Unwinnable by Theo Farrell

Author:Theo Farrell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House

McCHRYSTAL’S CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT

As McChrystal left Washington, Gates tasked him with conducting a strategic assessment of the campaign and to report back within sixty days. McChrystal used this process to generate his own campaign plan. To assist in the task, he assembled a team of civilian experts including Steve Biddle, Anthony Cordesman, Fred and Kimberley Kagan, Andrew Exum and Catherine Dale. Biddle was a senior fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations; a former professor at the US Army War College, he was widely respected as the leading social scientist of his generation working on military affairs.39 Cordesman was professor of strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, and former director of intelligence assessment in the US Department of Defense. The Kagans were something of a power couple on the US think-tank scene: Kimberley Kagan was founder and president of the Institute for the Study of War, and Fred Kagan a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Biddle, Cordesman and the Kagans had all served on similar assessment teams for Petraeus in Iraq. Exum was a fellow at the Center for a New American Security and a PhD student in war studies at King’s College London; possessing a slow Tennessee drawl and a sharp mind, he was a former US ranger who had served with multiple tours in Afghanistan and written a best-selling book about it.40 Dale was lead analyst on military affairs for the US Congressional Research Service and had previously been a political adviser to US forces in Iraq; forever in motion, she brimmed with energy and ideas. The civilian team were assembled hurriedly in late June and given a month to produce a draft assessment. McChrystal asked them to go back to basics, and among the exam questions he gave them was: ‘Is this mission doable, and if so, what changes in strategy and policy are needed to succeed?’ One team member recalls that this was ‘pretty ballsy’ of McChrystal, noting that ‘senior commanders rarely ask questions that might produce answers they do not want’.41

The civilian team travelled around Afghanistan but security restrictions imposed by the regional commands prevented them from getting out much to talk to troops and ordinary Afghans. Exum would later blog about his frustration at being driven around Mazar-e-Sharif, a largely secure city in the north, in a German armoured convoy ‘whereby I could only observe Mazar and the Afghans themselves through a narrow two inch by four inch slit of bullet-proof glass’. He likened it to ‘seeing Afghanistan through a periscope’. This problem was not confined to the German sector. The assessment team were wrapped in cotton wool everywhere they went. Exum captured this experience in a one-page memorandum to McChrystal entitled ‘Touring Afghanistan by Submarine’.42 Like McChrystal, the team also experienced excessive concern with force protection, resulting in behaviour that was alienating locals, such as barging through civilian traffic in armoured vehicles.43

The assessment team conducted an extensive review of intelligence and field reports (the Kagans, in particular,

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