General Petraeus' Greatest Afghanistan Challenge: Eikenberry

As General Petraeus takes command of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, he needs to address five fundamental areas.

First, he must increase the tempo with which we are training and delivering qualified Afghan National Army and Police units to the field. In the highly tribal and disaggregated society of Afghanistan, this is a challenge. Morale is low because Afghan leaders steal troop pay or if the troops receive their pay, the soldiers have to travel hundreds of miles to get the money to their families.

Second, the campaign plan must include covert boots on the ground in Pakistan. Everyone I talk to says this is politically not palatable, but is a ten- year war a better option? I guarantee that if we get boots on the ground in Pakistan the Al Qaeda and Taliban insurgents in that region will scatter like cockroaches, making them far more susceptible to our targeting, just as happened in Kosovo when the KLA began attacking Serb forces, flushing the heavy tanks and artillery.

Third, alternative crops and markets for those crops have to be created so that farmers can pursue reasonable livelihoods beyond poppy. As I’ve mentioned before, there are now close to 150,000 troops and civilians in Afghanistan and none of them eat the first Afghan crop in the contracted dining facilities. Feeding the troops could be an economic engine in its own right, spawning processing centers, trucking infrastructure, and ancillary associated markets.

Fourth, U.S. forces must continue to infuse counter improvised explosive device (IED) technology into the fight to the maximum extent possible. IEDs are the number one killer of our troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan and we need to keep the pressure on the reinvigoration of U.S. and NATO efforts to train our forces, defeat the devices, and attack the enemy IED networks.

Lastly, and most importantly, General Petraeus should have a heart-to-heart with Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, a man wholly unqualified for the position, and convince him to step down. Eikenberry should do the honorable thing and quit his post on his own accord, but he’s just not that kind of a guy. He’s an angry man, bent on his own self-aggrandizement at the expense of others.

My experience with Eikenberry in Afghanistan showed him to be clueless when it came to situational understanding and deferential when it came to the enemy.

On the first point, as the 10th Mountain Division was deploying into theater, I vividly recall a video conference with him from Fort Drum where he said, “There’s nothing on this battlefield that a rifle squad can’t handle.” Now we have some tremendous 9-man rifle squads in our Army, but when we got to southern Afghanistan they were facing 200 strong Taliban formations and a year later, in the northeastern provinces, the Taliban overran a 173rd Airborne outpost manned by a rifle platoon (four squads). So, Eikenberry missed the entire Taliban campaign plan and build up, despite multiple warnings and he does not have a tactile feel for the enemy or other strategic players – at all.

Secondly, when the Taliban dropped a rocket on a school in Asadabad, killing a teacher and eight children, we rapidly pushed out a press release for his headquarters approval so that we could get first mover advantage in the constant information war. We documented that the Taliban had a deliberate campaign against schools and education in Afghanistan, killing dozens of teachers in front of students and burning or razing over 100 schools. Eikenberry denied the press release, deferring to the Taliban, writing in an email, “It could have been mistargeting.” Excuse me? We give the Taliban the benefit of the doubt after they’ve just killed innocent civilians? As you might guess, while Eikenberry was denying our request, the Taliban issued a statement that gave them first mover media advantage, saying, “This is not our doing.” And so it stood with the good people of Afghanistan.

As further evidence of Eikenberry’s incompetence, the Department of State recently issued an inspector general report detailing the failings of his ambassadorship, namely that he and his team are wholly unprepared for the civilian aspects of the surge that were a critical piece of President Obama’s strategy. This report is damning in the lack of preparation and concern for the overall strategy that General McChrystal was implementing. Eikenberry doesn’t play well with others. In fact, he doesn’t seem to do much.

So General Petraeus’ challenge is a daunting one not merely because Afghanistan is one third larger than Iraq with 8 million more people, limited infrastructure, and brutal terrain, but also because he has no Ryan Crocker equivalent that can get the civilians moving apace with the military effort.