LESSONS ENCOUNTERED

The Surges in Iraq and Afghanistan
gained by slowing and reversing Taliban momentum. This injection of additional
forces could lead to a reconsideration by Taliban leaders that the United
States was increasingly committed to securing its interests, which could lead
to mutually beneficial negotiations within Afghanistan. Furthermore, the NSC
decision did not assess and resolve the viability of the Afghan security forces
to meet their recruiting goals and minimum effectiveness within the resources
and timelines framed by the President. Creating sustainable Afghan National
Security Forces would clearly be a longer term but relevant issue if U.S. security
interests were to be served. Finally, the State Department’s contributions
were long on promise and short on delivery. Both the strategic assessment
and oversight should have tested State’s capacity to actually support the plan.
Because of these nonmilitary elements, the strategic coordination phase was
deliberate and robust but less than fully satisfactory.
Decision Authorization Clarity. There appears little doubt that the President
was fully immersed and invested in the final strategic decisions in 2009.
However, the six-page strategic memorandum President Obama purportedly
authored contained contradictions. The President apparently intended that the
lesson of unclear objectives from Vietnam would not be repeated, based on a
reading of Gordon Goldstein’s Lessons in Disaster. 202 While intended to reduce
ambiguity and reflect his commitment to the decision, the President’s strategic
guidance evidences distinct tensions between the diagnosis of the problems in
Afghanistan and a limited allocation of resources and time.
Clarity was augmented by the discourse of the principals and the President’s
direct question to each to expressly assent to the final strategy. The ISAF
commander may have had some questions from the inauguration through late
November as to what the new administration really wanted to achieve in Afghanistan.
That doubt or ambiguity was clarified during the Surge debate. Our
reading of the November 29 memo reinforces the clarity of the commander’s
intent. The U.S. goal in Afghanistan was “to deny safe haven to al Qaeda and
to deny the Taliban the ability to overthrow the Afghan government.” The military
mission was defined in six operational objectives, which were to be “limited
in scope and scale to only what is necessary to attain the U.S. goal.” 203 In
case there was any question, the President’s memo noted, “This approach is not
fully resourced counterinsurgency or nation building.” 204 But at the same time,
the President articulated numerous military and civilian tasks at the opera-
137