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

CHAPTER FOURTEEN National Caveats

STANDING NEXT TO Canada’s command headquarters at Kandahar Airfield when I visited it in 2007 was a makeshift war memorial. The faces of fallen Canadian soldiers were etched in chiseled marble. There were no obelisks or ostentatious monuments, just faces. Corporal David Robert Braun. Private Blake Neil Williamson. Warrant Officer Richard Francis Nolan. The list went on. Each face stared back at those who paid tribute, usually fellow Canadian soldiers shuffling into and out of the command headquarters. Some of the faces smiled sheepishly from the blackened marble, while others stared intently. All had served their country and paid with their lives. Next to each face were their names, biographical data, and units. 2nd Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry (Shilo, Manitoba). 1st Battalion, The Royal Canadian Regiment (Petawawa, Ontario). 2nd Battalion, Royal 22^e Régiment (Valcartier, Québec).

The inscription on the memorial read: “Dedicated to those Canadians who gave their lives in the service of peace while serving in Afghanistan.” Visitors placed flowers and photographs of their fallen comrades across the nameplates. Amid the daily commotion of Canada’s headquarters and the constant roar of fighter jets overhead, the memorial was strangely serene.

Unlike the war in Iraq, which was largely unilateral, the war in Afghanistan was at first fought by a true multinational coalition. NATO eventually became engaged as a full partner in combat operations and reconstruction. But it didn’t start off that way. Following the September 2001 attacks, NATO invoked for the first time Article V of the 1949 Washington Treaty, its founding document. Article V embodied the allies’ collective-security commitment to one another, stating that the “Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all.”¹ Since the United States had been attacked, they felt obliged to step in.

Within months of the U.S. invasion, a number of NATO countries made Special Forces and intelligence assets available. Many went to Afghanistan, but U.S. policymakers chose to use most NATO assets in the United States. NATO fighter aircraft flew combat air patrols over some thirty U.S. cities and key infrastructure, with continuous patrols over Washington, DC, and New York City. U.S. Air Force and NATO air crews flew more than 13,400 fighter, tanker, and airborne early warning sorties over the United States. There were more sorties flown in the United States than during the war in Afghanistan up to mid-2002, when the continuous air patrols in U.S. cities ended.²

By 2006 and 2007, NATO began to play a more significant role in counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan, especially in the violent south. Despite a growing list of NATO countries that deployed forces to Afghanistan, however, many countries refused to allow their forces to engage in combat operations. One senior NATO official acknowledged, “It was like fighting with one hand tied behind our backs.”³

“Lead Nation” Strategy

Beginning in 2002, there were few non-U.S. NATO forces in Afghanistan; Secretary Rumsfeld had opposed the deployment of a stabilization force outside of Kabul. With rare exceptions, the 4,000-member International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) did not venture beyond the capital. Its purpose was to protect the Afghan interim administration and help provide security in the capital. Rather than deploy troops for combat operations, several NATO countries volunteered to help the Afghan government rebuild its depleted security sector. The effort was referred to as the “lead nation” approach. The United States volunteered to lead the construction of the Afghan National Army; Germany was responsible for training the Afghan National Police; the United Kingdom led the counternarcotics effort; Italy was the lead for rebuilding Afghanistan’s decrepit justice system; and Japan (with UN assistance) was the lead for the disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration of former combatants. In theory, each lead nation was supposed to contribute significant financial assistance, coordinate external aid, and oversee reconstruction efforts in its sector.

In practice, this approach was a disaster. Assessments from the Pentagon were scathing. “This ‘lead nation’ strategy produced mixed results, but overall it was a failure,” acknowledged Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith, specifically calling attention to the “efforts of the British, Germans, and Italians.”⁴

Afghans were equally critical. Daoud Yaqub, the director for security sector reform at the Afghanistan National Security Council, bemoaned the challenges of coordination. To get everything done, officials had to negotiate along four tracks: between Afghan government ministries, between international donors, between donors and the Afghan government, and within donors’ own agencies. “When disagreements broke out between the donors and us, the donors would come to me and say quite matter-of-factly: ‘It’s our money. We’ll do with it what we want.’ There was little I could do.”⁵

The justice system was perhaps the most significant challenge. To be fair, no formal justice system existed in Afghanistan after the U.S. invasion in 2001. The United Nations Development Program announced shortly after the overthrow of the Taliban regime that “the physical infrastructure of [the justice] institutions has been destroyed.” Even more critically, it fretted that “the country’s legal ‘software’—the laws, legal decisions, legal studies, and texts of jurisprudence—are largely lost or scattered across the world.”⁶ The December 2001 Bonn Agreement called for the interim Afghan government to establish a judicial reform commission to “rebuild the domestic justice system in accordance with Islamic principles, international standards, the rule of law, and Afghan legal traditions.”⁷ Consequently, Karzai’s government established the Judicial Reform Commission to oversee and coordinate reconstruction of the justice system.⁸

As the lead nation for justice-sector reform, Italy had the job of helping to establish a body of laws; train prosecutors, lawyers, and Ministry of Justice officers; build physical infrastructure; and improve detention and prison capacity. But assistance was fractured and Italian policymakers had difficulty coordinating the disparate range of aid pouring in from nations, the UN, the World Bank, and nongovernmental organizations. One study concluded that the “overall coordination and cooperation in the justice sector [was] lacking.” The Italian government also “maintained distance from the Afghan institutions. Rather than support Afghan-led decision-making, the Italian effort…preferred to choose and implement its projects with limited consultation.” ⁹

Even if the Italians had done everything right, they still needed to overcome severe divisions among the Afghan justice departments. President Karzai had created the Judicial Reform Commission to coordinate reforms, but by empowering the commission, Karzai also removed authority and control of foreign assistance from the permanent institutions. The commission was meant to set policy and priorities for the justice sector, and, in practice, to determine where donor funds would be directed. From the start, the commission had no capacity, funding, or political cover to manage this significant task. Without intervention from the presidency, a turf war raged among the Supreme Court, the Ministry of Justice, the Office of the Prosecutor General, and the commission.

Under Secretary Feith and other Pentagon officials complained incessantly about the Italians. “Italy made the underperforming Germans look good,” Feith noted sarcastically, referring to the German effort to train the Afghan National Police. “For well over a year the Italians failed to send to Afghanistan a team of experts; in fact, they did not send a single person. When I raised the problem with Italy’s Defense Minister, Antonio Martino—as thoughtful and reliable an ally as one could hope for—he said he would try to help, but judicial matters were not handled by his ministry.”¹⁰

Needless to say, the Italian reforms did not earn Afghanistan’s justice system high marks. The World Bank ranked Afghanistan in the top 2 percent of most corrupt countries worldwide every year between 2002 and 2006, with little difference between the late Taliban years.¹¹ And Transparency International, a nongovernmental organization based in Berlin that monitored corruption, ranked Afghanistan almost at the bottom—172 out of 179—of its corruption index. Only a few countries, such as Haiti, Iraq, and Somalia, were more corrupt than Afghanistan.¹² In fact, the World Bank judged that Afghanistan’s justice system had worsened over the period of Italy’s tenure. By 2007, for example, Afghanistan ranked in the top 99.5 percent of most ineffective justice systems worldwide. It compared poorly even with other countries in the region, such as Iran, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.¹³

There was little improvement in other areas, including the disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration of former combatants. The United States, the UN, and the Afghan government, with Japanese funding, collected a significant number of heavy weapons. But Afghanistan was still awash in weapons and ammunition, and there was an increase in the number of insurgent and other illegal groups. Warlords such as Abdul Rashid Dostum and Atta Muhammad retained large militia forces. Even Ismail Khan, who was brought to Kabul by President Karzai to serve as minister of water and energy, still commanded a formidable militia force in western Afghanistan. “The disarmament program was not successful,” remarked NSC staffer Daoud Yaqub; it only “went after low-hanging fruit.” The more powerful leaders refused to disband their militias. Since Coalition forces offered rewards for disbanding militias, commanders frequently demobilized “ghost soldiers” who never existed. This was one of many monetary inducements that proved counterproductive. An Afghan could turn in an AK-47 and get as much as $200 from the government. Some entrepreneurial Afghans realized that this was “profitable since AK-47s could be purchased in Pakistan for less than half that price.”¹⁴

NATO’s Expansion

With the lead-nation approach stumbling, it seemed NATO would be given a second chance to play a more serious part. The United States had occasionally discussed an increased NATO role in Afghanistan in the early years after the overthrow of the Taliban regime. On a trip to Gardez in 2003, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld had told senior U.S. military officials in Afghanistan, including General Eikenberry, that he was tired of being blamed for preventing NATO from expanding its mission in Afghanistan. Now he wondered whether it was worth putting NATO to the test.¹⁵

In 2003, General James Jones, who had recently become NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, was at an ambassadors’ lunch at the British Embassy in Brussels. He had prepared extensively to answer questions on a range of NATO issues, especially Bosnia and Kosovo. But he was surprised to hear one question repeatedly from the group: “How do we get NATO to Afghanistan?” After the meeting, he went back to his staff and began to put together an operational plan for Afghanistan. In August 2003, NATO officially took command of the International Security Assistance Force. It was based in Kabul, with its chain of command extending directly to NATO headquarters in Brunssum, Netherlands, and Mons, Belgium. In October 2003, the UN Security Council authorized the expansion of the NATO mission beyond Kabul.¹⁶ On October 24, 2003, the German Bundestag voted to send German troops to the quiet, northern province of Kunduz. A stronghold of the Taliban in northern Afghanistan during the late 1990s, the region was remarkably diverse. Tajiks, Uzbeks, Pashtuns, and Hazaras lived in relative peace, farming wheat, rice, and millet. About 230 additional soldiers were deployed by NATO, marking the first time that ISAF soldiers operated outside of Kabul.¹⁷

General Jones presented a detailed operational plan to NATO defense ministers in February 2004. The plan that was eventually developed, illustrated in Figure 14.1, called for a series of phased expansions beginning in Kabul and then working counterclockwise to the north, west, south, and the east. Over the next eight months, NATO completed Stage 1 of its expansion to the north. On June 28, 2004, NATO proclaimed the creation of four new Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) in northern Afghanistan: in Mazar-e-Sharif, Meymaneh, Feyzabad, and Baghlan. Stage 1 was completed in October 2004. NATO’s takeover had begun.¹⁸

With the Iraq insurgency worsening, senior U.S. policymakers decided to hand off more responsibility to NATO in Afghanistan, thus freeing up U.S. forces to go to Iraq. In 2005, during a series of video teleconferences with senior U.S. military officials, including Lieutenant General David Barno, Secretary Rumsfeld argued that the United States needed to “reduce the amount of money it was spending in Afghanistan and the number of troops it had deployed there.” With losses mounting in Iraq, Rumsfeld said these numbers were “not sustainable.” At the time, the United States was spending between $600 million and $1 billion per month in Afghanistan and had roughly six battalions of infantry soldiers stationed there. NATO was a perfect organization to fill in the gaps left by redirected U.S. troops. NATO was looking for a twenty-first-century mission, and Afghanistan would suit the bill.²⁰ Other senior military officials supported the secretary.

FIGURE 14.1 Stages of NATO Expansion, 2007¹⁹

One of the strongest advocates for NATO’s increased involvement was John Abizaid, who had been head of U.S. Central Command since July 7, 2003. Abizaid was born in Coleville, California, to a Lebanese-American father and an American mother. He learned Arabic and earned the nickname “the mad Arab.” His faculty adviser at Harvard University, where he received a master’s degree in Middle Eastern Studies, praised his intellect, stating that his 100-page paper on Saudi Arabia’s defense “was absolutely the best seminar paper I ever got in my 30-plus years at Harvard.”²¹ Abizaid had been tapped for great responsibility early in his career. In 1983, during a briefing at Fort Knox, Army Vice Chief of Staff General Max Thurman turned to his colleagues and exclaimed: “Let me tell you, there is this young captain who’s going to be one of the Army’s future leaders.” Thurman then meticulously went through the captain’s past record and said he would be a general unless he screwed up somewhere along the line. “His name is John Abizaid. Watch out for him.”²²

With support from influential Americans such as Rumsfeld and Abizaid, Stage 2 of NATO’s expansion followed in September 2005, when NATO expanded to the west under the regional command of Italy.²³ It established Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Badghis, Farah, Ghor, and Herat Provinces. Abizaid remarked in late 2005: “It makes sense that as NATO forces go in…we could drop some of the U.S. requirements somewhat.”²⁴ While NATO countries began to ramp up activities in Afghanistan, the United States continued to discuss downsizing. In December 2005, for example, Rumsfeld signed orders to reduce American troop levels in Afghanistan. Under the plan, the number of U.S. forces would decrease from 19,000 in December to 16,000 by the spring of 2006. The fourth brigade of the 10th Mountain Division, based at Fort Polk, Louisiana, would send a battalion task force of 1,300 soldiers instead of the entire unit of more than 4,000 troops.²⁵

For some NATO countries, Afghanistan presented a chance to rejuvenate the alliance that had been torn apart by the war in Iraq. On January 22, 2003, French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder had issued a joint declaration opposing the Bush administration in Iraq.²⁶ The date commemorated the fortieth anniversary of the Franco-German Treaty negotiated by Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer as a bulwark against American hegemony. During his 2002 reelection campaign, Schröder ran on a political platform that emphasized German opposition to the U.S. war against Iraq.²⁷ When the United States and Britain pushed for a second United Nations Security Council resolution in March 2003 that would effectively authorize military action, Berlin and Paris were opposed. As Chirac explained on French television, his government would oppose the resolution “quelles que soient les circonstances” (whatever the circumstances).²⁸ Both countries also refused to offer significant political and military support to the reconstruction effort after major combat ended, even as U.S. casualties began to mount.²⁹

There was nearly universal consensus among member countries that this was one of the most serious schisms between Europe and the United States since the formation of NATO. “The road to Iraqi disarmament has produced the gravest crisis within the Atlantic Alliance since its creation five decades ago,” concluded former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.³⁰ U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell remarked: “Who’s breaking up the alliance?…The alliance is breaking itself up because it will not meet its responsibilities.”³¹ Ivo Daalder, a scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington and former director for European affairs in the Clinton administration’s National Security Council, argued that one consequence of the war in Iraq “is the effective end of Atlanticism—American and European foreign policies no longer center around the transatlantic alliance.”³² Nevertheless, there was broad consensus among NATO members that Afghanistan was a conflict worth engaging in. Some members felt they could make up for their lack of support in Baghdad by committing to Kabul.

Contrary to some arguments, most NATO governments understood that this would involve deploying some soldiers to conduct counterinsurgency operations, not just peacekeeping. Canadian Colonel S. J. Bowes, who headed a Canadian civil and military reconstruction team, went on record in 2005 saying that his country would use the same rules of engagement used by American forces. “In Canada, it’s clear that this is not a peacekeeping mission,” he remarked. “We understand that there is an active insurgency.”³³ As 5,000 British troops were preparing to deploy to Helmand Province in 2005, British Defense Secretary John Reid stated: “The Taliban are still active in the area. So are the drug traffickers. We must be prepared to support—even defend—the provincial reconstruction team.” When asked by a journalist whether British troops would be placed in danger, Reid bluntly replied: “Yes, it is going to be [dangerous] and that is why we should be so proud of our servicemen and women.”³⁴ Several months before the official handoff of operations in Afghanistan’s south from the United States to NATO, NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer argued that “people have to realize that there are spoilers, that roadside bombs and improvised explosive devices can be put along a road.”³⁵

In July 2006, NATO formally expanded its mission to the south, thus completing Stage 3 of its initial plan. British General David Richards assumed command of what became known as ISAF IX. The expansion involved the deployment of 12,000 NATO soldiers to six southern provinces: Helmand, Kandahar, Nimroz, Oruzgan, Zabol, and Day Kundi. The largest contingent in this force was British, which included 3,600 soldiers based in Helmand Province. Canada also deployed a fairly large contingent. By a close vote in the Canadian Parliament in May 2006, the government designated 2,300 troops for Afghanistan, most of whom were sent to Kandahar Province. The debate in the Dutch Parliament was also contentious, but after initial opposition, the government chose to assign between 1,400 and 1,700 troops for duty in NATO’s Stage 3. Most went to Oruzgan Province, in central Afghanistan. The principal town was Tarin Kowt, with a population of 10,000 on the eastern shore of the Tirinrud River.

By 2007, international forces in Afghanistan were divided into five Regional Commands (RCs): Regional Command Capital headquartered in Kabul, Regional Command North in Mazar-e-Sharif, Regional Command West in Herat, Regional Command South in Kandahar, and Regional Command East in Bagram.

NATO’s Paradox

With NATO forces trying to cover most of Afghanistan, the organization soon found itself underresourced. NATO leaders had approved the operational plan for Afghanistan, but they deployed forces outside of Kabul without forcing member nations to fulfill their matériel requirements. They were short staffed, and the soldiers lacked maneuver battalions and aircraft—especially attack helicopters, dedicated fixed-wing close air support, and heavy-and medium-utility helicopters. “Yet NATO pushed ahead.³⁶ Suddenly, NATO found itself in the position of fighting its first foreign war without the resources to win. The shortfalls became increasingly problematic as the levels of violence rose in 2006 and 2007.

In 2007, NATO was still at least 3,000 troops short of its manpower goal in Regional Command South, and its ability to sustain force levels and capabilities over the longer term was tenuous. As NATO General Richards argued in testimony before the British House of Commons, the number of troops was his most significant concern: “Simply being able to move [NATO] troops from the North to the South would not have been a solution to me at all because we have got just about the right number of troops in the North to contain the situation there, which is broadly stable…. What I was really after was…an increase in the overall number of troops.”³⁷ There were roughly 47,000 troops in Afghanistan in mid-2007: approximately 36,000 were under NATO command and 11,000 were under U.S. command through Operation Enduring Freedom. There were also a handful of Special Operations units under U.S. command—teams from Canada, United Kingdom, Poland, United Arab Emirates, Italy, and Jordan.³⁸

What made matters worse was the refusal of most NATO countries to become involved in combat operations. Indeed, the most significant split involved not whether to go into Afghanistan but what to do there. Some allies, including Germany, vehemently opposed expanding NATO’s role to include riskier combat missions. Germany’s defense minister, Peter Struck, had argued at NATO defense meetings in Berlin in September 2005 that merging NATO’s peacekeeping mission with the American combat operation in Afghanistan would fundamentally change NATO’s role and “would make the situation for our soldiers doubly dangerous and worsen the current climate in Afghanistan.” Furthermore, he acknowledged that “NATO is not equipped for counterterrorism operations” and “that is not what it is supposed to do.”³⁹

In November 2006, at NATO’s summit in Riga, Latvia, tensions over national caveats had become acute. France, Germany, Spain, and Italy remained reluctant to send their troops to southern Afghanistan. These four nations said they would send help to trouble zones outside their areas only in emergencies. But it was unclear whether and when these commanders would have to request permission from their civilian governments to do so. Countries agreeing to ease the restrictions on deployment against the Taliban insurgency included the Netherlands, Romania, and smaller nations such as Slovenia and Luxembourg.

U.S. commanders referred to the refusal to become involved in combat operations as “national caveats,” which were triggered by at least two concerns. First, several NATO countries had a different philosophy about how to operate in Afghanistan and how to conduct counterinsurgency operations. They were particularly adamant that development and reconstruction efforts were the recipe for success and convinced that combat operations were likely to alienate the Afghan population, especially if they led to civilian casualties. Second, political leaders were reluctant to deploy their forces into violent areas because of low domestic support for combat operations.

A British House of Commons investigation discovered: “In Madrid, we were told by politicians and academics that while Spanish public opinion supported troops working on reconstruction projects in Afghanistan, it would not support a war-fighting role. In Berlin, we were told about the constitutional restrictions on Germany’s military operating abroad.”⁴⁰ In a German Marshall Fund poll in 2007, for example, 75 percent of Germans, 70 percent of Italians, and 72 percent of Spanish did not support the deployment of their troops for combat operations in Afghanistan.⁴¹ “Our domestic political situation certainly restricts our activities,” noted German General Markus Kneip in 2006, commander of NATO forces in Regional Command North.⁴²

The result was that countries such as France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Greece, and Turkey held restrictive views of the NATO mission and repeatedly balked at providing troops for counterinsurgency operations in the south. Their hesitation created two tiers within NATO: those involved in ground combat (United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Netherlands) and those who were not (everyone else). To be clear, those countries involved in combat also participated in reconstruction efforts. The two were not mutually exclusive.

Defense Secretary Rumsfeld spoke for a number of Americans, frustrated by NATO’s inaction, when he likened the situation to “having a basketball team, and they practice and practice and practice for six months. When it comes to game time, one or two say, ‘We’re not going to play.’”⁴³ But the Americans weren’t the only ones upset; the two-tiered structure also created significant friction among other nations. Several British and Canadian military and diplomatic officials I interviewed became increasingly frustrated. “The national caveats are a source of extraordinary tension within NATO,” noted Canadian Ambassador David Sproule.⁴⁴

Germany, which had been reluctant to commit troops in the first place, was frequently singled out as an egregious violator. The German Parliament did not allow the Bundeswehr—the German armed forces—to take part in combat operations against the Taliban in the south and east, except in emergencies. Indeed, German political leaders were extremely risk averse in Afghanistan. On my repeated trips to visit German troops in Kunduz and Mazar-e-Sharif, I noted several restrictions. German forces were generally prohibited from participating in offensive military operations. In addition, German forces initially were permitted to patrol in armored vehicles only during the day; some patrols were limited by the Bundeswehr regulation that military ambulances had to accompany all German patrols outside of Kunduz; and PRT commanders were usually unwilling to have their troops patrol in areas that were not secure. In response to a deteriorating security environment in the north in 2006 and 2007, the German reaction was often to establish more defensive measures, such as limiting the scope and range of patrols. This caused frustration among conventional German soldiers. It also angered some German Special Forces, who complained that they were not allowed to fight against terrorist and insurgent groups, for which they had been trained.⁴⁵

Others questioned the German military’s ability to conduct sustained counterinsurgency operations. German army units, such as mechanized infantry and airborne brigades, had extensive experience in peacekeeping. But they lacked sufficient trained personnel, combat equipment, and supporting communications and intelligence gear necessary to perform offensive attacks, raids, and reconnaissance patrols. While Germany had approximately eighty Tiger attack helicopters, none were deployed to Afghanistan during the first several years of the mission; the German government refused to authorize their use in combat. The Germans also had some Tornado multipurpose combat aircraft, but reconfiguring them for close air support would have been challenging. The German Parliament would have needed to issue a new mandate to arm the aircraft for ground-attack missions, pilots would have required more combat training, and logistics-support systems would have necessitated enhancements—none of which were possible in Germany’s antiwar political climate.

Several other countries lacked adequate enabler forces—including attack and lift helicopters, smart munitions, intelligence, engineers, medical staff, logistics, and digital command and control—to fully leverage and sustain their ground-combat power.⁴⁶ But, more important, there was no unity of command. In previous nation-building missions, such as the one in Bosnia, the international community had created a team (headed by the High Representative) tasked with overseeing reconstruction and stabilization. This did not happen in Afghanistan on either the civilian or the military side. The result was several external forces operating in the same area with different missions and different rules of engagement.

Command-and-control arrangements had been challenging from the beginning. In December 2001, the commander of Task Force Dagger (essentially the 5th Special Forces Group plus supporting units) was in direct contact with General Tommy Franks, the head of U.S. Central Command. The subordinate elements of Task Force Dagger had the most current and accurate intelligence about the situation on the ground. But this changed when the 1t Mountain Division assumed operations in Afghanistan in March 2002, and again when the XVIII Airborne Corps took over control of the Afghan theater in June 2002. By late 2002, the bureaucracy had become so oppressive that a request by a Special Forces unit to conduct an operation potentially had to be processed through six levels of command before being approved. One general officer said there was simply “too much overhead” to get anything done.⁴⁷ These challenges persisted over the next several years, especially as NATO began to take a more active role in 2006 and 2007.

In testimony before the House Armed Services Committee in December 2007, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates sharply criticized NATO countries for not supplying urgently needed soldiers and other aid as violence escalated. He stated: “NATO still has shortfalls in meeting minimum requirements in troops, equipment, and other resources,” and the “Afghanistan mission has exposed constraints associated with interoperability, organization, critical equipment shortfalls, and national caveats.”⁴⁸ For Gates and other senior U.S. policymakers, it was unconscionable that some NATO countries refused to deploy troops to southern Afghanistan as violence skyrocketed. In a broadside to America’s partners a month later, Gates later criticized most of the allies for failing to understand and prepare for counterinsurgency warfare. “Most of the European forces, NATO forces, are not trained in counterinsurgency; they were trained for the Fulda Gap,” he observed, referring to the region on the former East German-West German border where a Soviet ground invasion of Western Europe hypothetically might have occurred.⁴⁹

Clearing, but Not Holding

The national caveats and light-footprint approach had a debilitating impact on NATO’s counterinsurgency operations and put undue strain on a select group of countries that chose to pursue combat and development. In previous counterinsurgencies, success had been achieved by defeating insurgent forces and their political organization in a given area, holding it, and implementing reconstruction projects.⁵⁰ This has been called a “clear, hold, and build” strategy. Military forces set up secure zones and then slowly expand them outward like ink spots on blotting paper. Since only small numbers of U.S., Coalition, and Afghan forces were available, this strategy could be applied only in a few sectors of the country. Forces were assigned to contested areas to regain government presence and control, after which they conducted military and civil-military programs to expand the control and edge out insurgents. Counterinsurgency forces were supported with civil-affairs and psychological operations personnel.⁵¹

International forces in Afghanistan cast a wide net of operations outside their force-protection zone to disrupt and interdict insurgent operations. Units were required to live among the local population for significant amounts of time to gain their trust and support. Then they would proceed with patient intelligence work to ascertain the location of insurgents’ weapons caches, safe houses, and transit support systems. Once the hostile zones had been cleared, the force was to move to outer zones, where the population was neither friendly nor hostile to the counterinsurgency unit’s efforts. Occasional operations were conducted in these areas to keep the population “neutral” to the idea of supporting the insurgents. Battalion-size sweeps and clearing operations involving several hundred soldiers generally reaped far less than the effort required because of the difficulty of finding and fighting elusive insurgents.⁵² U.S., British, Dutch, and Canadian forces were sometimes successful at clearing territory through armed reconnaissance and specialized raiding. Individual units patrolled suspected insurgent areas. AC-130 Spectre gunships, Predator unmanned aerial vehicles, and other remote-reconnaissance tools helped support the patrols to keep insurgents off balance and disrupt their timing.⁵³

The “clear, hold, and build” strategy seemed straightforward, but low levels of troops made it virtually impossible to hold territory in Afghanistan’s violent south. As one Western ambassador remarked to me: “We can clear territory, but we can’t hold it. There aren’t sufficient numbers of NATO or Afghan forces.”⁵⁴ During Operation Medusa in 2006, for example, Canadian and other NATO forces had cleared Panjwai district from Taliban forces, but the Canadians and Afghans couldn’t hold the district. The Canadian military established a forward operating base in Panjwai and worked with local Afghan National Police, Afghan National Auxiliary Police, and some Afghan National Army soldiers to prevent a Taliban return. But their numbers were insufficient, and the Afghan police were unwilling to confront Taliban forces as they gradually reinfiltrated. By the summer of 2007, the Taliban were back in Panjwai at levels comparable to when Operation Medusa began.⁵⁵

Reinfiltration was a persistent problem, especially across the south, where one NATO general told me that in mid-2007, “NATO and Afghan forces control at most 20 percent of the southern provinces of Nimroz, Helmand, Kandahar, Oruzgan, Day Kundi, and Zabol. The rest are controlled by Taliban, groups allied to the Taliban, or local commanders.”⁵⁶

Writing on the Walls

By 2007, there were growing signs of NATO’s distress. Too few NATO forces and crippling national caveats impacted the organization’s ability to stem the rising violence, especially in southern Afghanistan. In December, Paddy Ashdown, a former member of the British Parliament and High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina, who was being considered to head civilian reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan, wrote to Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Foreign Secretary David Miliband, warning: “We do not have enough troops, aid or international will to make Afghanistan much different from what it has been for the last 1,000 years…. And even if we had all of these in sufficient quantities, we would not have them for sufficient time…to make the aim of fundamentally altering the nature of Afghanistan, achievable.”⁵⁷

If Afghanistan was supposed to be NATO’s first opportunity to show its new raison d’être, the result was underwhelming. “One of the lessons of NATO’s involvement in Afghanistan,” General Eikenberry told me, “is the need to fulfill minimal requirements before deploying forces. If minimal requirements are not filled, then perhaps NATO shouldn’t go in.”⁵⁸ There were other lessons as well. One of the most salient was the lesson of securing neighboring countries. The history of recent insurgencies demonstrates that the ability of insurgents to gain sanctuary and support in adjacent states significantly increases their probability of success over the long run. This brings us to Pakistan.