURE 7.1 Peak International Military Presence Per Capita³⁰

There were also no international civilian police deployed to Afghanistan to conduct law-enforcement operations.³¹ As Figure 7.2 shows, this was in marked contrast to such operations as Bosnia and Kosovo, where international paramilitary police had been used effectively to help establish law and order. In Bosnia, Italy deployed a small battalion of its carabinieri as part of the Multinational Specialized Unit to assist with refugee return, help with crowd and riot control, and promote public security by acting as a strategic reserve force.³² In Kosovo, the carabinieri joined the French paramilitary gendarmerie as part of the Multinational Specialized Unit to engage in patrolling, riot control, criminal investigation, and other public-order tasks.³³ These paramilitary police forces interacted with the UN’s International Police and Training Force, who worked with civilian police. In both Bosnia and Kosovo, international police were pivotal in establishing security.

The United States has traditionally lacked a national police force like the carabinieri and the gendarmerie that it could deploy abroad. Rather, it has approximately 20,000 state and local police forces in jurisdictions scattered across the United States.³⁴ Policing and law-enforcement services have historically been under the jurisdiction of local government. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is involved in high-level investigations but has little experience in such policing tasks as patrols and riot control. International police training has been handled by two federal agencies: the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs and the Justice Department’s International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program. Neither, however, has a cadre of civilian police ready to be deployed abroad. Both have instead relied on private firms such as DynCorp International to recruit and deploy civilian police abroad. The Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of Defense have also been involved in police training, but policing is not a core mission of either of those organizations.³⁵

FIGURE 7.2 Peak International Police Presence Per Capita³⁶

At $60 per Afghan, foreign assistance over the first two years of a nation-building operation was lower than most operations since World War II (see Fig. 7.3). States emerging from interstate or civil war have generally suffered significant damage.³⁷ High levels of funding are necessary to cover the costs of deploying military forces and police, train indigenous police and army officers, provide lethal and nonlethal equipment, and build infrastructure.³⁸ Assistance generally comes from an amalgam of donor states and international organizations such as the IMF, the World Bank, and the European Union. Despite the fact that Afghanistan was a safe haven for al Qa’ida terrorists and that it was the first front in what the administration referred to as a “global war on terrorism,” a wide array of U.S. government officials from the beginning of the conflict strongly opposed providing more resources for reconstruction efforts.³⁹

Despite promises of aid, many countries never delivered. In 2002, Rumsfeld appointed Dov Zakheim—who was already serving as the under secretary of defense (comptroller) and chief financial officer for the Department of Defense—as the Pentagon’s coordinator of civilian programs in Afghanistan. Zakheim had played a pivotal role as Rumsfeld’s principal financial adviser, overseeing all aspects of the department’s accounting and auditing systems, and negotiating major defense agreements with U.S. allies and partners. Rumsfeld asked Zakheim to take the lead in getting nonmilitary equipment to Afghanistan, including trucks and potable water. Zakheim then began a tour of allied capitals with Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs John Taylor, asking for contributions from U.S. allies.

FIGURE 7.3 International Financial Assistance Per Capita over First Two Years⁴⁰

“It was like pulling teeth,” Zakheim said. “In general, the levels of assistance were too low. We got some help from Gulf states, including some logistical support and petroleum, oil, and lubricants. But most of this was for support to forces moving through their countries. We didn’t get a lot of material support in theater. Allies simply weren’t providing a lot of support.” Zakheim and Taylor heard the same message during their meetings: “We have limited resources. We’ll see what we can do.” And then, Zakheim complained, “we just wouldn’t hear back.”⁴¹

U.S. assistance was also low. A major hurdle for U.S. policymakers in the Departments of State, Defense, and Treasury was the Office of Management and Budget. “The biggest scandal was OMB,” said Zakheim. “It was beyond our comprehension at the Pentagon that OMB refused to provide more support to Afghanistan than it did.” Zakheim and his staff found this baffling, because Afghanistan was largely peaceful. “There was no major insurgency in 2002 and 2003, yet we couldn’t get funding. The levels of poppy cultivation were low, and we lobbied to get assistance for alternative crops. But we couldn’t get it from OMB. Neither could State or USAID.”⁴²

According to several senior officials at the White House and in the Departments of State, Defense, and Treasury, one of the biggest obstacles at OMB was Robin Cleveland, associate director for national security programs. “We repeatedly hit a brick wall with her,” one senior White House official told me. “Robin was the single biggest problem because reconstruction is partly a function of money. And we had major troubles getting it.”⁴³

During this early period (2002 and 2003), the funding would have been especially useful for implementing reconstruction projects, because several competent Afghan government officials were overseeing finances. One was Ashraf Ghani, Afghanistan’s finance minister, recognized in 2003 as the best finance minister in Asia by Emerging Markets magazine. He was seriously considered for the post of UN Secretary-General, which he didn’t get, but Afghan Foreign Minister Rangin Dadfar Spanta described him in a private letter to UN officials as combining an unusual blend of “vision, management skills and a deep understanding of regional and global issues.”⁴⁴ Ghani had earned master’s and doctoral degrees in anthropology from Columbia University and later served on the faculties of Kabul University, the University of California (Berkeley), and Johns Hopkins University. He joined the World Bank in 1991, working on projects in East and South Asia. Despite Ghani’s best efforts, however, he was unable to obtain adequate assistance from the United States and its allies.

That Colin Powell had been opposed to the light-footprint approach was not surprising. After all, he had espoused a doctrine of military engagement that came to be known as the “Powell Doctrine”: Military force, when used, should be overwhelming and disproportionate to the force used by the enemy during stability operations.⁴⁵ When the United States deploys troops, he said, “we should win and win decisively.”⁴⁶ But Rumsfeld’s position ran contrary to the Powell Doctrine as well as to former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger’s theory that “in those cases where our national interests require us to commit combat force we must never let there be doubt of our resolution. When it is necessary for our troops to be committed to combat, we must commit them, in sufficient numbers and we must support them, as effectively and resolutely as our strength permits. When we commit our troops to combat we must do so with the sole object of winning.”⁴⁷

Without significant numbers of military personnel, ensuring security in an insurgency historically has been more difficult. Dissidents may be emboldened to use force. Borders may become porous and facilitate the movement of insurgents, drug traffickers, and other criminal organizations. Security along roads and highways may deteriorate, allowing criminals and insurgents easier transport.

It soon became clear that the light footprint allowed for too few U.S. and Afghan government troops to stabilize the country.⁴⁸ Small numbers of CIA and Special Forces were sufficient to overthrow the Taliban regime in 2001, but they were not strong enough to establish basic security. The small number of military forces, coupled with low numbers of trained Afghan military and police, failed to establish security in rural areas of Afghanistan. Because the Coalition did not venture into Pakistan, where significant numbers of Taliban and al Qa’ida militants had fled, they were not able to defeat Taliban, Hezb-i-Islami, and al Qa’ida insurgent forces.⁴⁹

A Fait Accompli

In the end, the result of the Powell-Rumsfeld showdown was moot; the war in Iraq obliterated America’s ability to contain the gradually deteriorating situation in Afghanistan. “From day one it was Iraq, Iraq, Iraq,” remarked Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. “Afghanistan was really an accidental war for much of the Administration. No one wanted to do it. And once it became clear the Taliban was likely to fall, senior Pentagon officials wanted to turn to Iraq as quickly as possible.” Most senior Bush administration officials supported an invasion of Iraq in principle. They differed, however, on such issues as how and when it would be done. Secretary of State Powell, for example, wanted to go in with much larger numbers and with overwhelming force. “My objection was timing,” said Armitage. “I wanted to turn to Iraq perhaps in November 2004, after the elections and after Afghanistan was somewhat under control.”⁵⁰

The prospect of invading Iraq surfaced immediately after the September 11 attacks. In a National Security Council meeting on September 13, President Bush asked CIA Director George Tenet whether he was looking into the possiblity of Iraqi involvement. “It’s a worldwide effort, yes,” Tenet responded. Rumsfeld went even further, contending that Saddam Hussein was a threat to the region and to the United States. “Iraq,” he noted, “was a state that supported terrorism, and that might someday offer terrorists weapons of mass destruction to use against us.” He added that, in Iraq, “we could inflict the kind of costly damage that could cause terrorist-supporting regimes around the world to rethink their policies.”⁵¹

Tension over Iraq surfaced again among senior U.S. policymakers at Camp David on September 15 and 16, 2001. Before the meeting, the staff of National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice had prepared three options for review. The first option was to attack only al Qa’ida targets, the second was to attack the Taliban and al Qa’ida, and the third added Iraq to the list. In a classified memo to Rumsfeld, Douglas Feith and Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs Peter Rodman supplemented Rice’s three options. They argued that “the immediate priority targets for action” should be al Qa’ida, the Taliban, and Iraq. Iraq was critical because Saddam Hussein’s regime posed a “threat of WMD terrorism.” The purpose of invading Iraq, their memo argued to Rumsfeld, would be “to destabilize a regime that engages in and supports terrorism, that has weapons of mass destruction and is developing new ones, that attacks U.S. forces almost daily and otherwise threatens vital U.S. interests.”⁵²

At Camp David, some of the most intense disagreements were between Colin Powell and Paul Wolfowitz. Powell told Wolfowitz “that Afghanistan was the main issue, not Iraq. The Taliban regime was a terrible regime, which the U.S. needed to get rid of. And al Qa’ida leaders planned and trained for the September 11 attacks from Afghan soil.” He maintained that the United States had significant multilateral support for the mission in Afghanistan and once the Taliban was overthrown, “the United States then needed to stabilize Afghanistan.”⁵³ Most of the officials at Camp David supported this logic. But Wolfowitz pushed particularly hard for an Iraq invasion. He was concerned that large numbers of American troops would get bogged down in Afghanistan, as the Red Army had done. But Iraq was doable, he said; Iraq was a brittle regime, and there was a 1 to 50 percent probability that Saddam Hussein was involved in the September 11 attacks. At this particular meeting, President Bush ultimately decided to focus on Afghanistan, but Iraq would resurface again soon.⁵⁴

In November 2001, before the fall of the Taliban, Tommy Franks asked General Gene Renuart to put together a special planning group for Iraq based out of U.S. Central Command at MacDill Air Force Base, near Tampa, Florida. Rumsfeld had flown to MacDill to meet with Franks and ask him to produce a rough concept, not a finished plan for execution, for overthrowing Saddam Hussein’s government.⁵⁵ In order to meet this demand, a number of individuals had to reassign critical staff working on the war in Afghanistan. For instance, Lieutenant Colonel Edward O’Connell, the chief of targeting at Central Command, had to release several of his key staff, such as Lieutenant Commander J. D. Dullum, to the Iraq effort.

“I didn’t have a choice,” said O’Connell. “I had to give up several of my Afghan targeters to support this new secret Iraq planning. It was still 2001. And we hadn’t finished the Afghan war yet.”⁵⁶

As the Afghan insurgency worsened, the U.S. faced a fait accompli almost entirely of its own making. Before the year was out, and even before the United States attacked bin Laden at Tora Bora, the U.S. government began downsizing its commitment of resources to Afghanistan. While U.S. policymakers had been hesitant to provide assistance to Afghanistan from the beginning, the invasion of Iraq ensured that Afghanistan would take a backseat in money, policy attention, and military and nonmilitary aid. It became more difficult to include discussions of Afghanistan in the schedule of the National Security Council. Assistance was cut significantly, and any suggestions for new initiatives received short shrift from policymakers, who were focusing their attention on diplomatic and military preparations for Iraq. After the overthrow of Saddam’s government, this attention shifted to stabilizing an increasingly violent Iraq torn apart by Sunni/Shi’ite fissures.

“The war in Iraq drained resources from Afghanistan before things were under control,” noted Armitage. “And we never recovered. We never looked back.”⁵⁷ According to Gary Schroen, leader of the first CIA team in Afghanistan in 2001, the war in Iraq drained key CIA personnel and resources from Afghanistan, “making it increasingly difficult to staff the CIA teams in Afghanistan with experienced paramilitary officers.”⁵⁸ Several intelligence operations directed at al Qa’ida and other terrorist groups were redirected to the Persian Gulf. Linguists and Special Operations Forces were reassigned, and several ongoing antiterrorism intelligence programs were curtailed. ⁵⁹ The CIA’s Robert Grenier acknowledged that “the best experienced, most qualified people who we had been using in Afghanistan shifted over to Iraq,” including the agency’s most skilled counterterrorism specialists and Middle East and paramilitary operatives. This shift reduced America’s influence over powerful Afghan warlords who were refusing to give to the central government tens of millions of dollars they had collected as customs payments at border crossings. While the CIA replaced its officers shifted to Iraq, it did so with younger agents, who lacked the knowledge and influence of the veterans. “I think we could have done a lot more on the Afghan side if we had more experienced folks,” Grenier told me.⁶⁰

The pattern continued at the very highest levels of military personnel and hardware. Covert Special Mission Units, such as Delta Force and Navy SEAL Team Six, shifted from Afghanistan to Iraq. Sophisticated Predator spy planes rolled off assembly lines in the United States, but most were shipped to Iraq, undercutting the search for Taliban and other terrorist leaders in Afghanistan and Pakistan. U.S. forces in Afghanistan never had sufficient intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) assets, such as Predators and Rivet Joints. Rivet Joint reconnaissance aircraft are extensively modified C-135s that support battlefield commanders with real time on-scene intelligence collection, analysis, and dissemination capabilities. The ratio of key ISR assets divided between Iraq and Afghanistan was typically 4:1 or 5:2. That is, for every four Predators that were shipped to Iraq, one went to Afghanistan. Or for every five Predators shipped to Iraq, two went to Afghanistan. Special Operations Forces were also reallocated from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Iraq. And the U.S. military focus on Iraq meant that Afghanistan had to use National Guard forces, rather than active-duty soldiers, to train Afghan National Army soldiers. These were not the “A team” of trainers. Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry repeatedly requested active-duty trainers to work with Afghan security forces, but he was told there simply were none available.⁶¹

U.S. financial support was also low. “Iraq definitely affected funding levels for Afghanistan in two respects,” explained Dov Zakheim. “The first was that we had only so much money and attention. We couldn’t keep going back to the same well. The second was probably unhappiness among some allies at the war in Iraq. It likely spilled over into other areas, including an unwillingness to help in Afghanistan in 2003 and beyond.”⁶² Sarah Chayes, who ran a nongovernmental organization in Kandahar Province, contended that a significant reason “why the great [American] machine that was supposed to deploy on all fronts churning out reconstruction for Afghanistan failed to gear up” was “the war in Iraq.”⁶³

Low levels of money, energy, and troops made it nearly impossible to secure Afghanistan after the overthrow of the Taliban regime and almost certainly increased the probability of an insurgency. Ahmed Rashid, author of Taliban, concluded: “The main factor in preventing a stronger international commitment was the United States’ diversion of its effort and interest from 2002 onwards to Iraq. Within three months of the overthrow of the Taliban regime, the United States was pulling out from Afghanistan.”⁶⁴ By 2003, the U.S. government had become convinced that Iraq, not Afghanistan, was the central hub in the war on terrorism. In a phone conversation in August 2003 with L. Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, Condoleezza Rice said: “Colin [Powell] and I are convinced that Iraq has become the decisive theater in the war on terrorism and that if we win in Iraq, Islamic terrorism can be defeated.”⁶⁵

Examination of internal U.S. government memos supports this argument. In a 2003 letter to Bremer, Jeb Mason, associate director of the White House’s Office of Strategic Initiatives, requested the adoption of “talking points” on progress in the “war on terror.” He wrote: “Iraq is now the central front in the War on Terror. As Vice President Cheney said on Sunday: “If we’re successful in Iraq…so that it’s not a safe haven for terrorists, now we will have struck a major blow right at the heart of the base, if you will, the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11.”⁶⁶ Afghanistan and Pakistan had been relegated to secondary fronts. The United States lacked the military, financial, and political resources and attention to secure Afghanistan because they were diverted to Iraq. The result was too few soldiers, too little assistance, and too little awareness of what was happening.

Warlords

The light-footprint approach had another unforeseen repercussion. With too few international forces and too few competent indigenous forces, local militia commanders, or warlords, filled the vacuum. Some were aided by the U.S. military.⁶⁷ Since it was not politically feasible to increase the number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, the U.S. military decided that the need to fight al Qa’ida was urgent enough that the United States simply couldn’t wait to develop Afghan government forces. Lieutenant General John R. Vines, commander of Combined Joint Task Force 180 in Afghanistan, acknowledged that “militia are part of the existing reality.”⁶⁸

Local-warlord militia forces “led every mounted patrol and most major operations,” partly because, according to one U.S. military assessment, “they knew the ground better and could more easily spot something that was out of place or suspicious.”⁶⁹ Such forces were often used for the outer perimeter of cordon-and-search operations. In several operations, such as the Battle of Deh Chopan, militia forces were critical in providing intelligence and the bulk of the maneuver force.⁷⁰

In the east, the United States gave money, arms, and other equipment to Pacha Khan Zadran, whose forces were based in Paktia Province. In the west, U.S. forces provided assistance to Ismail Khan, allowing him to establish significant political and fiscal autonomy in Herat Province. He controlled military and civil administration there, supported by large amounts of customs revenues from trade with Iran, Turkmenistan, and other Afghan provinces.⁷¹ In the south, U.S. forces provided money and arms to Gul Agha Shirzai and others to help target al Qa’ida operatives.⁷²

The U.S. assistance to warlords weakened the central government. President Karzai made a halfhearted attempt to reduce the power of warlords who also served as provincial governors by reassigning them away from their geographic power base. But Karzai’s tendency was to move warlords, not to remove them. Consequently, their networks continued to influence provincial-and district-level administration.⁷³ Public-opinion polls showed that the warlords’ increasing power alarmed many Afghans. One poll conducted for the U.S. military concluded: “A high percentage of respondents identified local commanders as bringers of insecurity to their district.”⁷⁴ According to the Afghanistan National Security Council’s National Threat Assessment: “Non-statutory armed forces and their commanders pose a direct threat to the national security of Afghanistan. They are the principal obstacle to the expansion of the rule of law into the provinces and thus the achievement of the social and economic goals that the people of Afghanistan expect their Government, supported by the International Community, to deliver.”⁷⁵ An Afghan provincial governor reinforced this conclusion, observing that “keeping warlords in power is weakening the government. The more the government pays them off, the stronger they will become and the weaker the government will be.”⁷⁶

This brings up an important dilemma. In past counterinsurgencies, the local country has usually needed to take the lead over the long run for successful operations. A large foreign presence—especially foreign military forces—has often undermined local power and legitimacy. But what if there is no competent government force in the early stages of an insurgency? In the Afghan case, there were no Afghan Army forces and no trained police. While there are no ideal options in these situations, the most effective strategy may be to: (a) work with legitimate indigenous forces (especially police); (b) effectively train and mentor them as quickly as possible; and (c) backfill with sufficient numbers of U.S. and other international forces to accomplish key security tasks such as patrolling streets and villages, monitoring borders, and protecting critical infrastructure. Higher per-capita levels of U.S. and Coalition military and police might have been useful in the immediate aftermath of the Taliban’s overthrow. Preparations for the war in Iraq made this impossible.

Learning the Right Lessons?

The light-footprint plan was based on the assumption that a heavy footprint would lead to a Soviet-or British-style quagmire. A key lesson from the past was that a large foreign army would elicit large-scale popular resistance. U.S. officials also believed that small numbers of ground troops and airpower, working with Afghan forces, would be sufficient to establish security. “The history of British and Soviet military failures in Afghanistan,” said Douglas Feith, “argued against a large U.S. invasion force.”⁷⁷

But this was a misreading of the Soviet experience. The key lesson was not the number of Soviet forces deployed but rather how they were used. One of the most comprehensive studies of Soviet combat tactics in Afghanistan, Lester Grau’s book The Bear Went Over the Mountain, concludes: “The Soviet Army that marched into Afghanistan was trained to fight within the context of a theater war against a modern enemy who would obligingly occupy defensive positions stretching across the northern European plain.” The Soviets used artillery, tanks, and ground forces to destroy Afghan positions, and “Soviet tactics and equipment were designed solely to operate within the context of this massive strategic operation.”⁷⁸

The Soviets used conventional tactics to fight an unconventional war. They terrorized the population rather than trying to win support for the Afghan regime. This allowed the United States, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and other governments to exploit the resentment by providing military and financial assistance to the mujahideen.⁷⁹ In short, the problem with the Soviet approach was not a heavy footprint. Rather, the Soviets were unprepared to fight a counterinsurgency that required them to focus on garnering the support of the local population. The Soviet footprint was, in reality, light. In January 1984, for instance, CIA Director William Casey informed President Ronald Reagan that the Afghan mujahideen, with backing from the U.S., Pakistan, and Saudi intelligence services, controlled two-thirds of the countryside. He argued that the Soviets would have to triple or quadruple their deployments in Afghanistan to put down the rebellion. Rather than being overcommitted, they were underresourced.⁸⁰

Was the light-footprint approach a wise one? In one of his final reports before leaving Kabul as the European Union’s special representative to Afghanistan, Francesc Vendrell poignantly remarked in 2008 that the “UN decision to adopt a ‘light’ footprint deprived the organization of the tools to undertake the kind of reforms the Afghans desired.” In addition, he contended that the “U.S. obsession with Iraq diverted energies from Afghanistan, while the decision to limit the deployment of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) to Kabul…limited its effectiveness.”⁸¹ The rest of this book argues that while the light footprint may not have been the direct cause of the Afghanistan insurgency, it certainly played an important role. The low levels of international assistance—including troops, police, and financial aid—made it difficult to stabilize Afghanistan as the insurgency began to worsen. And it strengthened the role of local warlords. Despite these challenges, however, the initial engagement in Afghanistan had some early successes.