Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [370]
We had seen some hopeful signs. We successfully pressured Pakistan to shut down its nuclear proliferation operation run by A. Q. Khan, widely regarded as the father of the Pakistani nuclear bomb. Musharraf’s government had been helpful in providing intelligence on senior al-Qaida operatives. With Pakistani intelligence, we often mounted sensitive special operations missions into their territory and conducted UAV drone strikes against terrorist targets. Musharraf had ordered Pakistani forces into western Pakistan to attack Taliban and al-Qaida strongholds and, as a result, lost hundreds of his soldiers.
To be sure, Pakistan was less forthcoming with intelligence on the Taliban networks in the country. Some in the Pakistani intelligence services believed they needed to fund and train the Taliban as a hedge against Indian influence in Afghanistan. Musharraf had made some unhelpful truces and arrangements with governors in western Pakistan, which had the effect of allowing the Taliban to regroup. It was clear by 2006 that the Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan were directly contributing to an insurgency and the destabilization of neighboring Afghanistan.
To blunt the insurgency, I had concluded we needed to expand and accelerate the Afghan National Army well beyond the seventy thousand troops originally planned. Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry, the commander who had replaced David Barno, had recommended we cut back the size of the ANA to fifty thousand in the fall of 2005, but we soon reversed the decision. I was disappointed to learn that Eikenberry had moved his military headquarters out of the U.S. embassy in Kabul, reversing the close civil-military linkage that Barno and Khalilzad had forged.
Strmecki recommended we develop a “multi-year COIN [counterinsurgency] plan” utilizing Afghan troops to defend key towns and villages against Taliban infiltration.28 “While the past three years have seen progressive improvements in the counterinsurgency techniques of the Coalition, there are opportunities to undertake additional innovations,” Strmecki wrote.29 Without deploying tens of thousands of U.S. military forces, we could use a parallel structure of civil, nonmilitary support teams to help Afghans stabilize their towns and villages, offering viable livelihoods rather than succumbing to the Taliban. This of course would require yet another effort, building on our earlier attempts, to get other departments and agencies of our federal government to send support teams of civilian experts.
I had sought to increase the NATO alliance’s involvement in Afghanistan to lessen the burden on our troops as well. Eventually all of the alliance’s forces were placed under one command—the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) led by an American general—to achieve an integrated effort.30 It was a major step for NATO that promised a new relevance for the Alliance in the twenty-first century.
Giving NATO a leading role in Afghanistan was not without its challenges. One was that NATO, though a military alliance, operates as a committee by consensus, and it’s difficult to conduct a war by committee. The command arrangements between NATO headquarters in Brussels, ISAF headquarters in Kabul, and the different commanders across the country were complex. NATO military forces were also under widely differing instructions from their home governments. If fired on, some forces could only engage in defensive maneuvers. Though I had hoped that NATO’s involvement would bring in more international contributions for Afghan reconstruction, it became a pattern for President Karzai to be promised more assistance than he received from the international community.
Most Afghan ministries were not getting