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

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