I am a Navy reservist and served as one of the primary economic development officers at NATO's Regional Command - South headquarters in Kandahar from September 2009 to September 2010. Thus it was with more than passing interest that I read Rajiv Chandrasekaran's recent journalistic expose, "Little America: The War within the War for Afghanistan," which chronicles the events and missteps of President Obama's civilian and military surge into southern Afghanistan beginning in mid-2009. Obviously, I'm not a neutral party; but I'd like to think that I'm fairly objective. Here are my thoughts on the book, along with my personals observations from serving "inside the surge," often alongside many of the people - American, Afghan and Allied - featured in this book.
The author achieved commercial and critical success with his first book, "Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone," a searing indictment of the Bush administration's Coalition Provisional Authority in the early days after the invasion of Iraq. "Little America" is very similar, yet quite different from that National Book Award winning effort. The similarities are the anecdote-rich, character-driven narrative and the portrayal of a bumbling, embarrassingly incompetent United States government, usually, but not always, focused on bureaucratic civilian agencies and a wide range of feckless senior politically appointed leaders.
The difference is the author's personal sympathies, both to the war and the primary players in the story, which clearly shine through despite his best efforts to maintain the appearance of journalistic neutrality and integrity. The main characters in "Emerald City" are portrayed as venal, irredeemable creatures, George W. Bush's small minded janissaries in his illegal and ill-advised war of conquest. The reader is expected to recoil in horror (as I'm sure the author did) from the thought that these people actually represent our flag and nation - and in positions with such consequence in the Arab world and greater Middle East.
The key players in the "Little America" narrative, on the other hand, are noble and principled (and liberal!). Main characters, especially Kael Weston and Marine Brigadier General Larry Nicholson, are portrayed as twenty-first century Galahads: thoughtful, sober, well-educated men with the very best of intentions and single-mindedly pursuing a better life for the benighted people of an unforgiving land, but adrift in a desert of bureaucratic incompetence and political ineptitude. If Iraq in 2003 was the wrong war with the wrong people, both in the national command authority and on the ground, Afghanistan in 2009 was the right war with (mostly) the right people in positions in Washington and in Helmand province, if not Kandahar and Kabul.
In many ways "Little America" reminded me of another relatively recent book on Afghanistan: "Charlie Wilson's War: The Extraordinary Story of How the Wildest Man in Congress and a Rogue CIA Agent Changed the History of Our Times." The veteran reporter George Crile produced a ripping good yarn about the CIA's covert operation to defeat the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, as told virtually exclusively from the perspective of Democratic Texas Congressman Charlie Wilson and his CIA partner, Gust Avrakotos. In that bestselling book - and eventual Tom Hanks / Julia Roberts major motion picture - there were only good guys (Wilson, Avrakotos and those who supported them) and villains (everyone else). In "Little America," Weston and Nicholson assume the role of Wilson and Avragatos, while the second tier characters in the narrative are placed in their respective camps - good guy or bad guy - depending on how they aligned, directly or indirectly, with the author's heroes. It makes for a tight narrative. But is it true? Only partially, I'm afraid.
Chandrasekaran may be sympathetic with the main characters he chose to develop for his storyline, but he doesn't shrink from pointing out the many errors and inconsistencies that have plagued the US and NATO in Afghanistan. Indeed, his laundry list of complaints is tough to synthesize. Here are a mere dozen of his scattershot critiques: 1) Helmand was made a focus of the surge instead of Kandahar not for strategic reasons but because the US Marine Corps wanted a clearly defined area of operations that they could control soup-to-nuts (aka: Marinestan), a heritage born from the second world war's Pacific theater; 2) cotton should have been the focus of agricultural development strategy in Helmand, but USAID was dead set against that crop for reasons described as short sighted and specious; 3) the heavy focus on developing district level governance was doomed from the start for cultural reasons and led to practically zero progress in improving the image and effectiveness of the central government in the insurgent strongholds of the south; 4) well intentioned USAID support programs, such as AVIPA, had minimal lasting development impact but led to enormous short-term distortions in the local economy where it was introduced; 5) the military implemented a full throttle, classic COIN campaign despite the White House's clear intent to engage in a more limited counter terrorism and training effort; 6) the human capital of the civilian surge was at best weak and more likely dilutive to the overall war effort; 7) the sole US Army unit available for Kandahar - the Stryker Brigade - happened to be led by a rogue commander who fostered a "Seek and Destroy" mentality rather than a "hearts and minds" approach, which ultimately alienated the local population wherever they served; 8) a criminally incompetent strategic partner in Afghan president Hamid Karzai; 9) various harebrained, big ticket development schemes, such as the rehabilitation of Kajaki hydroelectric dam, that had little chance for success and plenty of opportunity for graft and corruption; 10) sophomoric bureaucratic catfights between some of the most senior members of Obama's Afghanistan war council (Holbrooke versus Doug Lute and Karl Eikenberry); 11) dubious Afghan allies with ties to the opium trade and a penchant for arbitrary violence, corruption or pedophilia; and 12) a counter narcotics policy that sought to destroy poppy crops in the South despite evidence that the bulk of Taliban financial funding came from wealthy Gulf donors and such actions unambiguously alienated the local farmers from the coalition and their central government.
So what really doomed the Obama Afghanistan surge? Is "fixing" Afghanistan simply an impossible task that never had a chance for success? Was the fundamental strategy behind the surge fatally flawed? Did a lack of civil-military coordination and cooperation undermine the best laid plans? Is the absence of a responsible partner in Afghan leadership the primary cause of our frustration? Could we have succeeded if we had only planted cotton?!
In the end, Chandrasekaran judges Obama's surge an abject failure; but it was not a failure simply because it was poorly executed (although he claims it was). Rather, it failed, according to the author, because it was a muddled idea from the start and never had a chance for success. "[T]he surge was a big bluff," Chandrasekaran quotes Weston as saying, but clearing reflecting his own view, "a long odds gamble that the Afghan government, the Taliban, and the Pakistanis would have all behave differently with more American [forces on the ground]."
So how do my experiences align with the author's critical assessment? Unfortunately, fairly closely. Here are a few relevant anecdotes.
To begin with, Chandrasekaran faults the US forces for not spending enough time in the field, working directly with the Afghans and speaking to them in their own language. That's a fair critique. However, I can't stress how difficult it was to move around southern Afghanistan in 2010. As a junior officer in the US military, I constantly struggled to secure transport to the places we needed to go to do our jobs. Rajiv likely never experienced this challenge first hand; he was usually able to zip around the theater in dedicated Blackhawk helicopters (I actually traveled with him around the theater prior to the Marja offensive and remember marveling at the first class treatment, kind of like being a sophomore in high school and befriending a junior with his own car). It took me weeks of effort to conduct simple reconnaissance trips to the industrial park just outside of the Kandahar Airfield (KAF). Things were a bit easier in Kabul, because it was safer, although not nearly as secure as the author suggests in "Little America," which makes the Afghan capital sound more like Palo Alto on a sunny afternoon.
The author also claims that progress in the South was undermined by a lack of cooperation and mistrust between the US civilians (State, USAID, etc.) and the military, especially during the 2011 time period when the 10th Mountain Division was in charge. Personally, I had a wonderfully productive working relationship with my civilian colleagues in Kandahar, especially my partner from USAID focused on economic growth. The situation at the senior level, however, was definitely a different story. The person in charge of reconstruction and stability during my tour suffered from several "deficiencies" from the American leadership perspective: he was young (late 30s), he was British, and he was a civilian. Moreover, his position carried a broad, ambitious mandate but precious little in the way of tangible power: he held no positional authority (i.e. no one needed his signature or approval to do anything), he had no money to distribute to anyone, and he had few professional resources to contribute (just a dozen or so brains-on-a-stick like me).
Read more ›
