The War in Afghanistan is not going well for America
Muhammad Javed Iqbal
since U.S. forces first went into combat in Afghanistan against al-
Qaeda and its local supporters in the Taliban. That makes the war
there the second longest (after Vietnam) in U.S. history. More than
1,200 coalition troops have died in Afghanistan; some 730 of the dead
were American, but other nations have suffered too. Britain has lost
175 soldiers in the conflict, and Canada 124. And the deaths in
uniform are the easy ones to count: they do not encompass the
thousands of Afghan villagers who have been killed by the Taliban or
by errant coalition actions. Last year alone, 828 civilians were
killed by U.S., allied or Afghan troops, 552 of them in air strikes.
(See pictures of the U.S. Marines new offensive in Afghanistan.)
It is precisely because so many Afghans have been killed that the war
is, in effect, starting anew. McChrystal's task is to recalibrate the
war effort so local people can see that the coalition's actions
increase their security, in turn allowing them to get on with their
lives. Up to now, the deaths of Afghans in the fighting have done
little to aid the allies and a lot to turn locals against foreign
forces and the government of President Hamid Karzai, which those
forces sustain. This is a place - as British and Russian armies
discovered and were sent packing after their discoveries - where the
waters of vengeance run deep. "If the Americans kill an Afghan father,
the son will take revenge and pick up a gun and will stand against
foreigners," says Abdul Qadir, 38, who runs a shoe-shine business on a
Kabul street. "People hate Americans," echoes Ezatullah, a driver from
the town of Maidan Shahr, "because they kill innocent people."
To drain the hatred and give Afghanistan the room to build
institutions and an economy that just might, one day, heal the wounds
of 30 years of war, President Barack Obama and his generals are
shifting strategies. Their new doctrine emphasizes protecting the
Afghan people over killing insurgents. "What we really want is the
equivalent of a peaceful takeover, where the Taliban are forced out,"
McChrystal told TIME. Three days later, the general issued a "tactical
directive" to ISAF forces reinforcing the point: "We will not win
based on the number of Taliban we kill," McChrystal wrote, "but
instead on our ability to separate insurgents from the people." To
that end, the directive explicitly enjoined force leaders "to
scrutinize and limit the use of force like close air support against
residential compounds and other locations likely to produce civilian
casualties." In truth, the new policy was already being applied: on
July 2, nearly 4,000 Marines and 650 Afghan troops stormed into
Helmand province in southern Afghanistan aboard helicopters and
armored vehicles. But within hours, the Marines issued a statement
declaring they had "not used artillery, and no bombs have been dropped
from aircraft" in the offensive's opening thrust. You know a war has
turned topsy-turvy when U.S. Marines brag about the weapons they're
not using. (See pictures of the battle against the Taliban.)
The change in tactics and command (McChrystal was brought in to
replace Army General David McKiernan, who had led ISAF since June
2008) was necessitated by a grim truth. The war in Afghanistan is not
going well. The Taliban, funded in large measure by the opium trade,
which is centered in Helmand, now controls wide swaths of Afghanistan.
Over the past four months, a recent U.N. report says, the number of
"assassinations, abductions, incidents of intimidation and the direct
targeting of aid workers" has been higher than last year. Increasing
numbers of foreign fighters - "most likely affiliated with al-Qaeda" -
are fighting alongside the Taliban. "There is no question but that the
situation has deteriorated over the course of the past two years,"
General David Petraeus, who as chief of U.S. Central Command oversees
the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq, said recently.
The Second Afghan War
The offensive in Helmand is the first step in what has become
America's second Afghan war. The Marines have met little resistance,
although U.S. deaths spiked elsewhere in the country. On July 6, seven
U.S. troops were killed outside Helmand - the highest daily toll in
nearly a year. Using an age-old strategy, the insurgents seem to have
melted away when pressured, only to pop up and attack elsewhere. In
Helmand, U.S. troops will set up small outposts instead of pulling
back when the operation is done. They'll live near the locals and
offer protection in advance of Afghanistan's Aug. 20 presidential
election. Then McChrystal's forces and civilian advisers will begin
trying to build economic and governmental institutions.
See pictures of suicide in recruiters' ranks.
Watch a video on the challenge for the U.S. military in Afghanistan.
Terrorism and the illicit drug trade have flourished in Afghanistan
because the lack of a functioning economy has let warlords fill the
vacuum. That needs to change. The U.S. recently announced, for
example, that it is shifting its antipoppy efforts from destroying the
opium-producing flowers to encouraging different crops. But that's
quite a challenge: poppies are easy to grow and net four times as much
money per acre as wheat. So farmers will need new cash crops to
replace the poppies and newly built roads to get such goods to market
without paying bribes along the way. The best soldiers in the world
can't manage every step of that process, which is why Karl Eikenberry,
the new U.S. ambassador in Kabul and a retired Army lieutenant general
who served twice in Afghanistan, says, "The military can help set the
conditions for success. But it is not sufficient for success."
That said, without the military doing its bit, there will be no
success to measure. So part of the Obama Administration's strategy is
to increase the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, from 57,000 now
to 68,000 by the fall. The extra troops should help bring security to
parts of Afghanistan that lack it, but McChrystal is clear that
security alone is but a means to an end. "The point of security," he
says, "is to enable governance ... My metric is not the enemy killed,
not ground taken: it's how much governance we've got." Decent
governance, the thinking goes - providing the rule of law and economic
opportunity - will persuade those who take up arms because they have
no other economic alternative to stop fighting. And those who don't
use words like governance agree. "If people have work," says Mohammad
Ismael, a 58-year-old Kabul resident, "I don't think they will
fight." (See pictures of Afghanistan's dangerous Korengal Valley.)
Unshocked, Unawed
The new strategy, with its limits on actions that risk civilian
casualties, represents a sea change in U.S. military doctrine. It was
only six years ago that Air Force General Richard Myers, then Chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, predicted that a shock-and-awe strategy
would bomb Saddam Hussein's Iraq into submission. That - and the tech-
heavy force that then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld sent into Iraq
to stumble and falter for four years - hewed to the American way of
war, one that was equal parts laser beams and hubris. But the military
has rethought its strategy. "You can shock and awe human beings,"
McChrystal says, "but it doesn't last. I've seen operations where
kinetic strikes would go in on a target, and the enemy would come out
shooting. They weren't awed."
Instead of relying on brute force, McChrystal has to find more subtle
ways of dealing with an Afghan insurgency that grows out of a
patchwork of motivations based on tribal allegiances, Islamic
fundamentalism and the strategies of warlords eager to keep what has
been theirs for generations. "I am not sure," McChrystal says, "there
are two different people out there with the same reason for the
fight." He has to untangle the various threads in this skein and then
determine what action - economic development, strong government, death
- works best in each case. (Read "Why the Pentagon Axed Its
Afghanistan Warlord.")
And he has to be a diplomat too. Perhaps the most important military
action in the region isn't happening in Afghanistan but across the
border in Pakistan. Afghanistan and Pakistan, McChrystal says, are
"unique situations that are linked inextricably." Islamabad's fitful
offensive against the Taliban in Pakistan has successfully drained
resources from the Taliban in Afghanistan. "Money is drying up,"
Colonel John Spiszer, commander of the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 1st
Infantry Division, along the border, said on June 23. Over the past
year, the going prices for guns and ammo "have almost doubled," he
noted. "That's a great sign." Such pressure on safe havens in Pakistan
will reduce hit-and-run attacks across the border.
But however much the Pakistanis help, McChrystal does not have an easy
job. He concedes that Afghanistan's current security forces - 86,000
soldiers and 82,000 national police - aren't enough to protect the
country. And U.S. commanders have made it clear that even with
reinforcements in the pipeline, they don't have enough troops to run a
full-fledged counterinsurgency campaign. That is one reason U.S.
commanders came to rely on airpower, which only perpetuated a feedback
loop that made the job of winning trust among Afghans even harder.
See pictures of Osama Bin Laden.
See pictures of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on LIFE.com.
Long Career, Fresh Eyes
In Washington there had been a sense for months that the Afghan train
was off the track and that McKiernan - an able armor officer - wasn't
the right fit. On May 11, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, with Obama's
blessing, tapped McChrystal for the Afghan post, saying "fresh eyes"
were needed on the war.
McChrystal's official career is 33 years long, but he has, in effect,
been in the Army for all his 54 years - both his father and paternal
grandfather were Army officers, his father making it to two-star
general. After graduating from West Point in 1976 - 31 years after his
father - McChrystal climbed the Army ladder. He's seen some tragedies.
In 1994, McChrystal was a lieutenant colonel with the 82nd Airborne
Division when a flaming F-16 jet plowed into a parked C-141 at Pope
Air Force Base. The cargo plane's 55,000 gallons of jet fuel erupted
into a massive fireball, killing 18 of McChrystal's troops as they
prepared for parachute jumps on a sunny North Carolina afternoon. (See
pictures of the U.S. Army Reserve.)
Asked about the incident, McChrystal pauses for nine seconds, his mood
shifting from animated to muted. "We sent our own paratroopers to bury
each of our own killed," he says, saying the tragedy taught him the
importance of teamwork. Others say it showed his leadership.
McChrystal and his wife Annie attended all the funerals and memorial
services. "That was real moral courage," says Dan McNeill, who was
McChrystal's commander at the time and who later ran the war in
Afghanistan. "I don't know if I could have done that."
In between stints with various special-operations units, McChrystal
pulled tours at the Council on Foreign Relations and Harvard. Before
coming to the Pentagon, he spent 2003 to 2008 heading up the Joint
Special Operations Command, the secret corps of Army Delta Force and
Navy Seals based at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, although McChrystal
deployed regularly to its forward post inside Iraq. In 2006 his unit
succeeded in tracking down and killing Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, the
leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq. McChrystal's record has not been without
controversy. After the 2004 death by friendly fire of former NFL
player and Army Ranger Pat Tillman in Afghanistan, Pentagon
investigators said McChrystal provided information that misleadingly
suggested Tillman died at the enemy's hands when recommending him for
the Silver Star. But the Army decided that McChrystal had "no
reasonable basis" for second-guessing officers who drafted the
recommendation.
Fit as a tuning fork, McChrystal has a certain monkish mythology about
him that his aides seem keen to foster. In Afghanistan, they say, he
gets up at 4 a.m. to run and e-mail before his workday really begins
with an 8:30 video briefing with his regional commanders across the
country. His iPod and Kindle (the newest model) are stocked by his
wife with serious tomes on Pakistan, Lincoln and Vietnam. Right now,
he is reading William Maley's 2002 book The Afghanistan Wars, a
catalog of the long list of British failures in Afghanistan.
McChrystal famously eats little during the day, recently only picking
at an Afghan spread featuring four kinds of meat. To the chagrin of
Afghans, who see drinking tea as an inalienable human right, he
scrapped a morning tea break at a recent security briefing in
Kandahar, and aides grumble, nicely, that he sees others' demands for
lunch as a sign of weakness. (But he makes up for it at dinner: a
colleague says a typical evening repast may include a cheeseburger, a
fajita burrito, a pile of fries and ice cream. And maybe a brownie.)
And if it weren't for uniforms and the help of his wife, he wouldn't
have a clue what to wear. His tenor voice is soft, but his gaze -
fixed on his target - can make subordinates squirm. If he takes off
his glasses, says an aide, "you know you're in trouble."
Watching in Washington
Military policy in Afghanistan is now in the hands of this likable and
very, very focused soldier. An Administration and a nation are waiting
to see if his plan is any better than the one it replaced. Time is in
short supply. Some in Washington are leery of Afghanistan's becoming
another Vietnam. Representative David Obey, the Wisconsin lawmaker who
chairs the powerful Appropriations Committee, said in May he's giving
the White House a year to show progress - however defined - in
Afghanistan. But at his confirmation hearing, McChrystal said he
expects it will take 18 to 24 months to see whether things are turning
around, and talking to TIME, he was clear that it will take even
longer than that to make "permanent progress." (Read "Why Obama's
Afghan War Is Different.")
Success is by no means assured. McChrystal's order to keep Afghan
civilian casualties low, for example, may be politically savvy, but in
the short term it can be militarily fraught. Before the Helmand
offensive began, U.S. troops called in an air strike on a compound
after coming under fire from it. A number of civilians died, and
McChrystal was not pleased. "I want you all to stop dropping
compounds," he quietly told the 100 members of his staff gathered
inside his command center and others linked via video. "Yes, sir,"
responded the commander involved. Three days later, when troops in
Helmand came under fire from such a compound, they followed his order.
"We made the decision to isolate the compound and not destroy it," a
Marine captain said, "because we couldn't confirm if civilians were
inside."
The good news is that the compound wasn't bombed, no civilians were
killed and no additional measure of poison was added to the bitter
brew that has turned Afghans against the U.S. and its allies. The bad
news is that the insurgents escaped from the compound before U.S.
forces had a chance to secure it. The Marines call the need to
tolerate the frustration of such incidents "tactical patience." Just
how patient Americans and their Commander in Chief will turn out to be
with Stan McChrystal's new way of fighting the Afghan war remains to
be seen.
- With reporting by Ali Safi / Kabul
Satish Kumar
wrote:
> The War in Afghanistan is not going well for America
>
The question is how well is it going for Pakistan's army. Do you think
they are not being paid enough dollars for exterminating the jihad-
wallas? But do they really deserve the dollars? Aren't the American
drones doing a better job then the entire Paki army? This week, in the
course of a single day, didn't the drones succeed in sending some 5
dozen Talibans to hell?
Janab Eik Ball (Mr. One-Ball), you seem to be very interested in
bastards. And why not? Members of your household like Asmaa, Ali,
Farooq and Bilal were all sired by your Saudi employer. So, by
definition, the majority in your household are indeed bastards. Please
go to a hakim who can make your surviving testicle bloom. That way you
won't need your Saudi employer's help to increase the size of your
household. Good luck!
Mirza Ghalib
My view has always been that it is fruitless to bring progress to
Islamic countries. US should withdraw, but before leaving erect
a firewall around Afghanistan, so that no Afghan can leave his
country and engage in mayhem outside. Same applies to other
Islamic countries.
They do not need western style education, nor industries. The
Koran is enough for them.
uNmaiviLambi
Precisely my point. They should be isolated. But the tragedy is they
have oil! West wants oil.