The Long War: Afghanistan After July 2011

On my first reporting trip to Afghanistan, beginning in Jan. 2002, I lived for several months with 30 soldiers in a leaky tent heated against the bitter cold with a kerosene-fired pot-bellied stove. Waiting to be airlifted into the mountains to fight the Taliban, the soldiers and I shuffled through rutted snow to another sagging tent for chow and down a beaten path to the hastily built (and unheated) plywood latrine. We washed and shaved outside. The U.S. Army colonel who ran the base told me that no permanent structures would be built there; the policy of the Bush administration was to maintain a "light footprint'' for the few months it would take to finish off the war.

Just two weeks ago, near the end of my fifth tour in Afghanistan, I walked past a large, two-story brick building on a busy street at Kandahar Air Field (KAF), the huge NATO base in southern Afghanistan. It turned out to be an apartment building for American and allied military officers. I counted 12 rooms on each side, 24 air conditioned rooms per floor, two floors with bathrooms and shower rooms. Intrigued, I walked down the street and found another apartment building, and another, and another. Twelve in all, a village rising up out of the desert a few miles from Tarnak farms, the mud-walled compound where Osama bin Laden and the skyjackers perfected the 911 plot.

In Washington, the operative presidential declaration is that in July 2011 the troop withdrawal will commence because they will be increasingly unnecessary in the war. In Kandahar, meanwhile, so much construction is underway that KAF has its own cement factory that churns out concrete 24/7.

And that's just Kandahar. At other U.S. military bases across Afghanistan, bulldozers and cranes are at work, alongside battalions of carpenters, ditch diggers, gravel crushers, plumbers, steel girder welders and electricians, enlarging, expanding and improving.

The reality, in Afghanistan if not in Washington, is that the United States is digging in for the Long War.

That term was coined in 2006 by then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. He explained, when the term raised eyebrows among Americans impatient for victory, that "we're trying simply to tell the truth.''

At a Pentagon press briefing Feb. 1, 2006, Rumsfeld went on: " And the truth is that just as the Cold War lasted a long time, this war is something that is not going to go away.''

No such dismal outlook clouded President Obama's announcement last December that he had ordered an additional 30,000 troops into the fight. "After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home,'' he said in a speech at West Point. Beefing up U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan, and accelerating the training of Afghan forces, "will allow us to begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011,'' the president said, adding that "we will execute this transition responsibly, taking into account conditions on the ground.''

By now, of course, the reality of war -- the begrudging recognition that war by its nature is unpredictable – has begun to penetrate even Washington's fine marble buildings. Obama's flat assertion -- "after 18 months, our troops will begin to come home" -- has been contradicted by Defense Secretary Robert Gates (any drawdowns, he said on ABC's This Week Aug. 1, "will depend on conditions on the ground.'') as well as by Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the top Afghan war commander, Gen. David Petraeus. He has said the commencement of any transition would be "conditions-based.''

But it took the Marine Corps' blunt-spoken commandant, Gen. James Conway, who retires this fall, to name the rhetorical fig leaf that emerges from all the comments officials have made about July 2011: the White House could order an inconsequentially small withdrawal of, say, three dozen troops -- and claim it had fulfilled Obama's promise.
"I certainly believe some American unit, somewhere in Afghanistan, will turn over responsibilities to Afghan security forces in 2011,'' he told reporters at the Pentagon Tuesday. But not Marines in southern Afghanistan, he said, where "it will be a few years'' before any withdrawals are possible.

Seeming to call for some forthright talk from the Oval Office, the outgoing commandant added: "I sense our country is increasingly growing tired of the war, but I would remind [them] that the last of the 30,000 troops only arrived this month. I would also quote the analysis of one of my regimental commanders when asked about the pace of the war. He said, 'We can either lose fast or win slow.' ''

The upshot of all this hedging and backtracking, together with the steady drumbeat of sobering news from Afghanistan, is that a general understanding is emerging in Washington that July 2011 may come and go without any significant troop reductions, and perhaps without any troop reductions at all.

"To some extent now, there is more stability about the perception of the timeline than there was six months ago,'' said Steve Coll, president of the New America Foundation and the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden.''

"There's kind of an understanding that we're talking about a transition that will last [from] 2011 toward 2015,'' Coll said. And the fact that Petraeus will be guiding the pace of withdrawals will provide Obama some cover from political attack. Petraeus, Coll said, "is politically untouchable.''

Still, there are calls for the president himself to be more specific about what lies ahead, to bridge the gap between rhetoric and the reality that is emanating from Afghanistan.

"I think he deliberately wants some flexibility about what to do next summer,'' said Michael O'Hanlon, a Brookings Institution scholar and adviser to Petraeus.

"But I think he can preserve his leverage on various parties and maintain a little bit of cover with the Democratic Congress by being more direct, that it will take three or four years to phase out.''

Meantime, fresh U.S. troops are training to rotate into Afghanistan this fall to replace units that deployed there a year ago. And in Afghanistan itself, building for the Long War, and the fighting, will go on.