Last month, Gail Harris of the FPA U.S. Defense blog expressed some skepticism about the claim that the United States’ problems in Afghanistan arose because the U.S. was too focused on Iraq:
Like many, I’ve wondered why we didn’t do something earlier to counter the Taliban resurgence before it got out of hand. The conventional answer that it was because the military focus was on Iraq doesn’t ring totally true with me and raises many questions. As the situation deteriorated, did the on scene military commanders request more assets? If they did, were they denied because of a lack of available assets because the focus was on Iraq? Did the political leadership not recognize or refuse to acknowledge the situation was deteriorating because of concerns others would think their policy was flawed and they would be perceived as incompetent by political opponents?
Seth Jones, in his book, In the Graveyard of Empires, published last year, provides some answers. Jones suggests that the initial decision to employ the “light footprint” strategy in Afghanistan was partly related to the war in Iraq:
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. The logic, one senior U.S. official told me, was that “the U.S. military was already thinking about moving on to Iraq.” (p. 112)
But Jones is careful not to overstate this case. He notes that other factors influenced the “light footprint” decision. For example, Bush campaigned on an anti-nation-building platform and wanted his policies to reflect his campaign rhetoric. Also, Bush administration officials feared that a large Soviet-style military presence might provoke a counterinsurgency (ironic, of course, that the effort to avoid a Soviet-type situation led the U.S. to almost perfectly retrace the Soviets’ footsteps). And there seemed to be a “light footprint” ideology that pervaded senior levels of the Bush administration. They tried a “light footprint” in Iraq as well, which suggests they truly believed that the strategy would work. Regardless, the U.S. deployed only 8,000 troops to Afghanistan in 2002, and, as Jones writes, [o]nce the United States began planning the war in Iraq, the light-footprint plan was virtually impossible to alter.” (p. 115)
But here’s where we get to taking our eyes off Afghanistan:
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.” 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. 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.
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 of 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… The ratio of key 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, 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. (p. 127-128)
In 2003, Zalmay Khalizad, along with David Barno, pushed through a plan, which Bush approved in June 2003, to shift the U.S. strategy from counterterrorism to counterinsurgency. The U.S. troop level rose to 20,000, the NATO troop level to 10,000. But still, this brought the troop to population ratio to only 1 soldier for every 1,000 Afghans, well below the 20-25 soldier per 1,000 inhabitants ratio recommended by the Counterinsurgency Field Manual. And in 2005, even Khalizad, who was serving as the U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan, was moved to Iraq. As Jones writes, “[t]he State Department had taken one of its most seasoned and effective ambassadors who spoke Afghanistan’s two main languages and had a special rapport with its political leaders, and moved him to Baghdad during an extraordinarily fragile period in Afghanistan’s history.” (p. 150)
In 2005, the U.S. decided to shift troops to Iraq and give NATO more responsibility in Afghanistan. Rumsfeld signed orders in December 2005 reducing U.S. forces from 19,000 to 16,000 by spring 2006. (p. 246) NATO, though, was also under-resourced and lacked the political will, rightly so, to engage in combat:
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.” 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. (p. 250)
Similar factors affected funding levels. Jones quotes Dov Zakheim, who offers two reasons that the U.S. encountered funding issues:
“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.” (p. 128)
The Marines wanted to move from Iraq to Afghanistan but were met with administration resistance:
In December 2007, for example, Gates met at the Pentagon with General James T. Conway, the Marine Corps commandant, to discuss a formal proposal that would shift Marine forces from Anbar Province in Iraq to Afghanistan. The proposal called for a Marine integrated “air-ground task force” of infantry, attack aircraft, and logistics to carry out the Afghanistan mission and build on counterinsurgency lessons learned by Marines in Anbar. But senior Pentagon officials, including Gates, were concerned that reallocating resources to Afghanistan would jeopardize some of the fragile gains the U.S. military had made in Iraq in 2007… A small contingent of U.S. Marines eventually deployed to southern Afghanistan, but it was only a token force. (p. 221-222)
Jones also notes many senior officials and soldiers on the ground who complained about the lack of resources. One of them is a U.S. civil-affairs-officer serving in eastern Afghanistan:
“We’re like the Pacific theatre in World War II… We will get more resources after we defeat Berlin,” he said, alluding to the U.S. focus on Iraq. (p. 301)
Another is Mike Mullen:
In an unusually frank admission in December 2007 before the House Armed Services Committee, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Michael Mullen observed that an American military stretched by the war in Iraq could only do so much in Afghanistan. “Our main focus, militarily, in the region and in the world right now is rightly and firmly in Iraq,” he noted. “It is simply a matter of resources, of capacity. In Afghanistan, we do what we can. In Iraq, we do what we must.” (p. 221)
And there’s General McKiernan:
In June 2008, General David McKiernan became commander of ISAF; several months later, his staff completed the ISAF campaign plan, which was fairly blunt about the lack of forces to hold territory, noting that NATO had to resort to an “economy of force and special operations” effort to make up for the shortfalls…
The assertion that we took our eyes off Afghanistan to focus on Iraq seems fairly sound.
