The Day After: Why America Wins the War but Loses the Peace 9781501739637

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The Day After

The Day After

Why America Wins the War but Loses the Peace

Brendan R. Gallagher

Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

Copyright © 2019 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu. First published 2019 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Gallagher, Brendan R., 1978– author. Title: The day after : why America wins the war but loses the peace / Brendan R. Gallagher. Description: Ithaca, New York : Cornell University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019008044 (print) | LCCN 2019018062 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501739637 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501739644 (epub/mobi) | ISBN 9781501739620 (cloth ; alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Nation-building—United States—Case studies. | Peace-building, American—Case studies. | Postwar reconstruction— Case studies. | Kosovo War, 1998–1999—Participation, American. | Afghan War, 2001– | Iraq War, 2003–2011. | Libya—History—Civil War, 2011—Participation, American. | United States—Military policy. | United States—Foreign relations—1989– Classification: LCC JZ6300 (ebook) | LCC JZ6300 .G35 2019 (print) | DDC 327.1—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019008044 U.S. Marines in Afghanistan, 2009. © Peter van Agtmael/Magnum Photos.

For Elizabeth and our four terrific kids

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat. “I don’t care much where—” said Alice. “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat. “—so long as I get somewhere,” Alice added as an explanation. “Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Lewis Carroll

Just when I thought I was out . . . they pull me back in.

The Godfather: Part III Michael Corleone

Contents

Acknowledgments

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Introduction: A Troubling Pattern

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1. Kosovo: Not Perfect, but Tolerable

35

2. Afghanistan: A Road to Incoherence

69

3. Iraq: The Worst of All Worlds

109

4. Libya: A Slippery Slope

155

Conclusion: To Learn or Not to Learn

203

Note on Sources

227

Further Reading

231

Notes

235

Bibliography

279

Index

297

Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without extensive help and support. First, a wide range of interviews unearthed new knowledge that significantly influenced the trajectory of this book. I am grateful to dozens of civilian and military officials who provided personal recollections, candid insights, and other forms of crucial assistance. I would particularly like to thank General (retired) John Abizaid, Colonel (retired) Kevin Benson, General (retired) George Casey, Christopher Chivvis, Derek Chollet, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Joseph Collins, Ambassador James Dobbins, Colonel (retired) Michael Dziedzic, Peter Feaver, Colonel (retired) Thomas Fisher, Ben Fishman, Colonel (retired) Michael Fitzgerald, former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Michèle Flournoy, former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Ambassador Marc Grossman, General (retired) Carter Ham, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Leonard Hawley, Colonel (retired) Michael Hess, Colonel (retired) Paul Hughes, Michael Hurley, Lieutenant General (retired) Ralph Jodice, Erica Kaster, Admiral (retired) Samuel Locklear, Lieutenant General

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(retired) H. R. McMaster, former Special Assistant to the President Franklin Miller, Admiral (retired) Michael Mullen, Lieutenant Colonel (retired) John Nagl, General (retired) David Petraeus, Ambassador Thomas Pickering, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, General (retired) Joseph Ralston, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense James Schear, Ambassador Gregory Schulte, Admiral (retired) James Stavridis, Ambassador William Taylor, Andrew Wilder, General (retired) Anthony Zinni, and others who took the time to share valuable insights. At Princeton, I was grateful for invaluable feedback and advice from Aaron Friedberg, Gary Bass, Keren Yarhi-Milo, and Michael O’Hanlon. I also thank the broader Princeton Woodrow Wilson School community for many helpful suggestions, including those provided by John-Michael Arnold, Thomas Christensen, Mindy Haas, Doyle Hodges, Jeongseok Lee, Colonel John Schutte, Jacob Shapiro, Travis Sharp, and Aaron Taylor, among many others. I owe a particular debt to Jacob Shapiro for allowing me to present my working concept to his graduate course on terrorism and civil war. Additionally, I am grateful to the Bradley Foundation for its support of my research. The team at Cornell University Press has been top-notch in every way. My editor, Emily Andrew, believed in this project from the beginning. Her sound advice and the support of the entire team at Cornell University Press truly made this book possible. The constructive feedback of Dominic Tierney, James Dobbins, and other readers also helped improve the manuscript in countless ways. I am further indebted to Gary Bass, Greg Behrman, and former Acting Secretary of the Army Patrick Murphy for their efforts in helping me locate a publisher. I thank Army University Public Affairs for reviewing the manuscript and clearing its release to the public, as well as the U.S. Department of Defense Office of Prepublication and Security Review for reviewing and clearing vignettes related to my military service. More broadly, I am grateful that the U.S. Army has allowed me to serve as an infantry officer for eighteen years and counting, and for providing me an opportunity to think deeply about an important strategic puzzle. Throughout my military career I’ve had unparalleled opportunities to work, eat, sleep, and live alongside some of the most inspiring, devoted people one could imagine. It has truly been an incredible honor to lead and command infantry soldiers in combat. Serving more than three years

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in various parts of Iraq and Afghanistan, ranging from the often unforgiving streets of Baghdad and Fallujah to sprawling mountains and towns near the Afghan-Pakistan border, gave me a firsthand perspective on the evolution of these wars, along with their lasting consequences. Tragically, I lost young soldiers under my command and lost one my closest friends, Army Captain Jon Grassbaugh, to a roadside bomb in Iraq. I am forever indebted to every one of them for their service and sacrifice. The lessons we extract from these conflicts could hardly be of greater importance. My deepest thanks go to my wife, Elizabeth, and our four amazing kids for their love and support throughout this entire process, especially during years of deployments to faraway lands. The views reflected in this book are my own and should not be construed as reflecting the views of the U.S. Army, the U.S. Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.

Introduction A Troubling Pattern

Then it’s the day after Qaddafi is gone, when everybody is feeling good and everybody is holding up posters saying, “Thank you, America.” At that moment, there has to be a much more aggressive effort to rebuild societies that didn’t have any civic traditions. . . . So that’s a lesson that I now apply every time I ask the question, “Should we intervene, militarily? Do we have an answer [for] the day after?” President Barack Obama New York Times interview, August 2014

Afghanistan. March 18, 2002. Immediately after the devastating 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush had decided, “We were going to find out who did this, and kick their ass.”1 For the moment, it seems we have done exactly that. Operation Anaconda has just ended. The remnants of Al Qaeda and Taliban leadership are currently on the run. U.S. power has reached a new zenith. The Bush administration now has extraordinary domestic and international support that it can use to try to reorient Afghanistan and prevent its future use as a terrorist sanctuary. Under the watchful eye of the world’s superpower, the interim Afghan leadership appears to have a chance to chart a new course. Afghanistan’s future seems bright. Iraq. May 1, 2003. We have just decimated Iraq’s military with breathtaking speed and efficiency. After Saddam’s statue tumbles down in Firdos

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Square, President Bush, while aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, triumphantly announces the end of major combat operations. The prominent “Mission Accomplished” banner behind the president suggests that we did precisely what we came to do. After decades of dictatorship, could we now seize this moment, alter Iraq’s trajectory, and create a beachhead of democracy in the Middle East? To many, particularly those who pushed strongly for the invasion, it seems that we could hardly have asked for a more promising occasion to pursue this vision. Libya. October 31, 2011. The seven-month-long coalition air campaign comes to a successful end with the potential humanitarian disaster averted and Qaddafi dead. Encouragingly, these milestones were achieved at only a fraction of the cost of other unpopular wars. The Obama administration has seemingly engineered a new model of intervention, and Libya appears likely to be a notable feather in the president’s cap. For now, a widespread sense of optimism is infectious. The wind is at our backs, and there seems to be a singular path to shape Libya’s way forward. Could the Libyan people have a real shot at a more tranquil, prosperous, and perhaps even democratic future? At each moment highlighted above, the situation seemed highly favorable. Our military achieved what it set out to do. We mopped the floor with our enemies. We accomplished virtually all the battlefield objectives. We had a unique moment to build on success and try to foster a new political order. In short, the United States was now in a dominant position to try to impose its will, alongside its wartime partners. But as we know today, none of these stories ended particularly well. Instead of a new dawn of peace, we surrendered the initiative, and vacuums spawned in these places that ushered in violence, insurgencies, and chaos. Worsening conditions created the ominous prospect of renewed U.S. military action in some of the same areas we had already spilled blood and spent treasure. This contributed to deep disillusionment regarding the use of U.S. military power and a growing sense by the public that the United States should “mind its own business internationally,” as a Pew Research Center poll found.2 Many Americans would soon lose confidence in their government’s ability to devise and execute sound policy, as the “establishment” became discredited in their eyes. These developments, combined with other factors, helped usher in a tidal wave of change in the United States that has implicitly embodied an assault on the post-1945

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international order. Even previously unthinkable questions would soon rise to the surface, such as whether America would continue to lead on the global stage and whether we would continue to strive to uphold democracy in any meaningful way. As these wars were unfolding at the time, I personally witnessed and felt many of the immediate consequences firsthand. From as early as I can remember, I felt driven to serve my country. My paternal grandfather served as a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division during World War II, jumped into Sainte-Mère-Église on D-Day, and received the Purple Heart. On my mother’s side, my grandfather was a combat medic at the Battle of the Bulge, earning three Bronze Stars. Hence, I volunteered to enter the U.S. Army and have had the great honor and privilege of serving as an active-duty infantry officer since 2001 and commanding at multiple levels. Upon joining the ranks as a new lieutenant, I absorbed a key lesson: move to the sound of the guns. Go where the action is. So that’s what I did. After September 11, 2001, I completed seven deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, including multiple tours as a leader in the elite Army Rangers. This afforded an opportunity to serve alongside countless exceedingly brave, selfless, and inspiring people from all walks of life. But on occasion when our combat operations would briefly quiet down and I had a moment to gather my thoughts, I recall wondering, How did we get here? In other words, what was the initial plan that got us into some truly chaotic situations? Why didn’t our nation anticipate the obvious challenges before they struck us squarely in the face? A few years after the Iraq invasion, I was on my third combat tour, having recently taken command of a mechanized infantry company in western Baghdad. It was an extremely violent month: IEDs (improvised explosive devices) contributed to fourteen American deaths in our battalion’s area of operations, three from my company. Each patrol sent outside the wire seemed to be a horrible roll of the dice, with no rhyme or reason regarding who might be blown up, maimed, or killed. At nearly the same time, we were informed our tour in Iraq would be extended from twelve to fifteen months. Trying to do the mental math of how many more memorial services we might conduct by the time our unit redeployed was deeply disconcerting, not to mention anticipating how many more soldiers would suffer broken bones, disfigurements, amputated limbs, or other life-changing injuries.

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During this time, I recall a particularly emotional memorial service for a soldier in a sister company within our battalion. As the collective stress level seemed to reach a boiling point, a palpable sense of frustration hung in the air. We loitered outside the makeshift chapel at our forward operating base after the service ended, and I talked with a fellow captain out of earshot of other soldiers. I recall asking him (paraphrasing now from memory): What if we’d never come here? What if we’d taken all this energy we put into Iraq and just focused on Afghanistan from the start, and actually tried to get Afghanistan “right” after 9/11? He sighed in response. Yeah, man, you’re probably right. In between combat patrols and a seemingly endless string of enemy engagements, I started thinking more about these sorts of counterfactuals. How did we mess up these wars so badly? What were our plans going in from the beginning? Couldn’t we have made better choices and perhaps fostered different outcomes? And what should we ultimately learn from all of this to help us make smarter decisions down the road? Several years (and several more deployments) later, I monitored unfolding events in Libya with a familiar sense of disbelief. How did a new administration mess things up again, particularly an administration that had seemed so determined to avoid the mistakes of its predecessor? We’d initiated military action in a foreign land (again) and helped topple an odious regime (again), only to essentially replace the regime with nothing (again), thereby allowing disaster and chaos to unfold (again). Stunningly, we had lurched into another conflict with no coherent plan for what to do the day after military victory. Once again, we became the dog chasing the car, and, upon catching it, we had no idea what to do next. The idea for this book developed in my mind over more than a decade, spanning these overseas tours. The more time I spent in war zones, the more it became clear that there had been little if any coherent “plan” to win the peace. Eventually, when I was presented an opportunity to pursue a doctoral degree, I seized it, with the hope that it might provide a chance to reflect on all that I had experienced and ideally make a contribution to help preclude future disasters. The book you are holding is the product of that effort. Are all these debacles just an embarrassing footnote in the history books that we’d be better off simply forgetting and moving on? Although that

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might be tempting, I’d strongly recommend against it. In assessing their collective legacy, we should acknowledge the staggering costs of losing the peace in political, economic, diplomatic, reputational, moral, and human terms. Across these interventions, we have spent trillions of dollars.3 Multiple U.S. presidents mobilized—and squandered—significant political capital. There was lasting damage done to America’s reputation and credibility. Terrorist threats often intensified, and local populations felt let down by U.S. assurances of a better future. Further, many Americans soon believed that they’d been hoodwinked by their own government. Then there is the enormous human cost of these debacles. The U.S. military alone has lost nearly 7,000 lives across these war zones, with more than 52,000 wounded, many of whom suffered debilitating injuries that they will continue to cope with for decades.4 When I think about the human cost, I recall the faces of soldiers I lost. I have permanently etched in my mind the visual imprint of brave fallen warriors under my command. I recall visiting wounded subordinates in the combat support hospital after they had endured multiple amputations, courageously struggling to maintain hold on life, until in some cases they eventually succumbed to their injuries. And I recall the many times we conducted a slow, final salute at a framed photo of a valiant comrade next to a pair of empty desert boots and an inverted M-4 rifle with a helmet on the buttstock and dog tags dangling from the pistol grip. All too often, our tally of the human costs ends here. But that would be woefully incomplete. Whereas eventually Washington may decide to withdraw and go home, for the local population, this is their home. They may have few options but to stay and suffer the consequences. I still recall the assurances I personally gave countless Iraqis on their doorsteps, in their kitchens, and in their living rooms that we would continue to help them as best we could. But ultimately, we have sometimes turned our back, and many perished in the chaos that followed under the brutality of groups such as ISIS. Inexcusably, we even sometimes abandoned the extraordinary local interpreters who had risked everything to help us. This all connects to a difficult moral dilemma regarding what we should do about war-ravaged populations still struggling to survive, many years after we first intervened. When we topple a foreign government, do

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we incur a moral obligation to foster a better, more democratic government that improves the quality of life for the people? Or is it sometimes OK to risk American blood and treasure, anoint a friendly strongman, and leave? Some might rationalize what happens next by expressing some variant of “Hey, we gave the locals a chance, but they blew it.” However, such an attitude can understate our own moral culpability. In line with Colin Powell’s so-called Pottery Barn rule, when we topple a tyrant, the world will usually be looking squarely at the United States to take charge of the day after, whether we want that mantle or not. How we respond will shape America’s moral authority and leadership on the global stage. I frequently recall the plight of Hanan, a good-natured teenage girl in Baghdad. Long after the 2003 invasion, Hanan was severely injured by an IED blast that caused substantial nerve damage to her face. A local doctor performed a shoddy skin graft, leaving half of her face badly disfigured. My subordinates and I repeatedly interacted with Hanan, her family, medical professionals, and others to try to find a way to fix the damage that had been done, and nearly succeeded, only to redeploy with her situation frustratingly unresolved.5 Hence, when I think of the human costs of losing the peace, I also remember innocents like Hanan, who suffer for years through no fault of their own, well after these wars are supposedly “over.” So overall, I would suggest the costs of losing the peace have been quite high indeed. This is a book about an uncomfortable subject: why does the most powerful nation in the world achieve triumphant military victories but botch nearly everything that comes next? In each case our military achieved smashing success on the battlefield, and there was a short period of self-congratulation. But not long after we popped the champagne, things went horribly wrong. As we explore this central puzzle, we will delve into fascinating subpuzzles that emerge. For example, after the unprecedented shock of 9/11, why didn’t the Bush administration leverage this unique moment to develop a holistic strategy for Afghanistan? We likely could have gained overwhelming support for it. Or, given that we had years to prepare for post-Saddam Iraq, why were we caught flat-footed at the moment Baghdad fell? On a related note, why did we fail to learn from the 1990–1991

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Gulf War, despite the fact that the 2003 war was waged against basically the same enemy, was overseen by some of the same U.S. officials, and was led by the former president’s son? And years later, with the full knowledge of our earlier blunders in Afghanistan and Iraq, why did the Obama administration make strikingly similar mistakes in Libya with a familiar confluence of wishful thinking, excessive reliance on exiles, and lofty forecasts about oil and democratization? These sub-puzzles also raise another provocative question: what if we had undertaken serious, robust planning for each of these wars? Might it have altered the lasting outcomes that took shape? People naturally want to make sense of unsettling events, and many Americans are still searching for a compelling narrative to explain these fiascos. This book seeks to address this need by filling an important gap in the literature. It should prove useful to anyone thirsting for an explanation of what went wrong and what we should do about it. To be sure, there have been other books written on postwar issues. In my judgment a few of the strongest books in recent years are those by Gideon Rose and Dominic Tierney. They provide excellent, well-researched accounts with sharp insights. But these books do not specifically focus on postwar planning across our recent wars—that is, what were the original political and military plans crafted, and how precisely did they affect the lasting outcomes? Nadia Schadlow’s recent book examines postwar challenges as well, but it too does not focus mainly on planning, and, I’d argue, her book’s operational-level focus gives an impression that postwar issues are mainly the military’s problem to solve, which I’d suggest is not the full story. Aaron Rapport’s book does address planning, but mainly for twentieth-century conflicts, and its academic tone may limit its accessibility to wider audiences.6 I hope that my combination of infantry combat experience and academic qualifications gives me a unique platform to explore this puzzle by bringing a fresh perspective to the topic. Ideally, this book can serve as a single, go-to book that highlights much of what went right and wrong in U.S.-led wars of the last twenty years, written by an Army lieutenant colonel who has witnessed events up close. Because this topic is of immense importance and because we continue to make similar mistakes again and again, a fresh look is warranted from a new vantage point.

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Much of the material gathered for this book is brand-new. This book incorporates dozens of new interviews I conducted with civilian and military officials, ranging from mid-level planners to four-star generals and cabinet secretaries who were in charge at the time. Often, these officials were surprisingly blunt in their recollections to me, bringing further richness and new insights to this story. At the outset of his masterful Vietnam War book The Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam describes how he “could hardly wait to go to work each day” as he undertook an array of fascinating interviews that helped him piece together an intricate but truly important puzzle.7 Each day that I conducted research and interviews, I came to share a similar passion and sense of motivation. In addition to dozens of new interviews, this book also incorporates fresh analysis of declassified planning documents, National Security Council (NSC) meeting summaries, internal memoranda and correspondence, presidential phone transcripts, after-action reports, memoirs, and other primary and secondary sources, as well as my own personal experiences overseas. Like Halberstam’s work, a sense of impending doom hangs over the chapters that follow. We all know the outcomes, but how did we get there? Why did things fall apart? As U.S. officials make obvious missteps, parts of this book may almost resemble a horror movie in which you want to yell at the screen, “No, don’t go in the basement!”8 Yet although virtually all of us are aware of the unsettling outcomes in places such as Afghanistan and Iraq, we tend to have an incomplete picture of exactly how we got there. Further, the conflicts in Kosovo and Libya are particularly illunderstood by the U.S. public today. This book puts all four of these wars in a broader context by weaving them into a larger story. Most of my adult life, I have dealt with the unintended consequences of these wars and the life-and-death impacts they generated. I have invested years of my life, led infantry units on the front lines, conducted countless patrols and combat operations, been in multiple convoys hit by roadside bombs, and lost valorous young soldiers under my command. I feel driven to explore this compelling topic and to pursue the answers that have eluded us for too long. Can America get the postwar phase right? Human lives, politics, money, elections, credibility, and the leadership role of the United States may hinge on the answer.

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Clausewitz Revisited The postwar phase cannot be treated as an afterthought for someone else to worry about: if anything, it is the main event that shapes lasting victory or defeat, and it is inextricably linked to the war itself. As the Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz stated, “War is merely the continuation of policy by other means. . . . The political object is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and means can never be considered in isolation from their purpose.”9 This suggests that battlefield events that unfold in the short term can be far outweighed by political outcomes that form over the long term. If the U.S. government grasps this symbiotic relationship between war and politics, then our behavior in recent conflicts has not reflected it. In the wake of impressive military victories, we were astonishingly ill-prepared to handle what came next. We quickly committed fumbles that allowed hostile actors to pick up the ball and run with it, as the world watched in disbelief. It seems rather obvious that the military campaign is the easy part, and once it is complete, that is when the truly difficult part begins: securing the peace. But we routinely get it backward by focusing nearly all our attention on the combat phase while neglecting the far more important political endgame. Without question, planning for a postwar environment is tough. There can be difficulties in terms of limited planning time, bureaucratic challenges, competing priorities, and the occasional need for secrecy. Further, in the war-torn country, there are almost always countercurrents at play. Ultimately, even a good plan may not survive intact because the enemy always gets a “vote.” However, we should remember that the United States has accomplished some incredibly ambitious and difficult feats over the past century. The United States played a crucial role in the defeat of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan during World War II (albeit with substantial Soviet help) and, in doing so, helped achieve a historic victory over fascism.10 In the subsequent period, the United States used its newfound hegemony to establish a new world order of liberal institutions and transformed its former enemies into close partners.11 In 1969 the United States became the first and only country to walk on the Moon, and two decades later we won a multigenerational struggle against a rival superpower. More recently, America’s intellectual capital contributed to a global information revolution that ushered forth Facebook, Google, Twitter, and

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other platforms that have fundamentally changed the way that people communicate and use information, in ways both good and bad. Even today, the United States is an economic powerhouse, American cultural influence has remarkable sway, and the U.S. military is the best-equipped, best-trained, most-lethal fighting force in the world. In short, we have pulled off many extremely difficult tasks, some of which probably seemed almost impossible at the time. Given this track record, it probably should not be surprising that we routinely win overwhelming battlefield victories against weaker opponents. But it is more difficult to grasp why we would be so bad at preparing for what comes next. Like the 1993 film Groundhog Day, each postwar failure was depressingly familiar, evoking a sense that we had seen this before. Our decisive victories were seemingly overturned by disenfranchised groups, insurgents, militias, or “pockets of dead enders,” in Donald Rumsfeld’s words.12 How could this repeatedly happen? Many existing accounts treat these wars separately, as if each debacle had a unique logic of its own. We often focus on seemingly discrete errors, such as the gaffes by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Iraq. Did these errors matter? Absolutely. But repeated mistakes across multiple wars and administrations beg the question: What if these were not disconnected, one-off episodes? What if they had similar root causes we have not yet fully grasped? We need a comparative study of postwar planning across multiple wars and administrations to identify recurring themes and lessons. Interestingly, the postwar challenges that emerged did not come as a complete shock to some people. In each case there were those who saw the approaching storm and strongly recommended we either avoid war altogether or take sensible precautionary steps. Thus, sometimes postwar planning did in fact occur. But these efforts were routinely ignored at higher levels of government. It was like being handed the answers to the test but casually tossing them in the trash. Were good outcomes simply impossible to attain? It is true that we do not usually invade “easy” places—such as advanced, industrialized, unified democracies—that have pleasant conditions for postwar tranquility. Instead, we usually invade “hard” places—fractured, economically underdeveloped autocracies with unfamiliar cultures—where the starting conditions on the ground are grim. It is usually a herculean task to take a

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divided society that has suffered under repression for decades and transform it into a functioning democracy. Hence, we did not have absolute power to overhaul the social and political fabric of these war-torn lands. Yet in each instance we did have a substantial degree of leverage and influence, at least for a moment in time. In this book I suggest that there is an interaction between the preconditions in the targeted country and our postwar strategy. If both parts are in total disrepair, the odds of a good outcome are vanishingly small, like a weak swimmer struggling against a fierce current. But if one (or preferably both) are in reasonable shape, then the odds begin to rise for a decent outcome. In our recent history, each smashing military victory created a unique “golden hour” to try to shape each state’s path, in light of the enormous challenges.13 Yet we failed to take advantage of the fleeting opportunities. As one senior military official told me bluntly in an interview, “Postwar planning is annex Z in the war plan. And there’s nothing in it.”14 This neglect has contributed to deeply harmful foreign and domestic consequences that continue to resonate today. All too often, our improvisational approach to postwar planning has been like the Wallace and Gromit sequence in which Gromit hastily puts down each section of train track mere milliseconds before the train barrels over it. We must do better because the negative consequences of these debacles have been truly enormous. To help tackle these issues, this book explains a broader phenomenon that, to this point, we have not fully understood.

The Underlying Tension We generally do not spend enough time thinking about the endgame of war. But to the extent we do think about it, a fundamental ambivalence characterizes our approach to postwar situations and helps create bad outcomes. The tension consists of two countervailing impulses: our impulse to promote democracy and our competing impulse to get out of the war-torn country as soon as possible. Both impulses practically seem to be embedded in America’s DNA, yet they are inherently at odds with each other. The more aggressively we pursue one, the more it undermines the other. This fosters uncomfortable choices that we usually want to sidestep, so, rather than reconcile the tension, we engage in magical thinking and

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try to do both. It spawns an incoherent and fatally flawed approach. Subsequent events become far more likely to spin out of control. Establishing a path to democracy for a fragmented society emerging from decades of repression is almost always a long-term project. Even a remote chance of success requires local understanding, deliberate planning, and substantial resources to establish security and nurture legitimate institutions over an extended period. In contrast, pursuing a rapid withdrawal prioritizes an accelerated drawdown of resources and attention. When we are unable to choose between the two, it fosters a massive gap between ends and means. Such a postwar effort is more likely to fail. A more detailed look at each of these two impulses helps show what is happening. First, let’s look at the impulse to promote democracy. It reflects ideals that are enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. The basic premise that people have the right to participate in free and fair elections that produce a representative government is a deeply rooted cornerstone of America’s self-image. Woodrow Wilson was a key advocate of the notion that liberal democratic governments embody “the key to peace and security,” and he wanted the United States to promote democracy abroad to contribute the betterment of mankind and to improve the chances of world peace.15 As one study on U.S. political-military coordination put it, “Americans believe that their country has a unique mission to champion democracy and to defend human rights . . . they respond strongly to arguments based on America’s fundamental values.”16 But perhaps we should back up for a moment. What exactly does “democracy” even mean anyway? Tony Smith aptly defines it as follows: A democracy is a political system institutionalized under the rule of law, wherein an autonomous civil society, whose individuals join together voluntarily into groups with self-designated purposes, collaborate with each other through the mechanisms of political parties and establish through freely contested elections a system of representative government.17

So democracy is about more than just the physical act of holding elections. It entails the establishment of government institutions that can provide a secure environment to protect an open exchange of ideas, civic discourse, freedom of speech, a free press, rule of law, individual freedoms,

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and human rights. These cornerstones are often associated with the term liberal democracy. If elections are held without these cornerstones in place, then we can easily end up with a sham process in which a democratic facade shields a thinly veiled autocracy. Indeed, in some countries today, basic democratic underpinnings are being eroded, so a democracy may technically exist on paper, but in truth, creeping authoritarianism is at work behind the scenes.18 With this in mind, when I use the term “promoting democracy” in this book, it refers to actions intended to set conditions for free and fair elections, along with the liberal democratic institutions that underpin them. Sometimes when times get tough (or when other priorities are deemed more important), our leaders may settle for the simple act of holding elections, but that is problematic because it may not foster a legitimate democracy in the long run. Altruism is not the sole motive at work here. Advancing democracy can be a practical way to advance U.S. security and prosperity. As Paul Miller asserts, “Rebuilding states can seem to great powers an attractive and plausible way to reorder the postwar political environment to better serve their interests.”19 Creating liberal democracies roughly in our image can foster a landscape more conducive to expanding U.S. political, economic, military, and cultural power. Hence, there are self-interested as well as altruistic reasons for us to promote democracy in the aftermath of war. By the end of World War II, the United States reached a new pinnacle of power, and in this capacity we sought to expand democracy’s reach. The formative experiences in post-1945 Germany and Japan embodied the American drive to promote democracy as we transformed our two authoritarian enemies into the closest of democratic allies over time. In the case of West Germany, the United States spearheaded denazification and demilitarization, furnished significant economic assistance, deployed an occupation force, and encouraged binding to international institutions to help pave the way for a step-by-step adoption of democratic practices and norms.20 In the case of Japan, General MacArthur led what amounted to a U.S.-dominated “revolution from above” to transform Japanese society and induce democratization.21 Notably, as President Roosevelt stated in 1942 with regard to Japan, “Sure, we are going to rehabilitate them. Why? Not only from the humanitarian point of view . . . but from the point of our own pocket books, and our safety from future war.” His thinking coincided with widespread American sentiments that if the

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international landscape did not fundamentally change, it could spawn another major strategic threat and perhaps even spark a third world war.22 These two cases helped bolster the idealistic notion that the United States has a unique responsibility to promote democracy and act as a force for good in a turbulent world. Germany and Japan are also sometimes perceived as the gold standard in postwar planning, although the actual historical record is more complex. In the case of Japan, for example, the United States undertook aggressive preparation by establishing government subcommittees to help deal with economic reconstruction, security, and legal challenges while educating U.S. military officers on Japanese history and the nuts and bolts of postwar occupation, with planning efforts getting under way as early as 1942.23 Yet President Roosevelt personally showed a lack of interest in many details of postwar Japan, and most of the aforementioned military officers trained on postwar duties were not actually assigned to work in MacArthur’s command.24 Although the U.S. planning for postwar Germany also had some positive attributes, Secretary of War Henry Stimson believed that the process exposed a “chaotic administration and its utter failure to treat matters in a well organized way.”25 One could delve into a far lengthier analysis of these two planning efforts, but putting aside their strengths and weaknesses, we should acknowledge the extraordinary uniqueness of both cases. The United States was engaged in total war on an unprecedented, global scale and benefited from the wholehearted commitment of the public. This created enormous political will to stay invested and apply resources for years. These dynamics, among other unique aspects (including favorable economic and societal conditions, and Germany’s prior familiarity with democracy), rendered Germany and Japan fundamentally distinct from the places where we have fought in recent decades. Yet the two cases remain important partly because they fortified America’s self-image as the world’s leading promoter of democracy. Guided by widespread beliefs of democracy’s virtues, realpolitik motives, and the more practical observation that mature democracies rarely go to war with one another,26 the United States has often promoted democracy abroad. Democracy promotion became a central part of America’s national narrative and has affected our policy decisions. When we topple a regime and this question arises—“Well, we broke it, so what do we do now?”—the

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default answer is generally “Let’s create a new government that reflects our democratic institutions and that looks like a mirror image of us.”27 As an outgrowth of this, a 2003 RAND study went so far as to conclude that “nation-building is the inescapable responsibility of the world’s only superpower.”28 Most Americans would almost certainly balk at such a farreaching claim, but the prevailing sense of U.S. exceptionalism and can-do optimism has reinforced the drive to foster democracies in our image. But an important caveat is in order. This impulse to promote democracy is not the only show in town. Although it shapes Washington’s actions, it can sometimes be outweighed by other factors, particularly when we are not in the heat of battle.29 Hence, the United States has not always promoted democracy, and in fact we have sometimes undermined democracy. We have quietly supported undemocratic coups, and in lowervisibility cases Americans have shown a willingness to look the other way. In the 1950s, for example, the United States engineered coups to snuff out democratizing governments in Guatemala and Iran to try to stem the advance of communism.30 This sparks accusations of hypocrisy: America selectively promotes democratic values when it suits our interests and then conveniently abandons those values to support friendly autocrats when it doesn’t. For example, as Franklin Roosevelt purportedly said of Anastasio Somoza García of Nicaragua, “He may be a son-of-a-bitch, but he is our son-of-a-bitch.”31 In this sense, promoting democracy may be perceived as merely a screen for advancing American power and influence. Although critics can sometimes take this argument too far, it is true that the United States has repeatedly fallen short of its ideals and that we have deliberately undermined democracy on multiple occasions. When we are actively engaged in war, however, we cross a major psychological threshold, and our goals can be put under a far brighter spotlight, with greater reputational consequences. As Dominic Tierney states, “When the first shot is fired, the public rallies around the flag,” which triggers an intense, knee-jerk eagerness to change the world in our image.32 Today, it is difficult to imagine a scenario in which we would risk blood and treasure to go to war, topple the dictator, and then deliberately establish a new dictator in the aftermath with the eyes of the world upon us. Such an outcome would likely strike most U.S. citizens as morally wrong and un-American. For example, when it came to light that during the 2003 Iraq invasion, the Pentagon leadership quietly sought to airlift

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Ahmad Chalabi to Baghdad in an apparent attempt to allow him to seize power, it was quickly derided. An effort to rig the outcome and “anoint” a new leader at the culminating point of war is unlikely to sit well with many Americans.33 In short, Americans have a complicated relationship with promoting democracy: by default, most Americans generally want to do so for multiple valid reasons, especially in the heat of battle, but it is not the only priority. Hence, our leaders may verbally commit to promoting democracy to advance an attractive narrative and help boost support for war. But this can paint us into a corner once the fighting wraps up by establishing an extremely high bar and committing to an ambitious path before weighing the long-term costs. So while the impulse to promote democracy embodies one American tendency, it can be contested by other factors. In particular, a second tendency also comes into play: our impulse to quickly declare victory and go home. The searing images associated with our haunting legacy in Vietnam, along with other episodes such as the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing, the 1993 Black Hawk Down events in Mogadishu, and most recently the messy aftermath of the 2003 Iraq invasion, contribute to a desire to avoid getting U.S. troops bogged down overseas. The terms “Vietnam syndrome,” “quagmire,” “mission creep,” “slippery slope,” and other related phrases with pejorative connotations conjure up images of our troops being sucked into another unwinnable vortex that ends in catastrophe. This fosters the approach outlined by David Edelstein: “When in doubt, leave.”34 Hence, many Americans feel inclined to quickly pack our bags and go home as soon as the last battle is won. Similar to the desire to promote democracy, the desire to rapidly withdraw is also propelled by strongly held beliefs about the world, but in this case the historical reference points are mostly in the post-Vietnam era. One implicit belief is that long interventions are likely to spark blowback at home and abroad, which may make them counterproductive and unsustainable. U.S. domestic politics can loom large, as policy makers often assume that the U.S. public will not tolerate a long excursion in a faraway land. Another implicit idea is that nation building is akin to “welfare,” so the United States should avoid fostering a sense of dependency, and instead we should empower others to lift themselves up by their own bootstraps to quickly take charge of their own affairs.35 Further, another related

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belief is that our military should focus first and foremost on traditional war fighting—“to kill and break things,”36 as Sarkesian and Connor put it—rather than on unglamorous peacekeeping-type missions. Collectively, such beliefs can bolster the notion that we should rapidly withdraw after combat to avoid getting sucked into costly, unpopular efforts that could become the next Vietnam. The Weinberger-Powell doctrine partly grew out of such attitudes during the 1980s, and these attitudes still resonate today. This impulse to quickly get out reflects strong domestic political pressures, and it entails shrinking resource commitments, reducing our footprint, and minimizing exposure. It encourages greater reliance on others (such as exiles, local leaders, and other countries) to rapidly take charge. In this way, we focus on liberation rather than occupation by quickly putting the ball in someone else’s court. The long-term fate of the war-torn country may be demoted to a subordinate status. Mere stability might be perceived as “good enough.”37 We did our part; now someone else can clean up the rest. These two goals, when simultaneously envisioned, create a significant problem. On the one hand, promoting democracy in a broken society almost always requires extensive preparation, resources, time, and energy to build robust institutions. As Roland Paris argues, it takes significant time and effort to foster “domestic institutions that are capable of managing the destabilizing effects of democratization and marketization” in a way that fosters any reasonable chance of success.38 Promoting democracy offers the promise of a favorable outcome, but it usually requires substantial investment, political will, and understanding of local challenges. The end is highly ambitious, and so are the means required. On the other hand, the goal of getting out entails a far lighter, shorter commitment and is usually associated with wanting to assume less political risk. Although it offers the advantage of lowering costs and pulling back our forces to safety, it also decreases our leverage over the lasting outcome, can facilitate a backsliding of fragile gains, and eventually might even pave the way for renewed intervention. These impulses pull our strategy in opposing directions and reveal why our postwar effort can drift into incoherence. Americans are generally attracted to the idea of promoting democracy, especially while the bullets are whizzing by, but dislike the hard nationbuilding spadework required to pull it off.39 Hence, Paul Hughes, who

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served at the CPA in Iraq, recalls that our political goal in Iraq “seemed to be changing almost every other day. . . . What is our goal here? Are we doing nation building, or are we supposed to be getting out of here? It just kept going back and forth, and it was just confusing to us.”40 This tension is primarily an American problem. To be sure, other nations have toppled regimes from time to time, and other nations (like Great Britain) have sought to promote democracy. But there is an enormous difference in scale and frequency. In recent decades the United States is the one nation that has gone to war to topple foreign governments on an almost routine basis and then reflexively sought to establish democracy in the aftermath. The end of the cold war, which loosened up bipolar restraints and discredited communism, created new opportunities for us to promote democracy even more aggressively than before.41 But our instinct to quickly pull up the stakes and go home complicates the situation. Thus, although this tension can have relevance for some other countries, it has been heavily Americanized in practice. One impulse is the familiar American can-do, roll-up-our-sleeves attitude; the opposing impulse is to let others sweep up the mess. If our leaders do not recognize this tension by making tough choices, we will often embark on the path of least resistance by awkwardly trying to fuse elements of both. We announce a path to democracy as our goal to justify the war’s moral righteousness while we also fail to follow through and set conditions for a rapid withdrawal after the culminating battle. The former commander of U.S. Central Command, General Anthony Zinni, describes “a sense of hubris or arrogance we have . . . [the idea that] we’re going to beam in Jeffersonian democracy and free market economy in a shake-and-bake, short-term way.”42 This represents an untenable combination of a grand political end with meager means to achieve it. Similar to Icarus flying too close to the sun with wings of only feathers and wax, we announce a glorious, maximalist goal but fail to provide the necessary resources as we rush to the exit. This muddled approach is unsound and will almost always result in disappointment, if not outright disaster. The collision of incompatible goals helps explain why, several years after successful invasions, tens of thousands of U.S. troops (including myself) were still dodging insurgent snipers and roadside bombs without a coherent strategy in place.

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Three Tasks Unfortunately, there is no magic solution to this dilemma. But we can tilt the odds in our favor by being more honest about the postwar choices that our leaders face. To bring this tension to the surface and provoke tough but necessary decisions, I argue that we should tackle three interconnected planning tasks: identify a clear, achievable political goal; anticipate and try to mitigate the foreseeable obstacles; and mobilize resources aligned with the goal. This approach is not a silver bullet. However, it does provide a sensible way to force the key postwar trade-offs in front of our leaders in order to help better align ends with means, which is the single most important function of postwar planning. These tasks embody a “best practices” framework that is used throughout the book. They can help improve the odds of success while reducing the odds of disaster. If our time and resources were limitless, we could do everything on our wish list. But that is not the sort of world we live in. Strategy entails weighing trade-offs and setting priorities in a dynamic environment, given limited time, energy, and resources. As one senior U.S. official put it to me in an interview, “What is sorely lacking, in my view, in all these [wars] . . . is OK, what’s the strategy, what’s the end state, and then how do you get there?”43 Tackling these three tasks can help us assemble the cornerstones of a coherent strategy. A brief look at each of them illustrates their importance before we delve into why they are easier said than done. First, we should identify a clear, achievable political goal. This should be a realistic vision of the new political order we expect to take root after military victory. Often, our leaders establish a clear goal for the combat phase but then sidestep the aftermath we intend to foster once the fighting ends. Our political goal should avoid a state of affairs that can be propped up for a brief, soaring moment before collapsing in on itself. Instead, we should focus on a stable order that can withstand the test of time. Put differently, we should not foster “sand castles destined to be washed away,” as Tony Smith put it, but rather an outcome that can endure.44 If we never define such a goal, it may foster confusion about what we actually intend

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to achieve. Throughout my combat deployments, I often felt unclear about the specific endgame we were striving to achieve. As a senior official recalled, “There wasn’t any strategy in Libya,” largely because of our failure to decide on a clear, achievable goal there.45 In some cases it may be useful to start near the end by identifying our goal and then proceed back toward the beginning. For example, a U.S. Army field manual describes “starting with the envisioned end state and working backward in time toward the present. Planners begin by identifying the last step, the next-to-last step, and so on.” This technique might include relabeling the postwar phase Phase I (rather than Phase IV) and numbering backwards to the beginning in order to put added emphasis on the war’s endgame.46 Rather than focusing on incremental decisions about how many more troops to deploy or how much more money to spend, we should decide on the achievable end we seek and let that inform interrelated decisions regarding the means required to attain it. When they do not match up, we have a problem. This goal must be widely understood by civilian and military officials across our government. Of particular importance are the president, the secretary of defense, the secretary of state, the national security advisor, and the senior military leadership (especially the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and the senior field commander). If these leaders share a common understanding of the overall goal, then we are starting on a good path. But if they do not, it is an early warning sign of trouble, and rougher seas will almost certainly be ahead. Regarding Afghanistan, one U.S. official described our government as “being kind of confused as to what exactly we were trying to do,” in part because of divergent understandings of our overall goal.47 Before moving on to the next task, the difference between military goals and political goals deserves a bit more attention. Clausewitz draws a distinction between the “political object” of war and the military objective that should help attain it.48 Military objectives may entail the destruction of the opposing army, the seizure of the capital, or other tangible actions. For instance, in Iraq it was clear that we intended to topple Saddam’s regime. The public tends to focus on such concrete benchmarks of success. Yet this can pull attention away from our overall political goal, leaving it ill-defined. This relates to our traditional way of war, outlined by Russell Weigley, in which our military tends to narrowly pursue Napoleonic,

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climactic battles to annihilate enemies while giving short shrift to broader strategic and political considerations.49 An excessive focus on military goals can cause us to drift toward a more comfortable space in which we avoid tough political choices. As a result, we may settle on trying to create a democracy on the cheap. In the words of a former senior defense official, the Bush and Obama administrations both seemed to take for granted “that if you take the reins off of people under a dictatorship and you give them the opportunity for democracy, good things happen. . . . [We seem to believe] there’s somehow a magical bridge that gets you from . . . dictatorship over to democracy.”50 In some cases our leaders may decide on a knee-jerk political benchmark almost as an afterthought, such as to quickly hold elections a few months after hostilities end, but before the institutional groundwork in the country is ready to handle democracy’s destabilizing growing pains. This usually amounts to trying to be half-pregnant, and it makes disaster more likely. Thus, the establishment of a clear, achievable political goal that can endure is the first key task of postwar planning, and it provides a foundation for the other two tasks. If our goal is to foster democracy in a shattered country with no history of democracy, then we should brace for a massive effort across virtually all domains for any shot at attaining it. Second, we must anticipate and attempt to mitigate the foreseeable postwar obstacles. It is relatively easy to design a plan that assumes a benign environment. Practically anyone can do that. But it becomes far harder when there is an interaction of forces that resist every step you take. Unmitigated obstacles can derail even the best-laid plans. As business strategist Richard Rumelt states, “If you fail to identify and analyze the obstacles, you don’t have a strategy. Instead you have . . . a list of things you wish would happen.”51 Similarly, Andrew Krepinevich and Barry Watts suggest that there can be a “tendency to equate strategy with a list of desirable outcomes” in which “the mere statement of a desire to meet the objective is deemed sufficient.”52 We must distinguish achievable goals from mere hopes and wishes. To do so, we need to carefully study the starting conditions in the given country to avoid creating unrealistic expectations. We do not usually go to war against thriving, stable democracies with conditions that favor postwar tranquility. Instead, we find ourselves fighting backward, repressive regimes such as Saddam’s Iraq or Qaddafi’s Libya that have

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tamped down ethnic, cultural, religious, and local grievances and other forms of identity or expression for decades. When the regime is abruptly removed, tensions can quickly reemerge. One senior official told me that when we topple a dictator, “All of those old problems spring up [and] come back to life. . . . It’s like a pressure cooker that suddenly has the top lifted, and the stew comes boiling out, . . . [so] be careful when you start changing a regime that has no structure inside of it anymore.”53 Also, even if the repressive regime had institutions such as legislatures and courts, they may have been riddled with patronage and corruption, and were widely perceived as illegitimate. Hence, if we embark on a war to overthrow the existing regime and replace it with a democracy, we are usually introducing new, unfamiliar forms of political expression and institutions that can be highly destabilizing. Further, there is the vital question of who will provide security to avoid a postwar vacuum. Hence, an array of obstacles tends to quickly arise when a country emerges from decades of oppression, such as lack of governance, lack of security, and the potential resurfacing of sectarian, ethnic, tribal, or regional forms of identity. I recall being deployed to Afghanistan in 2013–2014, when these aspects were still formidable obstacles more than a decade after our original invasion. In addition, there will almost always be unique difficulties specific to each conflict zone. Our leaders must closely analyze the local environment in the soon-to-be-defeated country to anticipate challenges as best they can and to mitigate their pernicious effects. The key role of warlords and opium in Afghan society, the intensity of ethnic grievances in the Balkans, and the likely Sunni sense of disenfranchisement in Iraq embody just a few examples. Grappling with such specific obstacles will usually require contingencies to deal with some of the most likely (and most dangerous) scenarios that could unfold. To exacerbate the challenge, because of the closed nature of these societies, we often start out with minimal intelligence regarding the institutional and cultural dynamics at play. If we do not make inroads to alleviate these deficits, we might remain “sort of flat on our butt” for years, as one Pentagon official put it to me regarding U.S. strategy in Afghanistan.54 In Libya a senior official told me that early on “we didn’t have a clue” what was happening in Benghazi as the Arab Spring protests got under way in early 2011, and “there was sort of this, ‘well, we’ll figure it out as we go’ ” attitude.55 Hence, there is usually a

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need to identify intelligence gaps and to focus collection on reducing those gaps as much as possible. To be sure, we will never achieve omniscience. Our plans can never account for every obstacle, for such a standard would set the bar far too high. At least some surprises will unfold, requiring adjustments to the base plan. So it would deeply unfair to look back after the fact and expect our leaders to have predicted everything that would happen. Instead, we should assess whether, based on information available at the time, our leaders made a serious effort to mitigate the most likely challenges. We should also assess whether they recognized major intelligence gaps and made at least some meaningful attempt to close them. Merely identifying obstacles is one thing; developing concrete steps to mitigate them is another. There are almost always some people who foresee problems coming around the bend. But whether their warnings are acted upon is vital. If there are no tangible mitigating steps—or if we simply make a laundry list of things that could go wrong just to cover the bases—then it serves little purpose. In fact, doing so might even be counterproductive by providing false comfort that we grappled with the obstacles when in fact our leaders only identified them. In this book we will assess whether our leaders acknowledged the obstacles that could derail the postwar order and took specific steps to try to get ahead of them. This brings us to the third and final task, which involves resources. We must mobilize resources that are aligned with our overall political goal, while being mindful of the obstacles. Often, resources such as troops deployed and dollars spent are discussed in isolation from our overarching goal. This can lead to a distorted picture. Lofty, pie-in-the-sky goals such as “a democratic Afghanistan” can be casually tossed about without any apparent recognition of the vast resources that would be required to attain them.56 The alignment of ends with means is a vital cornerstone of any strategy. A serious effort to promote democracy in a broken society will almost always require major resources over a protracted period. A sound strategy should mobilize resources, particularly in the domains of security, economics, and governance/institutions, in a way that might actually bring about the intended postwar order. To do so, a prudent strategy will usually err on the side of mobilizing more resources rather than fewer in order to hedge against uncertainty.

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Ambassador James Dobbins, a senior U.S. diplomat and widely renowned expert on post-conflict situations, said the following: The sign of a good plan is not that it has correctly anticipated all of the twists and turns of subsequent developments, but rather that it has stimulated adequate preparation and assembled the necessary capabilities that will be needed to deal with those twists and turns. A plan that assumes best cases and minimal requirements for resources is highly likely to be deficient. But a plan that exaggerates the likely challenges, that over-prepares, assembles and deploys larger resources than will be necessary, is likely to be more successful.57

We should not orient resources toward best-case scenarios; rather, we should buy insurance to head off potential disasters. This is particularly true if our goal is a path to democracy, for such an ambitious goal usually requires extensive means across these domains, applied over many years, tailored to the local challenges. To analyze a given case, we should not start with the outcome that unfolded and trace backward to assess whether the resources were sufficient. Doing so would be unfair by using present-day knowledge to judge actors at the time. Instead, we should consider the context at the time in which leaders were making decisions to assess whether the resources aligned with the goal they were trying to attain. For example, let’s say a teacher instructs her students to build a replica of the Eiffel Tower but says to do so in only thirty seconds using construction paper, glue sticks, and glitter. We do not need to see the outcome to know that these resources are insufficient. There is a small chance the class might miraculously pull it off, but the scale and complexity of the task alongside the meager resources suggest that the teacher set up her class to fail. Hence, determining whether the resources and the goal are in alignment—or whether there is a fundamental mismatch—embodies the third task of postwar planning. These three tasks constitute a framework that can help us compare the cases in this book. There is no foolproof playbook to magically resolve the tension between promoting democracy and a quick pullout, but these tasks are a useful way to bring the tension front and center, making it nearly impossible to ignore. They might help us redress what General Carter Ham (the commander of U.S. Africa Command during the 2011

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Libya conflict) referred to as “the inadequate attention to the linkages between ends, ways, and means.”58 At first glance, you might presume that we fail at these tasks across the board. But we have actually shown a capacity to tackle them reasonably well. In recent conflicts we have certainly had several major blunders, but we also had a rare (but largely forgotten) accomplishment: the 1999 Kosovo war. In Kosovo we grappled with all three postwar tasks fairly well. We assessed the environment and made tough decisions, which improved the odds of a decent (but not perfect) outcome. Although preparing for postwar Kosovo was surely much easier than, say, postwar Iraq, many of the core challenges and trade-offs were surprisingly similar in nature. Botched planning is not inevitable, and we do have an ability to confront this in a rigorous way. Before moving on, a few cautions are in order. First, we should acknowledge that this book deals mainly with probabilities, not certainties. If we tackle these planning tasks (or fail to do so), it affects the likelihood, not the certainty, of a better outcome than would otherwise unfold. In other words, it is about increasing the chances of success and decreasing the chances of disaster: there are no guarantees. It is highly unlikely, but still possible, to have bad planning yet end up with a good outcome. As an analogy, at an orienteering course you might plan an absurd route (or blow off route planning altogether), and even forget to bring your map and compass, but still arrive at the right destination because of pure luck. Conversely, it is unlikely, but still possible, to have superb planning yet end up with a bad result. You might plan a brilliant route that accounts for every conceivable obstacle, but then you randomly twist an ankle or get struck by lightning along the way. There are few certainties in war, as Clausewitz highlighted when he described the friction of war. Friction creates countless ripple effects and involves “the factors that distinguish real war from war on paper.”59 So there is a strong relationship between planning and outcomes, and they will usually move in the same direction. But there might not be a perfect alignment every time. Thus, to use terms a political scientist might find familiar, this book can be only probabilistic, not deterministic. We also can’t emphasize enough that each war-torn place such as Afghanistan or Libya begins with certain baseline conditions—such as its degree of economic development, ethnic diversity, history of democracy

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(or lack thereof), population size, and geographic size—which make some places far harder than others to manage. Rigorous planning can help take the starting baseline, whatever it is, and improve the chances of a better outcome than would otherwise occur. Conversely, if we neglect these tasks, it will usually take the baseline and make chaos more likely. With that said, we usually go to war in “hard” places, so even the easier cases we confront are usually pretty tough. Also, our focus here is on the planning process more than the presence or absence of a single plan that captures our entire postwar strategy. Dwight Eisenhower’s maxim that “plans are useless, but planning is indispensable”60 is insightful, although I’d argue that the physical plans themselves still mean something. Ideally, a sound postwar plan should derive from a coherent strategy. A single, all-inclusive plan may not ever come together, and even if it does, it would still require adjustments to deal with changing conditions. But our government should still seek to develop a coherent approach that encompasses political, security, and economic domains. For this reason, a look at the planning process, including the specific plans generated, can help us see whether this has occurred. Finally, this book will focus more on planning than implementation. To be sure, our subsequent implementation of the plans matters a great deal too. How well did we implement our plans in, say, Kosovo? Or Libya? But if this book were to glide back and forth between planning and execution, it would muddy the waters. Therefore, at the end of each chapter I will briefly touch on implementation (and the lasting outcome), mainly to round out the historical picture. However, our main focus is on the planning itself.

Pathologies These three tasks seem rather obvious, so why does our government repeatedly mess them up? Recurring difficulties routinely get in the way, which I refer to as “pathologies” because they infect the process and make planning even tougher to pull off. Each pathology connects to the central tension between promoting democracy and getting out, which is the enormous shadow that looms over the entire endeavor. Whether our

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leaders mitigate these pathologies helps account for the planning that does or does not occur. The first pathology is wishful thinking. It can be tempting to wish our problems away and assume that we can do everything we want with little price to pay. By relying on rosy assumptions and a highly optimistic lens, it heightens the allure of democracy on the cheap. An idealistic administration in its first term, without firsthand, humbling experiences in war, can be particularly susceptible to magical thinking. The belief that we can topple the tyrant and quickly create a democracy obscures the difficulty of transforming a long-repressed area, especially for officials untested by the trials of war. With regard to postQaddafi Libya, in 2011 there was optimism that the Arab Spring could trigger democratic transformations across the Middle East, and one senior U.S. defense official told me a common view was “they have oil, which means they have money . . . and that money will help fix anything.”61 Another senior official recalled that not long after Qaddafi’s death, “Everybody’s high-fiving everybody,” with little serious thought as to what would come next.62 Similarly in Iraq, Colonel Michael Fitzgerald, a leading war planner, told me a widespread sentiment was “that we would go in, and everybody would kiss and make up.”63 If we convince ourselves that circumstances will take care of themselves, then it becomes easier to believe that postwar planning does not require much time or energy. Leaders can either fall for such a siren song or recognize it and take steps to mitigate its effects. The second pathology involves deficient learning. Practically every day, we rely on historical analogies to shape our decisions, whether we realize it or not. The extent to which we draw on both positive lessons to build upon and mistakes to avoid—as well as how those prior situations are similar to, and different from, the current situation—can have major impacts. Typically, when a new administration comes to power (particularly of the opposing political party), the default approach is to discard most or all of the policies of its predecessor. Officials often perceive themselves as smarter and cleverer than those who came before. This can contribute to overlearning by veering our policy in a radically different direction without a clear sense of what viable path to take instead. Overlearning is a phenomenon often associated with intelligence work, in which officials

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resolve themselves “not to make the same mistake again but are likely to commit the opposite one.”64 As Robert Jervis states, “Those who remember the past are condemned to make the opposite mistakes.”65 Similar to a pinball bouncing back and forth off the bumpers, a narrow desire to simply do the opposite of what was done before can sidestep the recognition of similar challenges. This can breathe new life into earlier mistakes. In some cases, certain historical events may seem so odious that officials refuse to even think about them, and they draw a reductionist lesson that boils down to “let’s just not do that again.” For example, despite many lessons learned in Somalia, Haiti, and the Balkans throughout the 1990s, “We unlearned a lot of that as we got ready for Afghanistan and Iraq,” according to former Ambassador Gregory Schulte.66 This desire to simply proceed in the opposite direction can stifle necessary debate about the true range of options. Yet if our officials can successfully learn negative and positive lessons from an array of experiences—and acknowledge how they are similar to and different from the current situation—it can provide a richer understanding of postwar challenges, including what to avoid and what to build upon. The third pathology is underuse of the NSC. If left to their own devices, government agencies often move along separate paths that reflect their own perceived lanes of responsibility and cultural proclivities.67 For example, the State Department may seek democratization while the Pentagon may seek to quickly get out and shift focus to other global hot spots. However, the complexity of postwar planning requires that our government synchronize its efforts. The NSC is the best entity to facilitate this because it can coordinate diverse actors and promote the weighing of trade-offs by the president. The term “NSC” can often refer to either the NSC principals, deputies, and/or the NSC staff—and all three elements have key parts in this process. In 1947 the NSC was given responsibility for “the integration of domestic, foreign, and military policies relating to the national security.”68 The NSC has evolved over the decades, but it retains a key role in facilitating coordination on matters of national strategy.69 This integrative function is vital for postwar planning. The term “whole of government” may conjure up idyllic images of perfect harmony, which is not realistic to expect. But substantial coordination must occur, and the NSC is the most logical entity to facilitate it.

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The NSC usually has at least some involvement in postwar planning. However, it might not actually lead interagency coordination and instead might engage on postwar issues only on a shallow level. Parallel processes in other parts of the government may outmaneuver the NSC, fueling compartmentalization. Colonel Kevin Benson, who led a postwar planning cell for Iraq, described to me a “kind of internecine warfare” that plagued the U.S. government in the run-up to the Iraq invasion.70 In such instances, the hub of decision making can shift to rival power centers (such as the Pentagon), or power centralizes within the White House itself. Hence, NSC principals and deputies may find themselves emasculated, and even if they briefly discuss postwar trade-offs, their actions may carry little weight. In contrast, an active NSC that energetically coordinates departments and drives presidential decisions embodies what “right” looks like by fostering a more integrated, coherent approach. The final pathology involves crosscutting U.S. domestic political pressures: the competing pressures on our leaders to promote democracy and to simultaneously bring the troops back home. These countervailing pressures generated by the public (and, by extension, Congress) can undermine a coherent strategy. Like an animated character stretched across two platforms trying desperately to maintain a grip on both sides, policy makers can find themselves pulled in opposing political directions. A failure to recognize this and make tough choices can prompt us to fall into the abyss. Clausewitz stated that the public embodies the “passions” that shape warfare, and Henry Kissinger suggested that the public’s attention may be “driven less by reasoned arguments than by what catches the mood of the moment.”71 In some cases the public may focus mainly on “winning and losing,”72 which might not be helpful when embarking on a long, grinding path of democratization. As a result, the president may proclaim the need to promote democracy but soon feel pressure to wrap things up. In some cases, even the anticipation of domestic fallout can have an impact as leaders make assumptions about what the public will or won’t tolerate, and craft policies accordingly. To counteract this, our leaders must harden their resolve and stick with tough choices, even though it may disappoint some audiences. Overall, if most or all of these pathologies are allowed free rein, then disaster will probably ensue. But if our leaders can recognize and mitigate

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them, it can help manage the underlying tension and contribute to a more coherent and realistic strategy. Is it possible that sometimes good postwar planning may simply be an exercise in futility? In other words, in complex societies such as Iraq or Afghanistan, is it possible that the obstacles may be so enormous and the preconditions so bad that any attempt to manage this might be like tackling a math problem with no solution—it simply cannot be done? Perhaps it should not be surprising that our planning comes up short, because we may be seeking to resolve issues that are inherently unresolvable. In each chapter of this book, we will consider the possibility that postwar planning was all but impossible to undertake. An offshoot would be that perhaps the Middle East and North Africa are impervious to democratization, so any plans to promote democracy there might be riddled with contradictions. Standard reasons given for this include the notion the region suffers from, as Eva Bellin has summarized, “the lack of a strong civil society, a market-driven economy, adequate income and literacy levels, democratic neighbors, and democratic culture,” which may doom any plans to promote democracy there.73 Could this too make any postwar strategy dead on arrival? To help assess this, we can explore whether our leaders could have assembled more successful efforts based on knowledge available at the time.74 As another alternative, is it also possible that our postwar planning might just be an outgrowth of the amount of planning time? From this perspective, perhaps the more advance warning we get, the better plans we construct, and if we are shortchanged on time, we may more easily get caught up in the “thundering present.”75 To help assess this, we can compare cases in which we had longer (or shorter) planning windows to determine if this factor had a real impact or not. Overall, this book will assess each of these alternative explanations to gauge their ability to explain what happened.

Four Revealing Cases The United States embodies the centerpiece of this book largely because it represents a crucial case.76 Any book on this topic that did not put U.S. wars front and center would have diminished utility. Also, to be candid,

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America’s recent wars have had a major impact on me personally as an Army soldier, providing additional reason for me to explore them. This book unpacks U.S.-led planning for Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya to explore how we handled postwar challenges over the past two decades. Each of these cases represents a touchstone limited war in the post–cold war era. Each one generated lasting consequences, and each one has continued policy relevance today. Additionally, in all four cases we confronted a vastly inferior opponent in a limited war, which should have made postwar planning logical to do, for military victory was virtually assured from the start. Further, in each case the war created an opportunity for us to impose our political will, should we choose to do so. Finally, I’ve personally spent significant time in some of these places, which makes them a natural fit for me to write about. When considered together, these four cases illustrate both adequate and inadequate planning, and the outcomes they helped foster. These four cases also offer another benefit: they illustrate how three consecutive administrations—those of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama—each handled postwar planning. This can reveal lessons that do not merely apply to one administration or political party but rather that characterize our government’s behavior more broadly. For all these reasons, this set of four cases can be highly useful and enriching. Perhaps an argument could be made for going back further in history to explore Korea, Vietnam, Panama, Somalia, Bosnia, or other cases too. Although I sympathize to some extent (and I considered a few of these options early on), ultimately we must draw the line somewhere. So in this book, I draw it at the last twenty years of war to help maintain a contemporary focus. Although some conflicts during the cold war might provide insights, our behavior during that era was also strongly influenced by the Soviet threat, so an analysis of cold war cases alongside other cases would introduce an unhelpful confounding variable. Additionally, the Persian Gulf war’s large-scale, conventional style of battle has proven a historical anomaly when compared to more recent wars, so it does not receive a full chapter here (although its legacy will be briefly discussed in chapter 3). Of the four cases in this book, I argue that Kosovo represents the one partially successful planning effort. In Kosovo we wrestled with underlying postwar trade-offs and made hard decisions. The Kosovo war took

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place well into Clinton administration’s second term, after it had already grappled with the often-frustrating 1990s interventions in Somalia, Haiti, and Bosnia. As civil affairs planner Colonel Michael Hess put it to me, “We had come a long way” throughout the tumultuous course of the 1990s.77 These experiences helped moderate thinking and lessened the appeal of pie-in-the-sky ideas. But in the next three war zones, which were often even more difficult than Kosovo, our leaders sidestepped the underlying choices and adopted far more disjointed approaches. This helped set the conditions for chaos. One difficult but necessary question to ask is this: In looking at these war zones, how should we define postwar “success”? Can we apply some sort of objective standard? I would suggest that if the targeted country has sustainable progress in stability and democratizing institutions for at least a decade, then we should consider it a postwar success. This definition is admittedly imperfect, but given the complexity of the topic, it should provide a reasonable baseline, as long as we keep the country’s starting conditions in mind. Alternatively, if we were to define success as a peaceful and prosperous Jeffersonian democracy maintained in perpetuity, then we would usually be chasing an impossible dream. Kissinger noted that “the test of policy is how it ends, not how it begins.”78 With that in mind, the following chapters will reveal why we have repeatedly had trouble preparing for the endgame of war. This book aims to provide an original explanation for an important challenge which generated enormous political, economic, military, and moral consequences that the world is still grappling with today. This topic has also defined much of my professional life as an Army officer. Our strategic failures have had enormous impacts on my unit, my friends, my family, and myself. Some truly unforgettable people I’ve known made the ultimate sacrifice. Given all that has been sacrificed and lost, the stakes are extraordinarily high, and I firmly believe that we need to learn something from all of this. Trying to sweep these wars into the dustbin of history would be an unforgivable mistake for our country and for future generations that will need to understand what happened and why. Our repeated debacles across multiple administrations embody a troubling pattern, particularly in this post-9/11 era, when, as Defense Secretary Robert Gates has pointed out, strategic challenges rarely go away but

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instead tend to fester and “accumulate” over time.79 Because the consequences of losing the peace have been so enormous and because it could easily happen again, we urgently need to wrestle with this puzzle now. In doing so, the following chapters will puncture a few prominent myths. For example, when I mention the topic of “Iraq postwar planning” to friends and colleagues, I’ve found that a common response is “What postwar planning?” with the implication that we must have forgotten to do it altogether. Yet this book will illustrate that often there was planning that took place, some of which was quite thoughtful and detailed. But these plans often gained no traction at the highest levels. In this book I will explain why. Ultimately, I argue that developing a coherent postwar strategy is indeed possible, it can make a difference, and in fact we do have an ability to do it rather well. We did so in the case of Kosovo, without much fanfare. Despite some imperfections, in Kosovo we demonstrated a capacity to get postwar planning mostly right by improving the odds of a decent outcome. A renewed look at our partial success in Kosovo, along with the three mishaps that followed, helps reveal how the challenges we encounter over time are similar but also how our leaders’ decisions matter. I have been privileged to serve on the front lines of a tremendous fighting force, leading and commanding in legendary units like the 1st Cavalry Division and the 75th Ranger Regiment. This has been an incredible honor. Yet I am also aware that our fighting force is the most expensive military on the planet by a huge margin, so when our country goes to war, the public rightly expects a positive return on investment. Such a positive return has failed to materialize recently, as short-term military victories translated into long-term fiascos. Continuing to expect a postwar cakewalk heightens the risk of even more catastrophes. We need to be honest with ourselves and seriously reflect on whether it is truly worth going to war in the first place and how we can improve the odds of winning the peace. At the end of the 2001 movie Memento, the memory-impaired protagonist realizes that he has been lying to himself because the truth is too painful to acknowledge, and ultimately he chooses to continue his self-delusion. Will we continue to delude ourselves into thinking that pipe dreams are attainable at little to no cost, and thereby continue to foster

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chaos? Or can we break the cycle and own up to the hard choices that we must make in the real world? Put differently, will we learn from our costly mistakes or provoke even more disasters? America’s sons and daughters are counting on us to get this right, and so are millions of innocent, vulnerable people like Hanan. Our story begins in the Balkans in the late 1990s with a partial success that most Americans have long since forgotten. But because it shows how we can get things mostly “right” by crafting a realistic postwar strategy even in the face of tall odds, it deserves our renewed attention today.

1

Kosovo Not Perfect, but Tolerable

I was determined not to lose the peace. Madeleine Albright, Madam Secretary

Accidentally bombing the Chinese embassy in Belgrade was bad enough. But that was not all that went wrong with the 1999 Kosovo war. Early on, senior Clinton administration officials mistakenly believed that the military intervention would be over in just a few days. The president initially seemed disengaged from the war effort. Tensions developed among key U.S. officials, and the field commander, General Wesley Clark, was barely on speaking terms with his chain of command in Washington. Meanwhile, the administration was weakened politically by the president’s recent impeachment ordeal and found itself fending off “wag the dog” allegations regarding the use of military force. So, in many ways the conduct of the Kosovo war didn’t go smoothly. But even more worryingly, there were also many signs that postwar Kosovo could be a potential debacle just around the corner. The U.S. public regarded the former Yugoslavia as an area of minimal importance and had little interest in another open-ended commitment. Moscow was

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a potential spoiler that might shore up postwar Serbia and obstruct our efforts. And perhaps most importantly, deep-seated ethnic grievances seemed likely to re-flare into violence with little warning. Yet despite this complex minefield, Kosovo still became a partial success. In the short run, the coalition achieved its immediate goals as Serbian forces departed, Kosovar Albanians returned, and an international stabilization force helped prevent the resumption of widespread killings. Over the long run, Kosovo became generally stable and free from sustained violence, and the concept of “substantial autonomy” helped put Kosovo on a gradual track toward democratization. Despite many enduring challenges, Kosovo eventually declared independence in 2008. How did all this happen? For starters, we should acknowledge Kosovo had a few factors going for it that made it easier to manage than other war zones (as will be discussed below). But that is not the full story. Motivated by tough lessons learned in nation building, the Clinton administration undertook rigorous planning for a difficult postwar landscape. This effort, led by the United States and supported by our NATO partners, tackled the three planning tasks fairly well. It helped tilt the odds in our favor and lessened the chances that chaos would unfold. We resisted the allure of self-delusion, and we didn’t spike the ball and head to the locker room before the game was over. The 1999 Kosovo war embodies a logical first case for this book because in many ways it was our first representative conflict of the post– cold war era. It seemed to herald a “new American way of war” for the early twenty-first century in that we sought to minimize our exposure and limit the means we employed, while operating in a perilous cauldron of ethnic, religious, and other societal divisions.1 It also entailed the daunting prospect of creating a new political order from scratch. President Bill Clinton stated with some justification that the Kosovo war “marked a new chapter in military history”: it set the stage for subsequent wars in the new millennium.2 Kosovo also gives us a useful starting point to assess how three consecutive administrations handled roughly similar trade-offs. Most importantly, of the four cases in this book, Kosovo is the probably only one we could call a partial success. Kosovo shows we can in fact get postwar planning mostly “right.” Hence, although most Americans have all but forgotten about Kosovo, it deserves careful study today.

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To get to the core of how and why Kosovo entailed adequate postwar planning, we need to explore a few questions. First, how did the planning take shape from August 1998 through the air campaign’s end in June 1999? Second, how did we do at the three postwar planning tasks? And finally, why were we able to tackle these three tasks reasonably well?

“We Will Win. Period. Full Stop.” The Kosovo war took place nearly two decades ago, and since then it has been overshadowed by other wars and crises in its wake. For this reason, a brief overview of the war’s context can be helpful as a reminder of what actually happened, before we delve into how the planning took shape. On March 24, 1999, the United States and NATO launched an air war over Kosovo. But the Clinton administration had reached that point only with great reluctance. Harkening back to his successful 1992 campaign, President Bill Clinton had paid close attention to domestic issues—particularly economic concerns, as reflected by the campaign slogan “It’s the economy, stupid”—which helped catapult him to the presidency. Foreign policy was perceived as a lesser priority (except for trade issues), and at first the new president spent a relatively small portion of his time focused on it.3 Yet over time his administration found itself enmeshed in intervention after intervention in Somalia, Haiti, and Bosnia. These experiences shaped its thinking about America’s role in an increasingly globalized world. By early 1999, well into President Clinton’s second term, many administration officials had already grappled with multiple nation-building and peacekeeping efforts—some of which were seen as modestly successful and others as fiascos—yet each generated notable impacts. These interventions would entail deepening U.S. involvement in the former Yugoslavia. In that volatile part of the world, Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic had spent a decade fanning the flames of Serb nationalism. This, along with the breakup of Yugoslavia, helped pave the way for ethnic-based killings in the cold war’s aftermath. Bosnia erupted as the first major Balkans flashpoint. Ethnic cleansing and atrocities unfolded reminiscent of Nazi Germany, with the establishment of more than 100 death camps and the genocide of more than 7,000 Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica a matter of days.4 In response, the U.S.-brokered 1995 Dayton Accords entailed direct

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negotiations with Bosnian, Serb, and Croat leaders, which represented a moderate feat that ushered in relative peace.5 But while Dayton focused on Bosnia, it deferred the knottier issue of Kosovo.6 Richard Holbrooke, the forceful and polarizing U.S. diplomat who played a central role in Balkans diplomacy, acknowledged that at Dayton, “the long-feared crisis in Kosovo was postponed, not avoided.”7 Kosovo had always represented a crucial piece of geography in Yugoslavia. It was “the most explosive tinderbox in the region” in Holbrooke’s view, even more so than Bosnia.8 Serbian history focused intensely on the 1389 Battle of Kosovo, in which the Ottomans defeated the Serbs. Many Serbs even viewed Kosovo as analogous to Jerusalem, and in the words of a former Serbian Orthodox bishop, it was “the holiest and the most important part of Serbia, the cradle of our spirituality, our culture and our statehood. . . . Kosovo is our inalienable identity.”9 This view persisted despite the fact that by the 1990s, ethnic Serbs had shrunk to less than 10 percent of Kosovo’s population, while Kosovar Albanians grew to constitute the other 90 percent.10 As ethnic cleansing and violence began to occur involving Serbian forces, Kosovar Albanian civilians, and the newly formed Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), the international community initially sought to stay out of the fray. But on January 15, 1999, the Serbian massacre of more than forty Albanian civilians at Racak became difficult for the world to ignore. Subsequent negotiations at Rambouillet, France, failed to stop the violence.11 After initial hesitation, the Clinton administration changed course and led NATO to launch an air campaign in March 1999 that targeted Serbian forces in Kosovo as well as strategic targets in Belgrade. This campaign had a humanitarian focus that sought to protect human life, while it also implicitly sought to preserve NATO’s credibility in the post–cold war world.12 In waging this war, “The United States was far and away the dominant player,” according to an analysis of Allied air power in Kosovo, as we delivered 83 percent of the total weapons and assumed the leading role in the coalition.13 But our leaders abided by an erroneous assumption that it would be a short campaign of a few days or perhaps a week or two at the most, with the idea that a quick show of force would convince Milosevic to withdraw.14 They were wrong. The Kosovo war dragged on notably longer than expected, stretching out to seventy-eight days, and during this time significant challenges unfolded.

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Some of the challenges encountered were self-inflicted. In the first month, the Clinton administration seemed reluctant to fully commit itself, as revealed by mixed messages regarding whether U.S. ground forces might join the fight, as well as the president’s reticent role in the war effort. At times, ownership of the war was publicly attributed to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (as reflected by a Time cover story titled “Madeleine’s War”), in part because of her advocacy for intervention but also because of the seeming detachment of the president in the early stages.15 This occurred alongside other difficulties such as State-DoD tensions, targeting challenges, and friction between NATO Supreme Allied Commander General Wesley Clark and Washington over issues ranging from AH-64 helicopters to preparing for a potential ground invasion.16 These frictions unfolded partly as a result of personality differences but also reflected a desire by some officials to avoid headlines and focus attention elsewhere, particularly in the conflict’s opening weeks. But one month into the war, the tectonic plates shifted. NATO’s fiftieth anniversary summit in Washington on April 23–24, 1999, was a transformative event that solidified Western resolve regarding Kosovo.17 President Clinton attended the summit alongside forty-two heads of state, and he emerged with a renewed commitment that fortified his own level of engagement, as well as that of NATO more broadly. This paved the way for a significant expansion of the bombing and robust planning for a ground invasion in case bombing alone failed to prove sufficient. National Security Advisor Sandy Berger underscored the changed environment: “We will win. Period. Full stop. There is no alternative . . . the president has said he has not ruled out any option.”18 The NATO summit was a turning point that redoubled the alliance’s commitment and signaled that NATO would see through the war to success. As an outgrowth, Kosovo became a “strategic testbed,” as James Kurth put it, that NATO could use to revalidate its importance in the twenty-first century.19 The United States and NATO soon expanded the air campaign and began planning a ground invasion. A convergence of pressures helped compel Milosevic to capitulate on June 3, 1999, and the conflict drew to a close.20 This brings us to the postwar planning. Months before the air campaign began, the United States started planning for what might follow a potential intervention in Kosovo. Given the huge disparity in military

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capability between Serbia and NATO, it appeared all but certain that we would eventually prevail on the battlefield if the alliance held together. As Michael Vickers put it, this was like “a preseason scrimmage pitting a top NFL team against a high school squad . . . the outcome of such a contest is foreordained,”21 a description that could suit any of the four cases in this book. Although maintaining a wartime coalition against Serbia presented notable difficulties, a far tougher question entailed what could or should come next, and how we might shape that outcome alongside the international community. Of the many planning challenges associated with Kosovo, the postwar landscape was the toughest one of all. The Clinton administration began planning for postwar Kosovo in the summer of 1998, about seven months before the air campaign began. Leonard Hawley (who served on the White House NSC staff) and Gregory Schulte (special assistant to the president for the Dayton Peace Accords) helped orchestrate political-military planning centered at the NSC. They initially focused on air strikes, sanctions, and other measures intended to compel Milosevic to concede, and helped produce a war plan—known as the Strategic Campaign Plan—that was briefed to NSC principals.22 Yet postwar questions soon garnered the lion’s share of attention. As Schulte recalls, “We did a lot more planning for after the war than we did for the war itself.”23 Schulte, along with James Pardew (deputy special advisor to the president for the Balkans), cochaired an executive committee under the NSC.24 The “ExComm” was established at a NSC deputies committee meeting on October 28, 1998, and it pulled in political and military considerations from across the government to shape a unified plan encompassing civil, security, and related aspects.25 It incorporated military inputs provided by the Joint Staff J-5, primarily from then-Brigadier General George Casey and his deputy, then-Colonel Martin Dempsey. It incorporated diplomatic inputs provided by a ten-person team at the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs led by Dennis Skocz. It also incorporated stabilization assistance-related inputs provided by USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI). These diverse inputs helped the ExComm shape the NSC’s deliberations. In the early stages, Hawley recalls that the “planning was strictly the U.S. We were driving the train,” and he further recalls that in the fall of 1998, NSC deputies met an arduous thirty-one times over a twenty-eightday period to formulate and refine Kosovo plans.26 The grueling array

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of planning sessions focused on both the waging of war and the political settlement that might follow. The frequency of meetings went through peaks and valleys as major events occurred (such as the Racak massacre) and then things quieted down again, but the ExComm still made headway over time.27 Ultimately, the committee “exported” its planning products to NATO to seek international buy-in and outline a way ahead for postwar Kosovo.28 The short-term aim settled on “Serbs out, NATO in, Albanians back.”29 This meant Serbian forces would need to leave Kosovo, NATO forces needed to enter to keep the peace, and hundreds of thousands of expelled Kosovar Albanians needed to be allowed to return home. Although this addressed the immediate crisis, it did not address the tougher question of Kosovo’s long-term fate. Doing so seemed to entail a difficult choice between Kosovo’s independence and its reintegration back into Serbia. Each path was fraught with hazards. Strong-willed actors—including Albanians, Serbs, Russians, NATO partners, and other constituencies in the United States and abroad—had forceful, often diametrically opposing views. U.S. officials realized that concessions in favor of one group could alienate others and that a major misstep might fracture the coalition, provoke a Russian objection in the UN Security Council, or otherwise endanger the war effort and its aftermath.30 To address this, the United States and NATO established a political goal of “substantial autonomy and self-government” for Kosovo.31 This basic idea was agreed to at an NSC principals meeting in June 1998.32 In layman’s terms, it meant that Kosovo would not be recognized as fully independent (at least not in the short term). But it also would not be restored under Belgrade’s full control. Instead, Kosovo would become an international protectorate, pending a later determination of its fate. This would result in full international ownership until a more enduring path could take shape. Hence, the independence issue was kicked down the road. This approach “was specifically designed to be ambiguous,” recalls Hawley, to keep all parties on board and buy time to shape the road ahead.33 General Casey stated that “it had to be purposely unclear to get the Russians and the Serbs to agree to it.”34 The fact that it did not spell out a definitive political end helped fuel later criticism, yet there were few other viable options. Even with the benefit of hindsight, it is difficult to discern a better political goal for that moment.

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The integrated planning developed four pillars for postwar Kosovo: interim civil administration, humanitarian relief, institution building, and economic reconstruction. Hawley took a lead role in crafting these pillars, recommending specific international actors to take charge of each. He also sought to emphasize that organizational reputations would hinge on the outcomes. The pillars were packaged and ready immediately upon the end of the air campaign. In early June 1999, upon Milosevic’s capitulation, the United States formally submitted these pillars to the UN Secretary General. Within days they were issued by the UN to begin implementation.35 “But when we sent it to the UN, we didn’t make a big deal of it,” Schulte recalls, and “we didn’t say this is a U.S. plan, because we wanted people to buy into this.”36 In short, the NSC’s ExComm developed an integrated political-military plan that was waiting in the wings, with defined responsibilities for the United States and for international organizations. By the end of the war, it was ready to implement, and the UN Secretary General could issue a formal report directing execution. A cornerstone of this plan was an international peacekeeping force led by NATO. This force (known as Kosovo Force, or KFOR) was intended to secure Kosovo, allow the return of refugees, disarm the KLA, and perform other stabilization tasks. It built on earlier conceptions outlined in NSC deliberations as early as September 1998 and later refined at Rambouillet.37 KFOR was intended to provide “a safe and secure environment” to allow governance to take root.38 Michael Hess, who worked on civil affairs planning for Kosovo, recalls that the NATO force generation conference in May identified KFOR’s requirements, outlined sectors of responsibility, and addressed foreseeable gaps.39 And ultimately, KFOR’s planned size of nearly 50,000 service members represented a steep commitment to a geographic area of two million inhabitants.40 Regarding governance, the United States planned for an international organization to oversee postwar Kosovo. Unfortunately, the selection of the UN to do so occurred at relatively late, in early June, even though the requirement was known for some time.41 Nevertheless, the UN Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) was assigned responsibility for civil administration to compensate for the lack of existing institutions and would thereby treat Kosovo as an international protectorate.

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The postwar planning essentially ended—and implementation began— on June 12, 1999, as Serbian officials agreed to withdraw military forces from Kosovo, seventy-eight days of major combat operations had ended, and the UN Secretary General directed the implementation of the four pillars. Since the summer of 1998, the United States had implicitly acknowledged the danger of shooting for the stars and had settled on a modest approach of “substantial autonomy.” It identified capable international actors to take charge of Kosovo’s humanitarian, political, security, and economic needs. This fostered reasonable odds of success, while leaving some aspects for refinement.

An Earnest Attempt at the Three Planning Tasks Now that we’ve summarized the planning for Kosovo in broad terms, can we sharpen our analysis to help us compare it to other cases in the book? More specifically, how did we do at the three postwar planning tasks? Task 1: Did we identify a clear, achievable political goal? The short answer to this question is a qualified yes. After a few days of equivocation at the Kosovo war’s outset, we established realistic military and political goals in short order, and abided by them throughout the war. From the war’s earliest stages it was clear that a central motive for intervening was humanitarian in nature. Yet this begged the question of what goals we would establish to align with that aim. During the war’s first ten days, various leaders outlined objectives that were not always consistent. For example, President Clinton stated on March 22, 1999, “Our objective in Kosovo remains clear: to stop the killing and achieve a durable peace that restores Kosovars to self-government.”42 But at other times, the president and other officials discussed other goals, such as reducing Serbia’s future capacity to wage war, halting Serbian aggression, demonstrating NATO’s opposition to aggression, deterring an escalation of violence, and allowing mass flows of refugees to return to their homes. Thus, these opening days saw some haziness.43 The war’s military and political logic was not yet clearly laid out, and a jumble of priorities seemed to circulate. However, by April 3, 1999 (the tenth day of the air war), senior officials in the United States, Germany, the UK, Italy, and France outlined

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the core military goals that would guide the conflict. It entailed the notion that Serbian forces needed to exit Kosovo, NATO forces needed to enter, and Albanian refugees and internally displaced persons needed to be able to return.44 In part because these objectives did not roll off the tongue, the United States and NATO boiled them down to the shorthand “Serbs out, NATO in, Albanians back.” At the NATO summit in late April, this was refined into a more detailed concept: “a cease-fire, Serb military and police out, international security presence in, refugees returned, [and] an opportunity for a political settlement.”45 The “opportunity for a political settlement” alluded to the lasting political goal, which we will discuss more shortly. But this multipart end state—in its shorthand and longhand versions—provided a realistic, achievable starting point for postwar Kosovo. It also closely resembled UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1199 from September 1998, which had articulated similar objectives.46 Hence, after an initial period of vagueness, our short-term goals soon came into focus. At the end of air campaign, President Clinton gave a speech that reemphasized the importance of these objectives and the fact that they were on the way to fulfillment.47 What about our lasting political goal for Kosovo? It centered on the notion of “substantial autonomy.” As early as June 1998, NSC principals had discussed the idea of establishing Kosovo’s autonomy within a greater Serbia. Ideally, this would create a path to end the fighting while allowing Belgrade to save face, giving it an incentive to end hostilities. This did not conclusively resolve Kosovo’s status. But in light of the conflict’s complexity, a more straightforward goal was almost certainly unfeasible. U.S. officials such as Richard Holbrooke and Ambassador Christopher Hill had recognized going back to at least the Dayton negotiations that any firm political path for Kosovo could open a Pandora’s box.48 On the one hand, if we were to support independence, it could jeopardize the crucial acquiescence of Russia and China. Doing so might trigger a Russian veto in the UN Security Council and encourage secessionist movements elsewhere, possibly even inciting turmoil in places such as Macedonia and Albania that might pull NATO into future conflicts.49 Hence, we sensibly ruled out independence as an explicit goal. But instead, if Kosovo were reintegrated into Serbia, it could deeply upset Kosovar Albanians,

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jeopardize the moral basis of the war, and embolden Milosevic to undertake future aggression.50 There was no simple way forward. U.S. officials realized that this catch-22 made it impossible to find an easy answer that would please everyone. As Hawley pointed out, “It was very obvious early on that independence would be a real bridge too far,” while it was also equally clear that reintegration was not a good idea.51 U.S. officials shied away from easy answers, the allure of rapid democratization, or the appeal of a quick withdrawal. General Ralston, who was vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time, recalls numerous NSC meetings each week delving into postwar Kosovo which highlighted that there was simply “no way to ever resolve that at a high level,” and thus the political goal chosen “was probably the best way you could get through this.”52 Although Kosovar Albanians would optimistically interpret UNSCR 1244 as creating a path toward independence,53 the United States and NATO planned for a more cautious glide path by establishing international ownership until a more lasting path could take form. Hence, the concept of “substantial autonomy” had drawbacks, but it could keep all parties (especially Russia) on board while leaving open the possibility of independence. As one observer put it, “Nobody in NATO liked the idea that Kosovo would become a quasi-protectorate for years or decades to come, but no one had a better option.”54 Hence, we embraced “constructive ambiguity”55 to thread the needle of independence and reintegration. This was probably the clearest, most achievable political goal possible at the time. We implicitly discarded the alluring idea that a liberal democracy—as a mirror image of the United States—could quickly take root. Because Kosovo would become in effect “a virtual trusteeship, a ward of the UN and NATO,” in Strobe Talbott’s words,56 the political goal provoked some criticism. Critics characterized the goal as slippery and unclear, in part because it did not establish a specific exit strategy or withdrawal schedule. Michael Mandelbaum wrote a sharp critique of the Kosovo war which asserted that “when the war ended, the political question at its heart remained unsettled. That question concerned the proper principle for determining sovereignty.”57 Others, such as Eliot Cohen, suggested that the war aims grew out of the “absence of clarity and precision” and “muddiness of thought” typical of 1990s interventions and further

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that this embodied a misguided response to the “fuzzy purposes and openended commitments [that] helped doom the U.S. effort in Vietnam.”58 But in fairness, there was no realistic path that could resolve lingering issues in Belgrade, keep Russia and the rest of the international community on board, and allow a quick, clean end to our involvement. If our leaders had sought to fuse such hopeful aspirations together, it would have constituted a dangerous siren song. In particular, a sweeping effort to remake the Balkans would have been exceptionally risky, especially with a U.S. presidential election the next year. Such an ambitious goal, if established hastily and without recognition of the massive obstacles and resources needed, would have increased the odds of failure. This reinforces the soundness of the agreed-upon path and illustrates why, in the words of ExComm Co-chair Gregory Schulte, “Sometimes you need fuzziness” if it is employed in a careful, deliberate way.59 The United States struck an appropriate balance between clarity and achievability in selecting its goal. The immediate creation of a democracy in Kosovo was not a priority. Although it is true that eventually creating a democratic Kosovo (as well as a democratic Serbia) embodied a long-term U.S. desire, there was no sense that it could be accomplished quickly or easily, and in fact it was downplayed in public to help manage expectations.60 Throughout this period the Clinton administration sought to enlarge NATO and gradually expand democracy after the Soviet Union’s demise, but there was no illusion this could be done quickly or cost-free in the Balkans. Although General Casey recalls a general desire to eventually hold free elections in Kosovo, he stated “I don’t remember the word ‘democracy’ being used in the discussions” at the NSC.61 Similarly, Schulte recalls that forging a path toward democracy “wasn’t the key theme, but it was understood” to be part of the desired long-term path.62 Also, Hawley recalls that “it was really never stated explicitly—democratization—but there was an underlying assumption that if we’re going to go through this air campaign and blast away and so on . . . we’re not going to have something that [is] a dictator here . . . this was all about representative government.”63 After earlier dramatic events (and setbacks) in Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti, and Bosnia, Clinton administration officials had developed a better sense of the difficult trade-offs in such complex conflicts. They generally “recognized that democratization is a process, it’s not an end state . . . you

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democratize as you go along,” as Hawley recalls,64 so they did not expect the rapid creation of democracy on a shoestring budget. The administration acknowledged that once Serb forces departed, the international community would need to take over the security and governance of Kosovo. This was bolstered by the recognition at Rambouillet that Kosovar Albanians were not organized or ready for self-government and would need extensive help for the foreseeable future. Thus, the United States and NATO agreed “to force the removal of Serbian military and police forces and place Kosovo under international protection until its final status could be determined,” as a RAND study put it.65 U.S. officials saw democratization as a long process rather than a fixed event that could be reached by simply liberating Kosovo and stepping out of the way. The potential goal of regime change in Serbia could have been another goal of the Kosovo war. Had we pursued regime change in Belgrade, as some suggested, it might have fostered a feel-good approach, offering the allure of toppling the chief instigator of the crisis.66 Yet the casual addition of such an aim would have vastly increased the complexity of a war widely deemed of only peripheral importance. It would have required far more planning, resourcing, and energy by the United States for years or even decades to come. This could easily have fostered a slippery slope of democratization on the cheap, in a similar manner that plagued our subsequent wars. Therefore, early in the war the Clinton administration briefly considered—and wisely rejected—the idea of “declaring Milosevic’s removal from power an explicit war aim,” in the words of Albright.67 Instead, we developed a plan that, though admittedly imperfect by leaving the fate of Kosovo and Serbia to be refined, was generally suited to the situation. Our leaders wanted a liberal, Westernized, prosperous Serbia but believed it should come about through internal processes within Serbia.68 And the fact that Milosevic was indicted for war crimes in late May 199969 provided reassurance that some changes could be expected in Belgrade even without foreign-imposed regime change. Overall, the goal of substantial autonomy was not perfect, and it did not please everyone. It ruled out a clean break from Kosovo, and it left key matters to be refined down the road. But it was an adequate approach that identified in a complex corner of the globe a reasonably clear, achievable political end that was better than any other realistic alternative. It incorporated ambiguity for understandable reasons and reflected a sensible

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balance between clarity and achievability. This goal was well-suited to the conditions at hand. Task 2: Did we anticipate and seek to mitigate the foreseeable obstacles? Yes, we did. U.S. officials acknowledged the daunting array of obstacles that could undermine postwar Kosovo and took prudent steps to mitigate them. First, lingering ethnic tensions embodied one mammoth obstacle that had incited the conflict and contributed to a “seething cauldron of resentments.”70 It was quite possible these tensions might incite violence after the air campaign that could drown out the humanitarian reasons for going to war in the first place. As one account highlights, “Ethnic tensions were white-hot, and the potential for retributive violence was very high.”71 Not only was it possible that Serbian atrocities could resume against Kosovar Albanians, but Albanians might also launch reprisal killings as reverse ethnic cleansing against Serbs. Either outcome, or potentially both, if conducted on a widespread basis, could jeopardize Kosovo’s security, rule of law, outside financial aid, and, ultimately, U.S. domestic support.72 Other dynamics might also serve as catalysts for postwar violence. In contrast to Bosnia, where most ethnic groups spoke a common language, in Kosovo the Albanians and Serbs spoke different languages and had minimal interaction with one another before the outbreak of atrocities.73 In this limited respect Kosovo embodied an even tougher challenge than that faced later in Iraq, which had a shared language among Sunnis and Shi’ites, and regular sectarian interaction (including common intermarriage) prior to the 2003 invasion.74 It was also possible that Kosovo’s violence could spill over beyond its borders, potentially into Macedonia, Albania, or Montenegro.75 These daunting ethnic, linguistic, societal, and regional dynamics made the situation ripe for renewed turmoil. As an illustration of this complexity, despite his deep foreign policy knowledge, former President George H. W. Bush reportedly had trouble understanding the various actors and interests in the Balkans while in office, as the region seemed to embody “the most complicated civil war imaginable . . . with unusually high possibilities of things going wrong,” in historian David Halberstam’s words.76 Further, in another sobering development, the Rambouillet negotiations in February 1999 underscored that Kosovars were nowhere near

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ready to govern. This ushered forth the question of who would do so in order to grapple with lack of institutions, severe economic underdevelopment, and other issues.77 A vacuum of governance in Kosovo might serve as a pressure cooker within which atrocities could recommence. To further add to the challenge, “There were no police, judges, or jails to provide law and order,” and militant extremists and organized crime might constitute additional threats after the war.78 In short, a lack of governance, the potential reemergence of ethnic violence, and other looming problems might undo any battlefield gains in short order. In some respects this array of obstacles was like those confronted twelve years later in Libya: another U.S.-led air war, geographically close to Western Europe, and involving a relatively small population that might result in renewed hostilities, lack of public order, and militias needing to be demilitarized. But rather than punt the problems to ill-suited actors or assume them away with optimistic presumptions—as we would do in Libya—we confronted them head-on in Kosovo. U.S. officials recognized most of the likely obstacles and took practical steps to deal with them. As perhaps the most visible attempt to do so, on the day Operation Allied Force began, President Clinton publicly signaled his willingness to participate in a NATO stabilization force. Specifically, he said that “if NATO is invited to do so, our troops should take part in that mission to keep the peace.”79 Clinton recalled in his memoir that “we wanted a NATO-led peacekeeping force to guarantee the peace and safety of Kosovo’s civilians, including the Serb minority.”80 As General Casey recalls from his position at the Joint Staff J-5 at the time, “Everybody thought the primary postwar challenge was going to be ethnic violence. And that’s why the peacekeeping force was put in there.”81 This was a reasonable attempt to mitigate the risk of violence after a Serbian withdrawal. A lack of such deliberate steps, or a public statement that we would not participate in any stabilization force whatsoever, could have easily fostered a vacuum. Official records reveal that in January 1999 the NSC principals discussed engaging NATO on this topic of a stabilization force. By February 1999, NSC deputies were already using the term “KFOR”: the Kosovo force that would assume responsibility for establishing a secure postwar environment.82 And by early March 1999, the NSC deputies recommended that the United States should “insist on a NATO-led implementation

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force,” while UNSCR 1244, issued on June 10, played a helpful part in formally laying this groundwork for KFOR.83 To help set conditions, NATO began staging 45,000 service members in neighboring Macedonia for a potential ground invasion if needed, but this force could also assume duties as a stabilization force upon the war’s end.84 These were admirable steps to prepare for the likely postwar difficulties. Further, the NSC prepared for other dangerous contingencies. Schulte viewed these as potential “wild cards” that could undermine postwar Kosovo.85 One wild card was that the KLA might violate the peace agreement, turn against NATO, and spark an insurgency. To mitigate this risk, Schulte and the ExComm asked the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) to conduct a historical review of insurgencies, including successful and unsuccessful counterinsurgency approaches, and provide a few recommendations. USIP did so and came back with a recommendation to transform the KLA into a “Kosovo protection force” after the conflict. The ExComm followed this recommendation to help ensure that the KLA wouldn’t become a disruptive actor and instead could contribute to stability. To further bolster post-conflict stability, the Joint Staff, working closely with NSC civilian staffers, developed carefully worded orders that tasked U.S. and NATO forces with policing tasks in Kosovo, but without using such a loaded term. The avoidance of the term “policing” was done deliberately to avoid provoking blowback at the Pentagon and among NATO partners. This was intended to ultimately allow for a gradual transition to local policing forces by incorporating lessons learned from Bosnia.86 In addition to these hazards, Russia was another serious postwar challenge. Moscow had historically close ties to Belgrade, and it perceived Serbian affairs as falling within its sphere of influence. Hence, Russia (along with China) had sought to impede Western intervention by arguing that it would infringe on Serbian sovereignty.87 On March 25, 1999, Russian Foreign Minister Ivanov asked Secretary Albright, “How can Russia stand by and watch NATO destroy a sovereign nation?” This underscored Russia’s fear that the precedent set in Kosovo might usher in a new era of Western interventionism under the guise of humanitarian action that might soon extend to places such as Chechnya.88 At the moment hostilities ended, a Russian force of fifty vehicles embarked on a race to occupy Pristina airfield. This seemed to indicate that Russia might become a postwar spoiler by grabbing its own sector and seeking a de facto partition.89

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This prospect that Russia might undermine postwar Kosovo embodied yet another challenge, on top of all the aforementioned ones. How could U.S. and NATO officials deal with Russia? They started by acknowledging that Russia could create significant problems, so they sought to bind it to postwar Kosovo rather than exclude it. General Wesley Clark noted that “it is the fear of every commander . . . that what was won on the battlefield would be lost at the peace table”; hence, U.S. officials aimed to integrate Russia into other nations’ sectors rather than allow it to establish its own autonomous sector.90 Just three weeks into the bombing, President Clinton called President Yeltsin to propose that Russia participate in the postwar peacekeeping effort. A recently declassified phone transcript reveals that Clinton told Yeltsin on April 19, 1999, “I know, Boris, how high the stakes are. We’re trying to achieve a lasting peace in the Balkans,” and further, “There is no way in the world this will work, Boris, unless Russia plays a military and political role. . . . It cannot happen unless we find a way to do this together.” Senior-level dialogue involving President Clinton, Vice President Gore, Secretary Cohen, Secretary Albright, and Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott with their Russian counterparts continued throughout the war to try to anticipate and manage postwar U.S.-Russian tensions.91 Ambassador Marc Grossman, who served as assistant secretary of state for European Affairs, recalls that U.S. officials “tried to consult Russia as much as possible”92 throughout this period. Albright in particular sought to advance a “double magnet” approach that aimed to bring “Russia closer to NATO’s position, then Belgrade closer to Russia.”93 Strobe Talbott also engaged in weeks of exhaustive diplomatic dialogue with Russian special envoy Chernomyrdin, as well as Finnish President Ahtisaari (who served as a neutral third party) to address Russian concerns.94 All this unfolded at a time when the United States still had hopes of bringing Russia into the community of liberal democracies, before Russia assumed the brazenly authoritarian role that it has today. Rather than merely trying to shut Russia out of postwar Kosovo (which could have transformed its potential spoiler role into a self-fulfilling prophecy), the United States instead sought to conduct a delicate balancing act that invested Russia in Kosovo’s future without granting it excessive authority that could foster a de facto partition. Although we never seemed to satisfy every Russian concern (as epitomized by the race to Pristina airfield), doing so completely was probably impossible.

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Nevertheless, U.S. officials grasped the basic Russia challenge in Kosovo and tried to get ahead of it. Once again, our leaders not only anticipated postwar difficulties but also sought to craft solutions to head them off at the pass, or at least to mitigate their effects. In addition to all these obstacles, one domestic obstacle could have derailed our planning: bureaucratic friction. Initially, Secretary of State Albright clashed with both Defense Secretary William Cohen and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Shelton regarding the wisdom of planning for a ground invasion. Albright naturally had an interventionist mind-set, but Cohen and Shelton were more circumspect.95 Cohen and Shelton were skeptical of peacekeeping in general and were concerned about getting trapped in another nation’s civil war, in contrast to Albright and Clark’s greater willingness to get involved.96 Further, General Clark had notoriously frosty interactions with the Joint Chiefs, particularly Army Chief of Staff General Reimer, and was repeatedly scolded by Washington for allegedly exceeding his authority throughout the war.97 In one striking exchange after a press conference in Brussels, General Clark received a call from General Shelton directing him to “get your fucking face off the TV. No more briefings, period. That’s it.”98 After a separate incident, Shelton reportedly said that Clark “had one foot on a banana peel and one foot in the grave.”99 Then, as an unmistakable rebuke after the war’s end, the Pentagon announced Clark’s replacement unexpectedly early, which represented a “world-class slap in the face” to the successful commander and laid bare the interpersonal disagreements throughout the war.100 This intersection of personalities and outlooks had all the makings of a major roadblock with regard to planning for postwar Kosovo. Yet this roadblock did not materialize. Heated bureaucratic battles gravitated toward unresolved aspects of the military campaign—such as deploying AH-64 attack helicopters and a potential ground invasion—rather than the postwar plan. The fact that President Clinton made a clear commitment to Kosovo from the start likely helped redirect debate to other unresolved aspects. From the beginning, his administration anchored itself to Kosovo’s fate, so most of the major bureaucratic battles centered on other loose ends. In all these ways, the Clinton administration not only acknowledged the main obstacles that could undermine postwar Kosovo but actively sought to manage them.

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Task 3: Did we mobilize resources in a manner aligned with the goal? Our resources mobilized for postwar Kosovo did indeed align with our political goal, despite disagreements in other resource areas. First, it is true that, regarding the military campaign, resources were an area of friction. The deployment of AH-64 helicopters and the planning for a ground invasion entailed major, heated disagreements over the resources we should commit to increase coercive leverage over Milosevic. But regarding the postwar landscape, there was little doubt that we would allocate meaningful resources. As previously highlighted, on the day the air campaign began, President Clinton agreed in principle to a stabilization force. This provided reassurance that we would not bolt for the exits as soon as hostilities ended. The precise size and scope of this force would be refined at NATO’s fiftieth anniversary summit in late April and the NATO force generation conference in May. But early on, we crossed a major psychological threshold when we signaled that we would mobilize substantial resources for postwar Kosovo. Ultimately, the United States committed 7,000 service members to KFOR, which was significant relative to Kosovo’s modest size.101 This idea of a post-conflict peacekeeping force had been a recurring theme in planning throughout the summer of 1998 and into early 1999,102 and became formalized on May 25, 1999, with the determination that KFOR would include nearly 50,000 service members from various countries.103 It would entail forces from NATO, non-NATO, and NATO partner states to help provide law and order, distribute food, secure the population, secure the borders, and perform other stabilization tasks.104 As the planning was refined, U.S. forces came to be one of five multinational brigades, focused in Kosovo’s east, with other sectors controlled by French, German, Italian, and British forces also under KFOR/NATO command.105 Thus, NATO “assumed responsibility for Kosovo’s security . . . [and] made the daily operations of the province its own problem.”106 To help grapple with potential U.S. domestic pushback, senior officials such as General Ralston privately assured members of Congress that the American contribution to KFOR would not exceed 15 percent of the total force.107 This could commit meaningful ground presence while helping allay concerns of a quagmire. Overall, the size of this force was significant. In per capita terms, these nearly 50,000 troops represented the most significant external assistance

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of any intervention in recent decades (along with Bosnia in 1995). It also helped that “NATO began to prepare for its role in postconflict Kosovo several months in advance,” in the words of a RAND study, as it prepositioned forces in Macedonia, ready to deploy within hours of the war’s end.108 This constituted aggressive preparedness to act quickly in the conflict’s aftermath and help avoid a vacuum (see table 1.1). James Dobbins served as special advisor to the president and secretary of state for the Balkans, and he recalls that the resources mobilized for Kosovo may have been “unnecessarily large” and “probably could’ve been equally successful at lower levels, but it was a useful reassurance policy.”109 It helped hedge against uncertainty and manage unforeseen challenges, further tilting the odds in our favor. The peacekeeping force was important, but it represented only one part of our overall strategy. We also needed to craft a new political order out

TABLE 1.1. Initial troop density by war zone War zone (year)

Initial international military presence (number of personnel)

Local population (in millions)

Kosovo (1999)

49,000

2.1

23.3

Afghanistan (late 2001/early 2002)

12,200

20.5

0.6

Iraq (2003)

168,500

25.6

Libya (2011)

N/A

6.3

Troop density (troops per 1,000 inhabitants)

6.6 0

Sources and notes: Population data is from the World Bank at http://data.worldbank.org/ indicator/SP.POP.TOTL?locations=XK-AF-IQ-LY. In 1997 Kosovo’s population was 2.1 million, which is the figure used in the table. Shortly thereafter, ethnic violence triggered mass refugee movements, dropping the population to 1.8 million. If one were to use the 1.8 million figure instead, the Kosovo troop density increases to 27.2 per 1,000 inhabitants. Regarding the 49,000 KFOR personnel deployed to Kosovo by early September 1999, see Ivo H. Daalder and Michael E. O’Hanlon, Winning Ugly: NATO’s War to Save Kosovo (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2000), 176. Regarding the forces mobilized for Afghanistan, the figure of 12,200 includes 5,000 international personnel focused on the greater Kabul area plus the 7,200 U.S. personnel focused mainly on counterterrorism. Both figures reflect the situation in March 2002 as Operation Anaconda was ending. See Ian S. Livingston and Michael O’Hanlon, “Afghanistan Index, Also Including Selected Data on Pakistan,” Brookings, September 30, 2012, 4–5. See also Hannah Fairfield, Kevin Quealy, and Archie Tse, “Troop Levels in Afghanistan since 2001,” New York Times, http://www. nytimes.com/interactive/2009/10/01/world/middleeast/afghanistan-policy.html?_r=0. Regarding the 168,500 personnel in Iraq as the invasion ended in May 2003, see Donald P. Wright and Colonel Timothy R. Reese, On Point II: Transition to the New Campaign: The United States Army in Operation Iraqi Freedom, May 2003–January 2005 (Fort Leavenworth, KS: Combat Studies Institute Press, 2008), 170.

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of virtually nothing. This, too, would require substantial resources. While tens of thousands of KFOR troops would focus on security-related tasks, the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) was designed to fill the governance gap. It would establish an interim civilian authority to foster a nascent, provisional self-government.110 Similar to KFOR, the concept of UNMIK was outlined in UNSCR 1244, with further details provided in the secretary general’s report of June 12, 1999, which defined the four pillars of responsibility. Each pillar was placed under the authority of a multilateral organization such as the European Union or the OSCE (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe).111 Admittedly, some of the planning for UNMIK was less than ideal, for it was unclear until near the end of the planning whether the UN or OSCE would take charge of governing, which fostered some resentment in OSCE and got the UN’s planning off to a slower start.112 Nevertheless, the overall commitment to UNMIK signaled a meaningful pledge to Kosovo’s future. The United States also leaned forward by identifying formal and informal leaders in camps of displaced Kosovars in order to discern their skill sets and further help put together the civil administration.113 In other areas as well, the Clinton administration assembled resources in line with the goal of “substantial autonomy.” Kosovo was located in an exceedingly poor and underdeveloped part of Europe,114 and the planning pillar of economic reconstruction, headed by the European Union, helped provide much-needed resources. The USAID Office of Transition Initiatives facilitated resourcing of financial programs tied to infrastructure, refugee resettlement, and other areas, while also prodding the World Bank and the European Union to provide assistance.115 The active involvement of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in interagency discussions also helped financially pave the way for USAID’s postwar projects. Further, because we shouldered the overwhelming burden of the military effort, this was used as leverage to compel other nations to “pony up to handle the other costs involved in postwar Kosovo,” in the words of Michael Hurley, who served as NSC director of Southeastern European Affairs.116 A July 1999 donors conference at Brussels spurred international pledges totaling $1.4 billion, which set the stage for additional donor contributions.117 A 2003 RAND study found that “international assistance for Kosovo’s reconstruction proved more generous than for any earlier postconflict response

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TABLE 1.2. Development aid within one year of initial military victory by war zone War zone (year)

Total international development aid disbursed (in constant 2012 dollars)

Aid per capita (per inhabitant)

Kosovo (1999–2000)

$2.01 billion

$957

Afghanistan (2001–2002)

$2.21 billion

$108

Iraq (2003–2004)

$8.54 billion

$334

Libya (2011–2012)

$0.75 billion

$119

Sources and notes: The Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya aid amounts are from the OECD “Query Wizard for International Development Statistics,” found at http://www.oecd.org/ dac/stats/idsonline.htm. Each year’s aid amount is converted to January 2012 dollars using the Bureau of Labor Statistics Inflation Calculator, found at https://www.bls.gov/data/infla tion_calculator.htm. The Afghanistan 2001 and 2002 aid amount of $1.72 billion converts to $2.21 billion in 2012 dollars. The Iraq 2003 and 2004 aid amount of $6.94 billion converts to $8.54 billion in 2012 dollars. The Libya 2011 and 2012 aid amount of $728 million converts to $746 million in 2012 dollars. The OECD statistics do not cover Kosovo during this period. The Kosovo 1999 and 2000 aid amount of $1.5 billion is from Dobbins et al., America’s Role, 125, which converts to $2.01 billion in 2012 dollars. Development aid amounts reflect entire calendar years; by-month data were unavailable. The population data used for the per capita calculations are the same data used in table 1.1.

or any since,”118 which is supported by table 1.2. The per capita development assistance of $957 per Kosovar dwarfs that of any other case in this book. Without question, Kosovo’s smaller geography and population size helped a great deal. Planners might have used Kosovo’s smaller size to lowball or assume away the postwar challenges, but they did not take the bait. Resources would not win the peace by themselves. But the fact that robust resources were mobilized in support of a reasonably clear, achievable political aim, while mindful of the likely obstacles, helped increase the odds of a decent outcome. The baseline conditions in Kosovo entailed significant challenges but also a few opportunities. We took these conditions, made difficult decisions, and crafted a gradual path toward stability and democratization. Ultimately, this improved the chances of winning the peace.

Why Did We Get Kosovo (Mostly) Right? Now we arrive at a crucial question: Why did our government conduct adequate planning for postwar Kosovo? Why didn’t we mess things up as we did in later war zones such as Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya?

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First, we should acknowledge that Kosovo was easier in several ways. Kosovo’s small size and population were undoubtedly helpful. Kosovo enjoyed close geographical proximity to Western Europe (and in fact it was in Europe), which likely increased NATO’s level of interest. Also, the fact that our goals in Kosovo largely overlapped with the desires of Kosovar Albanians (who constituted nine-tenths of the population) helped ensure that we would not be seen as a foreign invader on an imperial crusade. Further, enforcing the peace was made easier by an essentially partitioned population, as illustrated by the divided city of Mitrovica, where Kosovar Albanians overwhelmingly relocated south of the Mitrovica Bridge while ethnic Serbs consolidated to the north. Finally, we did not have any other major wars going on at the time to distract our attention. All these aspects undoubtedly made managing postwar Kosovo easier. In these various ways, we were lucky to have some favorable tailwinds. But couldn’t we have used these factors as reason to kick back, relax, and let postwar Kosovo coast on cruise control? Why did we still put together a rigorous plan that addressed the planning tasks reasonably well? The way in which our officials handled the recurring pathologies helps explain why. The Clinton administration built on its previous experiences, made sensible decisions, and avoided the pitfall of trying to implant American-style democracy on the cheap. The first pathology of wishful thinking is often a serious danger. Indeed, U.S. officials initially expected a relatively quick war, with the assumption that Milosevic would capitulate once we showed that we meant business. In the war’s early days, Albright stated that she expected the military campaign to wrap up in a “relatively short period of time.”119 However, this expectation soon withered away. By late April, the United States had hardened its thinking as the NATO summit helped dispel any lingering hope for a quick win. Thus, while wishful thinking helped shape the initial military campaign, U.S. officials resisted its sway with respect to the crucial postwar phase. Our officials had firsthand, humbling experiences that helped reduce their susceptibility to pie-in-the-sky postwar scenarios. The direct experience of multiple interventions throughout the 1990s helped bestow a more realistic sense of achievable outcomes. After the arduous Dayton negotiations, it would have been almost inconceivable for administration

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officials to believe that lasting stability in the Balkans could take shape with minimal effort. As two U.S. officials deeply involved in Kosovo planning recounted, the “experience with the difficulties in stopping hostilities in Bosnia had given most officials a guarded posture as they faced the conflict in Kosovo.”120 As a subcomponent of wishful thinking, U.S. officials might have dealt with intelligence gaps by using overly confident estimates. The accidental May 7 bombing of the Chinese embassy embodied one clear example of the limits of our intelligence at the time. Further, the motivations of both the Serbs and the KLA remained partly shrouded in mystery, and our officials had little choice but to make assumptions about their intentions. Although the KLA was outwardly aligned with the United States and NATO, during its formative period “the KLA was a mystery. Nobody knew anything about its leadership, ideology, or command structure,” according to David Phillips.121 Rather than sugarcoat such gaps with optimistic assumptions about the ease of implanting democracy and the virtues of a quick exit, our officials did the opposite and assumed that the KLA could become a problematic actor that could jeopardize the peace if left unmanaged. Holbrooke concluded from an early point that the KLA might prove just as treacherous as Milosevic himself. This helped prompt planners to explore how to manage the KLA’s postwar role, with an aim to demilitarize the KLA, bind it to the settlement, and reduce the possibility that it could incite violence.122 Another major intelligence gap entailed the long-term intentions of Milosevic, including whether Serbian forces might restart hostilities after the war. Yet Clark, Albright, Holbrooke, and other officials had studied Milosevic’s behavior—and had extensive personal interactions with him— which helped narrow intelligence gaps and facilitated better judgment of Serbia’s likely actions. Such intensive study of the region and its web of actors did not eliminate all wishful thinking, but it at least fostered hardnosed estimates while mitigating pipe dreams. The second pathology involves learning. In a nutshell, the Clinton administration learned from its formative—and often sobering— experiences throughout the 1990s. Early on in the administration’s first term, the intervention in Somalia was widely perceived as a failure (despite saving between tens of thousands and one million Somali lives).

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President Clinton later acknowledged that the Mogadishu battle of October 3, 1993, “haunted” him, and U.S. officials struggled to discern how they had meandered down a vague nation-building road with little deliberation.123 A few months later, Somalia’s lingering impact contributed to the decision not to intervene in Rwanda as the world watched a catastrophe unfold. Rwanda would become what Clinton described as “one of my great regrets in foreign policy.”124 Some months after that, the United States intervened in Haiti and attained its short-term goals but had serious interagency planning problems and ended the intervention before robust institutions and reforms could take root.125 Then came Bosnia. Precarious negotiations confronted deep grievances head-on at Dayton to help halt ethnic cleansing. This set the stage for a follow-on force in Bosnia with a “clear, limited, achievable mission,” from President Clinton’s perspective, that helped stabilize the tenuous situation, despite problems in command and control and in stovepiped lines of effort.126 Clinton later stated in his memoir he “had learned from our experience in Bosnia [that] even after the conflict there would still be a great deal of work ahead” in places such as Kosovo.127 Holbrooke also came away from Bosnia with the sense that “there will be other Bosnias in our lives . . . in distant and ill-understood places,”128 and similarly James Dobbins concluded that Bosnia embodied yet another 1990s “learning experience” as the Clinton administration gained greater understanding with each intervention.129 Collectively, these formative 1990s interventions—which entailed both qualified failures and successes—embodied a school of hard knocks. They informed the Clinton team’s thinking about the need for robust post-conflict planning and the difficult choices required. They also highlighted that dreamy aspirations for knotty internal wars would almost certainly be unattainable, so we needed to set realistic goals with an extended time horizon. Further, these experiences underscored the need to avoid stovepiping and to prioritize coherent civil-military planning. The fact that many officials involved in Kosovo had repeated, direct experience in intervention after intervention helped underscore the need to avoid shooting for the stars and the allure of democracy on the cheap. Dobbins recalls that by the late 1990s, the senior levels of government featured “the same people doing the same thing repeatedly that honed their skills and overcame a lot of the bureaucratic resistance.”130 Similarly,

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General Casey recalls that officials “had built a level of expertise . . . there’s no question that the Kosovo postwar planning effort was informed by what the folks who had been there had learned in Bosnia and Somalia. No question.”131 Additionally, senior interagency planner Hawley referred to it as “an organizational learning process, very much so,” and “we learned from those experiences.”132 Ambassador Marc Grossman also recalls that the NSC principals, deputies, and staff, as well as the senior military leadership, had learned a great deal during these 1990s experiences about managing postwar challenges.133 The substantial knowledge about the Balkans in particular helped shape how officials handled postwar Kosovo. Bosnia had underscored the need to build institutions before rushing into elections, the need to focus on policing, the need for a strong high representative, and the need for integrated political-military planning. So U.S. officials built on these experiences as they prepared for postwar Kosovo, while mindful of the similarities to, and differences from, earlier efforts.134 For example, General Clark had been involved in the 1994 Haiti planning and the 1995 Dayton negotiations, he personally knew Milosevic (and even drank brandy with him),135 and he was uniquely well-suited to plan a war in the Balkans, despite his difficulty getting along with Washington. Additionally, Albright also had intimate knowledge of the Balkans, given her impressive personal story of being born in Czechoslovakia, seeking refuge in Yugoslavia (and then London) during World War II, and speaking multiple European languages from a young age. Her unique background prompted her to declare “I am a Sarajevan” in Serbo-Croatian at the 1994 dedication of the future U.S. embassy. Albright’s childhood in Europe further influenced her to see Kosovo in Munich-like terms and suggested to her that even a seemingly small problem in a remote corner of Europe, if left unchecked, might spiral out of control.136 The 1990s interventions helped prod officials to tackle the postwar challenges in ways that built on earlier lessons while mindful of Kosovo’s uniqueness. To be sure, mistakes still occurred, particularly related to the military campaign itself. For example, when he spoke about a potential peacekeeping mission, President Clinton added the unhelpful statement “I do not intend to put our troops in Kosovo to fight a war.”137 According to historian David Halberstam, this conveyed a mixed message to the Pentagon that “we want this one but how far we are willing to go, we

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still don’t know. Check with us later.”138 Yet the equivocation regarding the combat phase did not detract from the adequacy of planning for the postwar phase. Effective learning helped better tackle the difficult tradeoffs at hand. A third pathology that might have undercut postwar Kosovo involves the role of the NSC. Rather than allowing governmental agencies to scatter in different directions, the NSC served as the hub of politicalmilitary coordination. National Security Advisor Sandy Berger led a grinding array of principals committee meetings focused on both the war and the postwar. The meetings delved into underlying issues, entailed constructive debate, and developed recommendations for the president’s approval. As then-Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Ralston recalls, the United States “had a very functioning National Security Council . . . and it was quite active . . . different views came to the table and they were hammered out,” and as a result, “we didn’t do stupid things that we otherwise would have.”139 This coordination contributed to why “the NSC did better in thinking about postwar aspects,” from General Casey’s perspective, as compared to other later conflicts.140 Similarly, Ambassador Thomas Pickering, who often attended NSC principals and deputies meetings for the State Department, recalls the NSC would “deeply involve the departments and agencies” to conduct thorough interagency reviews of policy, and “it was a good period in the sense that we were able to get things done.” Despite sometimes heated differences, Pickering recalls, the deputies committee would thoroughly unpack complex issues and frame tradeoffs for higher-level decisions.141 The coordination undertaken by the NSC staff was regularly “teeing up decisions for the principals to make [and] for the president to make,” as Michael Hurley, who served at the NSC, put it.142 Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Hawley further recalls that Berger “held people accountable for integration. . . . If your activities were not integrated . . . you were called up to his office and he said, ‘Are you going to be a team player or not?’”143 This atmosphere prioritized coordination among political and military departments. Presidential Decision Directive 56 (PDD-56) encouraged the NSC to operate in this manner. As an outgrowth of gaffes and synchronization problems during Somalia, Haiti, and Bosnia, the Clinton administration developed PDD-56 in May 1997 to try to inculcate lessons learned and

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improve integration. Leonard Hawley played a central part in drafting PDD-56, which directed the creation of an ExComm under the NSC’s purview to handle “complex contingency operations,” and delineated responsibilities and expectations.144 Further, PDD-56 established interagency working groups to facilitate synchronization and specified a need to delineate the “desired pol-mil end state,” along with “demonstrable milestones and measures of success,” while expressing a desire to make resource decisions “early, preferably before the operation begins.”145 A key theme of PDD-56 was the need to build on lessons from Somalia, Haiti, and Bosnia to facilitate coherent planning.146 PDD-56 provided a useful framework for dozens of planned interventions—many of which were never actually executed—but still set the stage for a more mature, integrated planning process to unfold for Kosovo.147 Although we should be careful not to overstate its importance as a single document, PDD-56 represented a way of doing business that stressed problem solving through coordination. It empowered the NSC deputies, staff, and the ExComm to feed decision making by the NSC principals and the president in particular.148 Unfortunately, PDD-56 would soon be cast aside following the change in administrations, with no replacement put in its place. Nevertheless, its active use in the late 1990s improved coordination and allowed the Clinton administration to better grapple with underlying trade-offs. A fourth pathology entails crosscutting domestic political pressures to quickly withdraw while still expecting a democracy. These competing pressures, if allowed free rein, might have helped sink any planning effort and paved the way for an abrupt abandonment of Kosovo. At the time of the Kosovo war, the American public was ambivalent about a new intervention in the Balkans. Pessimistic comparisons between the Balkans and Vietnam bubbled up throughout the 1990s. Further, polling in June 1999 indicated that the public was evenly split about whether the Kosovo war was worth fighting (47% to 47%), and a slight majority (53%) favored sending U.S. peacekeeping troops to Kosovo, while roughly the same percentage (55%) believed that the peace would probably break down.149 To add to the mixed signals, nearly simultaneous with the rising violence in Kosovo, the Clinton administration encountered “wag the dog” questions related to the president’s impeachment and U.S. air strikes against Iraq in December 1998.150 This diminished the administration’s

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leverage, reduced its interest in provoking a new political fight with Congress, and might have suggested an abrupt withdrawal as a path of least resistance. However, despite the competing pressures, the Clinton administration publicly and unambiguously anchored itself to postwar Kosovo. This was loosely reminiscent of President Clinton’s earlier, controversial decision to commit forces to Bosnia in late 1995 despite roughly two-thirds disapproval in U.S. polls.151 Such actions in both Bosnia and Kosovo at least partly counter the narrative that President Clinton simply followed the polls at every juncture. In the Balkans his administration proved willing to stick its neck out to increase the odds of better outcomes. Despite later criticism of Kosovo as a messy, incomplete engagement that bogged down U.S. forces, in fact our commitment to Kosovo emerged from rigorous, coherent planning in the face of political headwinds. The deliberate decision to assume risk was an appropriate way to manage the domestic crosscurrents rather than an effort to please all audiences by sidestepping hard choices. In addition to these pathologies, two other factors may help explain the Kosovo postwar planning that unfolded. For one, Kosovo embodied a place in which there would be nothing existing upon which to build. Officials such as General Ralston recognized that “they don’t have any organs of government, . . . [so] this is going to be a long-term effort.”152 Because there would need to be a governing entity created from the ground up and Kosovar Albanians were clearly not ready to take charge, it underscored that Kosovo needed significant international help. One could not merely tweak or modify what was already in place; it would entail building a new order from scratch. The fact that the conflict would unmistakably leave “Kosovo without the most basic structures of governance”153 might have created additional impetus to plan for the day after. Additionally, Kosovo’s geographic location in Europe and the perception that NATO’s reputation was on the line further helped stimulate the planning. In the words of Admiral Stavridis, Kosovo “was actually in Europe, so the Europeans’ stake in the game was higher.”154 From the perspective of President Clinton and other leaders, Kosovo became a direct test of NATO’s future viability. If the West were to intervene, only to have the situation backslide into chaos, it could call into question NATO’s relevance and credibility in the twenty-first century. Berger stated

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that the view of President Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair was that “we have invested NATO’s credibility. We have invested U.S. credibility. We have invested British credibility, and we will do whatever it takes.”155 This psychological commitment and strong multinational support made it easier for us to confront the postwar challenges, given the view that NATO’s failure was simply not acceptable. This perception, linked to Kosovo’s location in Europe, likely helped foster tough decision making. The above factors are not the only way to explain what unfolded in Kosovo. One alternative explanation might be that postwar planning is often doomed to fail, and Kosovo epitomizes such a failure. This chapter has briefly outlined a few criticisms that might bolster this idea, such as the allegedly fuzzy political goal, the lack of a firm exit plan, and the indefinite occupation. Yet, overall, such a harsh judgment is not warranted. Our planning for Kosovo was admittedly imperfect, and it did leave some aspects to be refined. However, it addressed the three planning tasks about as well as could be expected. Further, our refusal to establish a rigid withdrawal time line was probably a virtue, not a fault. Our leaders grappled with most of the major obstacles with reasonable success. The case of Kosovo suggests that it is indeed possible to conduct adequate planning for the day after. A related explanation might center on the idea that the Middle East represents a uniquely treacherous vortex, and perhaps the United States cannot construct any adequate postwar plan there. Geographically, Kosovo is obviously located outside the Middle East and North Africa, so this case is inconclusive in that respect, but Kosovo did entail adequate postwar planning for a predominantly Muslim population. As another alternative explanation, is it possible that more planning time fostered better planning? It is true that in Kosovo we had indicators of a potential war months in advance, which provided time to sharpen our planning. However, there were also lulls in late 1998 when events temporarily quieted down and intervention in Kosovo was not seen as inevitable. During these lulls, planning sessions become rarer, and competing flash points arose. Further, as will be seen in later chapters, the United States had the benefit of far greater planning time in the case of Iraq, but our planning there was far worse. Hence, Kosovo illustrates that time can be helpful for planning, but only if it is used wisely.

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Aftermath To help complete the historical record, we’ll briefly turn to the actual outcome that unfolded. After the seventy-eight-day air war ended in June 1999, events in Kosovo proceeded along a satisfactory track, albeit with some setbacks. Most Kosovar Albanians quickly returned home, and “by November, over 800,000 of the 850,000 refugees had returned, making this one of the largest and quickest refugee returns in modern history,” according to the International Independent Commission on Kosovo.156 Economically, significant inflows and foreign aid helped spur Kosovo’s recovery.157 UNMIK and KFOR went into action and generally performed their roles according to the assembled plans. Roland Paris noted that UNMIK “took over key administrative functions, from taxation to garbage collection, . . . [and] no previous operation of this kind had exercised such extensive and direct administrative control over a territory.”158 Yet difficulties also unfolded. Reprisal killings by Albanians against Serbs took place, although not on a massive or sustained level sufficient to jeopardize Kosovo’s overall stability. Over time, KFOR would become more popular in Kosovo than UNMIK, as Kosovar Albanians came to see UNMIK as a barrier in the way of independence.159 In 2002 the international community advanced “Standards for Kosovo,” which were conditions to be met before deciding on Kosovo’s political status, but delays of independence proved frustrating to Kosovar Albanians.160 Other issues also arose, including corruption, organized crime, and extremely high unemployment.161 One particularly concerning incident of ethnically motivated violence took place in March 2004, following the mysterious drowning of Kosovar Albanian youths that locals blamed on Serbs. The resulting riots resulted in thirty-one deaths and widespread destruction, and provided a psychological jolt to the international community, helping spur greater calls for independence.162 Yet these setbacks did not derail Kosovo. They also did not induce a resumption of sustained ethnic violence, and they did not foster a failed state. Instead, given a sustained Western commitment that built on the plans assembled, conditions remained decent. Kosovo’s nascent political institutions took shape. In February 2008, Kosovo formally declared independence (and has since been recognized by more than a hundred nations,

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including the United States), setting the stage for UNMIK’s extended role to fade into the background.163 With regard to overall resources, a RAND study found that the United States and its partners ultimately allocated “25 times more money and 50 times more troops per capita into postconflict Kosovo than into postconflict Afghanistan.”164 The study further concluded that “Kosovo has been the best managed of the U.S. post–Cold War ventures in nation-building.”165 Rigorous postwar planning helped lay the groundwork for such a major commitment. Today, public sentiments of Kosovars toward the United States are exceedingly positive. Dominic Tierney described Kosovo as “probably the most pro-American country anywhere outside the United States.” For example, in Kosovo’s capital of Pristina, one can locate Bill Clinton Boulevard, with an eleven-foot-tall statue of the U.S. president nearby. Kosovar crowds chanted “USA” during the statue’s official unveiling in 2009 while waving American flags.166 Streets named after Presidents George W. Bush and Woodrow Wilson, among other prominent Americans, are also present across Kosovo’s cities.167 Overall, adequate planning helped set the stage for a tolerable outcome. As a senior official stated, “If you look at where we are today in Kosovo versus where we were in 1998 . . . you’d have to say that’s a success story.”168 So if Kosovo entailed decent planning and it had a tolerable outcome, then why isn’t it perceived more positively by Americans today? This is probably the result of multiple factors, including the fact that Kosovo quickly fell out of the headlines, it didn’t entail a clean U.S. exit, and most Americans already had hardened opinions about the Clinton administration that had little to do with Kosovo. In particular, the fact that we remained committed for so many years in a nation-building capacity likely helped dampen views of it as a clear-cut success. Yet this sort of unfulfilling, protracted endgame may be the closest we come to “success” in such limited wars, particularly if our aim is to promote democracy. Planning that shoots for the stars can induce a catastrophic plummet back to Earth, as we discovered in subsequent conflicts. The Clinton administration receives little lasting political credit for Kosovo, but, generally speaking, forgotten accomplishments might be better than remembered disasters. Was Kosovo uniquely “easy” to manage? As discussed, without question Kosovo’s small size and population certainly made things easier.

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The fact that Kosovo was located within Europe, with NATO’s credibility directly at stake, also played a helpful role. All in all, it was indeed easier than most of the cases in this book. However, Kosovo’s starting conditions were still far from good. The Balkans entailed a complex web of ethnic animosities with centuries-old origins. These grievances prompted some observers to see it as another Vietnam-like quagmire in the making, and they even perplexed a foreign policy expert such as President George H. W. Bush. Kosovo also entailed a lack of existing governance and security institutions, with meddlesome actors—e.g., Russia and Serbia—that might try to undo the postwar settlement. Poor planning could have created space for postwar Kosovo to unravel and to transform a short-term military success into a long-term strategic defeat. If we had optimistically assumed that events would take care of themselves, so that we could “liberate” Kosovo, perhaps topple the regime in Serbia too, and then walk away while still creating a democracy, the outcome would have almost certainly been far worse. In that counterfactual scenario, observers today might be trying to explain why Kosovo was destined to fail, instead of whether it was too easy. Some aspects of Kosovo’s final status were left unsettled, which sparked some understandable criticism. But even with the benefit of hindsight, it is difficult to imagine a better approach that could have gained the support of the stakeholders. The degree of imprecision was understandable and even necessary to get Russia on board and to allow Milosevic to save face. Further, our basic strategy stayed within reasonable bounds in that it did not veer wildly between rapid democratization on the one hand and abrupt withdrawal on the other. In a difficult region of the world, our political goal, anticipated difficulties, and resources committed set the stage for an adequate way forward. This is not to say Kosovo’s postwar planning was perfect: it was not. But it was conducted tolerably. The tough, necessary decisions were made. And we did not expect a postwar cakewalk. The formative 1990s interventions played a crucial role. They were a school of hard knocks that gave Clinton administration officials hands-on experience and informed their judgment. It is hard to imagine the Kosovo planning proceeding in a similar way had those experiences not occurred. Building on our accumulated knowledge, the NSC took charge and paved the way for key presidential decisions.

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Kosovo was hardly problem-free, and this chapter does not fawn over the war or its aftermath with rose-tinted glasses. It was an “unwanted war, fought by an essentially uninterested country, orchestrated by a divided government,”169 in Halberstam’s words, and Kosovo had all the makings of a potential postwar fiasco. There is certainly much to criticize, such as the overt ruling out of a ground invasion early on, and other instances of lack of resolve and missed opportunities.170 Even two decades later, Kosovo’s future is not entirely settled, serious challenges endure, and events could always take a turn for the worse. But specifically with respect to postwar planning, we generally met the challenge. In a deeply complex region, with no vital national security interests at stake and many other competing demands, we went to war while we simultaneously looked ahead to try to plan the peace. The United States committed itself to a long-term, gradual path to stability and democracy promotion while also committing the requisite resources. If flaws must unfold, it might be best if they do so mainly in the combat phase rather than in the more treacherous postwar phase. The Kosovo war never culminated with public euphoria or a ticker-tape parade on the streets of Washington. But that is probably not a realistic expectation for such a messy internal war. Overall, our planning and decision making for Kosovo illustrate most of the best practices one would want to see. We avoided the temptation of self-delusion, and we made difficult choices, while acknowledging that the outcome would be imperfect. An examination of subsequent wars highlights even more clearly why our approach to Kosovo embodies a decent model to emulate. In subsequent wars we would soon face even bigger, tougher challenges, but we would avoid the basic choices we had grappled with in Kosovo. As the next administration came into office, it sought to detach itself from the 1990s, and it ignored recent lessons learned. This would help magnify the difficulties and would sidestep the tension between pursuing democracy and quickly getting out. The case of Afghanistan begins to illustrate the consequences of embracing pipe dreams, in stark contrast to our rare, reasonably successful approach to postwar Kosovo.

2

Afghanistan A Road to Incoherence

Afghanistan was the ultimate nation building mission. We had liberated the country from a primitive dictatorship, and we had a moral obligation to leave behind something better. . . . A democratic Afghanistan would be a hopeful alternative to the vision of the extremists. President George W. Bush, Decision Points

It was fall 2013, and we were in a race against the clock. I was on my fifth tour to Afghanistan. Nearly a decade earlier, during my first deployment to that forbidding country, I’d been a young platoon leader focused on killing or capturing insurgents. Now, as a major, I was the XO of an infantry brigade combat team in a desolate southeastern part of Afghanistan. Our brigade was planning a series of operations to try to bring government capacity to remote patches of Zabul province, where the Karzai government had virtually no control. Our aim was to quickly get some type of functioning local government in place before the impending troop drawdown fully kicked in. In a few months our brigade would be replaced by just a battalion. So we launched offensive missions to try to insert key Afghan figures who could stay in place, link the government to the people, and help fill the void after our departure. There was a name for this. It was called a “government in a box.”

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Could installing a government in a box really work? If you introduced fresh faces to a long-neglected area, could they gain and sustain local support, with sufficient capacity to do their intended jobs? Would they have more credibility and legitimacy with the locals than the Taliban? Our brigade comprised outstanding, top-tier soldiers trying to do the best we could, given the hand we were dealt. Still, it was disheartening to step back and think about the fact that we were the world’s superpower, and here we were, roughly a dozen years after we entered the country, and this nascent effort was as far as we’d come. In 2013 it felt like we had barely inched out of the starting blocks. Was this the original vision for Afghanistan’s future? If not, how did we get off track and squander so much time? To answer this, we need to turn back the clock several years. Well before Afghanistan became the longest war in U.S. history, the Bush administration sought to chart its initial post-invasion path. During the defining opening months from September 2001 to March 2002, we aimed to establish a course for Afghanistan that would require minimal attention. The planning had a few positive attributes, but on the whole it had serious deficiencies and sidestepped crucial trade-offs. This wobbly foundation made a hard situation even harder and increased the odds of a precarious outcome. The presence of such inadequacies is puzzling. The invasion of Afghanistan occurred in response to arguably the most devastating surprise attack in U.S. history, resulting in nearly 3,000 civilian deaths. The impact of 9/11 was extraordinary, in some ways analogous to that of Pearl Harbor six decades earlier. If we could ever summon the energy and resources to develop a robust plan and garner overwhelming support for it, the immediate aftermath of 9/11 might seem to be an ideal circumstance in which to do so. Why didn’t that happen? After 9/11, our initial planning and the military campaign began to unfold almost simultaneously. Yet in short order we quickly encountered roughly similar trade-offs to those confronted in Kosovo. Rather than wrestle with them head-on, we popped the champagne and shifted our focus to Iraq before assembling a coherent strategy. Even with the benefit of greater lead time, it is doubtful that the Bush administration’s approach to Afghanistan would have dramatically differed. The recurrence (and

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even magnification) of similar problems in Iraq reveals how familiar trade-offs can soon emerge. During these opening months from the 9/11 attacks to the conclusion of Operation Anaconda, we bungled a unique historical moment to establish a realistic path for Afghanistan. Yet how exactly did the planning unfold from September 2001 through the intended end of major combat in March 2002? How did we grapple with the three fundamental tasks? Finally, why did the planning unfold in this way? A look at each of these questions can shed light on the Bush administration’s troubled planning for Afghanistan, why we came up short, and how we might have done things better.

“So Who’s Going to Run the Country?” Our Afghanistan story begins with September 11, 2001, for this was the catalyst for the United States to even consider such a war in the first place. On that morning, I was a student in the infantry officer basic course at Fort Benning, Georgia, before I headed off to Army Ranger school. My fellow lieutenants and I were in the woods rehearsing how to emplace a deliberate ambush. Our platoon trainer—a blunt, hard-charging noncommissioned officer whom we universally admired—got a radio call. The initial report vaguely described some sort of explosion in Washington. We continued training. A few minutes later he got another call and became somber. I recall he looked at those of us nearby and said, You all are gonna earn your paychecks now. The unimaginable terrorist attacks came as a shock to practically all Americans, including our senior leaders. The horror of watching airplanes slam like missiles into multiple landmarks almost simultaneously, causing desperate people to leap from the World Trade Center to their deaths before the towers collapsed into rubble—killing nearly three thousand innocent people in total—cannot be overstated. The memoirs of Bush administration officials characterize it as a transformative event for the United States and the world, which fostered a sense that “every day since has been September 12,” in the words of Condoleezza Rice.1 As highlighted earlier, President Bush candidly recalled that after the

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attacks, “My blood was boiling. We were going to find out who did this, and kick their ass.”2 As we began to sort through the initial challenges associated with waging war in Afghanistan, there were a few major elements working in our favor, particularly the unwavering support of the international community. Shortly after 9/11, President Bush received calls of sympathy and support from Britain, France, Germany, Canada, Japan, and China, among other nations. We even received expressions of support from historical antagonists such as Cuba, as well as Iran, which not only condemned the 9/11 attacks but also held moments of silence and candlelight vigils in an unprecedented show of solidarity.3 “Everybody was on our side because of the tragedy of 9/11,” one senior official recalled.4 Additionally, NATO invoked Article V for the first time in its history, signaling that the devastating attack on the United States amounted to an attack on all NATO member countries.5 Many traditional constraints seemed to dissolve in this transformed international arena, and U.S. power reached a new apex.6 This moment bestowed on the Bush administration tremendous latitude and a singular opportunity to pursue virtually any path it deemed fit. Ironically, prior to the 9/11 attacks, Afghanistan had been widely perceived as one place we would not have to fight. An anecdote later circulated at the Pentagon suggesting that, in a pre-9/11 briefing, a general officer had asserted, “We need to be prepared to fight everywhere. The only place that I’m sure we’ll never fight is Afghanistan.”7 Whether this statement was actually uttered or just became an urban legend is less important than its accurate implication that the Pentagon (and the U.S. government more broadly) had simply not expected to fight a war in Afghanistan. There was no existing contingency plan for how we might invade Afghanistan, nor was a plan ready for such a hypothetical war’s aftermath. We would begin with a blank slate, and this was amplified by a cognitive rejection of the 1990s interventions, to be discussed more below. To heighten the challenge, our military had not been on a traditional war footing prior to 9/11. To the extent that U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) had been doing planning, it was mainly focused on other parts of the Middle East and the Horn of Africa.8 At that time, CENTCOM’s J-5 section, which was responsible for long-range planning, consisted of only twelve people: a plans chief, nine planners, and two administrative

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individuals. But shortly after 9/11, CENTCOM expanded its capacity and added various coalition planners and augmentees who sought to quickly familiarize themselves with the geography and dynamics of Afghanistan.9 As we embarked on the initial military campaign, the Bush administration chose to adopt a “light footprint.” This would entail special operations teams working with local Afghan forces (principally the Northern Alliance, which had resisted Taliban rule for years), supported by U.S. airpower. The approach emphasized agility and speed, and it reflected a desire to avoid the perceived errors of the Soviet-Afghan war of the 1980s, particularly the idea that a large Soviet footprint had alienated the Afghan people. Rather than flood the sprawling, mountainous terrain with foreign troops, we instead aimed for a more limited campaign that would quickly dismantle Al Qaeda and its Taliban sponsors, leverage local warlords, and allow Afghans to assume the reins in short order. This might limit the scope of our involvement and would ideally generate minimal opportunities for blowback. But it would also set conditions for a postwar landscape with only modest resources mobilized in key areas, which implicitly would foster difficult trade-offs and contradictions. During these opening weeks after 9/11, planning for the immediate military campaign took priority over the postwar phase (commonly referred to in the military as “Phase IV”). In an observation often echoed by other officials, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Joseph Collins recalls that “there wasn’t much thought of post-conflict planning at the time.”10 This was partly because, as CENTCOM planner Colonel Thomas Fisher recalls, “There was no plan sitting on the shelf for the invasion of Afghanistan . . . it was more of a movement-to-contact planning effort,” so the prevailing sense was “we’ve got to go kill Al Qaeda. They’re in Afghanistan. Go get ’em.”11 Almost by necessity, the war plan would need to prioritize a rapid military response that relied on some degree of improvisation, at least initially.12 This should have helped temper our expectations, for it is unreasonable to expect a robust postwar plan to come to fruition instantly. Some initial period for us to absorb the situation, get our bearings, and direct an immediate military response was probably reasonable to expect. Yet once the initial sense of shock subsided, one might hope Afghanistan’s postwar fate would garner more attention and give rise to a holistic, long-term strategy. Unfortunately, that did not happen.

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In mid to late September 2001, CENTCOM developed a basic framework to guide its initial campaign. Phase IV of this framework had a long title: “Establish Capability of Coalition Partners to Prevent the ReEmergence of Terrorism and Provide Support for Humanitarian Assistance Efforts.” It sketched out discrete tasks such as humanitarian assistance and reconstruction in the invasion’s immediate aftermath.13 In doing so, it steered attention toward tangible tasks and measures of performance. A detailed Army study of Afghanistan noted that “CENTCOM planners were concentrating most heavily on deploying the right forces into central Asia and defeating the Taliban and al-Qaeda. What would come after that victory never really came into clear focus in this initial vision for OEF [Operation Enduring Freedom].”14 As battlefield events unfolded in Afghanistan, the focus on military goals—particularly those related to counterterrorism—consumed most of the oxygen in the room and crowded out broader political questions. Crucial questions such as whether we would fully commit to building a new democracy received less attention in these opening weeks and months, and CENTCOM Commander General Tommy Franks directed his subordinates not to get involved in planning for nation building in any way.15 During the period from September 2001 to March 2002, no comprehensive document outlined an overall strategy or aligned military tasks in support of a clear political end. “There was very little concern given to postwar planning,” recalls Colonel Fitzgerald, who served as CENTCOM chief of plans at the time, and “I don’t know that we ever got to Phase IV, to be honest with you.” He adds, “We built it on the fly, the focus was not on Phase IV, [and] in fact there was an intent that Phase IV would be fairly minimal—we would just reestablish this government, keep a few guys in there to do CT [counterterrorism], and we would get out.”16 This desire from Washington to rapidly “get out” of Afghanistan is a consistent theme in the accounts of military and civilian officials involved in the planning. Fitzgerald recalls that the push his CENTCOM planning team received from senior levels in Washington was to “get in, get out, we just want to stand up something really quick” and further recalls that “you would get fired” for using the term “nation building.”17 These sentiments largely grew out of strong-willed Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s aversion to nation building. As Rumsfeld had asserted in a memo about the Middle East nearly two decades earlier, “We should never use U.S. troops as a ‘peacekeeping force.’”18 A prominent theme

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in Rumsfeld’s memoir is that large, indefinite U.S. troop commitments foster harmful dependencies that inhibit the development of local solutions to local problems.19 He believed that large-scale nation-building efforts were “unwise, well beyond our capability, and unworthy of our troops’ sacrifice.”20 This aligned with a prevailing Bush administration view that the previous decade had bogged down U.S. forces in inconsequential efforts.21 This outlook also coincided with Rumsfeld’s broader vision of military transformation. It partly grew out of the “revolution in military affairs,” which advanced the idea that high-tech advancements heralded a new era that would transcend antiquated methods of combat. Rumsfeld focused on preparing for a range of combat scenarios rather than what he saw as a binary on-or-off posture akin to a light switch.22 His views on military power pivoted away from the Weinberger-Powell doctrine’s seemingly “all-or-nothing” orientation for deploying forces,23 as he perceived the Pentagon he inherited as “frozen in time” and unable to grasp the importance of speed, agility, precision, and technological innovation.24 Interestingly, in his memoir Rumsfeld suggests “the transformation agenda that I supposedly brought with me to the Pentagon in January 2001 was not of my making” and proposes that he was merely implementing what he later refers to as “the President’s transformation agenda.” Most evidence suggests otherwise, including the memoirs of both the president and vice president,25 but regardless of its precise origins, this desire to overhaul the military affected thinking about Afghanistan. Rumsfeld’s vision of twenty-first-century warfare, his desire to transform the military, and his aversion to nation building would influence the Afghan military campaign and the planning for what would follow. Yet Rumsfeld’s views did not embody the sole tendency in the government. In his memoir, President Bush recalls the following exchange during a national security meeting shortly after the 9/11 attacks: In late September . . . I threw out a question to the team that had been on my mind: “So who’s going to run the country?” There was silence. I wanted to make sure the team had thought through the postwar strategy. I felt strongly that the Afghan people should be able to select their new leader. They had suffered too much—and the American people were risking too much—to let the country slide back into tyranny. I asked Colin [Powell] to work on a plan for a transition to democracy.26

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On September 24, Secretary Powell directed Richard Haass to meet with a variety of Afghanistan experts to discuss post-conflict Afghanistan, and on October 3, Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley began to assemble an initial checklist of potential nation-building tasks.27 These actions helped sketch out basic requirements that might be required for a nation-building approach oriented on democratization. In October, Powell suggested at multiple NSC principals meetings that the UN could take responsibility for postwar Afghanistan, potentially under the leadership of Lakhdar Brahimi. Brahimi served as the UN special representative for Afghanistan, and such an effort could leverage the UN’s willingness to help shape Afghanistan’s future.28 An international protectorate led by the UN might have roughly resembled postwar Kosovo, in which the UN took over governance for an interim period until local actors built up legitimacy and capacity. Yet the Pentagon’s leadership strongly opposed anything resembling nation building and had a deeply skeptical view of the UN. Hence, the idea never gained traction. The United States would support the new Afghan government in a more removed manner. Unlike in Kosovo, we would not try to persuade the UN to temporarily govern the country.29 For the first roughly ninety days, a flurry of NSC principals and deputies meetings took place, mainly focused on immediate actions and deployments of U.S. forces, as well as the broader campaign against terrorism. These meetings focused less attention on Afghanistan’s political future.30 Although postwar issues occasionally bubbled up, they were often addressed in a nonspecific way that did not directly address the major, sustained exertions that would be required to promote democracy. This temporarily left open the question of what type of Afghan government could or should emerge, as well as what role the United States would play alongside the international community. Nevertheless, some diplomatic headway was made. The U.S.-brokered Bonn Agreement (December 2001) was a cautiously positive milestone that helped loosely outline a political way forward. This conference at Bonn, Germany—which involved influential Afghans and diplomats, and was sponsored by the UN—established an Afghan Interim Authority for a six-month period. This interim body was intended to set conditions for a loya jirga (grand tribal council) to be held no later than June 2002 that would pave the way for a new constitution and open, democratic Afghan

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elections within two years.31 The agreement outlined a conceptual path of democratization, with Hamid Karzai designated as the leader of this interim authority. U.S. Envoy James Dobbins led the American diplomatic effort at Bonn and initially sought to adopt a somewhat discreet U.S. presence. But eventually Dobbins got involved in helping manage disagreements regarding the leadership of the interim Afghan government, the composition of the Afghan cabinet, the role of the Afghan king, and the overall effort to establish an inclusive government encompassing various opposition groups. Dobbins was pleasantly surprised to find that even Iran played a constructive part at Bonn by repeatedly engaging with American officials (and U.S. and Iranian delegations even met over coffee each morning).32 This reflected the continued goodwill of the international community and the unique degree of leverage the United States still had at the time. Bonn was a notable milestone, but the American diplomatic team encountered resistance from the Pentagon when it came to mobilizing U.S. military resources, particularly in support of a multinational peacekeeping force.33 While ambitious aspirations of democracy were being outlined at Bonn, the Pentagon was mobilizing minimal resources to support its implementation. Shortly after Bonn, a significant development took place in late December 2001. Responsibility for postwar Afghanistan quietly shifted from the NSC to the State Department’s Bureau of South Asian Affairs. This bureau at State represented “the smallest, weakest, and least prestigious of the State Department’s six regional subdivisions” and constituted “a sign that Afghanistan was already slipping in the administration’s list of priorities” and an apparent return to “business as usual,” in Dobbins’s words.34 Although significant planning, coordination, and resourcing were still needed to shape Afghanistan’s future, the attention of leaders was clearly shifting elsewhere. Throughout this early period, Joseph Collins, who served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for stability operations, recalls an array of meetings regarding postwar Afghanistan that involved “a few dozen people within the government,” entailing personnel at the Pentagon, the State Department, and USAID. But despite the “big talk about getting Afghanistan on its feet” at Bonn and other venues, these meetings often focused on relatively minor topics, and “the deputies, I think, felt that they were

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being eaten alive by meetings on very small issues.”35 In the absence of clear guidance and an overarching strategy, these officials struggled to discern a concrete way forward. On January 21–22, 2002, a donors conference took place at Tokyo that clarified some aspects of Afghanistan’s future. At the International Conference on Reconstruction Assistance to Afghanistan, donor states, including the United States, agreed to provide a total of $4.5 billion to Afghanistan over five years.36 Important side discussions also took place that set the stage for G-8 nations to delineate “lead nation” responsibilities for Afghanistan. For example, Great Britain would assume responsibility for counter-narcotics, Italy for the justice sector, and Germany for the police. These responsibilities would be formalized at a subsequent conference in April. But from its inception, this delineation of responsibilities did not align with each country’s intrinsic strengths or capabilities, and was soon derided as the “adopt a ministry” plan.37 Developments at Bonn and Tokyo outlined grand objectives, and although they were helpful in the sense of getting the international coalition on board,38 they provided only a loose outline. It had the effect of confirming the idea that postwar Afghanistan was already on cruise control. In February 2002 the NSC principals considered the key question of whether to deploy a stabilization force beyond Kabul. It embodied a notable decision that would shape our overall commitment to the country and would implicitly affect whether U.S. troops would be engaged in peacekeeping duties to help foster democratization. Powell and the State Department supported the deployment of a multinational force to secure urban areas outside of Kabul and provide a visible commitment to Afghanistan’s future.39 The chairman of the Afghan interim administration (and future president) Hamid Karzai also expressed strong interest in such a force, as did other key Afghan and U.S. officials, and the Bonn Agreement left open the door for such an expansion: “Such a force could, as appropriate, be progressively expanded to other urban centers and other areas.”40 One proposal that Dobbins suggested at the time would have deployed roughly 20,000 service members to secure four or five Afghan cities, plus an additional 4,000–5,000 service members in Kabul.41 This modest force would have represented only roughly half the size of the force deployed to Kosovo.

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But the Pentagon’s senior leadership was adamantly opposed, and after a rather short discussion, the idea was shelved. Rumsfeld and General Franks strongly wanted to keep the U.S. presence even more limited and to leverage local warlords to help destroy Al Qaeda and Taliban remnants. The Pentagon successfully prevailed over the objections.42 Thus, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) would consist of only a small international force of roughly 5,000 (or 10% of the manpower committed to Kosovo, for a country ten times more populous) that was confined to Afghanistan’s capital and its immediate outskirts, along with a U.S. force of 7,200 focused on counterterrorism.43 Throughout this period, the issue of Iraq began pulling attention away from Afghanistan, even while the Afghanistan military campaign was still under way. In late September 2001, before we had even invaded Afghanistan, Secretary Rumsfeld reminded General Franks at the end of a teleconference, “By the way, general, . . . don’t forget about Iraq.”44 On November 21, 2001—a month after we invaded Afghanistan—President Bush informed Rumsfeld that he wanted an update on military options for Iraq. This spurred a meeting six days later in which Rumsfeld directed Franks to prepare an Iraq war plan.45 These developments occurred just weeks after U.S. forces first entered Afghanistan, while Osama bin Laden remained at large, while the Taliban still maintained its grip on Kandahar, and while there was no concrete plan yet for Afghanistan’s future. This would contribute to reduced planning energy applied to Afghanistan. Lingering postwar questions would receive diminished attention. Despite the huge challenge of overseeing a historic transition in Afghanistan, U.S. officials had already begun to look ahead to the next target in the crosshairs. In mid-March 2002 the U.S. military directed the deployment of XVIII Airborne Corps (which would become Combined Joint Task Force 180) as a hesitant step toward deeper postwar involvement.46 But with the formal end of Operation Anaconda in eastern Afghanistan on March 18, for all intents and purposes the initial military campaign seemed to be over.47 Despite a few hiccups along the way, for the moment Afghanistan was widely perceived as a stunning success. According to one senior official, “We thought that the solution was in place . . . it looked to us like we had something that would work,” and there was widespread optimism.48 Yet from September 2001 to March 2002, most of the key trade-offs were

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sidestepped, despite the ambitiousness of the goals outlined at Bonn. The NSC principals concentrated mainly on operational issues, global terror threats, and the looming shadow of Iraq, while the U.S. military focused primarily on counterterrorism. A coherent plan for Afghanistan’s future that aligned ends with means never really came together.

A Road to Incoherence This brings us to the three postwar planning tasks. In Afghanistan, did we build on our partial success in Kosovo and do a reasonably decent job? In a word, no. Our postwar approach for Afghanistan was riddled with inconsistencies and contradictions. Task 1: Did we identify a clear, achievable political goal? From the outset, our political goal for Afghanistan was only vaguely defined, and various parts of our government interpreted it differently. President Bush’s intentions for Afghanistan seemingly drifted, and in short order our political goal was subordinated to near-term military priorities. This would establish an unsteady foundation for our postwar strategy. From the outset, U.S. goals for Afghanistan would likely need to account for three main issues: what to do about Al Qaeda, what to do about the Taliban, and what to do about Afghanistan’s future government.49 The first two were largely defined in military terms—and the Pentagon and CENTCOM would naturally gravitate toward them—while the third centered on the broader political future of Afghanistan. However, all three were intertwined: the fate of Al Qaeda (the terrorist group responsible for 9/11) connected to the fate of the Taliban (which had provided a safe haven for Al Qaeda), and both connected to Afghanistan’s new political order (which ideally might render it difficult or impossible for Al Qaeda and the Taliban to operate freely in Afghan territory). Despite the apparent simplicity of this conceptual framework, one could conceivably map out wholly different orientations for each line of effort, with strikingly different implications. On the one hand, we might be content with relatively modest goals, such as eliminating Al Qaeda’s sanctuary, removing the Taliban from power (once it refused to hand over bin Laden), and then fostering a moderate but weak central government with U.S.-friendly warlords

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across the provinces. This might allow us to maintain a light footprint, focus narrowly on counterterrorism, and avoid nation building, although it almost certainly would not foster a democracy. On the other hand, we could adopt a more ambitious approach by seeking to decisively defeat both Al Qaeda and the Taliban and their remnants, and then try to remake Afghanistan into a more modern, centralized democracy. This could offer the possibility of a durable political solution by changing the environment that had spawned 9/11, but it would also be far more taxing, with no guarantee of success. Thus, whether our leaders realized it or not, their basic choice was whether to favor a quick withdrawal or build a democracy. Neither choice was inherently right or wrong, but both involved different costs and risks. A clear decision was needed in recognition of the trade-offs. As the Bush administration sought to discern its desired goal, its worldviews and biases factored into the equation, particularly with regard to nation building. President Bush had earlier expressed reservations about this idea. For example, in a 2000 presidential debate he had stated, “I don’t think our troops ought to be used for what’s called nation-building. I think our troops ought to be used to fight and win war.”50 As highlighted earlier, Rumsfeld shared this reluctance to embark on open-ended commitments. These factors tilted us toward a quick exit from Afghanistan with a narrow set of goals. Yet in a rather surprising twist, President Bush’s thinking began to change after 9/11. The attacks themselves embodied a central catalyst. From the president’s perspective, the terror attacks had fundamentally transformed the world. Bush indicates they were “the key to understanding my presidency . . . after 9/11, I felt my responsibility was clear. For as long as I held office, I could never forget what happened to America that day. I would pour my heart and soul into protecting the country, whatever it took.”51 Four days after 9/11, the president seemed to partially open the door to protracted overseas commitments when he stated in a radio address, “The conflict will not be short . . . the conflict will not be easy . . . [and] the course to victory may be long.”52 The president’s statements in September and October 2001 reflected his increasingly ambivalent views. At a news conference on September 25, President Bush reaffirmed his pre-9/11 outlook as he asserted, “We’re not into nation-building. We’re focused on justice, and we’re going to get

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justice.”53 Yet a week later, British Prime Minister Tony Blair urged, “We will not walk away as the outside world has done so many times before there,” and shortly thereafter, on October 11, President Bush mentioned Blair’s remarks and expanded on them: I think we did learn a lesson, however, from—and should learn a lesson from the previous engagement in the Afghan area, that we should not just simply leave after a military objective has been achieved. . . . It would be a useful function for the United Nations to take over the so-called nation-building—I would call it the stabilization of a future government— after our military mission is complete. We’ll participate. Other countries will participate.54

President Bush soon began to extol the virtues of fostering freedom and democracy, both to deny potential terrorist breeding grounds and to promote U.S. ideals and interests, thus planting the seeds for his “Freedom Agenda.”55 In his memoir, Bush recalls that he underwent a complete change in perspective as an outgrowth of September 11: When I ran for president, I never anticipated a mission like this. . . . At the time, I worried about overextending our military by undertaking peacekeeping missions as we had in Bosnia and Somalia. But after 9/11, I changed my mind. Afghanistan was the ultimate nation building mission. We had liberated the country from a primitive dictatorship, and we had a moral obligation to leave behind something better. We also had a strategic interest in helping the Afghan people build a free society. The terrorists took refuge in places of chaos, despair, and repression. A democratic Afghanistan would be a hopeful alternative to the vision of the extremists.56

This reflected a dramatic shift in outlook. Bush believed that “this time we would put boots on the ground, and keep them there” with a goal of “helping a democratic government emerge.”57 In short, the president had begun to soften his earlier opposition to nation building, and he adopted a more expansive notion of a democratic Afghanistan. The quickness of our battlefield victories and the positive, infectious sense that events were going our way seemed to facilitate this glide down the slope of goal expansion.58 First Lady Laura Bush’s subsequent efforts to improve educational opportunities for Afghan girls symbolized this

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major shift to apparently try to remake parts of Afghan society.59 Zalmay Khalilzad, the Afghan-born U.S. envoy to the interim Afghan government, and later U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan (and Iraq), asserts the following: Bush administration officials took it as a given that liberal democracy was the best form of government for Afghanistan and that elections were the most legitimate way to work out differences among Afghans. The president and his principals seemed to believe that these goals were achievable, at least in broad outlines, without a significant U.S. investment in state and nation building.60

The goal of forging an Afghan democracy was admirable in theory, but it would require a major, protracted commitment to have any chance at success. Yet even as late as May 2002, the president’s press secretary was still insisting that the president did not support U.S. military involvement in nation building.61 Overall, the evidence suggests that in these initial months the president was having conflicting impulses, given his dislike of nation building as well as his desire to leave something better behind. He soon warmed to the idea of democratizing Afghanistan and began to distance himself from a hasty departure. But at the same time, Rumsfeld’s long-standing skepticism about nation building never wavered. So how did we reconcile these diverging goals? We didn’t. While President Bush tilted toward a more ambitious goal of an Afghan democracy, the Pentagon focused on short-term military objectives that often undermined it. The debate over what to do about Afghan warlords was symptomatic of this incoherence. The influence of Afghan warlords embodied “perhaps the most persistent challenge of this period,” according to Khalilzad, and related to our heavy reliance on warlords during the initial military campaign, an approach referred to derisively as a “warlord strategy.”62 Making a quick exit would likely mean cutting deals with, and buying off, various warlords to enhance our security and counterterrorism objectives. But to promote democracy would require marginalizing or discrediting these same warlords because their influence would undermine a legitimate, democratic Afghan government.63 Our leaders did not resolve this tension between political and military goals. Some parts of the U.S. government empowered warlords (particularly the Pentagon and the CIA), while

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others sought to marginalize warlords (particularly the State Department and the U.S. delegation at Bonn). This contributed to a schizophrenic and incoherent approach. In the early stages the Pentagon’s views assumed primacy, and counterterrorism emerged as a central goal. As an outgrowth, democratization “was never the top priority,” according to Andrew Wilder, who spent over a decade managing humanitarian and development programs in Afghanistan and Pakistan.64 William Taylor, who coordinated U.S. assistance to Afghanistan, recalls that “we were not very clear within our own government about what exactly we were after.”65 Similarly, Colonel Fitzgerald at CENTCOM sensed that the United States quickly leaned toward military goals, for it prioritized “very narrow objectives that did not involve a lot of focus on establishing a long-term stable government in that region. That might have been a desire, but the level of effort didn’t match it.”66 Fitzgerald further recalls that “there was always a theme of democracy” in broad discussions about Afghanistan,67 however a concrete effort to support that aim did not materialize. This transpired even though Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Myers recalls thinking as early as September 20, 2001, “I wasn’t at all sure that we could topple the Taliban and eradicate al-Qaida and then simply leave.”68 Although the views of the president, reinforced in the Bonn Agreement, identified democracy as our desired outcome, the actual planning did not clearly embrace it. A desire for quick-fix solutions could prop up unsavory warlords, delegitimize the nascent government, and undercut institutional maturation,69 but many senior officials did not seem to acknowledge this incompatibility. A U.S. Army study indicates the Pentagon leadership directed a three-star general in early 2002, “Don’t you do anything that looks like permanence. We are in and out of there in a hurry.”70 It was thus unclear how highly democratization ranked relative to competing short-term military goals, as the latter seemed to gain the upper hand. We sidestepped difficult trade-offs rather than confront them. This related to the tension between promoting democracy and quickly getting out. In early 2002, President Bush would draw a parallel between the enduring U.S. commitment to Afghanistan and the historic Marshall Plan as he pledged we would “stay until the mission is done.”71 Yet his own defense secretary reportedly said in private, “We’re not invading, we’re not going to stay.”72 On the surface, our stated goal was to foster an

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Afghan democracy. Yet the Pentagon subordinated that goal to narrower military objectives. The disconnect would foster an incoherent postwar strategy of countervailing efforts, at odds with itself. This disjointed approach undermined the very institutions we were seeking to build.73 The lack of clarity also partly stemmed from the amorphous nature of the “global war on terror” itself: a contest with seemingly no clear parameters, realistic goals, or specific end state. Rather than acknowledge the trade-offs at hand, our leaders dodged the tough decisions. Is it possible that the president’s emphasis on democratizing Afghanistan might just be an after-the-fact construction? One observer asserted that the president’s statements years later could represent “a cloak to hide a more base interest—presenting the country as a successful case of US intervention, in contrast to Iraq.”74 However, this undervalues the president’s sweeping statements about Afghan freedom and democracy made at the time, ranging from his public remarks expressing an openness to nation building, to his reported private discussions with close advisors, to his Marshall Plan analogy, to even the operational name Enduring Freedom itself.75 The president felt himself being pulled in multiple directions but drifted toward promoting democracy. Yet to pursue such a course would require a major, lasting investment that was never seriously considered. In addition to the murky political goal, our handling of the other two tasks would further jeopardize Afghanistan’s future. Task 2: Did we anticipate and seek to mitigate the foreseeable obstacles? U.S. officials tacitly acknowledged some of the difficulties in postwar Afghanistan, but only partly sought to mitigate their negative effects, and often sought to punt them to the Afghans to resolve despite their obvious lack of capacity. Planning for any postwar effort in Afghanistan would encounter a plethora of serious challenges. The country of twenty million people was characterized by diverse ethnic groups, an unfamiliar culture, multiple languages, unforgiving terrain, severe underdevelopment, widespread illiteracy, heavy reliance on opium, lack of familiarity with democracy, years of internal war, a porous border with neighboring Pakistan, and a tendency of outside powers to get bogged down in its territory from the time of Alexander the Great to the Soviet war of the 1980s.76 In many ways, if you were looking for one of the most difficult places in which to establish a new democracy, Afghanistan would be an attractive candidate.

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All these factors would complicate the U.S.-led effort to shape an acceptable political outcome. It would require detailed planning to acknowledge and grapple with these serious challenges, on a scale far greater than that applied toward Kosovo, especially if the goal were to foster a liberal democratic government. And even if we assembled a solid plan, there was still no guarantee of success. U.S. officials outwardly acknowledged many of the challenges, but their efforts to mitigate these challenges were often nonexistent or selfdefeating. A trend emerged of identifying problems but not taking the next step of crafting realistic mitigating steps. From the earliest stages, President Bush and Vice President Cheney acknowledged Afghanistan’s ominous reputation as a “graveyard of empires,” and shortly after 9/11, the president received a CENTCOM briefing in which it became clear to him that “everything about the country screamed trouble. It is remote, rugged, and primitive. . . . Tribal, ethnic, and religious rivalries date back centuries.” General Franks further perceived that Afghanistan was “out of sync with the rest of the world” by roughly “two thousand years,” which also seemed to acknowledge the intrinsic difficulties involved.77 Although there were a select few cautiously positive aspects, Afghanistan was undoubtedly at the hard end of the spectrum with respect to its baseline conditions. However, a frequent default response seemed to be that Afghans needed to figure out solutions for themselves, with little attention paid to whether the Afghans actually had the capacity to pull this off. Rumsfeld’s memoir repeatedly stresses themes related to “the modesty of our goals” and “letting Afghans solve Afghan problems.” The following reflects Rumsfeld’s overarching view on Afghanistan: “My position was that we were not in Afghanistan to transform a deeply conservative Islamic culture into a model of liberal modernity. . . . Instead, Afghans would need to take charge of their own fate. Afghans would build their society the way they wanted.”78 Vice President Cheney’s thinking seemed to roughly align with that of Rumsfeld, as he believed that “we were there to liberate, not to occupy,”79 which also underscored the limited nature of our mission. But given the Afghans’ glaring lack of capacity, lack of government institutions, lack of security forces, and lack of familiarity with democracy, were they really up to the task of building their own society? Couldn’t this deference

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to Afghans quickly put power in the hands of those who were not yet ready to wield it? Such a course could easily foster instability, corruption, and other harmful side effects that could seriously impede Afghanistan’s future. A desire to rapidly empower Afghans by “liberating” them and getting out of the way might be interpreted as simple neglect. As James Dobbins believed at the time, “The idea that Afghans could adequately secure their country after a twenty-three-year civil war struck me as naive and irresponsible.”80 Additional challenges loomed in Afghanistan. The aforementioned role of warlords would exacerbate the difficulty of democratization. Further, the centrality of opium production was another obstacle vaguely acknowledged but not firmly addressed in the planning.81 The Bush administration recognized that Afghanistan had many such challenges, but it settled on a vague idea that we could still implant democracy on the cheap and that Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks, and other groups in Afghanistan could figure out how to take the Bonn concept and run with it. This ran counter to our Balkans experiences in the 1990s, which had underscored the difficulty of stabilizing ethnically divided lands. Either we needed to own up to the level of difficulty and assemble a comprehensive effort or our goal needed to be significantly scaled back. Neither took place. Democratization remained our supposed goal while we failed to mitigate the major obstacles staring us in the face. Afghanistan’s leadership represented a particularly thorny challenge. Early warning signs suggested that there could be problems with overreliance on Hamid Karzai as the anchor for U.S. strategy. First, Afghanistan’s recent history of civil war with power diffused to tribes and warlords suggested that a transition to a strong central government would likely be extremely difficult to manage. Any Afghan president would likely have trouble establishing authority over such a dispersed, heterogeneous population, as illustrated by some officials’ descriptions of Karzai as only the “mayor of Kabul.”82 Further, the fact that many Al Qaeda leaders were not actually eliminated, but instead merely displaced into Pakistan, suggested that the fight against extremist networks might be far from over. The Pakistani sanctuary could easily plant the seeds for future violence against the nascent Afghan government. Despite these challenges, the United States embraced local warlords and adopted an optimistic belief that Karzai embodied “a George Washington kind of a figure,” as Collins

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recalled,83 whose positive leadership could sort through the issues if provided money and occasional attention. Rumsfeld, in particular, believed that Karzai should consider relying on patronage to strengthen his grip on power,84 a suggestion that the fledgling Afghan government would eventually embrace and that ran counter to democratization. Neighboring Pakistan embodied an especially grave challenge that could threaten Afghanistan’s future. Our actions in Tora Bora in December 2001 exacerbated the postwar difficulties, as the White House received intelligence indicating that bin Laden might personally be present there,85 but we relied mainly on local forces to act.86 These local Afghan forces at one point started negotiating a cease-fire with Al Qaeda fighters until a U.S. special forces unit on the ground intervened to stop them. This delay, and the overall meager degree of U.S. involvement, provided additional time for roughly a thousand fighters to escape, likely including bin Laden himself.87 Admittedly, Tora Bora had treacherous mountainous terrain that would have been difficult to completely isolate.88 But the paltry U.S. effort virtually assured their escape. Some Al Qaeda leaders repositioned into parts of Pakistan that were less than a hundred miles from their previous operating sites.89 Once established, this cross-border sanctuary was a major problem: enemy networks could rebuild themselves over time, and the complex U.S.-Pakistan political dynamic would only deepen the challenge. There was no straightforward way for the United States to deal with the challenge of Pakistan and the double game it would play, but we might have started by not digging an even deeper hole for ourselves. This hardly embodies Monday-morning quarterbacking, for voices in our government were pleading for a more substantial commitment as events unfolded in November and December 2001.90 The failure to do so widened the opportunity for Al Qaeda forces to relocate to remote, inaccessible tribal areas in Pakistan. This would intensify postwar challenges rather than mitigate them, and would set the stage for even more intractable problems. Our botched handling of Tora Bora illustrated how little consideration U.S. officials were giving to the looming postwar challenges. In addition to all these obstacles, bureaucratic friction in the U.S. government also hindered planning. Divergent outlooks undermined the prospects of a coherent strategy, contributing to rifts at multiple levels, including between Defense and CIA, between State and Defense,

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and within Defense itself. Various entities sought to define our mission in Afghanistan differently, which diminished the chances that a cohesive postwar plan would emerge. Confusion in the chain of command fostered one rift in the early stages between Defense and CIA, as it was unclear who had responsibility for which parts of the war effort. As General Franks recalls, “There had to be one line of authority. But in this goat rope there had been CENTCOM, the Pentagon, the White House, the CIA . . . and the gratuitous advice of a Service Chief.”91 There was also friction within the military itself, as Franks perceived the service chiefs to be preoccupied with “parochial bullshit,” as he bluntly put it.92 To underscore the sense of confusion, Condoleezza Rice recalls that “the President, frustrated by the lack of clarity in the chain of command, asked pointedly, ‘Who has the lead?’ . . . The President turned to me and said, ‘Fix this!’ He ended the meeting somewhat abruptly.”93 This confusion characterized not only the invasion but carried over to the postwar effort as well, for it would remain unclear who was expected to implement the president’s vision of “ultimate nation building.” Conflicting views and a lack of clear decisions contributed to compartmentalization. Strong tensions emerged in particular between State and Defense. The State Department looked to officials such as Richard Haass and James Dobbins to lay the groundwork for a nation-building approach, but they received practically no support from the Pentagon. This helped spawn the State-Defense divergence over whether to assemble and deploy a multinational peacekeeping force to cities beyond Kabul. “Powell and Rumsfeld [were] at loggerheads,” as Dobbins recalls, and the disagreement largely boiled down to competing images of postwar Afghanistan.94 The unsettled nature of these differences contributed to disjointed planning. The multitude of obstacles in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, and back in Washington were often identified by our senior leaders, but they were rarely mitigated in a coherent way. Many officials seemed to grasp that there would be major challenges related to severe economic underdevelopment, lack of democratic familiarity, rough terrain, tribal and linguistic diversity, a Pakistani sanctuary, and decades of ruinous civil war, among many other issues. Yet to merely point out problems is easy. It is far harder to craft specific mitigating steps in a way that supports the overall goal. In Afghanistan our overall goal was unclear, and we deferred most of the major obstacles to the Afghans to manage despite their obvious lack of capacity.

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Task 3: Did we mobilize resources in a manner aligned with the goal? The overall resources we mobilized for postwar Afghanistan were a mixed bag: although somewhat robust in a few areas, in others they were exceedingly sparse. Given the competing desires to either close out Afghanistan quickly or pursue ultimate nation building, there was an inconsistent mobilization of resources. “Trying to start from scratch to establish a government over a nation-state that was never a nation-state,”95 as Colonel Fitzgerald perceived it, could require a robust mobilization of resources on a scale rarely seen in U.S. history. President Bush explicitly invoked the analogy of post–World War II Europe when he pledged in an April 2002 speech that our lasting commitment would bear similarity to the Marshall Plan.96 Given the apex of U.S. influence just after 9/11, a roughly equivalent level of resourcing might very well have been possible. Instead, the United States and its partners mobilized disjointed resources, which undermined a coherent strategy. On the positive side, the economic and financial resources pledged were somewhat noteworthy in scale. These resources might loosely align with a goal of democratization, given that the nascent Afghan government would have constraints in terms of how much aid it could process and put to use. The $4.5 billion pledged by the United States and other donor countries at Tokyo in January 2002 could provide at least a starting point for the long political road ahead, if supplemented over time. Because the absorptive capacity of the Afghan government would be limited in its formative period, these financial resources may have been understandable.97 Of the $4.5 billion pledged, however, less than half that amount was dispersed to Afghanistan by the end of 2002. This resulted in development spending per capita of just $108 per Afghan, which paled next to the $957 spending per Kosovar over a roughly similar time frame (as depicted in table 1.2 in chapter 1). In the governance and institution-building realm, the Bonn Conference and the G-8 agreements at Tokyo embodied cautiously positive first steps toward a democratic Afghanistan. The delineation of responsibilities at Tokyo had some passing similarities to that of the U.S.-led effort in Kosovo, but important differences set them apart. In the case of Kosovo we had empowered international organizations such as the UN and NATO to oversee areas of natural core competency (governance and security respectively), with an emphasis on reputations being tied to results. But in

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Afghanistan, the delineation of lead nation responsibilities was arbitrary, and not in accordance with capabilities. For example, Germany’s designation to develop Afghan police did not reflect a natural German strength, and it quickly floundered. This arrangement allowed countries to establish primacy over efforts such as Afghan justice, counter-narcotics, and other areas in a stovepiped manner, with little oversight, accountability, or consequences for failure.98 Rather than setting the stage for a robust commitment, it embodied a fire-and-forget model that could engender a quick loss of interest. Hence, Bonn and Tokyo were deeply mixed in that they galvanized some resources toward Afghan institutions, but without the necessary structure and oversight mechanisms built in. With regard to security, our resources were wholly aligned with a quick exit and were completely out of step with a path to democracy. The Pentagon controlled the main resources in this domain and sought to strictly limit U.S. involvement, focus narrowly on counterterrorism, and rapidly hand off responsibility to the Afghans. The Pentagon resisted attempts to try to secure Afghan cities outside of Kabul despite the lack of an Afghan security force, and it actively blocked efforts to expand ISAF’s scope.99 The modest deployment of only 12,200 service members was not aligned with a goal of democratization, and on a per capita basis our overall security presence was miniscule. As table 1.1 in chapter 1 illustrates, whereas the troop density in Kosovo was more than 23 troops per 1,000 inhabitants (roughly in line with historical standards of generally successful stabilization efforts), in Afghanistan the density was an anemic 0.6 troops per 1,000 Afghans, even when the counterterrorism forces are included. This meant we would need to heavily rely on militias, warlords, and other unsavory actors (who in some cases had helped prop up the Taliban) to stabilize the country, which would impede good governance and legitimacy, and might intensify Pashtun sentiments of disenfranchisement.100 Concerns were raised at the time by multiple officials, including Powell and Dobbins, who argued for an early expansion of ISAF to assist in Afghanistan’s stability and governance.101 Additionally, the Afghan interim leadership, including Karzai, strongly made the case for a more capable international force, and the small force deployed to Kabul was warmly received by the local populace.102 However, the Pentagon’s leadership blocked the proposed expansion. Thus, we did not mobilize security forces (either American or multinational in nature) to stabilize

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cities outside of Kabul. The resulting lack of stability was foreseeable. The extremely modest resources mobilized in the security domain were aligned with a goal of getting out rather than promoting democracy. Overall, our mobilization of resources was roughly aligned with promoting democracy in a few limited respects but not in most others (most glaringly in the security realm). Parts of this approach might make sense if the goal were to quickly pull out and assume substantial risk. But if the goal were to foster a democracy—which the Bonn Agreement indicated, and which President Bush firmly asserted it was—then this resourcing would foster major gaps. The overall U.S. approach did not acknowledge the central, undeniable fact that introducing democracy to Afghanistan would require a major, long-term effort to have even a remote chance of success. As with the previous two tasks, difficult choices were bypassed. It remained unclear what realistic endgame we truly intended to attain.

“By the Way, General, . . . Don’t Forget about Iraq” Why did we have such difficulty assembling a coherent strategy? The pathologies help us understand why. First, wishful thinking largely went unmitigated. Although U.S. military operations would continue through early 2002—such as Operation Anaconda, which targeted Taliban and Al Qaeda forces in the Shahi Kowt Valley—by the end of 2001, the prevailing view was that the war was already “over.”103 Less than ninety days after we entered Afghanistan, a sense began to sink in that the heavy lifting was done and that subsequent events were of less importance. President Bush would acknowledge in his memoir that “in retrospect, our rapid success with low troop levels created false comfort, and our desire to maintain a light military footprint left us short of the resources we needed.”104 There was a premature sense of completion, despite the fact that Afghanistan needed a long-term campaign to have any chance of fulfilling the president’s ambitious vision. Wishful thinking embodies a pitfall in any war, particularly during an administration’s first term. In Afghanistan it enjoyed free rein. “It was a time of incredible hope” and “unrealistic expectation,” according to Wilder, that entailed an “incredibly bright future, Afghans returning, . . .

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and the mood was very positive and infectious, and it was hard not to get caught up in that.”105 After the fall of key Afghan cities in November and early December 2001, Karzai emerged to preside over the interim Afghan authority, and the Bush administration believed that events were well in hand. Karzai’s personal role during this period deserves particular attention, for he emerged as an individual whom Bush personally liked and trusted to oversee Afghanistan’s transition to a modern, democratic state. The Western-educated Karzai initially appeared favorable to the West, and some hoped that he would grow into an Afghan version of Nelson Mandela: a figure who could bring together Afghanistan’s various factions and ethnic groups under his leadership.106 As Collins expressed, “Karzai was the good guy. He was George Washington. He was our valiant ally . . . and he was doing the right thing and saying the right thing.”107 This helped minimize the degree of preparation; according to one senior U.S. official, “The president, I don’t think he really had any serious thoughts about it [postwar planning]. He wanted to get the country going, and he thought he had an ace with Hamid Karzai.”108 But the implicit idea that Karzai—or any single leader for that matter—could oversee Afghanistan’s sweeping transformation from an underdeveloped, decentralized land to a liberal democracy with little outside help was always a pipe dream. Senior U.S. military leaders adopted a short-term mind-set, buttressed by a focus on operations over strategy, and a view that postwar affairs did not fall within the military’s purview. This reflected a narrow conception of warfare that prioritized short-term battles over the enduring political challenges. Dobbins observes that “the U.S. military had been dragged along kicking and screaming throughout the nineties as its responsibilities [in nation building] . . . were gradually enlarged.”109 Hence, when the Bush administration allowed it to return to traditional combat tasks, it eagerly did so. General Franks proved to be a loyal adherent of Rumsfeld’s transformation agenda as he sought to get in and out of Afghanistan in short order and did not seem to view postwar stabilization as a military task. Thus, the military command responsible for Afghanistan spent minimal time anticipating long-term challenges.110 Although short-term humanitarian relief and reconstruction projects were important and some limited efforts occurred in those areas, they hardly constituted the totality of a postwar plan. Franks would later portray CENTCOM’s performance

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in Afghanistan as successful, as suggested by his memoir’s chapter titled “Historic Victory.” Yet the lack of preparation for what would follow would help render the initial success fleeting. As Gideon Rose suggests, we can become cognitively drawn to the equivalent of a fad diet or a get-rich-quick scheme, which offers the allure of outstanding results with only minimal investment.111 There was a widespread view that military power could be used to achieve sweeping results in Afghanistan with little to no long-term commitment. Many officials adopted the optimistic notion that Karzai could take charge and get things on track, that Bonn provided a sufficient way forward, and that our attention could quickly shift to the next battlefield. These hopeful aspirations contributed to the flawed pursuit of democracy on the cheap. Our leaders embraced an ambitious end with only minimal means. Such a misguided approach, bolstered by a view that we had entered a new strategic era in which the old playbook no longer applied, undercut our planning. Intelligence gaps exacerbated the reliance on wishful thinking. Although U.S. leaders were aware that Afghanistan presented notable challenges, they had minimal knowledge of its cultural intricacies. Apart from residual intelligence assets that were mainly holdovers from the Soviet-Afghan war, we entered Afghanistan with little knowledge of the tribes, languages, and other societal dynamics on the ground.112 As an example, one year prior to 9/11, General Franks had rhetorically asked a subordinate, “Have we ever had any HUMINT [human intelligence] worth a rat’s ass out of Afghanistan?”113 Rumsfeld also noted the dearth of understanding regarding Afghanistan: Further complicating matters, there was scant current intelligence on the country . . . our intelligence personnel did not know the extent to which tribal leaders would tolerate, let alone welcome, American forces into the country. We didn’t even have an up-to-date picture of the terrain. In some cases our analysts were working with decades-old British maps . . . few intelligence operatives and analysts spoke the Afghan languages.114

These deficits were deepened by antiquated U.S. intelligence processes that, at the outset of the war, often represented holdovers from the cold war era.115 These deficits were not necessarily the fault of the Bush

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administration, and, admittedly, some intelligence gaps will unfold in any conflict. But all too often these deficits were filled by wishful thinking. Instead of focusing intelligence collection on the all-important human terrain to help close the gaps, our attention was enemy-focused, primarily centered on the Taliban and counterterrorism. This could help root out enemy remnants but by itself would hardly facilitate a path to democracy. In fact, an enemy-centric focus could also prompt us to pander to local power players for tips and information, which might further set back the prospects for a legitimate, democratic government.116 Additionally, because we planned for no stabilizing presence outside of Kabul, we seemed unlikely to gain better cultural understanding even with the passage of time. In such a decentralized landscape in which provincial and district-level dynamics would carry great weight, long-term success or failure would almost certainly connect to our ability to learn the local undercurrents. The fact that we did not aggressively seek to do so intensified wishful thinking and undermined the postwar effort. Second, deficient learning embodies another explanation. The Bush administration had a worldview that effectively wrote off the 1990s interventions as a series of blunders. Dobbins recalled that, as new administrations often do, the Bush administration “came in with a set of prejudices that had been built up over the past decade as a result of their being in opposition, . . . [including] a disinclination to adopt any of its [predecessor’s] conclusions, or any of its policies.”117 Joseph Collins recalls that “there was a sense that . . . we wanted to get away from nation-building, and that things like Bosnia and Kosovo were draining our assets and keeping us away from the big picture activities.”118 As a manifestation of this during the 2000 presidential campaign, Cheney had asserted that “for eight years, Clinton and Gore have extended our military commitments while depleting our military power . . . help is on the way.”119 This focused inordinate attention on the flaws of earlier interventions, with little attention paid to their positive attributes. On the whole, Afghanistan embodied a much tougher challenge than Kosovo: it was far bigger in geography and population, even more diverse, more economically deprived, and much farther from Europe’s doorstep. But instead of building on successful aspects of the 1990s planning with greater rigor, our officials discarded earlier lessons and did far less. As Gregory Schulte notes, following Kosovo, “We unlearned a lot of that as we got ready for

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Afghanistan and Iraq.”120 Dobbins observed that the approach to postwar Afghanistan embodied “a reflection of criticisms that had built up over the previous decade, and a resistance to applying lessons learned that had been learned through trial and error.”121 This lack of serious study of both weaknesses and the strengths of previous nation-building efforts, along with their underlying differences and similarities, would impede our strategy. Afghanistan was largely seen as a unique case in a new era, in which pre-9/11 considerations represented “old think” that no longer had relevance. After 9/11, Secretary Rumsfeld asserted “we need to get rid of old think,” and General Franks believed the United States was “moving into a new strategic and operational paradigm.”122 These statements devalued the importance of learning from history. Most senior Bush administration officials did not have firsthand experience during the recent interventions in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo, and this lack of a personal connection also likely impeded learning. General George Casey, who participated in the planning or execution of multiple wars in this book, observed the following: There’s something about living with it. The [Clinton] administration lived through the peacekeeping force in Bosnia. They were dealing with what happens day in and day out in those types of environments. So they built a level of understanding that was well beyond conceptual. You read a book about postwar operations and you think “OK, I think I understand this.” But when you live it every day for six or seven years, you have a much deeper level of understanding of the implications of your decisions. And you get to see what happens as things play out. . . .123

The Bush administration did not have the benefit of such firsthand experience as it entered Afghanistan. It was a first-term administration comprising people with little to no recent post-conflict experience. When combined with the prevailing bias that the Clinton administration had done nearly everything wrong—and that the pre-9/11 playbook had become irrelevant—it hindered their ability to discern similar challenges. Hence, they discarded earlier lessons learned and saw Afghanistan as wholly different from previous wars. Admittedly, one historical episode that the Bush administration did try to learn from was the Soviet-Afghan war of the 1980s. The shadow of the

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Soviet quagmire features prominently in the memoirs of multiple officials. The Soviets’ December 1979 invasion had sought to preserve its sphere of influence, prevent the spread of radical Islam (in the wake of Iran’s revolution), and convey a message to Eastern Europe that it needed to stay in line.124 Yet despite sending in mechanized forces, helicopters, fixed-wing aircraft, and other resources, the Soviets encountered little success and eventually withdrew.125 U.S. officials concluded that the Soviets had introduced too many forces and provoked a textbook case of Afghan xenophobia, and thus we should take a starkly different path. To underscore the weight of the Soviet analogy, Rumsfeld’s memoir begins its chapters on Afghanistan by describing the Soviets’ humiliating exit after the long quagmire.126 Similarly, General Franks recalls, “Secretary Rumsfeld and I agreed that the U.S. force should remain small. We wanted to avoid a cumbersome Soviet-style occupation. . . . It hadn’t worked for the Soviets, and it wouldn’t work for us.”127 But this interpretation of history was reductionist. It downplayed how exactly the Soviets had employed their forces, particularly the fact that Soviet troops had launched direct attacks on Afghan civilians. These attacks may have intensified the Afghan insurgency far more than the sheer number of Soviet forces on the ground. In fact, some historical accounts have drawn the conclusion that the Soviets may have had too few forces on the ground, and this, combined with their overreliance on firepower, indiscriminate attacks on Afghan villages, and a seeming aim to “terrorize the population,” may have collectively had a greater impact.128 Interestingly, Vice President Cheney seemed to take away a different lesson from the Soviet-Afghan war that stressed events after the conflict, namely how our subsequent neglect of Afghanistan contributed to a vacuum, creating space for the Taliban to take power.129 Prime Minister Blair and President Bush’s remarks in October 2001 seemed to acknowledge this latter interpretation, with the implication that this time we should remain committed.130 However, because Rumsfeld wielded great power in the president’s inner circle, his own historical interpretation gained traction. Rumsfeld’s narrow interpretation of the Soviet conflict—as well as his rejection of pre-9/11 lessons as “old think”—constituted a dominant strand of thought. Lessons from Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, and similar postwar experiences were swept under the rug because of a desire to move

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in the opposite direction. Overall, we expunged relevant experiences that could and should have informed our Afghan strategy. A third explanation is the NSC did not spearhead integrated politicalmilitary planning. Throughout this period, the role of the NSC principals, deputies, and staff resembled a dog that didn’t bark. The NSC could have served as the president’s instrument to develop a coherent strategy. As discussed earlier, the NSC principals and deputies met exhaustively in the weeks and months after 9/11. Although the topic of “what comes next” in Afghanistan resurfaced on multiple occasions, it did not prompt tough choices. Instead, to the extent that interagency coordination occurred, it “focused almost exclusively on ensuring that the U.S. military buildup in the region proceeded smoothly. This . . . created a gap in the interagency management process,” as Dobbins put it.131 The December 2001 shift of Afghanistan from the NSC’s purview to that of the State Department’s South Asian Affairs bureau was particularly telling. National Security Advisor Rice highlights in her memoir some U.S. involvement in Afghan reconstruction, the events at Bonn, and the later creation of provincial reconstruction teams (PRTs), but there is little to no evidence of aggressive NSC efforts to craft a cohesive interagency plan.132 The NSC was the single best mechanism through which this might have occurred, yet it did not happen. This partly stemmed from a philosophical view regarding the proper role of the NSC. Condoleezza Rice adopted an outlook distinct from that of her predecessor, Sandy Berger. Whereas the NSC under Berger represented the hub of political-military planning, Rice sought to push greater authority to the agencies, shrink the NSC staff, and allow the NSC to step back and focus more on staffing and advising the president. This reflected a more modest approach that she associated with Brent Scowcroft (who presided over what is often considered the golden age of the modern NSC), as well as a desire to avoid an Iran-Contra–like scandal stemming from an overly active NSC.133 Hence, PDD-56, which had put the NSC at the forefront of political-military planning, was cast aside early in the Bush administration.134 Although decentralization and empowering agencies might prove helpful in certain situations, when strong-willed personalities at the top fundamentally disagree, it can foster a lack of cohesion, particularly for a complex endeavor like postwar planning that requires them to row in the same direction.135

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Presidential leadership style also contributed to the NSC’s passive role. As we embarked on this “different kind of war,”136 the president adopted a hands-off approach that granted his subordinates too much flexibility, particularly the military. This revealing passage in President Bush’s memoir exposes his thinking: My instinct was to trust the judgment of the military leadership. They were the trained professionals; I was a new commander in chief. I remembered the Vietnam-era photos of Lyndon Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara poring over maps to pick bombing targets for routine missions. Their micromanagement had an impact throughout the chain of command.137

As an outgrowth, Bush relied heavily on the Pentagon and his military commanders, including General Franks, who was a fellow resident of Midland, Texas, and who had formed a personal bond with the president.138 This hands-off approach applied not only to the military campaign (which was especially evident during the bungled handling of Tora Bora) but also to the postwar phase. The president seemed to envisage broad, sweeping aims but would focus less on the details of how to achieve them. Given Rumsfeld’s forceful personality, the Defense Department seized the opening and took a commanding position in the bureaucracy. Meanwhile, the State Department’s efforts on Afghan governance took place in a separate stovepipe, with minimal integration between the two. Rather than a coordinated interagency process, it quickly became a Pentagondominated affair in which military goals assumed primacy and State operated in its own subordinate political sphere. Ideally, one would want to see an active NSC vigorously coordinating political and military efforts, and shaping key decisions for the president, as occurred in Kosovo. Instead, an emasculated NSC did not take charge, and it ceded excessive authority to the individual departments (particularly the Pentagon). This helped foster a desynchronized and flawed approach. Finally, crosscutting domestic political pressures also undermined our postwar planning. Despite the overwhelming domestic and international support immediately after 9/11,139 U.S. officials were aware that these sentiments might have a limited shelf life. The overriding importance of speed is a prominent recurring theme in the memoirs of Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld,

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and Franks regarding Afghanistan.140 The president himself acknowledged the “the urgency of the cause,” driven by a perceived need to eliminate terrorist bases before a potential second wave of attacks could strike the U.S. homeland.141 Condoleezza Rice recalls while monitoring the initially slow start of the ground campaign, “Impatient, the President would complain, ‘They just need to move!’”142 From the war’s opening weeks, a sense of urgency characterized the Afghan campaign, in recognition of the need to quickly respond to 9/11, eliminate the threat, and satisfy U.S. domestic expectations. This emphasis on speed also reflected the administration’s desire to wrap things up and shift to the next target before domestic sentiments could begin to falter. A rapid shift away from Afghanistan, before public support could erode, would shortchange the aim of promoting Afghan democracy. Rice notes that “we did not have the luxury of concentrating exclusively on Afghanistan” in light of multiple competing demands at the time, including pressing concerns regarding homeland security reforms, surveillance methods, detention processes, anthrax letters, and the fear of follow-up attacks.143 More broadly, some officials saw Afghanistan as just the first encounter in a global war on terror that would entail other, harder battlefields. Such an outlook encouraged a desire to quickly put Afghanistan in the rearview mirror while keeping the American public on board, thus reinforcing the allure of a cakewalk and compounding the difficulty of promoting democracy. The countervailing political pressures, combined with the other factors outlined above, helped undermine our planning. Some dynamics pulled us toward promoting democracy, but others pulled us toward getting out. This tension was never addressed in a coherent way. In addition to these explanations, another major factor also influenced our postwar planning for Afghanistan: the looming shadow of Iraq. Dobbins asserts that senior officials held a “view that Afghanistan was only the opening campaign in a longer war on terrorism, and not the largest or most difficult,”144 which contributed to a desire to not get bogged down, but rather to stick and move, and quickly prepare for the next encounter. The Bush administration believed that it had been caught embarrassingly off guard by 9/11 and now sought to take full advantage of this historic moment to irrevocably change the global landscape well beyond Afghanistan’s borders. To do so, attention quickly diverted away from Afghanistan and toward Iraq. This badly undercut our focus on Afghanistan’s future.

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We would have been wise to keep the NSC principals, deputies, and staff focused on the origins of the 9/11 attacks rather than shift attention elsewhere. In the words of William Taylor, “The Iraq thing diverted us in all kinds of ways” by consuming senior leader attention during the decisive early months in Afghanistan.145 Joseph Collins had similar thoughts: “What should we have done better in Afghanistan? We should have not invaded Iraq.”146 By mid-November 2001, the Afghan effort seemed on track for an unexpectedly easy victory, and it appeared that our first battlefield test was essentially over. So attention skipped past the lingering difficulties and on to the next global target. Many parts of our government stopped carrying their Afghanistan rucksacks and picked up Iraq rucksacks instead. Once attention shifted, it embodied a tipping point, and there seemed little reason for it to shift back: events in Afghanistan appeared relatively benign. Iraq became the new hot ticket, and Afghanistan’s unresolved difficulties were pushed aside. Is it possible that postwar planning for Afghanistan was simply an exercise in futility, entailing not just difficult odds but impossible ones? It is true that the local challenges involving tribalism, terrain, and other societal, economic, and political dynamics made stabilizing and democratizing Afghanistan a herculean task, and some might presume it was impossible.147 However, for much of the twentieth century (up until near the 1978 communist coup), Afghanistan was relatively peaceful, stable, and prosperous relative to comparable developing nations, particularly in the 1960s and early 1970s, which many Afghans perceived as “Afghanistan’s golden age.” Although decades of civil war inflicted massive damage, claims of Afghanistan’s intrinsic backwardness can occasionally be overstated.148 If we had directly tackled the underlying trade-offs, if Iraq had not become a strategic distraction, and if key pieces of advised proffered at the time had been acted upon, our planning might have been better. There was no single “right” answer for postwar Afghanistan, but a totally incoherent plan was not inevitable. In fact, key U.S. actors and emerging Afghan leaders sought to reconcile President Bush’s apparent goals with the major obstacles and resources at hand, but their voices were drowned out. If the Bush administration had been willing to listen and make tough decisions, it could have at least improved the odds of a decent, acceptable outcome, as had occurred in Kosovo.

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What might a better plan for Afghanistan have looked like? If our goal was indeed to promote democracy, then—building on the planning for Kosovo—we could have pursued far greater involvement by international organizations—particularly the UN and NATO—to lock in their commitments from the start in order to help oversee and stabilize the country.149 Similar to Kosovo, we might have mobilized a robust multinational peacekeeping force consisting of several tens of thousands of troops or more, under NATO’s umbrella, to secure Afghanistan’s largest cities. We also could have formally asked the UN to take over governance for a multiyear interim period, just as it had done for Kosovo, to nurture Afghan institutions. We had more than ample influence to do all of this in the immediate wake of 9/11. Yet we squandered the international community’s expressed willingness to help. Condoleezza Rice acknowledges that we likely “missed an opportunity to make the declaration of Article V have meaning. . . . I’ve always felt that we left the [NATO] Alliance dressed up with nowhere to go. I wish we’d done better.”150 Overall, these suggestions do not reflect hindsight being 20/20, but they reflect explicit recommendations made to senior levels of our government at the time. It is inaccurate to presume that a broken, incoherent plan was inevitable. Indeed, if the 9/11 attacks had occurred at the tail end of the Clinton administration (instead of at the start of the Bush administration), many of these issues might have been directly addressed. In such a scenario, we might have fully leveraged NATO and the UN in the security and governance domains, and perhaps initiated a robust long-term effort roughly as we had done in Kosovo. In that scenario, Afghanistan surely would not be perfect today. But it might be on a far better trajectory. We also might have sought to reconcile with select, receptive Taliban leaders early on, when our leverage was at a high point, rather than wait years to do so.151 Is it possible that the Middle East represents a uniquely perilous region for us, and this explains why we could not develop a rigorous plan for Afghanistan? To unpack this, first we should acknowledge that Afghanistan is not generally considered part of the Middle East per se. But even if Afghanistan were included in such a broad geographic conception, many of the challenges encountered were roughly similar to those previously described in Kosovo (although magnified in scale). Both landscapes entailed ethnically diverse, predominantly Islamic populations suffering

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from years of brutal internal violence and serious economic underdevelopment. Admittedly, the magnitude of the challenges in Afghanistan far exceeded those in Kosovo, including a substantially larger population and geographic area. There was also the Pakistani sanctuary, the extended period of civil war, and other unique aspects that have been discussed. But we might have started by relying on a roughly similar framework, bolstered by significantly more planning energy and resources than we applied in Kosovo, and tailored to the local challenges. As mentioned earlier, we also had a few unique advantages in Afghanistan, particularly the overwhelming levels of domestic and international support. Yet we did not bring these factors together to craft a cohesive strategy. Instead, we punted problems to the Afghans and shifted our focus to Iraq. Another explanation might be that we simply did not have enough planning time. Did the pressures of quickly going to war make it all but impossible to plan for the peace? From this perspective, once 9/11 put the war in motion, like a rock rolling downhill, it may have taken exceptional effort to try to deliberately step back and assess the postwar landscape. From a certain vantage point, this explanation may have at least some merit. Our leaders did not have the luxury to think about postwar Afghanistan for weeks or months beforehand. The shocking nature of 9/11 caught us on our back foot and set processes in motion that might have made it tough to go back and review the basic strategy. However, it is also plausible that the Bush administration’s approach might have been nearly identical even with substantial advance notice. If we hypothetically had one year of unfettered lead time to prepare for postwar Afghanistan, it is difficult to imagine Rumsfeld suddenly becoming enamored with the idea of building an Afghan democracy. Hence, the underlying tension between Rumsfeld’s outlook and the president’s growing desire to leave behind a democracy would persist. Further, all wars— whether conducted deliberately or hastily—generate immense pressures on senior officials, whether advance warning is present or not. The Bush administration was not simply a victim of circumstance in Afghanistan. We had a definite ability to shape the postwar approach after the tensionfilled opening weeks, particularly once the series of Taliban-controlled cities fell in mid to late November. This battlefield lull provided a window of opportunity when we could have deliberately sat down and developed a comprehensive strategy. Instead, we unwisely diverted attention to Iraq.

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Key choices can make a difference, and our plans are not strictly an outgrowth of fate or time available. The recurring explanations throughout this book—including the looming shadow of Iraq—provide a more compelling account of why major problems took root.

Aftermath To complete our historical story, we should briefly consider what unfolded next in Afghanistan. After Operation Anaconda ended in March 2002, we remained minimally engaged in Afghanistan for years and treated it as a back-burner, economy-of-force effort. On a superficial level, events seemed more or less on track for a while, despite the fact that our precise goals and overall strategy remained unclear, with ends and means doggedly out of step. Bureaucratic differences continued to emerge, in part stemming from divergent understandings of our underlying aims. For example, bureaucratic jockeying unfolded over whether State or Defense should take charge of training Afghan police from Germany, and Pentagon leaders accused State of sending its lesser-qualified diplomats to Afghanistan on excessively short tours.152 Further, poor intelligence continued to be an issue intensified by the minimal American presence, as a U.S. Army study pessimistically noted that “even in 2004, almost 3 years after OEF began, there were areas of Afghanistan about which the Coalition knew almost nothing.”153 But in the bigger picture, the United States saw little compelling reason to stay decisively engaged in Afghanistan, and we lost interest. The country seemed to fall off the radar for years. In the words of Colonel Fitzgerald, we continually applied “just enough, just enough, piecemeal,”154 and a comprehensive strategy never materialized, while the highest levels of our government shifted gears to Iraq. Joseph Collins characterized Afghanistan in the early days as “an extremely successful pick-up game . . . being sort of plotted out one inch at a time.”155 In some significant respects Afghanistan was largely left to fend for itself, except for infusions of (often misdirected) cash and sporadic, uncoordinated attention from the West. Coalition forces on the ground tried to muddle through as best they could and would make some limited headway in political, security, and reconstruction efforts.156 But for his part, Karzai would grow frustrated

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by the obvious contradictions in U.S. policy and increasingly went down his own wayward path, to the point that eventually he would even rhetorically refer to his “Taliban brothers.”157 Michèle Flournoy noted that “Afghanistan became an economy-of-force mission in every sense of the word, including in the investment on the political and economic and postconflict side. It just got shortchanged. It was kind of a series of one-year campaigns that didn’t accumulate.”158 Conditions deteriorated drastically in the period from 2006 to 2008. A reconstituted Taliban mounted increasingly sophisticated attacks, created shadow governments to rival the authority of the Karzai government, and severely undermined the prospects of a stable, democratic Afghanistan. Corruption also became a far more urgent problem, and reinvigorated warlords helped fill the vacuum across many provinces. To make matters worse, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (I.S.I.) was reportedly supporting the Taliban’s resurgence behind the scenes.159 Beginning in 2009, the Obama administration vastly enlarged the U.S. military footprint in Afghanistan to stave off a feared strategic defeat, but even during this period our overarching goal for Afghanistan remained foggy, contributing to civil-military discord and strategic confusion.160 Further, the sharp drawdown at the tail end of this escalation (which was imprudently telegraphed from the start) helped relinquish the fragile security gains in short order, and the Taliban soon clawed its way back to a strategic stalemate. The persistent narrative that we would soon be leaving was not helpful throughout this period, as I recall from my own foxhole in Afghanistan at the time. It only perpetuated ongoing confusion about what we were actually trying to achieve and whether we were staying put or going home. As of this writing, the fate of Afghanistan still hangs in the balance. From an optimistic lens, it is a fragile state with a few roughly democratic traits that is better off than it once was. But on the other hand, the endemic corruption and widespread insurgency (including the Taliban’s recapture of significant swaths of the country) are deeply disappointing given the scale of economic, diplomatic, and military resources—and, most importantly, human lives—we’ve invested over a decade and a half. This lackluster outcome was hardly President Bush’s goal. We never acknowledged the underlying tension between promoting democracy and getting out, so we used magical thinking to strive for both. This muddled path helped pave

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the way for a disappointing result. Although the present outcome is not a total catastrophe and some degree of stability may still be salvageable, it is still highly discouraging. The three tasks illuminate how Afghanistan started to veer off the tracks. First, our political goal was not clear or achievable, and it entailed a disconnect between the lofty rhetoric of building a new democracy and the incompatible desire for a quick exit. Second, we nominally acknowledged some of the massive obstacles but did not take firm steps to mitigate them. Third, our mobilization of postwar resources was a mixed bag, which alternately favored both a quick exit and democratization in different ways. As an outgrowth, a coherent strategy connecting ends with means did not come together. Although the planning had a few redeeming features, such as the financial pledges made at Bonn and Tokyo, it ultimately sidestepped the hardest choices and was not internally coherent. A rigorous postwar strategy can enhance resiliency to deal with unexpected hardships. But like the block-stacking game Jenga, if the core foundation is weak, then everything resting on top of it becomes precarious and subject to greater instability. Our desired transformation of a decentralized tribal country into a centralized democracy embodied an exceptionally difficult project, with odds stacked against success from the beginning. But Afghanistan’s prospects were further set back by an incoherent strategy that made the huge mountain to climb even steeper. Yet, despite all these aspects, Afghanistan’s fate has never been fully predetermined, and subsequent decisions still matter. Another path was possible. The ideal window for comprehensive planning would have begun in mid to late November 2001, as battlefield victories were unfolding in Mazar-e-Sharif, Herat, Kabul, Jalalabad, and elsewhere. This was the crucial moment when many immediate political pressures were lifting off the Bush administration. The NSC principals, deputies, staff, and military leadership had their first real chance to lift their heads above water and take a deep breath. If a path to democracy was indeed our goal, then we could have used the Kosovo template as our rough model at this moment, when U.S. leverage was still at a high point. We could have requested that the UN take over governing Afghanistan for an indefinite period, while nascent institutions took shape. We could have sought NATO leadership of a robust stabilization force comprising U.S. forces working alongside partner nations to secure Afghanistan’s largest

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cities. The commitments at Bonn and Tokyo could have served as a springboard to leverage the international community’s willingness to assist and thereby helped stabilize and temporarily govern the country while Afghan institutions built capacity over time. The basic elements of this potential path were suggested by U.S. officials at the time, particularly in the State Department. It would surely not have established a flourishing American-style democracy overnight. But if sustained over time, it could very well have contributed to a better, more democratic, and more stable outcome than what unfolded. We also might have made an earnest effort to reach out to reconcilable Taliban elements to enlist their help. Instead, in late November 2001 we began to embark on a historic blunder by pivoting our attention to Iraq. Long before the job was done, our government had already begun to lose interest in Afghanistan’s future. President Bush recalls in his memoir that, shortly after the 9/11 attacks, he reflected on Lincoln’s admirable “clarity of purpose” during the turmoil of the Civil War.161 But regrettably Bush did not demonstrate such clarity of purpose for Afghanistan. Even if our overall goal were clear in his mind (and it is not clear that it was), that is still not sufficient; instead, it must be reasonably clear in the minds of the various civilian and military leaders responsible for developing and implementing our strategy. If the president wanted to embark on “ultimate nation building” with “a plan for a transition to democracy,” as he put it, then his vision was not understood across his administration. We were fundamentally confused about what we were trying to achieve. Publicly announcing a lofty goal such as creating a new democracy is only an initial step, and a fairly easy one at that. However, there must be follow-through in the actual planning and execution for that goal to acquire real meaning. In Afghanistan our gearshift seemed stuck, as we aimed to forge a democracy on the one hand while still empowering warlords to help hunt Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters on the other, thereby allowing for the lightest possible footprint. Our rhetoric aimed high, but we wanted to avoid the grinding process of nation building, and we did not seek to learn from recent experiences. We never constructed an overarching strategy that linked ends and means, or political and military objectives, into a coherent whole. Instead, we shifted attention to Iraq and left the contradictions and tough choices for someone else to figure out.

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Rather than build a seaworthy boat from the beginning, we took shortcuts and then ended up furiously bailing out water while plugging leaks with our fingertips. In many ways, we are still plugging those leaks today. One gets the sense that many of our leaders simply did not believe that postwar Afghanistan deserved significant time or energy. We focused on taking down the Taliban but gave short shrift to what would come next. This raises the following question: should we have embarked on a vast effort in postwar Afghanistan? The answer involves a great deal of subjectivity, yet clearly we could have given it a shot. We had the overwhelming goodwill of the Afghan people, who were grateful for the Taliban’s overthrow. We had the unparalleled sympathy of the international community, which was primed and ready to help. And we had extraordinary domestic political capital in the United States for virtually anything our president wanted to do. But we squandered the fleeting opportunity because we couldn’t get our act together. If we had undertaken more rigorous planning, it would not have guaranteed success. Afghanistan was going to be exceptionally hard no matter what, and it is quite possible that we still might have come up short. However, clinging to pipe dreams and selfdeception made a debacle all but certain. In 2017 alone, the fact there were more than 10,000 civilian casualties, including more than 3,000 children, underscores the enormous ongoing price that Afghans continue to pay to this day.162 Despite many problems beneath the surface, for a while the Afghanistan war was still widely seen as a success. It bolstered the Bush administration’s self-confidence and prodded it to shift attention elsewhere. Soon the administration would find itself in the second major battlefield of its ostensible global war on terror: in this case, at a time and place entirely of its own choosing. As we prepared to embark on a brand new war in Iraq, we would unfortunately learn the wrong lessons from Afghanistan, magical thinking would become even more pervasive, and our decision making would become even more dysfunctional. Familiar problems would reappear and even magnify in intensity to ultimately wreak even greater havoc.

3

Iraq The Worst of All Worlds

You pay attention to the day after and I’ll pay attention to the day of. General Tommy Franks, American Soldier

In the dim Iraqi twilight, I stood a stone’s throw away from Saddam Hussein. My M-4 rifle was in hand, mounted with an ACOG optical sight, an AN/PEQ-2 infrared aiming laser, and a tactical flashlight, along with a full mag of 5.56 mm ammo in the magazine well. Our mission entailed securing High Value Detainee #1, the most high-profile prisoner in the world. Without question, it was a cool mission to get. In early January 2004, just a few weeks after Saddam’s capture, my Ranger platoon was given the mission to safeguard his tactical holding facility. If anyone attacked the compound to try to spring Saddam loose, we were prepared to immediately respond with lethal force. Being a platoon leader in the 75th Ranger Regiment was an incredible experience. As a young man recently back from a year stationed near the Korean Demilitarized Zone, getting the opportunity to lead an elite group of about forty phenomenally fit, specially selected, highly trained warriors in combat was just about the most awesome job I could imagine. In addition to jumping out of airplanes, fast-roping out of helicopters, and

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conducting raids, our unit would sometimes get sensitive missions of strategic importance. This was certainly one of them. To be ready for anything, we brainstormed an array of possible scenarios. What if a group of Saddam loyalists attacked from multiple directions to try to overwhelm us and reclaim their former leader? What if they punched a hole in the perimeter fence with a truck full of explosives and used that breach point to funnel through waves of reinforcements? Or, more improbably, what if someone piloted a small aircraft and crashed it into the facility, killing him in a 9/11-styled kamikaze strike to try to stop him from talking? We had tried to war-game every possible contingency and developed detailed plans just in case. On some occasions, we even had Rangers from our unit keep an eye on Saddam at his inner holding cell. So on this night I walked along the facility’s rooftop, re-verifying our primary and alternate fighting positions. Saddam was just below me, pacing in the enclosed, outdoor area. He was apparently on a smoke break and seemed unaware that I was watching him. As I watched the former dictator getting some air, there was a partial sense of victory. Ladies and gentlemen, we got him! But at the same time, our special operations task force was also busy planning an aggressive series of night raids in various Iraqi cities that my platoon would execute in short order, which would entail multiple tense firefights with elusive enemies. There was a sense that we’d accomplished what we’d initially set out to do, but there was also a feeling of apprehension and uncertainty. Some among us speculated we’d be completely out of Iraq in a few months. Others assumed we’d stay in Iraq for so long that U.S. soldiers would eventually be settling down with Iraqi spouses, like events in Germany or Korea. So what exactly was our plan for Iraq? Now that we got Saddam, what was supposed to come next? Even today, the exact motivations behind our original 2003 invasion of Iraq remain hazy. But they likely included at least a few elements: to remove Saddam Hussein once and for all, to expand the “global war on terror,” to eliminate a supposed nexus between weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and terrorism, to lessen our post-9/11 sense of fear, to finish the Gulf War’s unfinished business, to intimidate potential aggressors, and to plant the seeds of democracy in the Middle East. It was a jumble of lofty aims, to be sure. However, the invasion’s deeply troubled aftermath soon

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introduced a fresh set of problems, including sectarian violence, insurgency, and a new magnet for terrorism. We embarked on a war of choice with a hodgepodge of grand ambitions, but it quickly spun out of control and propelled our interests backward in many respects, rather than forward. This raises the following question: we had substantial time to think about postwar Iraq prior to launching our invasion, so why didn’t we craft a coherent plan? The unresolved tension between promoting democracy and getting out played a crucial role. Our failure to acknowledge and deal with this tension helped derail our postwar approach long before the first U.S. troops arrived in Baghdad. We did not develop a cohesive strategy to address the underlying trade-offs, so the planning was at odds with itself. This helped give rise to incompatible goals, a flourishing of governmental infighting, and a general sense of confusion that squandered our key window of opportunity. The widely held presumption that no postwar planning took place for Iraq is wrong. Postwar planning did occur in parts of our government, and in some cases civilian and military sections made valiant attempts to forge a way ahead. Yet the various plans were never brought together into a unified whole. Responsibilities were passed like a hot potato among various entities, and no single approach took primacy. In this confusing, rudderless environment, new actors (who were often understaffed and ill-equipped) were thrust into key positions at the eleventh hour and hastily assembled new approaches in a manner like building an aircraft already in flight. This increased the likelihood of a tragic outcome. Today it is tempting to perceive the fate of post-Saddam Iraq as a train wreck that was always going to happen, irrespective of the plans developed. Admittedly, some turbulence was almost guaranteed because orchestrating regime change after decades of autocracy unleashes major challenges, particularly for a country of more than 25 million people with an unfamiliar culture, various sects, and no experience with democracy. Further, the discovery of no active WMD program—which was the main rationale publicly articulated for the invasion—would have generated blowback regardless of our amount of preparation. Yet the wholesale collapse of the entire political, social, economic, and security-based order in Iraq was not foreordained and could have been mitigated through better

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planning. In no small part, the eventual chaos and the inception of multiple insurgencies were outgrowths of our immense planning blunders. To explore these dynamics, we need to answer a few questions. First, how did our postwar planning for Iraq unfold from the 1990s through the declared end of major combat operations on May 1, 2003? Second, how did we handle the three planning tasks? Finally, why did we conduct our planning so poorly? This can illuminate how we might have made smarter choices and probably attained a better outcome.

A Foundation on Sand The twists and turns of post-Saddam planning began shortly after the 1990–1991 Persian Gulf War. A neoconservative belief took hold in the 1990s and early 2000s that the Gulf War’s endgame had unwisely left Saddam in power and that if an autocracy in the Middle East were toppled (such as Saddam’s Iraq), it might kick off a beneficial domino effect that could transform the region. In 1994 Paul Wolfowitz, who would become a chief architect of the Iraq war, authored a book review in which he lamented the Clinton administration’s alleged “failure to appreciate that Saddam Hussein’s continuation in power is a problem.” Wolfowitz further suggested that the status quo in Iraq might not be sustainable.1 Throughout this period, Saddam’s unruly actions were a constant thorn in America’s side. The passage of the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998 reflected a growing view that this frustrating situation should be altered by removing Saddam. His regime embodied a potential foe that we had already fought once and, some believed, might have to fight again. A hypothetical post-Saddam landscape received sporadic attention in the late 1990s and early 2000s in the context of various contingency plans and war-gaming exercises. In contrast to Afghanistan, which took us wholly by surprise, there were years to deliberate before invading Iraq, so “the administration had the luxury of time.”2 In fact, the United States benefited from a more prolonged preparation period for Iraq than for any other case in this book. This renders our botched planning even more puzzling. Op Plan 1003 (pronounced ten-oh-three) was the U.S. military’s principal contingency plan for a new conflict with Iraq. This on-the-shelf plan

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outlined a Desert Storm II–style campaign, entailing an extended buildup of hundreds of thousands of service members. These forces were intended to achieve decisive victory by using overwhelming military force, and they would set the stage for a sizable occupation lasting up to ten years.3 However, Op Plan 1003 did not provide much detail about the precise challenges that the Phase IV occupation might entail, what specific goals we should prioritize during that phase, or how we should tackle them. Hence, Op Plan 1003 reflected a basic acknowledgment that Phase IV could be difficult and would likely require major resources, but it also had notable gaps. To help address the planning gaps, in June 1999 CENTCOM, under General Anthony Zinni, sponsored a war-gaming exercise called Desert Crossing. The exercise was motivated by the concern that air strikes such as those conducted during Operation Desert Fox in 1998 might trigger Saddam’s regime to collapse from within. Hence, CENTCOM sought to refine Op Plan 1003 (and its 1998 iteration, dubbed 1003–98), with a focus on the challenges that could unfold after Saddam’s downfall.4 The war game highlighted a range of potential crises and issues related to Iraqi security, possible fragmentation, power struggles, governance, and economics, as well as the impact of regional actors, intelligence gaps, and challenges in synchronizing civilian and military efforts.5 Although it did not offer a solution to every post-Saddam issue, in retrospect much of its analysis was prescient. Its after-action review concluded in bold type on the opening page that “regime change may not enhance regional stability.” This was in part because “the country could fragment along religious and/or ethnic lines,” while it also concluded that “western-style democracy may not engender long-term stability without considerable stabilization, preparation, and long-term sustainment.”6 This sobering 1999 report anticipated major post-Saddam challenges, with the implication that winning the peace might be far harder than toppling the regime. However, despite its astute analysis, a civilian portion of the plan was never finalized.7 Op Plan 1003–98 and Desert Crossing helped form the existing framework for a post-Saddam Iraq as the Bush administration took the reins, yet the major challenges that had been identified would be de-emphasized. As President George W. Bush took office in January 2001, Iraq loomed large in the minds of some of his incoming officials, seemingly more so

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than the growing threat posed by Al Qaeda.8 When the president prepared to receive his initial array of national security briefings, his new team sought to reorient those briefings to delve into Iraq in greater detail, in part because of concern that the status quo of sanctions and no-fly-zone confrontations might be unsustainable, but also because some officials had a sense of unfinished business when it came to Iraq.9 From Donald Rumsfeld’s perspective, Iraq “remained a festering problem” that would require a more muscular approach than that of the Clinton administration.10 Almost immediately after 9/11, the topic of military action against Iraq briefly came up in discussion, although the president tabled it at the time with an indication that he wanted to focus on Afghanistan for the short term.11 Yet 9/11 had opened up an array of new strategic possibilities, and as events in Afghanistan quieted down by late November 2001, the topic of military action against Iraq reemerged with greater forcefulness.12 As highlighted in the previous chapter, the U.S. military began a marked shift in focus from Afghanistan to Iraq before the Taliban had even been completely toppled,13 but as this shift occurred, much of the analysis embedded in Op Plan 1003–98 and Desert Crossing would be discarded. In fact, when then-retired General Zinni contacted the CENTCOM deputy commander to ask if he had reviewed Desert Crossing’s findings, the response Zinni received was “Desert Crossing? What’s that?”14 As President Bush contemplated a more aggressive policy toward Iraq, he asked the Pentagon to generate a fresh set of military options. Rumsfeld examined CENTCOM’s existing war plans and found himself unimpressed. Rumsfeld regarded the standing invasion plan as an antiquated, unimaginative refighting of the Gulf War that would be lumbering and predictable, and he believed it failed to maximize new technologies that could facilitate a speedier war of precision, agility, and maneuver.15 The idea that we might embark on a lengthy occupation was especially distasteful to him. Rumsfeld retained his deep aversion to nation building, and the seemingly successful Afghanistan invasion only served to harden his resolve. He gave a speech in February 2003 on the brink of the Iraq invasion titled “Beyond Nation Building” that reflected his ardent belief that “a long-term foreign presence in a country can be unnatural.”16 As an outgrowth, within CENTCOM at the time one could not use the dreaded “o-word”: occupation.17 This desire to shun nation building would

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influence the range of options considered and, as in the case of Afghanistan, would contribute to irreconcilable aims. Throughout this prewar period, Rumsfeld maintained a meticulous focus on details of the military campaign, and he exerted pressure on CENTCOM to develop a plan that aligned with the light footprint perceived as having worked in Afghanistan. As the ground invasion plan, titled “Cobra II,” took shape from the remnants of Op Plan 1003–98 (which itself morphed into a new variant, titled 1003V, in October 2002),18 civilian and military leaders focused most of their attention on the military effort. This entailed the familiar domain of operational scheme of maneuver, basing rights, and possible axes of advance (to include the 4th Infantry Division’s potential northern axis through Turkey), alongside exhaustive focus on the individual units scheduled to deploy in the timephased force deployment data (TPFDD), with an aim to reduce the force’s size as much as possible.19 To the extent that senior officials addressed contingencies, they often related to the military campaign itself, such as the possibility of a “Fortress Baghdad” scenario, the possible use of WMD against U.S. forces, and the possible early collapse of Saddam’s regime.20 Throughout this period, postwar Iraq embodied a dog that did not bark: a crucial phase with its own set of complexities that senior officials should have subjected to at least as much scrutiny as the invasion, but it received far less. As the Cobra II invasion plan went through various iterations, from “Generated Start” to “Running Start” to “Hybrid,” a select few tried to look ahead to the postwar challenges. Planners within CFLCC (Combined Forces Land Component Command), which was CENTCOM’s subordinate command responsible for the land campaign, sought to do so. Initially, the CFLCC postwar planning section consisted of only four full-time officers who reported to Colonel Kevin Benson, along with a fifth officer who provided additional oversight on a part-time basis. When CFLCC deployed to Kuwait in December 2002, Benson requested much-needed reinforcements and received four additional officers (three Americans and one Briton). Still, this brought the total number of CFLCC planners engaged in full-time postwar planning to only eight,21 which paled in comparison to the mammoth amount of manpower devoted to the invasion itself. This postwar planning cell would receive little explicit guidance and was often treated as an afterthought.

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Ultimately, these CFLCC planners concluded that the breadth and depth of the challenges were insufficiently addressed in the Cobra II plan and that there was a need for a separate postwar plan rather than simply an add-on to Cobra II. Benson discovered that “the war-gaming was more complex than anything I’d ever done,” and this helped give rise to “Eclipse II,” which became CFLCC’s distinct postwar plan.22 Similar to how the nomenclature for “Cobra” evoked an analogy to World War II (specifically, the Allied breakout from Normandy, which relied on maneuver and surprise), the “Eclipse” nomenclature harkened back to the postwar occupation of Germany. This revealing analogy reflects the mental construct of CFLCC planners at the time and suggests how sharply their construct diverged from that of Pentagon officials who shunned nation building. Given the lack of specific guidance, CFLCC sought to build on lessons from historical cases such as Germany while trying to be mindful of differences in geography, society, politics, and other aspects. Based on Iraq’s sizable population of 25 million, Benson’s team estimated that twenty brigades would be needed to secure the peace.23 Yet this scale of resources (and the historical reference point used) did not align with Pentagon preferences. Further, Eclipse II relied on multiple assumptions that would not survive intact. One assumption was that we would build on existing Iraqi institutions rather than re-create them from the ground up. It further assumed that we would recall the Iraqi security forces and would rely on the existing Iraqi bureaucracy to help maintain stability and order. Benson recalls that these Eclipse II planning elements were considered so inviolable that “those weren’t assumptions. We took those to be fact, frankly.”24 But in late March 2003, a video teleconference with Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith caused confusion, as he suggested that we would pursue sweeping de-Baathification, which seemed to indicate that the planners’ “foundation was on sand,” in Benson’s words.25 By this point, however, the invasion was already getting under way. This uncertainty would persist until Baghdad fell, when a plethora of contradictions would come to a head all at once. To exacerbate the difficulty, because of competing demands and lack of senior-level emphasis, Eclipse II would not be published until after the invasion was already in progress. Hence, military commanders on the ground had little understanding of their expected postwar duties.26

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CFLCC did not embody the only element grappling with postwar Iraq. Another effort consisted of the State Department’s ambitious “Future of Iraq Project.” To undertake this project, the State Department assembled more than 200 Iraqi exiles and regional experts to explore problems that might unfold in post-Saddam Iraq. The exhaustive study consisted of 17 working groups that held 33 meetings from July 2002 to early April 2003 and ultimately produced a 13-volume report entailing over 1,200 pages. It addressed a wide array of issues, including challenges in public health, agriculture, finance, justice, education, infrastructure, media, civil society, and energy.27 In subsequent years some critics correctly noted the study was bloated and did not provide a concrete operational plan; hence, the criticism that it was “unimplementable” is quite valid.28 However, the study did outline the possibility of sectarianism, looting, violence, and sabotage of public buildings, along with suggested steps to mitigate many such risks.29 Yet the interdepartmental dynamics were so toxic that for a military planner to even admit that he or she read the Future of Iraq study could be career damaging. Benson sought copies of the study as a reference for his CFLCC planners but recalls being warned, “This could be your career, if folks know you’ve got a copy of it.”30 This enmity was exacerbated by verbal jabs on a regular basis, such as Pentagon characterizations of the State Department as a “Department of Nice” that incensed Secretary Powell and further undermined the planning effort.31 This vitriol fostered the opposite of a “whole of government” approach. For an extended period, one central question was who would take the overall lead for postwar Iraq. During most of 2002, it was widely understood by the military that the State Department would assume the lead. As late as August 2002, General Tommy Franks was still informing his subordinates in CENTCOM of that arrangement.32 However, this shifted in the final months before the invasion. On January 20, 2003 (two months before the war began), President Bush signed National Security Presidential Directive (NSPD) 24, which assigned overall primacy for postwar Iraq to the Pentagon.33 This followed a request made by Douglas Feith at an NSC meeting on October 15, 2002, to “put a single cabinet official in charge of all the tasks necessary to complete our military mission,” with the recommendation that the Pentagon be selected to do so. The president concurred, and the signing of NSPD-24 in January solidified

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that arrangement.34 As the shift to the Pentagon unfolded, it helped spark the surge of postwar planning at CFLCC, as well as other activity in the Defense Department. Nonetheless, in December 2002 Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Myers was growing concerned by the lack of an overarching postwar plan. To address this, he directed the establishment of Joint Task Force IV under Brigadier General Hawkins.35 Joint Task Force IV was intended to help crystallize the military’s approach to postwar Iraq and to facilitate interagency coordination. But in practice, the task force consisted of a hastily established pickup team with no independent budget and practically no resources. Further, it was unclear which command it reported to in the military hierarchy, and its mission would almost immediately overlap with ORHA’s ostensible mission.36 In a revealing episode, Hawkins reportedly had to use his personal credit card to buy office supplies for his task force.37 After ten weeks of failing to gain traction, Joint Task Force IV was disbanded in March 2003, with little to show for its brief life span. Shortly after the creation of Joint Task Force IV, the Pentagon also established the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), led by retired Lieutenant General Jay Garner. As its title implied, ORHA’s intended focus centered on potential humanitarian crises in the immediate post-invasion period (such as oil fires, refugee crises, food shortages, and epidemics)38 along with initial reconstruction tasks. It was designed to facilitate a speedy transition to Iraqi governance rather than to oversee a vast nation-building effort.39 Hence, Garner made it clear to ORHA staff members that they were expected to try to work themselves out of their jobs within about ninety days.40 ORHA was an overstretched, quickly assembled group of roughly four hundred members, weighted with current and former military officers with minimal preparation and who in some cases underwent screening by Rumsfeld and Feith to ensure loyalty to Pentagon policy objectives.41 Similar to Joint Task Force IV’s predicament, it was unclear who exactly ORHA reported to: whether to CFLCC, to CENTCOM headquarters, or directly to the Pentagon itself.42 Paul Hughes, who served as ORHA’s senior officer for strategic plans and policy, recalls that at CENTCOM “nobody wanted anything to do with ORHA . . . and CFLCC within its own family wanted nothing to do with JTF IV.”43 In the weeks leading

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up the invasion, gaps between the administration’s vague strategic aims and ORHA’s limited capacity crept to the surface as harbingers of the difficulties to come. In February 2003—one month before the invasion—ORHA participated in a two-day exercise at Fort McNair to assess the overall postwar strategy. The exercise proved to be alarming. It highlighted glaring unresolved issues that would materialize almost immediately after Baghdad fell, particularly crises in security and governance. Further, it became clear that ORHA would have woefully insufficient resources to accomplish its specified and implied tasks.44 Army Colonel Michael Hess, who served as ORHA’s humanitarian planner (and later served as Paul Bremer’s chief of staff at the CPA), recalls that “there was certainly a realization that the emperor had no clothes.”45 The exercise served as a final warning that the postwar effort was in danger of mission failure unless ORHA somehow received dramatically more senior leader guidance, resources, or time. ORHA produced a 25-page Unified Mission Plan for Post-Hostilities Iraq in April 2003, yet this product contained sweeping generalities, had sizable gaps and incomplete portions (frequently using question marks as placeholders), and never made it to the Bush administration for approval. Thus, it remained an unapproved, incomplete draft with little impact.46 Collectively, these ORHA-related warning signs went unrecognized. Most attention centered on the invasion and how to use the lightest possible footprint. The sequence of events was like the crew of the Titanic receiving multiple warnings of icebergs ahead, doing little if anything to avoid calamity, and proceeding at full speed regardless. The short nature of the military campaign would bring the problems to a head in just a few weeks. To further confuse the situation, in addition to all these redundant and unsynchronized efforts, postwar planning was also conducted in other parts of the government. In July 2002 the Joint Staff J-5 established an Iraq political-military cell (IPMC). General George Casey, who served as the J-5 at the time, recalls that there was some positive coordination and deliberation that occurred through this venue, with weekly meetings focused on a phased transition from U.S. to Iraqi authority. However, friction emerged between the Pentagon and the State Department regarding who should be in charge of postwar Iraq.47 Further, an executive steering group (ESG) was assembled to tie in with the IPMC, under Franklin Miller, who served as NSC senior director for defense policy. But during most of

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its life span the ESG focused mainly on invasion-related issues such as landing rights, overflight rights, and pre-positioning logistics rights, and “the postwar plans kind of took second place,” according to Miller.48 The ESG’s working groups, such as the Iraq Relief and Reconstruction working group, tended to focus on humanitarian and reconstruction concerns more than the overarching strategy.49 Despite interagency meetings held over months, these venues were unable to drive firm higher-level decisions on postwar matters. Attempts at integration unfolded at the middle levels but did not gain traction at the highest echelons. In the final days before the invasion, the fact that there was still no concrete post-Saddam plan became inescapably obvious. On March 10, 2003, an NSC principals meeting convened with President Bush in attendance and hurriedly agreed to establish the Iraqi Interim Authority (IIA). The IIA concept was briefed by Douglas Feith, after being prepared by Franklin Miller’s team, as an eleventh-hour compromise to try to bridge the massive gaps and various concepts circulating across the government.50 It outlined a provisional Iraqi government that would have limited authority over certain areas, along with a “rolling transfer of authority” from the United States in other areas.51 On a superficial level, it seemed to epitomize the best of all worlds in that it could put Iraq on a path to democracy without a long occupation or major resource investments. But the IIA concept was lacking in detail and was quickly seen as “the plan merely of the ‘Pentagon’s policy office,’” in Feith’s words.52 It only confirmed the ambiguity regarding the overall strategy. On March 10, President Bush also approved a general concept of de-Baathification, but whether it should apply to only the top tier of party members or a broader array of Iraqis was left somewhat open to interpretation.53 Further, the president also expressed a desire to retain most of the Iraqi Army and to expunge only select radical units, as he states in his memoir that he had the impression that “we would draw on the rest of the Saddam-era forces to form the foundation of the new Iraqi military and police.”54 Yet in many respects these intentions were undermined by a lack of specificity and were not widely understood. The NSC summary of conclusions of this meeting was written in a purposely vague manner so that it would not be perceived as overly directive of the agencies, which contributed to the confusion.55 The day after this NSC meeting, Rumsfeld went to speak with the president to

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express concern about “unresolved issues in this planning and the lack of policy resolution.” Many parts of the U.S. government rejected part or all of the IIA concept, and “an unequivocal order from the President resolving the differences was not forthcoming,” as Rumsfeld recalls.56 In short, no coherent postwar plan was widely understood and ready for implementation. From November 2001 onward, postwar planning was conducted separately at CFLCC, Joint Task Force IV, ORHA, the State Department, the Joint Staff, the IPMC, the ESG, and Douglas Feith’s policy office at the Pentagon.57 These efforts never coalesced into a coherent whole. “There was a tremendous amount of redundancy,” as Hughes recalls,58 for the planning did not reflect the presence of one comprehensive plan but simply isolated pockets of planning divided by fundamentally different conceptions of Iraq’s future. The United States planned for everything and consequently planned for nothing. The eventual IIA concept did not so much provide a “plan” as it did an imprecise vision, parachuted in to the NSC principals at the eleventh hour, that was not widely accepted or understood and suffered from internal contradictions. On May 1, 2003, following the short, successful military campaign, President Bush gave a historic speech that formally declared an end to combat operations. The speech gave the impression of being a “victory dance,” an unfortunate image for which President Bush would later acknowledge was a “big mistake” in light of subsequent events.59 Nevertheless, the president’s speech marked the end of the opening phase. From that point onward, we would find ourselves scrambling to address the plethora of unresolved problems on the fly. An analysis of the three planning tasks helps us better understand how things went wrong.

Irreconcilable Differences Task 1: Did we identify a clear, achievable political goal? The failure to establish a clear, achievable political goal for Iraq was a central problem that plagued the entire process. Would we allow Iraqi exiles such as Ahmad Chalabi to rapidly take charge and pave the way for a speedy exit (as Rumsfeld and Feith seemed comfortable with) and thereby assume risk when it came to democratization? Or would we undertake the

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unglamorous, grinding “long-term project of nation-building here, like it or not” (as Paul Bremer would later refer to it) to construct a viable democracy?60 The former would prioritize a quick withdrawal. The latter would almost certainly entail a multiyear occupation. U.S. military officers responsible for planning were deeply confused, and they came to believe that the desired answer was a combination of both, which essentially amounted to having our cake and eating it too. As the CENTCOM chief of plans recalls, “There was this desire to get in and get out, and still have democracy—which from our viewpoint, wasn’t reconcilable.”61 Heated disagreements would unfold, particularly between Defense and State, as the overarching postwar goals would be clear in theory—to create a democracy in short order, with minimal presence or commitment—while remaining stubbornly unclear in practice. The incompatible assumptions remained unresolved. On the one hand, the Pentagon’s leadership remained as entrenched as ever in its desire to avoid nation building at all costs. Secretary Rumsfeld “saw the commitment of U.S. troops to a foreign land as a failure of some kind,” as Paul Hughes expressed it, because such uses of military power did not involve traditional war fighting.62 Our recent experience in Afghanistan had only hardened the resolve of Rumsfeld and Feith in this regard. Feith recalls that Rumsfeld wanted to avoid “the Yankee can-do, fill-every vacuum hyperactivity that deprives other countries of incentives to pull their weight,” so Iraq would become the newest test case to try to prove the validity of the light footprint and military transformation.63 The Pentagon lobbied for, and was granted, overall responsibility for postwar Iraq, which helped this outlook gain greater traction and advanced the idea that we would foster a liberation of the Iraqi people rather than an occupation.64 The Pentagon was willing to assume risk in promoting democracy, given its confidence that Iraqi exiles such as Chalabi could quickly take charge and lead Iraq to a better place (which might or might not resemble an American-style democracy). Condoleezza Rice characterized this position as “if a strongman emerged, so be it.”65 Rajiv Chandrasekaran has suggested that Pentagon officials intentionally did not want a detailed plan, with the logic that “without a clear blueprint for the political transition, Garner would turn to Chalabi and his band of exiles” to fill the resulting vacuum.66 Regardless, if we had wholeheartedly pursued this

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path, from an optimistic standpoint it might have resulted in an Egyptlike outcome under Hosni Mubarak, in which a friendly strongman emerges to foster stability for an extended period, with perhaps some vague aspiration of democracy but no real path to get there.67 The Pentagon’s dominant position in the bureaucracy helped bolster this outlook and also helped military objectives gain greater prominence. “The planning for the conflict essentially was all about the battle,” according to a senior U.S. official,68 as military goals assumed preeminence over political goals and a multiyear occupation seemingly had to be avoided at all costs. The influence of neoconservative thinking certainly had a strong impact, but it is an oversimplification to portray all echelons of the Bush administration as captivated by a single vision. There were deep unresolved divisions among the NSC principals, deputies, and staff, for they did not share a common idea of what postwar Iraq should look like. This entailed serious differences over how deeply we should enmesh ourselves in Iraqi affairs and how prominently the element of democracy should factor in. The president’s own thinking about Iraq affected these discussions. As described in chapter 2, after 9/11 and the Afghanistan invasion President Bush had softened his opposition to nation building and came to see a moral imperative in fostering better societies in endangered states in order to try to expand freedom and reduce the terrorism threat.69 With the passage of time, the president seemed to move further in this direction of promoting freedom and democracy as universal values. As a result, Bush never seemed fully comfortable with America choosing Iraqis’ leadership for them or with an abrupt handoff to the Iraqis, come what may. He reinforced this view both publicly and privately. In September 2002, just after the one-year anniversary of 9/11, Bush gave a speech to the UN General Assembly in which he spoke in sweeping terms about the possibility of establishing: a government that represents all Iraqis—a government based on respect for human rights, economic liberty, and internationally supervised elections. . . . Liberty for the Iraqi people is a great moral cause, and a great strategic goal. The people of Iraq deserve it; the security of all nations requires it. . . . If we meet our responsibilities, if we overcome this danger, we can arrive at a very

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different future. The people of Iraq can shake off their captivity. They can one day join a democratic Afghanistan and a democratic Palestine, inspiring reforms throughout the Muslim world.70

Similarly, in closed-door discussions, the president reinforced to his cabinet that he wanted Iraqis to choose their own leadership and for them to be able to benefit from universal democratic values and thereby “address the freedom gap,” in Rice’s words.71 This reflected the president’s desire to provoke far-reaching change in Iraq and reorient the region in a more democratic direction. It constituted an outgrowth of the president’s moral and realist impulses that had meaningfully shifted after 9/11. This also partly reflected the view, as General Zinni described it, that “if you could throw out the leadership and somehow democratize it, it would be the fire that would catch all of the Middle East . . . every country would suddenly turn over.”72 Franklin Miller recalls that “the U.S. was going to reshape the world in the image of democracy . . . the administration thought we could build democracies all over the Middle East, Iraq being the first.”73 One should not take this point too far: many officials did not want to invade Iraq solely to create a democracy. But if we were going to invade, the president believed, establishing a path to democracy was the right outcome, for doing so might create positive ripple effects across the region.74 This fostered a serious problem given the Pentagon’s countervailing outlook. The cabinet did not share a common vision of the overall goal: the secretary of state was unsure if everyone grasped the huge commitment that would be needed to pull off this ambitious vision, while the defense secretary continued to push for a rapid handoff to Iraqis come what may.75 After an extended period of ambiguity, the president would firmly announce an aim of democracy promotion, as illustrated by his May 2003 speech aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln in which he made the sweeping statement “The transition from dictatorship to democracy will take time, but it is worth every effort. Our coalition will stay until our work is done.”76 The speech alarmed Rumsfeld, who believed that it countermanded the short war of limited aims that he had sought.77 But this only brought to the surface the deep, lingering disconnects that had plagued the entire process. As the administration’s internal war over its war aims unfolded, the Pentagon often emerged victorious, but even within the Pentagon confusion

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was rampant, as the CENTCOM commander focused on military goals, CFLCC planned for an extended effort modeled on postwar Germany, and ORHA seemed to be flailing in virtual isolation. Our overall goal was unclear across the government, in large part because our reasons for going to war were unclear. This prompted George Packer to refer to Iraq as “the Rashomon of wars”78 in that different observers can arrive at starkly different conclusions regarding why exactly we invaded Iraq in the first place. As one defense official expressed, when a nation has trouble defining why it is going to war, it should not be surprising that it finds it difficult to discern what comes next.79 Along similar lines, General Zinni notes that “when the decision is made [to go to war] before the analysis” is undertaken to arrive at that decision, it can foster major problems later on.80 Fundamental differences regarding the overall political goal remained unresolved, despite the fact that our military goal was clear: to advance to Baghdad and topple Saddam. This degree of clarity regarding military aspects helped focus greater attention on the invasion itself while deferring tougher postwar questions. The vitriol between Rumsfeld and Powell personified the murkiness of the political goal. Powell was skeptical of reliance on exiles such as Chalabi (whom State officials viewed as “a clever, manipulative self-promoter”), was worried about the unknowable aspects of what would unfold after Saddam, and was also concerned about the global impression that the United States would be held singularly responsible whatever came next.81 In short, Powell’s position came to be known as the Pottery Barn rule: You break it, you own it.82 In contrast, Rumsfeld advanced an alternative “bicycle seat” analogy in that a new rider may fall off the bicycle repeatedly, but ultimately you just need to let go and hope for the best.83 Feith elaborates on the bicycle seat analogy by noting that “if the dad never lets go of his kid’s bicycle seat, he [Rumsfeld] warned, the kid will become a forty-year-old man who can’t ride a bicycle.”84 These two incompatible views had diametrically different implications for what we should do in post-Saddam Iraq. Would we accept the prompt installment of untested Iraqis in a new government even if they had questionable legitimacy and might not foster a path to democracy? Or would we take the considerable time and effort to secure and possibly govern Iraq for years—or perhaps allow the UN to do so, thereby relinquishing U.S. freedom of action—to lay the groundwork for credible, democratic Iraqi institutions?85 The fact

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that there was no clear decision punted the hard choices down the road. As Rumsfeld recalls, “The debate between them was legitimate, but it remained just that—a debate. It was never hashed out at the NSC and never finally resolved.”86 Despite the president’s stated desire for democracy and his discomfort with handpicking Iraq’s leadership, the extended period of indecision would pivot toward the Pentagon’s light footprint of minimal commitment. The eleventh-hour Iraqi Interim Authority idea, rather than piercing through the fog, instead only formalized the ambiguity regarding our political goal. Feith’s memoir lauds the IIA concept and claims that it was simply not implemented correctly, but a more objective look uncovers serious shortcomings that rendered its implementation nearly impossible. The IIA concept sought a power-sharing arrangement between Iraqis and Americans that would enable a credible Iraqi government to form and take charge of all ministries in short order,87 but it represented a vague siren song that underscored our inability to address core trade-offs. It seemed to be the best of all worlds: the Iraqis could rapidly take charge, we could quickly leave, Iraq would be stable without an outside stabilization force, and Iraqis with practically no democratic experience could forge a new democracy. It essentially reflected Feith’s testimony to Congress the previous month: “to transfer as much authority as possible, as quickly as possible, to the Iraqis themselves.”88 The IIA was an abstract idea riddled with optimistic assumptions, and in many ways it embodied a repackaged quick exit with a nod to democratization. It pooled together all the existing contradictions rather than reflecting a serious effort to try to sort through them. A rough analogy to our incongruous approach relates to a 1976 Saturday Night Live commercial parody in which a husband and wife argue over whether “New Shimmer” is a floor wax or a dessert topping. Chevy Chase interjects to cheerfully announce that New Shimmer is both a floor wax and a dessert topping, to everyone’s satisfaction. In the case of postwar Iraq, the contradictory desires to implant democracy and do it quickly (while on a shoestring budget) were fundamentally incompatible. Yet they were awkwardly joined together with an implicit aim to please everyone. As one CENTCOM planner recalls, “From D.C., it was ‘do it with less, get out quicker, we’ve got to scale this down, we can’t have a big commitment and spend a lot of money.’”89 But this ran counter to the

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president’s stated desire to create an Iraqi democracy, as well as Desert Crossing’s prescient analysis that it would require a major, lengthy commitment to control Iraq’s borders, impede Iranian interference, and manage sectarian tensions. General Casey observes that “there was no way that we were going to get out quickly and the Iraqis were going to, all of a sudden after 35 years of oppression, set up a functioning democracy.”90 The goal was both deeply unclear and wholly unachievable. We could not leverage our light footprint and desire to rush for the exits while still fostering a viable democracy, especially while grappling with a multitude of emerging challenges. Task 2: Did we anticipate and seek to mitigate the foreseeable obstacles? We vastly underestimated the postwar challenges in Iraq and did not take anticipatory steps to mitigate their most harmful effects. However, this is not to say that our leaders had no awareness of likely postwar problems. Looting, instability, lack of essential services, and sectarian violence all embodied potential problems to emerge from decades of autocracy that were foreseen by different parts of our government, and in some cases they had been identified years before the invasion took place. There were often vague acknowledgments of such challenges, yet our leaders did not pinpoint specific mitigating steps. As previously mentioned, Desert Crossing and the Future of Iraq Project had both highlighted significant challenges that could unfold in Iraq. CFLCC did so as well; it prudently sought to create an entirely separate postwar plan (Eclipse II) to try to manage these complexities. Additionally, the possibility of sectarian violence and civil disorder was highlighted in a January 2003 National Intelligence Council report which emphasized on its first page that “domestic groups might engage in violent conflict with each other unless an occupying force prevented them from doing so.”91 Further, a National Defense University report provided to Wolfowitz and the Joint Chiefs in November 2002 (which emanated from a workshop of more than seventy experts and scholars) highlighted as its top finding “the potential for internal disorder and conflict” that should drive an overriding focus on “establishing and maintaining a secure environment” while avoiding an abrupt handoff.92 Rumsfeld also developed what became known as his “Parade of Horribles” memo, briefed to NSC principals in October 2002, that outlined twenty-nine things that could go wrong, including ethnic strife, prolonged stabilization challenges, and

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other problems.93 All of these constituted just a few of the warnings our leaders received about how post-Saddam Iraq could unravel. But merely pointing that things can go wrong is only one step. Deciding on specific steps to head them off at the pass is a much harder proposition: it often demands tough choices. Regarding the possibility of looting—a post-invasion challenge raised repeatedly—the Bush administration did not assign responsibility to any specific actor to prevent looting or safeguard critical Iraqi infrastructure. Regarding the possibility of sectarian violence, which was also raised at different levels of government, there was no specific plan to secure even the capital of Baghdad itself, much less other Iraqi cities, thereby increasing the likelihood that violence would erupt. Regarding the possibility of Sunni disenfranchisement, senior officials again received warnings but did not coherently plan to mitigate the risk that Sunnis would feel excluded from the new Iraq. And regarding the possibility of Iranian interference, we made minimal effort to secure Iraq’s borders. The Future of Iraq project, the November 2002 NDU report, the January 2003 National Intelligence Council report, the so-called Parade of Horribles memo, and other formal and informal venues had all raised such warnings to the highest levels of government. But tangible steps did not emerge to mitigate the risks. Although the obstacles in postwar Iraq were truly daunting, not everything was dire. On the positive side, Iraq had substantial economic potential (more so than Afghanistan), oil revenues, and a middle class that was well-educated and robust in size. These represented opportunities upon which we might have sought to capitalize. Yet Iraq also entailed enormous, undeniable difficulties. It was a fairly sizable country that would be emerging from decades of dictatorship, it had sectarian and tribal cleavages, and it had no familiarity with democracy. It also had a neighbor to the east, Iran, that could stir up serious problems, particularly after its post-9/11 diplomatic overtures were tacitly rejected by Bush’s “axis of evil” speech in January 2002. Although there were some opportunities, these factors firmly put Iraq’s baseline conditions at the hard end of the spectrum. Nevertheless, we adopted heroic assumptions of what would unfold. In addition to the various obstacles embedded in Iraq, within our government itself enormous bureaucratic obstacles also went unresolved. Deep animosities between Defense and State started at the top and permeated both organizations; Rumsfeld and Powell (and their respective

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deputies) viewed Iraq through entirely different lenses. Rumsfeld sought to pursue his transformative vision of speed and precision as an implicit repudiation of the Powell doctrine. He had little interest in a long, grinding process of promoting democracy. Further, he viewed Iraq as an opportunity to advance his ongoing battle against a military bureaucracy that he perceived as moving “with all the speed and dexterity of a half-million-ton oil tanker.”94 In contrast, Powell emphasized the inevitability of U.S. ownership of postwar Iraq, along with the need to leverage the international community, to proceed carefully, and to use decisive force as insurance to hedge against unexpected challenges.95 As our strategy for Iraq remained adrift, the two heavyweight cabinet officials and their staffs would jostle with one another in ways that further undermined postwar planning. As one of many examples, Powell’s State Department sent a handful of senior ambassadors and Arab experts to the Pentagon to help with planning. Yet several were rapidly ordered to exit the Pentagon because they held views contrary to those of Pentagon leadership, prompting a terse exchange between Rumsfeld and Powell.96 Rumsfeld also played a role in ostracizing Tom Warrick (the director of the Future of Iraq Project) by denying his ability to join ORHA, and when Rumsfeld rejected a handful of State Department candidates to serve as senior minister advisors for ORHA, Powell reportedly became “enraged beyond anything that anyone had seen before.”97 On the flip side, the Pentagon became infuriated by a steady stream of leaks to media outlets, apparently emanating from State, that undermined the Pentagon’s position and questioned the credibility of exiles such as Chalabi.98 President Bush recognized that this friction was seriously impeding his administration and was deeply upset by it. In his own words, the president observed as “high-level officials within the respective departments started sniping at each other viciously. Colin and Don . . . were like a pair of old duelers who kept their own pistols in their holsters, but let their seconds and thirds fire away.”99 These tensions carried over to other parts of the government as well. In a sharply worded letter in late 2002, Rumsfeld admonished Rice for alleged interference in the military’s chain of command, with a stern warning that “one way or the other, it will stop, while I am Secretary of Defense.”100 Ultimately, Bush became “furious” as the “destructive” feuding escalated to a fever pitch,101 but he was unable to bring it under control.

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Without question, these tensions at least in part derived from personality differences. Yet that was only part of the story: they also reflected diametrically different conceptions of postwar Iraq and a lack of clarity regarding our overall strategy. One military planner notes that the level of cooperation was so poor that “when I hear ‘whole of government,’ I think h-o-l-e because that’s what we had.”102 This environment became extraordinarily toxic. Each agency proceeded in its own direction, and the central questions were never answered. For too long, the handling of postwar Iraq was like a roomful of cats batting around individual pieces of string, with little real progress. Overall, the Bush administration did not mitigate the foreseeable obstacles. Despite a general awareness that major problems could unfold, ranging from looting to sectarian strife to Sunni disenfranchisement to Iranian interference to other factors, we took few coherent steps to mitigate them. This increased the odds of chaos. Task 3: Did we mobilize resources in a manner aligned with the goal? As different conceptions of Iraq collided with one another, our exceptionally modest resources were far more aligned with getting out than with promoting democracy. A mammoth gap emerged between ambitious ends and meager means, with no overarching strategy to intertwine them. This disconnect went unaddressed and fostered serious problems. As highlighted earlier, the Desert Crossing war game assessed years before the invasion that “western-style democracy may not engender long term stability without considerable stabilization, preparation, and longterm sustainment.”103 An effort to promote democracy in a diverse country emerging from decades of dictatorship would require major investments across the elements of national power for any hope of success. CFLCC had estimated on the military side that it would require roughly twenty brigades. Yet despite President Bush’s proclamation that “our coalition will stay until our work is done” to foster Iraqi democracy, our resources mobilized for postwar Iraq did not match up. With regard to security-related resources, the strong desire to reduce our footprint to the smallest possible size (via intense, repeated scrutiny of the TPFDD) would dramatically reduce the size of any post-conflict stabilization force unless partner nations made major commitments to pick up the slack, which seemed unlikely to occur. After exhaustive scrutiny and repeated rounds of deductions, we mobilized roughly 150,000

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U.S. service members to enter Iraq (168,500 in total when including international partners). This was only a fraction of the forces identified as necessary in Op Plan 1003–98, in Desert Crossing, and in General Eric Shinseki’s testimony before Congress. On a per capita basis, this total force represented only 6.6 troops per 1,000 Iraqis, which was roughly a quarter of the troop density of the Kosovo Force (KFOR), as reflected in table 1.1 in chapter 1. To compound the problem, as the invasion got under way the Pentagon off-ramped the 1st Cavalry Division, which further shortchanged the forces available to stabilize Iraq. These sparse resources diminished the likelihood that post-Saddam Iraq would be stable, a necessary precondition for a long-term path to democracy. Rather than allocating resources to try to stabilize the country, U.S. officials spent time exploring surreal questions such as how to create a new Iraqi stock market or how to redesign traffic flows in Iraqi cities.104 Hence, “postwar security in particular was left an orphan,”105 as Gideon Rose put it, and the security resources mobilized were far more aligned with a quick handoff than democratization. With regard to governance and institution building, again the resources mobilized were more in harmony with a quick exit than the president’s stated goal of democratization. To transition from autocracy to democracy, Iraqi institutions would need substantial support, oversight, and perhaps even temporary management by outside actors such as the United States or the UN for an extended period. However, we did not mobilize the resources needed to put a nascent Iraqi government on such a path. Because senior Pentagon officials did not look fondly on the UN, they did not seek its assistance, so governance challenges would mostly fall in America’s lap. In the crucial effort to foster credible Iraqi institutions, we mobilized few resources, ORHA found itself flailing and overwhelmed, and minimal effort was made to solicit outside help. In one revealing incident, rather than mobilizing international resources to support credible Iraqi institutions, instead in April 2003 the Pentagon sought to transport Chalabi and several hundred Free Iraqi Fighters to Baghdad in a gambit widely perceived as rigging the outcome for Chalabi to take power.106 The resources in this domain firmly aligned with getting out rather than the stated goal of an Iraqi democracy. Regarding economic resources, again the resources were out of step with a path to democracy. Table 1.2 in chapter 1 illustrates that, on a per

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capita basis, the aid dispersed to Iraq in its first year ($334 per Iraqi in constant 2012 dollars) was just over a third of that provided to Kosovo. Key defense officials such as Paul Wolfowitz anticipated in February 2003 that Iraq’s oil exports and the unfreezing of Iraqi assets could help finance Iraq’s reconstruction costs.107 This optimism helped curtail the economic resources mobilized. Paul Hughes recalls a proposal circulated to spend roughly $38 million to deploy trainers and related personnel to quickly get Iraqi police in Baghdad back on the streets. But Wolfowitz rejected this modest investment with the logic that the Iraqis could use their own oil revenue to pay for such training, a response that Hughes regarded as “penny wise and pound foolish.”108 Along similar lines, during a Nightline interview in April 2003, the administrator of USAID confidently asserted that Iraq’s rebuilding would cost the United States only $1.7 billion.109 Further, according to Richard Haass, senior U.S. officials wanted to exclude nations that were not vocal supporters of invading Iraq, with the underlying attitude that “to the victor should go the spoils.”110 Hence, by lowballing the estimates of what would be required and by elbowing out international actors that might be inclined to help, the extensive resources needed to reconstruct and rejuvenate Iraq’s economy after decades of autocracy were lacking. Further, the Pentagon’s prominent shadow over postwar Iraq made NGOs nervous to commit themselves to Iraq’s reconstruction in the first place; they were “wary of being seen as pawns of the U.S. government and, in particular, the Department of Defense,” as one State Department official recalled.111 In each of these ways, we publicly declared maximalist aims for postwar Iraq, but we allotted only minimal resources to try to achieve them. The resources aligned far more closely with getting out than with promoting democracy. The Bush administration did not adequately address the three planning tasks, and its efforts were plagued by contradictions. Collectively, these gaffes would jeopardize our overall effort in Iraq.

Do You Believe in Magic? The recurring, interrelated pathologies help us understand why we did not construct a coherent plan for Iraq. First, with respect to wishful thinking, the planning was infused with flawed assumptions about the ease of

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implanting democracy on the cheap. In retrospect, it can be easy to forget the pervasive sense of elation and intoxication following the Afghanistan invasion, and the sense that Iraq, like Afghanistan, would prove the skeptics wrong yet again. The notion that our troops would be greeted as liberators, that Iraq’s oil revenues would cover the cost of the invasion, and that precision weaponry and technology would negate the need for sizable ground forces, along with other buoyant ideas, collectively fostered a view that transforming Iraq into a democracy might be quicker and easier than the critics thought. As one military planner recalls, there was a sense of “hubris that we would go in, and everybody would kiss and make up . . . and we’re shaking our heads down here like, ‘I’m missing something, I don’t see this.’”112 There was also a psychological sense of “euphoria” that once Saddam was out of the way, everything would simply “click in place.”113 The elevated stature of Ahmad Chalabi in some circles reflected such magical thinking. Chalabi was a fluent English speaker with a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Chicago, and he had connections to various U.S. officials. However, he had not lived in Iraq since he was a teenager, and his legitimacy among Iraqis was questionable. State and CIA officials were deeply skeptical of him (to put it mildly), yet Franklin Miller notes that the Pentagon’s approach was “built on the hope that Chalabi would be their white knight in shining armor and would take over the reins of government, thereby allowing us to back out quickly.”114 Although the memoirs of Rumsfeld and Feith deny pinning their hopes on Chalabi, nearly every interview I conducted with participants directly involved in Iraq planning strongly disputed that claim, referring to it, as Paul Hughes did, as an “after the fact construction. It’s revisionism.”115 Chalabi seemed to embody the Pentagon’s simple answer to a complex set of questions. Yet the upbeat assumptions and outlooks were misguided, based on information readily available at the time.116 The upper levels of the U.S. military also fell victim to wishful thinking. General Franks’s memoir reflects a disinclination to think deeply about long-term considerations: he indicates that his feeling toward the Pentagon bureaucracy was “you pay attention to the day after and I’ll pay attention to the day of.”117 He writes that his outlook at the time was to “keep Washington focused on policy and strategy. Leave me the hell alone to run the war.”118 This narrow focus by the military commander reflected

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a laser-like focus on military goals, little attention devoted to broader strategic questions, and a cognitive displacement of Phase IV onto the shoulders of others so that CENTCOM could focus on familiar, breadand-butter tasks of operations and maneuver. Although retired Lieutenant General Jay Garner’s ORHA was nominally given the postwar lead, Garner was not given adequate authority, guidance, or resources to carry out his assigned mission. Hence, the hopeful assumption that Garner could single-handedly tackle the mass of postwar problems with little oversight was a clear example of wishful thinking. The default cognitive answer to many postwar issues became “over to you, Jay.”119 Our leaders focused on the relatively easy part—the invasion—and sidestepped the far tougher part—everything that comes next. Our lack of understanding of Iraqi culture and institutions compounded this wishful thinking. Almost any discussion of intelligence and the Iraq war tends to center on the topic of WMD, such as CIA Director George Tenet’s claim of an intelligence “slam dunk” and Powell’s address to the UN in February 2003. However, the WMD issue was only the most obvious of many underlying intelligence gaps regarding Iraq. General Franks’s admission that “if ever we needed human intelligence, it was now”120 embodied an outgrowth of Iraq’s status as a second-tier intelligence focus area for years, as well as earlier budget cutbacks to the U.S. intelligence community. Our overall intelligence on Iraq was generally even worse than that on Afghanistan, for in Afghanistan we at least had established intelligence networks with the mujahidin in the 1980s, whereas there were no equivalent networks to build on in Iraq.121 This was a problem throughout much of the planning, as reflected by excessive reliance on “Curveball,” the code name of a shady source who fabricated stories, for much of our ostensible knowledge.122 As an outgrowth, we had a reduced grasp of what might unfold in postwar Iraq, and magical thinking often filled the gaps. For example, planners did not know about the decades of mismanagement and neglect by Saddam’s regime that had caused some key infrastructure facilities to lack repairs since the 1950s, to the point that portions of some sites were literally being held together by duct tape.123 Rather than use other available sources of information or make sober assumptions about infrastructure conditions, Pentagon officials instead artificially limited their information intake and believed that only limited reconstruction of Iraq’s

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infrastructure would be needed, for a short military campaign would minimize collateral damage.124 Iraq’s sectarian dynamics, underlying tribal cleavages, and serious oil, water, and electrical challenges could also have major impacts, but we made strikingly little effort to grapple with these challenges in advance. Further, senior officials did not seem to fully grasp the sweeping influence of spiritual leaders such as Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and the sway they would have over the population,125 as well as the historical importance of the Iraqi Army, with its long roots in Iraqi society. Again, these information deficits went largely unaddressed and in fact were exacerbated by reliance on figures such as Chalabi, who gave rosy predictions that a war could be waged relatively easily (with a not-sosubtle implication that Chalabi himself could take charge). Rather than make careful assumptions and seek to close information gaps, our leaders often brushed aside uncertainty and doubled down on wishful thinking. The Bush administration found itself grappling with a closed authoritarian regime, few concrete indicators of how actors in Iraq might respond, and a sparse number of sources who were highly unreliable. In light of this setting, one officer responsible for postwar planning recalls that “the intelligence wasn’t adequate. . . . There just wasn’t a whole lot there.”126 The combination of sparse intelligence with poor quality evokes the pun of “such terrible food, and such small portions too.”127 Because information gaps will unfold during any war, the question of how senior leaders deal with them is vital. In this case our leaders made little effort to close the gaps. Best-case thinking reinforced the lofty idea that we could rapidly invade, accomplish sweeping aims, implant a democracy, and depart in short order while keeping most Iraqis content. Pipe dreams and magical thinking helped cripple the overall strategy. Second, with regard to deficient learning, the Bush administration ignored a broad range of historical lessons, and this too had a meaningful impact. Iraq was a complex country of multiple sects with no history of democracy. Hence, we would need to leverage our historical experiences to inform our overall strategy. However, the psychological rejection of 1990s interventions described in chapter 2 continued in the run-up to the Iraq war, and the “ABC” acronym of “anything but Clinton” remained in vogue.128 During the Iraq planning, General Franks reportedly stated, “This ain’t no Kosovo. This is a real big deal,”129 as an implicit repudiation of Kosovo’s relevance. In September 2002 the State Department

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undertook a thorough analysis of previous nation-building efforts to help glean historical insights, but this report had little apparent impact on the government as a whole.130 Further, Desert’s Crossing’s findings and recommendations from 1998 were altogether ignored. This lack of learning was not entirely accidental. In some ways it was deliberate. Senior Bush administration officials—particularly the Pentagon’s civilian leadership—intentionally sought to avoid anything seen as tainted by the Clinton administration. This “determination not to study the lessons of its predecessors,” as Gordon and Trainor put it, embodied a cognitive repudiation of earlier interventions and of the Powell doctrine more broadly.131 In some ways it constituted an effort to unlearn accumulated knowledge. Former NSC official Robert C. Orr described it as an implicit desire “to discard and disinvest in all the capacity and knowledge built up during the 1990s,”132 which would encourage naive beliefs about managing the day after. Previously encountered postwar challenges were seen as irrelevant to twenty-first-century warfare. This lack of learning was amplified by excessive attention paid to the Afghanistan war’s perceived virtues. Afghanistan was still widely seen as a shining success, vindicating the Pentagon’s belief that it had been right all along. As highlighted in chapter 2, General Franks regarded Afghanistan in mostly positive terms, indicating that “what was important was that those fights produced victories, and the victories were historic.”133 The Pentagon was “riding high in the wake of what seemed to be an impressive and inexpensive military victory,” from Richard Haass’s perspective at the State Department,134 and this helped swell selfconfidence and minimized study of events in Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo, along with the difficult trade-offs they had entailed. The Afghanistan war bolstered the personal standing and influence of Rumsfeld in particular, and the “euphoria over seemingly easy successes”135 fostered a misleading conclusion that maximal results could be obtained with minimal investment. In short, Afghanistan was erringly seen as a resounding success and prompted the wrong lessons to be learned. It bolstered the problematic belief that we could sidestep the historical difficulties if only we were bold enough to topple the evil regime: the skeptics would be proven wrong again. Our leaders thought they could take quick military action and get virtually everything they wanted once again, with little price to pay.

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The ill-conceived Iraqi Interim Authority concept in particular resembled a rushed Afghanistan-like approach,136 which doubled down on earlier errors rather than seeking to rectify them. Ideology contributed to this lack of learning. Rigid ideological views— although not uniformly held by all leaders—captivated influential pockets of the Bush administration and prompted them to breezily sidestep the difficulties that had been previously encountered. Neoconservative ideas among select officials helped enable this to occur and implicitly devalued key lessons regarding the benefits of multilateralism and interagency cooperation. The desire to sidestep the U.S. experience in postwar Germany was somewhat surprising given the use of World War II analogies in other contexts, such as repeated comparisons made between the Ba’ath Party and the Nazis.137 But overall, much of the knowledge that the State Department, USAID, and the U.S. military had painstakingly accumulated in building civil societies over decades was cast aside. According to a former NSC official, “It cost us not to call on that expertise.”138 The lack of learning from the Persian Gulf War was especially surprising and inexcusable. The Gulf War was waged against the same country (Iraq), was overseen by some of the same officials (including Cheney, Powell, and Wolfowitz), and was led by the president’s own father. During that conflict, we had deliberately decided not to march on to Baghdad, in part because of valid concern over whether the coalition would hold together, the unintended consequences it could generate, and the possibility that eviscerating Saddam could strengthen Iran’s power in the region.139 As former President George H. W. Bush explained years later, Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in “mission creep,” and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. . . . We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. . . . Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different—and perhaps barren—outcome.140

Cheney echoed similar views in a 1994 interview, when he stated, “If you take down the central government of Iraq, you could easily end up

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seeing pieces of Iraq fly off . . . it’s a quagmire, if you go that far and try to take over Iraq.”141 One might have expected this experience to have formed a solid base of learning and to serve as a useful starting point for any thoughts of toppling Saddam a dozen years later. It did not. Although this Pandora’s box of post-Saddam challenges had been a major consideration in 1991, similar concerns were discarded twelve years later.142 They seemed to be almost entirely forgotten the second time around. The traumatic nature of 9/11 likely helped allow this unlearning to occur. By imparting a psychological sense that the world had fundamentally changed, the 9/11 attacks seemed to relegate the Gulf War to the dustbin of history. Implicitly, history seemed to become segmented into pre-9/11 and post-9/11 eras, and lessons from the former era became synonymous with a backwards-looking worldview. In a revealing passage, Cheney’s memoir refers to Brent Scowcroft’s skepticism of invading Iraq as reflecting a “pre-9/11 mind-set,” which failed to appreciate that “the world had changed” after the terrorist attacks.143 The Gulf War seemed to become a relic of a bygone era, in which it might have been (barely) tolerable to exercise some degree of strategic caution, but that time had passed. There was a sense that 9/11 had fundamentally changed the rules of the game, and accumulated knowledge no longer had the relevance it used to. This contributed to intellectual arrogance that helped selectively ignore history. Hence, the key lessons from one of the Gulf War’s most consequential decisions—the decision not to march to Baghdad in 1991— went largely unheeded. This hubris impeded our ability to learn and further explains why efforts such as Desert Crossing were dismissed as outdated. The apparent ease of invading Afghanistan had swelled confidence that a new age had dawned144 in which difficult choices were no longer necessary, and the will to act was enough. Similarities with pre-9/11 wars were overlooked, and the post-9/11 era became seen as unique. Mistaken lessons from Afghanistan took center stage, and other experiences were cognitively discarded. A third pathology involves underuse of the NSC rather than reliance on it to develop a unified strategy. Chapter 2 outlined Condoleezza Rice’s approach in the early 2000s that entailed a more passive NSC role in interagency coordination, with more of a focus on staffing and advising the president instead. This shift gained steam during the run-up to the Iraq invasion. As strong disagreements took place, the NSC strove for

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consensus among cabinet departments: a so-called “bridging” approach. This would sometimes create consensus at a superficial level while obscuring key differences and avoiding forcing tough decisions in front of the president.145 Rumsfeld recalls the following: Postwar planning for Iraq lacked effective interagency coordination, clear lines of responsibility, and the deadlines and accountability associated with a rigorous process. . . . Trying to achieve a bridge or compromise between the two different approaches [those associated with Rumsfeld and Powell] was not a solution.146

This situation partly grew out of Rice’s self-image of the national security advisor position as an “honest broker” and “a very good administrator who can ‘keep the trains running on time’” that deemphasized the need to frame explicit trade-offs and compel the president to make difficult choices.147 It contributed to a situation in which vital decisions— such as our overall political goal in Iraq (as well as whether invading Iraq was even a good idea in the first place)—were not directly tackled by NSC principals, instead often settling on the path of least resistance. As Michael Hess recalls from his position at ORHA and later as Bremer’s chief of staff, “We didn’t do the coordinated planning across the interagency” that should have taken place.148 Admittedly, it is true the NSC did take part in some postwar planning. There were loose attempts at coordination such as the Iraq politicalmilitary cell and the executive steering group, as previously highlighted. Additionally, select NSC principals meetings did examine the issue of postwar Iraq just before the invasion in March 2003. But these efforts never integrated political and military considerations into a single, coherent plan. Middle tiers of government spun their wheels while NSC principals and deputies remained out of synch. Meanwhile, the White House remained mostly disengaged from postwar issues. To the extent that political-military coordination occurred for postwar Iraq, it took place at middle echelons and did not shape the senior levels, where it mattered most. The untimely death of PDD-56 without a proper replacement facilitated this dysfunctionality. The Pentagon’s dominant seat at the table substantially undercut Rice’s authority and undermined the chances that vital interagency coordination

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would occur. Although the memoirs of Rumsfeld and Feith blamed Rice for this state of affairs, the Pentagon did her few favors. Once the president signed NSPD-24, the Pentagon’s bureaucratic control over postwar Iraq was set. Franklin Miller recalls that NSPD-24 represented a fateful decision that “was intended to make postwar planning totally and entirely an element of DoD. . . . We should never have let the Defense Department have that responsibility.”149 Paul Hughes, who served as a senior staff officer at ORHA, observes that “everything in Iraq was run by the Pentagon. And that was a real mistake.”150 The Pentagon’s actions were like a player pleading for the coach to put him for the big play, whereupon the coach grants the request and gets him the ball, and then the player drops it in the open field. Political-military integration would be crucial to forge a rigorous, cohesive plan, yet the military side of the equation held all the highest cards. This knocked the normal checks and balances out of whack and accentuated military over political priorities. Thus, the Pentagon found it could steamroll its way through the bureaucracy to get its way (roughly analogous to how the United States could steamroll its way into Iraq despite UN misgivings). Miller asserts that “the interagency process was essentially destroyed by OSD [Office of the Secretary of Defense] as a matter of deliberate intent.” As one of many revealing examples, Miller recalls that Rumsfeld would show up to NSC meetings with only two sets of slides—one for himself and another for the president—so the other principals could barely follow along. Further, Miller recalls when important topics would arise at NSC meetings requiring interagency deliberation, Rumsfeld would inform the president that the issue was too sensitive and they needed to discuss it one-on-one—hence, other principals would have little to no visibility of what the president was or was not agreeing to.151 This undermined the NSC’s ability to craft a coherent postwar strategy. According to a senior official involved in the NSC, “It was a conscious effort to sort of screw up the National Security Council, because Vice President Cheney and Secretary Rumsfeld could bulldoze their way through. And they did.”152 Rumsfeld benefited from an exceptionally powerful ally in Cheney, with whom he had shared an enduring, close friendship since the 1970s that created a powerful back-channel connection.153 Cheney also established an unusually large policy office under his personal oversight (the Office of the Vice President, or OVP) that

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David Rothkopf’s book describes as a parallel power center of its own, akin to a “mini-NSC,” that contributed to the overall “balkanization” in the government.154 Rather than an empowered NSC taking charge of political-military integration, the NSC found itself emasculated and outgunned as the Pentagon, the OVP, and the formidable Rumsfeld-Cheney alliance assumed dominance. Rice’s inclination to allow for greater autonomy by the departments created an opening that was fully exploited. Attempts at cooperation at lower levels gained no momentum because they were not invested with real authority to drive decisions. Hence, the mutual priorities of the Pentagon and the vice president elevated the aim of getting out, while creating serious problems for the president’s desire to create a democracy. As Richard Haass put it, this “was akin to playing tennis and having one player make all the line calls.”155 The NSC deficiencies that had taken shape during Afghanistan had metastasized in dramatic fashion. An interagency process that had been merely problematic was now broken. Although the president wanted a viable representative government in Baghdad, his main execution arm, the Pentagon, had no interest in pursuing such a move because it would require occupying Iraq for years. ORHA nominally tried to push the interagency ball forward, but it was hastily established and under-resourced, and could hardly sort through these overarching questions on its own. One would ideally want to see the NSC vigorously taking charge of political-military planning and shaping the president’s decision making, as took place for Kosovo. That did not happen for Iraq. Before moving on, one might ask why Condoleezza Rice did not go to the president to insist that he reassert her authority over the interagency process. The national security advisor is the one actor who might bring the various pieces into alignment. As Rumsfeld undermined the process and the NSC’s dysfunction reached a boiling point, Rice might have gone directly to the president to state that the status quo was unacceptable and that she needed his help to get these actors back in line or she could not do her job. The evidence does not indicate that such a frank discussion ever occurred. The NSC’s dysfunctionality persisted, the political heavyweights went their separate directions, and Iraq ultimately paid a steep price. As a fourth pathology, crosscutting domestic pressures intensified the desire to exit Iraq quickly while still expecting a democracy. These countervailing pressures helped undermine the planning. As the road to war

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unfolded, Bush administration officials did not want to acknowledge that it would be a longer, harder, and costlier project than they had been publicly claiming. Advocates for war were acutely aware of what they believed that domestic public opinion would tolerate, and this influenced the postwar options they discussed. President Bush candidly states in his memoir that the American people represented the first key audience he considered: “Their support was essential to funding and fighting the war . . . if the cost seemed too high or victory too distant, they would grow weary.”156 To bolster this view, Rumsfeld was deeply skeptical that democracies like the United States could sustain enduring nation-building projects while maintaining domestic support.157 Such notions regarding the importance of domestic support—and the potential danger of losing this support in the event of a multiyear occupation—helped suppress consideration of any open-ended commitment, particularly with the president’s reelection bid coming up in 2004.158 This helps explain why the administration presented the war to the public as a cakewalk. These officials eventually seemed to believe their own hype about postwar Iraq, largely because of their assumptions about the resistance to a long occupation. They became increasingly smitten with the pipe dream they had packaged and sold to the public. The public rebuke of General Shinseki’s preinvasion comments that postwar Iraq might require “something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers” reflected this strong desire to pitch the war as a breeze.159 Once our initial invasion seemed successful and President Bush’s approval ratings climbed, his famous speech aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln then seemed to move the goalposts outward, toward democratization, in apparent recognition of his expanded domestic latitude. Our gliding war aims seemed to loosely coincide with the shifting tides of public opinion, and this exacerbated the already mammoth challenges involved in developing a consistent strategy. The fluctuating moods affected the morphing political aims, further undermining the chances of any coherent approach. Senior officials kept in mind domestic political considerations, yet these factors had little impact on military planners, who rarely concerned themselves with what the American people would tolerate. When asked to what extent they accounted for domestic politics in postwar planning, one U.S. military planner states, “Never. There was nothing of that sort

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in the planning to take into consideration,” and their section’s outlook at the time was not to feel constrained by “what you hear and see in the news.”160 Military planners tended to focus more narrowly on achieving U.S. strategic goals (at least as they understood them) rather than to assess what they believed public opinion might or might not accept, which they viewed as the role of the civilian leadership. Thus, while the domestic arena embodied the president’s first audience of concern and unmistakably influenced how officials pitched the war, it had dramatically less sway over planners at subordinate levels. This was yet another disconnect, as different parts of government incorporated different planning considerations that were never brought into a cohesive whole.161 In the previous decade the Clinton administration had demonstrated steadfastness in its post-conflict Balkans commitment despite a lack of public enthusiasm and concern over a Vietnam-like quagmire. In the case of Iraq, if President Bush strongly believed that a lasting effort to democratize Iraq was the right strategic move, then his administration could have mounted a public relations effort in support of a lasting commitment. Conversely, if he perceived that the public would never support such an effort, then it might have been wise to either dramatically reduce our strategic aims or, even better, reconsider the whole war in the first place. In either case the domestic domain could have been better synchronized with the overall plan, rather than punting crucial issues until after the fall of Baghdad. Admittedly, public opinion would have turned downward anyway once it became clear that the WMD-related rationale for the war was fundamentally wrong. But the administration could have tried to better manage expectations and been more forthright with the American people (and with itself) about how it intended to achieve its goals.162 The above explanations do not embody the only conceivable way to explain what happened. Is it also possible that postwar planning for Iraq was just an impossible endeavor from the start and that the reason it came up short was simply because no path could have fostered a decent outcome? This argument may seem alluring, given the chaos that unfolded in Iraq and the occasional tendency for us to perceive historical events as inevitable. However, if we had made different choices, it might have altered Iraq’s path. Admittedly, postwar Iraq would have been extremely difficult to manage regardless because of many challenges arising from decades of authoritarian rule, sectarian diversity, lack of democratic

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experience, and so forth. Also, given the faulty WMD claims at the heart of the war’s justification, at least some blowback would have transpired. But the overall extent of the setbacks need not have been so severe. It is possible we might have achieved some of our core aims at dramatically lower costs than were eventually paid. We could have tried to address the postwar planning tasks from the outset, during the extended planning period. An integrated politicalmilitary effort spearheaded by the NSC could have forced hard decisions to the surface, paving the way for rigorous debate. The Powell-Rumsfeld clash embodied a crucially important debate for the president to consider in the early planning phases. The advantages and disadvantages of each approach could have been systematically unpacked, perhaps in a manner roughly analogous to the Eisenhower administration’s Project Solarium of 1953.163 Similar to the Solarium effort, the Bush administration might have been better served to establish competing groups within the government, each advancing a different strategy, and then to carefully examine the foundations of each for intellectual rigor and associated risk, before the president firmly decided on the best one. Building on the Kosovo model, we might have spearheaded an international stabilization force of roughly 350,000 to 400,000 troops to secure Baghdad, Mosul, Basra, and other major cities for an extended period. We might also have requested temporary UN assistance to govern the country and to provide close oversight of Iraqi institutions during the delicate transition period while Iraqis found their sea legs. This approach could have also leveraged existing Iraqi institutions and security forces (as CFLCC and others had intended) rather than discard them. Such an approach could have provided a foundation for a reasonably stable Iraqi government and might have embodied the first steps on a long-term path toward democracy. Gideon Rose makes a compelling argument that if we had undertaken a comprehensive effort to stabilize and establish “full control of Iraq” from the outset, “civil war might not have broken out,” and the entire sequence of post-invasion events might have been different.164 It can be easy to forget that Iraqis of different sects often interacted regularly for decades and that roughly 30 percent of Baghdad residents were intermarried. Widespread sectarian violence took root only after Iraq descended into a Hobbesian struggle for survival.165 The very conditions that helped give rise to Sunni and Shi’ite insurgencies, particularly the power vacuum

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and lack of essential services, could have been directly addressed in a manner that built upon the logic embedded in Desert Crossing, the Future of Iraq Project, and many other warnings and recommendations made well before the invasion. There can be a tendency to assume that the current unfortunate state of Iraq (which, as of this writing, is plagued by political turmoil, sectarianism, and terrorism) was wholly unavoidable from the start. However, although a substantial amount of difficulty was inescapable, decisions at key junctures can make a difference. Not everything has been inevitable about Iraq’s path.166 U.S. leaders made colossal, avoidable errors that helped chaos unfold. Based on his personal experiences planning for post-conflict Bosnia, Kosovo, and Iraq, Michael Hess contends that the Iraqis “had more going for them than anybody else. . . . Iraq had a lot more human capital than almost any place I had ever worked. . . . They’re very well educated. They had a larger middle class than most parts of that part of the world.” He also noted that “they certainly had a swinging chance at it.”167 Had we adopted a starkly different approach and made hard decisions, the vast challenges could have been rendered at least somewhat more manageable. This could have contributed to a better (albeit still imperfect) outcome in which large-scale insurgencies might not have the political “space” to develop.168 Thus, it is inaccurate to conclude that postwar planning for Iraq was simply impossible. A coherent plan could have been assembled to grapple with underlying questions, and this could have increased the odds of a better outcome. Iraq’s location in the Middle East, and all the vexing challenges associated with that region, rendered it difficult, but probably not impossible, to assemble such an approach. Could we have done all this and still implemented a coherent plan for postwar Afghanistan? There is reason to be skeptical that we could have successfully tackled both staggering challenges at the same time. By ourselves, it may very well have been impossible to pull off both simultaneously. Perhaps if we had solicited vast international help—on top of a truly gargantuan commitment by the Bush administration that would have swallowed up practically everything else on the agenda—we might have had a small chance to do both. But given the actual state of play in 2003, by which point the Bush administration had already put Afghanistan on the back burner, we undoubtedly could have assembled a far better strategy for Iraq than we did.

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As another alternative, is it possible that the amount of planning time is a key factor? From this perspective, perhaps more time allows better plans to be developed. But this explanation makes little sense in the case of Iraq and in fact provides powerful evidence against it. We began our post-Saddam preparation years before invading Iraq. The planning gained steam in November 2001 and continued in earnest through the spring 2003 invasion. We had substantially more time to plan for postwar Iraq than we did for any other case in this book. But, as Franklin Miller recalls from his position at the NSC, “We did not truly get into the postwar planning until the end.”169 The fact that our planning was still so bad suggests that the availability of time does not necessarily explain the adequacy of postwar planning. How the government uses its time has a greater impact than the sheer amount of time available. Related to this, some observers have suggested another potential explanation for our poor planning in Iraq: the need for secrecy. By this logic, our government may have deliberately compartmentalized some of its planning to maintain secrecy, minimize leaks, and avoid creating an impression that a war with Iraq was prebaked (which would have implied that our diplomatic efforts to avoid war were only window dressing).170 Hence, from this standpoint the need for secrecy may have impeded interagency coordination. This might account for some dynamics early on, but it ultimately has only limited explanatory power. Most of the compartmentalization was caused by diametrically opposing visions of Iraq, not the need for secrecy. The desire for secrecy also fails to account for why extensive, detailed planning still occurred for the invasion itself. Instead, the central themes of this book provide a more plausible account for why our planning was so poor.

Aftermath Of the four cases in this book, the calamitous events of post-invasion Iraq are the most widely known, and they do not need a full retelling here. However, in many respects the looting, violence, insurgencies, and general sense of confusion were spawned by our incoherent postwar strategy. The fact that fundamental questions were sidestepped fostered ideal conditions for chaos to thrive as soon as Saddam was toppled.

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Even before President Bush announced the end to major combat operations on May 1, 2003, a multitude of crises had already begun to unfold. Iraqi ministries and historical sites were looted in Baghdad. A vacuum rapidly took shape. No elements were assigned the explicit task to maintain law and order. The Iraqi security forces disappeared (and were not recalled to duty despite some U.S. plans to do so), and the invading force was spread too thinly to stabilize even just the capital. CFLCC planners responsible for the Eclipse II postwar plan had intended to recall the Iraqi military and bureaucracy, and had even undertaken initial coordination with Iraqi Army generals to reconnoiter locations to facilitate this recall and gather arms for reissue.171 These were sound plans that should have been executed. However, they did not occur, as various actors descended on Baghdad to try to implement competing sets of ideas. Unsurprisingly, the overall effort quickly veered off the rails. As television images depicted rampant looting and lawlessness, President Bush asked his NSC, “What the hell is happening? . . . Why isn’t anybody stopping these looters?”172 Shortly thereafter the United States dissolved Garner’s fledgling ORHA and replaced it with the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) under former Ambassador Paul Bremer. Upon Bremer’s arrival at a chaotic scene, he would oversee the issuance of two infamous edicts: one regarding de-Baathification and another regarding the dissolution of the Iraqi security forces.173 These two CPA orders have been explored extensively in other literature, so I won’t cover them in detail here, except to highlight that they revealed the ongoing confusion regarding our strategy. These CPA orders reflected Bremer’s quickly established, overtaxed team reacting to multiple crises, roughly in line with Bremer’s desire for “clear, public, and decisive steps,” and matching the guidance that he understood was imparted to him by Pentagon leadership.174 However, the orders were also serious misjudgments that symbolized a postwar approach in free fall, as irreconcilable visions of Iraq were now crashing into one another. Not only was there an initial crisis in security, but there were also serious crises in economics, infrastructure, and currency realms, among a host of other areas. Bremer’s CPA had little choice but to grapple with an array of emergencies nearly simultaneously, almost immediately upon its formation. To complicate matters, the fact that a civilian official (Bremer) was given preeminent responsibility for postwar Iraq, with the

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U.S. Army’s most junior three-star general (Lieutenant General Sanchez) assigned as the senior military leader, helped further confuse the question of who was overall in charge: neither Bremer nor Sanchez had complete responsibility and authority over the entire Iraqi landscape.175 To further muddy the waters, within CENTCOM there was significant confusion regarding which military headquarters would take over the postwar mission, with the eventual selection of V Corps by General Franks coming as a surprise to nearly all parties involved.176 Franks then swiftly requested to retire shortly after Baghdad fell, which also caught many by surprise.177 In the months after Saddam’s statue tumbled down in Firdos Square, Iraq started to come apart. Multiple brutal insurgencies would soon arise, led on the Shi’ite side by Muqtada al-Sadr and on the Sunni side by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, that would propel Iraq into a violent sectarian vortex and would ultimately consume more than four thousand American lives, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, and trillions of dollars.178 The Iraq war would shatter the extraordinary post-9/11 international sympathy for the United States. To make matters worse, the active Iraqi WMD program at the heart of the administration’s justification for war never turned up because it did not exist. Despite the Pentagon’s desire to depart in short order, the United States found itself stuck, and the idea of democratizing Iraq gained even more steam because we seemingly had to extract something positive from the anarchy we had stirred up. After years of strategic drift and dramatically worsening conditions, the United States eventually doubled down years later in a multiyear counterinsurgency campaign that would consume far greater resources and energy than the Bush administration had anticipated back in 2003. In many respects the eventual 2007–2008 surge, which embodied a last-ditch attempt to salvage Iraq, entailed roughly the type of robust planning and resourcing that should have been in place all along. Colin Powell correctly noted that “the surge forces should have been there from the start.”179 Against all odds and amid widespread skepticism, the revamped strategy entailed difficult choices and actually helped bring stability to much of the country.180 I found myself on the front lines of the Iraq surge in 2007. I served as the commander of Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry Regiment, in the Ameriyah neighborhood of western Baghdad. In this predominantly

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Sunni area our battalion had been getting hammered by insurgent attacks with no end in sight. Sniper fire and RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades) were serious problems, but large IEDs (improvised explosive devices) buried under the roads were especially lethal. On one tragic day a mammoth deep-buried IED in Ameriyah detonated under a Bradley Fighting Vehicle in our battalion with such devastating force that it flipped the 25+ ton tracked vehicle upside down, exploded off the turret, and set the vehicle on fire, killing all seven occupants: six Americans and one Iraqi interpreter. At the same time, with few exceptions, the Iraqi Security Forces were performing dreadfully and were plagued by rampant corruption. Virtually every measure of progress was headed south. To say we were desperate would be a huge understatement. Yet Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) had overplayed its hand, and its incessant brutality was angering the residents of Ameriyah. Unexpectedly, an uprising got under way against AQI. Our battalion allied with a breakaway faction of former insurgents, thereby breathing new life into the saying “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Working with this ragtag Sunni militia, my infantry company ate with them, patrolled with them, and coordinated with them at our austere combat outpost as temperatures soared above 120 degrees. Over the subsequent weeks and months, we leveraged their crucial intelligence to help round up weapons, IEDmaking materials, and remaining members of the AQI network. Soon the entire neighborhood of Ameriyah transformed. Where there had once been IEDs on practically every block, now schools and shops reopened. Once-deserted streets now teemed with people. During the final months of our battalion’s combat tour, we did not record a single shot fired, a monumental change from a few short months earlier. Although it was unclear if these “volunteers” would be formally recognized by the Iraqi government, I left Iraq in early 2008 feeling exhausted but cautiously optimistic. This Baghdad neighborhood that had once been proclaimed the capital of the Islamic State of Iraq was coming back to life. It seemed that the so-called Sunni Awakening along with our troop surge had somehow helped attain some stability.181 However, the relative calm would not last. A few years later, in 2011, the United States precipitously slid out the exit door. We conducted an ill-advised withdrawal that helped usher in a fresh wave of instability and the startling advance of ISIS (which emerged from remnants of AQI).

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Alongside other local and regional factors, including the chaos in neighboring Syria, this lack of an enduring stabilization effort helped pull the rug out from under the fragile progress achieved at tremendous cost. In 2014 the United States changed course yet again and began to reintroduce limited numbers of troops back into Iraq as part of a counter-ISIS campaign. Today the long-term fate of Iraq remains deeply uncertain, but the legacy of the original 2003 invasion has been enormous. One obvious method to avoid the postwar challenges was always available from the outset: don’t invade Iraq. This wise move would have allowed us to retain a sharper, sustained focus on postwar Afghanistan, would have preserved U.S. credibility, and would have had an array of other positive benefits in terms of conserving money, prestige, opportunity costs, and, most importantly, American and Iraqi lives. For all these reasons, not invading Iraq would have been a much smarter path. But with that said, if the Bush administration was going to invade Iraq no matter what, then it should have planned seriously for what would follow. Our leaders sought to pitch the war as a quick and easy affair, but there was never a quick and easy way to create a democracy in Iraq. A more rigorous approach would not have resolved every issue because unforeseen problems still would have arisen. However, we could have at least mitigated some of the most serious crises to emerge after Baghdad’s fall if we had been more realistic about what we could accomplish. If we were going to invade Iraq with any notion of promoting democracy, then we should have adopted the core tenets outlined in Desert Crossing and General Shinseki’s testimony before Congress. We should have entered Iraq with several hundred thousand troops, roughly on par with the force size used in the Persian Gulf War, and then fully taken charge by planning to be in Iraq for years with as much help from the international community as we could possibly muster, until eventually turning back over the reins to Iraqis based on conditions on the ground. Corresponding efforts in security, governance, and economic domains could have had positive impacts. Again the Kosovo template proves useful. We could have solicited much greater help from the UN, NATO, and other international organizations to temporarily manage and oversee governance, stability, and economic domains, particularly given Iraq’s far larger size and complexity compared to Kosovo. The continued use

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of the Iraqi bureaucracy and Iraqi security forces could have also helped smooth out the initial post-invasion period. To undertake such a vast effort would have required a far greater investment of U.S. political capital at home and abroad. But a year and a half after 9/11, political capital was something we still had in stock. It admittedly would have entailed political risk to make such an enduring commitment to Iraq’s future, and not everyone would have been on board, given the controversial decision to invade in the first place. But the Bush administration ultimately assumed far greater risk, and paid even greater costs, by failing to assemble any realistic plan at all. Alternatively, we might have pursued an immediate handoff to a Chalabi-like strongman and sprinted for the exits. However, this would have gone against basic American values. It might have provided some degree of stability with a possible Egypt-like outcome, but it also probably would have generated harmful domestic and international ripple effects by prompting many to wonder why we had even risked blood and treasure in the first place. It would not have fulfilled President Bush’s democratic vision and would have likely further eroded America’s credibility on the issue of democracy. This chapter has sought to explain how and why our Iraq postwar planning unfolded as it did, with a focus on the key trade-offs that remained unresolved and impeded our strategy. Our government invaded Iraq without meaningful internal debate about whether doing so was a good idea, and never really settled on what should come next. By skipping past the central strategic questions, once our troops arrived in Baghdad, we were lost. There was no common understanding of what to do. Our leaders had confidently pitched the war as a quick and straightforward affair, so the ends and means ended up completely out of step, like aspiring to reach outer space with only a bottle rocket. The core problem in Iraq was not a complete lack of planning. Bush’s memoir accurately notes that postwar planning did occur, which sought to address some aspects of Iraq’s reconstruction, politics, and security.182 But the problem is that there was not one postwar plan—instead, there were multiple plans—and the whole of our government never agreed on which one to follow. Each element marched to the beat of its own drummer. As Michael Hess recalls, there were fundamentally irreconcilable views of postwar Iraq regarding whether to develop credible democratic

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institutions (which the State Department strongly preferred) or to rapidly impose a solution from the top down (which the Pentagon and Vice President Cheney strongly preferred): It was this difference in approach, of whether you were going to have the top-down quick fix, or whether you were actually going to take your time and build up civil society, which I think was a very doable case because Iraq certainly had a much larger middle class than Afghanistan, [and] a much more educated society.183

These basic, underlying differences were never resolved. Many midlevel planners were bright and talented people who developed promising approaches that were simply never brought together. Over time, rather than focus increasingly on the details of postwar Iraq, as late as March 2003 (only days before the invasion) the NSC principals were just beginning to weigh in on the overarching question of who would govern Iraq.184 Rumsfeld acknowledges in his memoir that there were “too many hands on the steering wheel” regarding postwar Iraq and that if the president had made a firm decision, the advocates of opposing views would likely have “saluted and carried it out, even if it had not been their recommendation.”185 Of course, Rumsfeld himself embodies one of the biggest reasons for this breakdown in coordination. As an outgrowth, our postwar approach gravitated toward a magical hybrid: a rapid handoff, paired with a hopeful goal of democratization. This was not a serious plan, and it enabled us to nose-dive from cakewalk to chaos. Overall, our Iraq invasion suffered from two glaring failures. The first was that the basic rationale for war that was sold to the U.S. public and the world—that a burgeoning nexus between Iraqi WMD and terrorism posed a major threat to our homeland—was simply false. Yet even if we were somehow able to accept this as an outgrowth of poor intelligence, the post-9/11 “climate of fear,” or other factors,186 it still left a second mammoth failure in its wake: our failure to develop a coherent plan for what should come next. Consequently, both the war’s rationale and the planning for its aftermath were fatally flawed. The fact that our rationale for launching the war was so muddled helped set the stage for an incoherent postwar effort by fostering ambiguity about what exactly we were trying to achieve in Iraq.

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Soon after Baghdad fell, a third failure would soon emerge. For the three-and-a-half-year period from May 2003 to late 2006, our leaders failed to acknowledge the new form of conflict in which we found ourselves engaged. I experienced and witnessed this failure firsthand as an infantry leader on the ground. We embarked on one ill-conceived improvisation after another, still seeking in vain to forge a democracy on the cheap and still believing that a short, easy victory was just within grasp. Our leaders vehemently denied that they confronted an insurgency, and they actively suppressed thinking that might have helped us recognize and deal with the growing crisis. Although the Bush administration failed to develop and implement a comprehensive plan for far too long, its late-2006 planning of the Iraq surge was ultimately a positive example of how the same president could conduct decision making far better, in what was arguably an even tougher strategic situation. Motivated by a true sense of desperation (after bruising midterm elections in November 2006) and the sense that his own legacy hinged on Iraq’s outcome, President Bush made a realistic assessment of the war, evaluated the options, and made tough decisions. In doing so he removed Rumsfeld as secretary of defense, dismissed easy answers (including the recommendations of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group), and risked further alienating key domestic constituencies. His bold gambit paid off. It helped stabilize Iraq at the tail end of his presidency, despite mammoth skepticism and outright opposition within and outside his own government. The desire to salvage something positive from the disaster Iraq had become as his presidency wound down was likely the true goal of Bush’s surge. And in that limited sense, it worked. As in the case of Kosovo, this suggests that difficult postwar landscapes are not inherently doomed to fail—even in the case of an exceedingly complex, heterogeneous country such as Iraq—and key decisions can indeed help shape strategic outcomes. The sense of despair and the lack of another reelection bid helped spur the Bush administration to make the tough choices in late 2006 that it should have made at the war’s outset. By the end of 2006, the administration stopped trying to pitch the war as a cakewalk and owned up to the major effort needed to properly align ends with means. Unfortunately, by this point enormous costs had already been paid in blood and treasure by both Americans and Iraqis.

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Our leaders could and should have made an honest assessment from the beginning by clarifying what exactly we intended to accomplish in Iraq and how much we were willing to commit to attain it. Or we could have chosen to not invade Iraq in the first place and continued to focus on postwar Afghanistan, which would have been the wisest choice of all. Instead, our errors stacked upon one another and helped foster a massive imbroglio that would bedevil us for years to come. One might have expected our historic debacle in Iraq to serve as the definitive wake-up call that would compel subsequent administrations to fully acknowledge the need to make hard decisions and to assemble a coherent, realistic strategy. Regrettably, this would not occur. Events in Libya in 2011 would soon illustrate how a new administration could commit all-too-familiar errors by helping topple yet another regime with little forethought and a tragically familiar outcome.

4

Libya A Slippery Slope

Chris Wallace: President Obama: Chris Wallace: President Obama:

“Biggest accomplishment?” “Saving the economy from a great depression.” “Worst mistake?” “Probably failing to plan for the day after what I think was the right thing to do in intervening in Libya.” Interview on April 10, 2016

The besieged U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi was in flames. The highly regarded ambassador struggled to see and breathe, inhaling heavy black smoke into his lungs as he tried in vain to crawl to safety. But the sustained, multipronged assault from attackers equipped with automatic weapons, RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades), and mortars would persist through the night and into the early-morning hours. By the time the dust settled, four Americans would be dead across multiple locations, including U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens.

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The September 2012 Benghazi attack shattered any remaining pretense that events in post-Qaddafi Libya were generally on track. It marked the first time in decades that a U.S. ambassador had been killed on duty. When viewed alongside the rising level of chaos, it was now undeniable that things in Libya had somehow gone very wrong. In the American lexicon, the word “Benghazi” quickly became synonymous with “disaster,” and some zealously spread rumors of a cover-up. But to understand the underlying roots of this event, we need to go back to the origins of the Libya intervention, one-and-a-half years earlier. By exploring the Obama administration’s postwar planning, only then can we begin to understand what actually went wrong in the post-Qaddafi period and what lessons we might extract from it. This can help us move beyond the subsequent finger-pointing and conspiracy theories to get to the heart of how and why Libya truly went off the rails. Of the four cases in this book, our bungling of post-Qaddafi Libya embodies the most puzzling case of all. Chronologically, it occurred after major problems in post-invasion Afghanistan and Iraq were unmistakably obvious to even the most casual observer. In fact, the widespread frustration with those twin debacles had helped propel Barack Obama into the White House in the first place. This should have given his team a valuable opportunity to reflect on earlier mistakes and to improve its handling of the postwar phase. In many ways the Libya situation was also easier than either of its two immediate predecessors. Libya had a smaller, less ethnically diverse population of six million consolidated along its coastline. Its location on Europe’s southern doorstep could enhance Western interest in Libya’s fate. The 2011 Libya war took place with strong backing from Arab and European partners, and it was initiated by local forces on the ground, thereby enhancing the war’s overall legitimacy. Libya also benefited from promising economic dynamics and educational levels among its people. Collectively, all these factors fostered a more manageable set of conditions, and it was closer to Kosovo in terms of the overall level of difficulty. Although there were still major, undeniable challenges, these circumstances should have improved the odds of a decent outcome. But while our military campaign in Libya was successful, once again we sidestepped difficult questions and did not develop a coherent plan for what would come next. Our overall political goal was blurry and

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unrealistic, the principal obstacles were not mitigated, and our mobilized resources were fundamentally out of step. It remained unclear what exact end state we were trying to achieve and whether the war was being waged for humanitarian purposes or to topple Qaddafi (or both). The United States sought to defer tough postwar issues to actors who had questionable legitimacy, capacity, or commitment, yet still believed that this could somehow give rise to a democratic Libya. Years later, President Obama conceded that mishandling postwar Libya was the most significant mistake of his presidency. How and why did we make tragically familiar mistakes, even with the full knowledge of our earlier blunders? The case of Libya illustrates that the central themes of this book are hardly unique to any administration or political party. Despite a strong desire to proceed in a different direction, the Obama administration’s handling of postwar Libya bore striking similarities to previous debacles under the Bush administration. To get to the bottom of this, we should first ask how postwar planning unfolded during the military campaign—specifically, during the seven-month period from March to October 2011. Second, how did we handle the three tasks of postwar planning? And finally, why did we conduct our planning so poorly? The answers to these questions can help us understand what truly happened in Libya while highlighting important lessons that cut across all four cases of this book.

“We Never Answered the Mail on Libya” Before we dive into the issue at hand, some broader context about the Libya conflict can be helpful. The initial U.S. decision to intervene militarily can seem rather surprising at first, given the Obama administration’s orientation at the time, as well as the changing nature of U.S.-Libya relations. For decades, Libya had embodied a rogue nation that supported international terrorism and pursued WMD, among other troublesome behaviors. In the 1980s, President Reagan had derided Colonel Qaddafi as a “mad dog of the Middle East” and launched a bombing raid against his regime in April 1986 in retaliation for a terror attack in Berlin.1 Yet in December 2003, Libya seemed to turn a corner. For reasons that remain debated, Qaddafi became noticeably more conciliatory with the

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West as he agreed to complete WMD disarmament, to extradite suspected terrorists, to share intelligence, and to financially compensate families of victims of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing.2 These steps in late 2003 helped Qaddafi’s regime partially rehabilitate its image and begin to rejoin the international community after decades of isolation.3 As an outgrowth, by early 2011 Libya was not seen as a major threat or as a state of particular strategic importance. It was not a vital supplier of oil to the United States, and it did not embody a sanctuary for terrorist groups that directly threatened us.4 For a first-term administration that wanted to dramatically scale back involvement in the Middle East, Libya was not a high priority. Practically no one expected the United States to intervene militarily there. However, the tumultuous events of early 2011 jarred the landscape. As the Arab Spring unfolded and massive protests engulfed neighboring Tunisia and Egypt, Libyans seized the moment, and the 17 February Revolution was born. Protestors demanded greater liberalization but were met with a brutal crackdown by Qaddafi’s military. This provoked fear of potential widespread human rights atrocities. On February 21, 2011, Qaddafi appeared on Libyan television and used fiery, alarming rhetoric as he referred to protestors as “cockroaches” whom he would track down “house by house” and kill.5 Qaddafi then began to maneuver military forces toward the epicenter of the resistance in eastern Libya. U.S. intelligence anticipated that Qaddafi might soon undertake a genocide in Benghazi that could resemble the tragedies in Rwanda or Srebrenica. Some have since questioned whether the threat might have been inflated, such as a British after-action report which assessed that the danger to civilians may have been “overstated.”6 Yet the fact that substantial Libyan military forces with associated logistics were converging on Benghazi, when considered alongside Qaddafi’s ominous threats, suggests that a humanitarian disaster could very well have unfolded.7 Qaddafi certainly had the capability to undertake a massacre, and his public statements conveyed an intent that he might carry it out. Pressure built for the West to take swift action to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe. After initially seeking to stay out of the fray and avoid military action in another Muslim country, President Obama changed his thinking and decided to intervene in mid-March 2011. The president reportedly admitted to Defense Secretary Robert Gates in private that his decision was “a 51–49 call,”8 but he was prodded by the strenuous

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arguments of Great Britain and France, countries that were closer geographically to Libya and would presumably have a bigger stake in its future, as well as the Arab League’s surprising support of intervention. Although some NATO members such as Germany and Poland were less enthusiastic,9 the overall degree of support for military action across European and Arab capitals was significant, and it stood in stark contrast to the road to Iraq. On March 17, Qaddafi reappeared on Libyan media and renewed his threats by referring to the “rats” in Benghazi as he stated, “We are coming tonight . . . we will find you in your closets,” which added to the sense of urgency.10 On March 19, President Sarkozy dispatched French fighter jets toward eastern Libya (informing the United States after the fact they were en route), which marked an unconventional beginning to this unconventional conflict.11 From a military perspective, the intended U.S. role in the NATO air campaign was initially to destroy Libyan air defense assets to help establish a no-fly zone and then to provide “unique capabilities” that partner nations lacked, such as munitions, intelligence, and refueling assets.12 Crucially, the United States would also play the central role in establishing and holding together the coalition. These unique capabilities, and the United States’ singular ability to establish and maintain an international coalition, proved vital to the overall conduct of the intervention. It is unlikely that a campaign of such duration and complexity could have been sustained for months without the United States at its core. Ben Fishman, the NSC’s director for Libya, recalled in comments echoed by other officials that “although we didn’t drop the most bombs, we really were the leaders. . . . The Europeans alone couldn’t have done that.”13 In a similar vein, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asserts in her memoir, “No one else could have played the role we did, both in terms of the military capability to land a decisive first blow against Qaddafi’s forces and the diplomatic capacity to build and hold together a broad coalition.”14 Within days of getting under way, the air campaign changed its operational name from Odyssey Dawn to Unified Protector, which signaled a shift in responsibility from U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) to NATO. This transition reflected President Obama’s desire to promote burden sharing and multilateralism rather than an American-centric approach.15 Although the United States assembled and orchestrated the military

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campaign, we did not seek to own the Libya conflict or its aftermath. Instead, the Obama administration sought to eschew ownership from the outset in order to ensure that U.S. involvement in Libya would be sharply limited. The president’s firm intent was that this would not become a slippery slope in which we would introduce increasing amounts of force until it became a de facto U.S.-led nation-building mission. Unlike the developments in postwar Iraq, we would not assume responsibility for postwar Libya but would enable other regional and local actors to take charge.16 In his address to the nation on March 28, 2011, President Obama highlighted that “we went down that road in Iraq . . . regime change there took eight years, thousands of American and Iraqi lives, and nearly a trillion dollars. That is not something we can afford to repeat in Libya.”17 The desire to strictly limit involvement was also bolstered by UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1973, which provided the basis for intervention as it forbade the introduction of “a foreign occupation force of any form on any part of Libyan territory” and instead put the focus on protecting civilians, enforcing the no-fly zone, and tightening the arms embargo.18 As the air campaign unfolded, the phrase “leading from behind” entered the discourse as a reflection of this distinctive U.S. approach. The phrase derived from a comment by an anonymous Obama administration advisor in the intervention’s opening weeks19 and soon became associated with the Libya war as a whole. The administration’s critics latched onto the phrase and used it in a pejorative way to suggest an abdication of U.S. leadership in Libya and across foreign affairs more broadly.20 Conversely, administration officials, including the president, believed it was wise to try to leverage the initiative of Britain and France, the support of the Arab League, and the apparent willingness of Libyans to shape their own destiny. As Under Secretary of Defense Michèle Flournoy put it, “There was a sense that the U.S. could intervene in a limited manner and prevent this massacre and basically provide an enabling backbone for allies who have more of an interest and more of a desire to get more deeply engaged.”21 Hence, the Obama administration sought to intervene with limited objectives to resolve the immediate crisis without assuming much risk or responsibility for what would follow. Such an approach aimed to promote an “anti-free rider campaign,” as the president put it, to empower other actors and avoid being caught in the middle of Libya’s aftermath.22 From

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a postwar perspective, leading from behind would presumably put most of the burden on others, rather than on us, for whatever came next. The intervention was highly improvisational in nature, driven by the desire to avoid an imminent humanitarian catastrophe. This quickly assembled effort garnered praise in some quarters for representing a smart use of U.S. military power that was the opposite of the approach used in the Iraq war. Whereas in Iraq we had stormed into Baghdad with little international support and then found ourselves in charge of chaos, in Libya we sought to let others do much of the heavy lifting and then allow Europeans, the Arab League, and Libyans to lead the next phase. Fareed Zakaria commended the United States for “doing pretty much the opposite of what was done in Iraq.”23 Ironically, however, in many ways this approach shared underlying similarities with Rumsfeld’s “light footprint” in terms of pursuing a short war, minimizing exposure, rapidly disengaging, and then looking for others to pick up the pieces.24 As the Bush administration had belatedly discovered, this can give rise to a crucial dilemma: how to reconcile the desire to quickly disengage with the countervailing desire to promote democracy. The strong desire to minimize ownership provided some tangible benefits, but it left unanswered the underlying question of what exactly would happen after hostilities ended. Some parts of the U.S. government tried to address the issue, but with little success. Select elements in the State and Defense Departments assembled a post-conflict task force that sought to look ahead to Libya’s postwar landscape. The post-Qaddafi, “post-Q,” or “Q+1” task force, as it was known, was initially headed by mid-level officials at the State Department’s Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization (S/CRS), an office established in 2004. In contrast to the Pentagon, the State Department does not have an organizational culture that is traditionally associated with detailed longterm planning. Thus, the fact that postwar planning was relegated to a fairly new functional office at State began the Libya postwar planning on unsteady footing. As one former government official notes, “Where it fell in the bureaucracy is sometimes telling of where the emphasis lies—or does not,” and the relegation of postwar Libya in this manner reflected a perception that “there were closer sharks to the boat . . . and this was but one line of effort” among many competing global priorities, including Afghanistan, Iraq, and the broader Arab Spring.25

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Nevertheless, the Q+1 task force conducted a plethora of planning sessions that explored an array of contingencies for postwar Libya. Since it had little senior-level direction or oversight, the task force considered the entire spectrum of possible scenarios, such as if Qaddafi were to flee to another country, if Qaddafi were to remain in power with an opposition government, if some other power-sharing arrangement were to take shape, or if an opposition leader were to gain control and request an outside stabilization force. The task force grappled with a seemingly endless number of hypothetical scenarios, with little clarity on which ones to most actively pursue. Because it lacked a clear understanding of the war’s intended outcome, as one official recalls, the Q+1 task force developed “hundreds and hundreds of papers on every contingency under the sun, not knowing where it would end up,” and further, because “we didn’t have clear objectives or end states . . . we didn’t really know where we were going.”26 The task force planned for practically every possibility without a firm grasp of exactly what senior U.S. officials expected to see transpire. Shortly after its inception, oversight of the task force transferred from the State Department to the National Security Council (NSC) under the supervision of Derek Chollet, the NSC’s senior director for strategic planning. Although the NSC embodied a more logical home for the task force, it still struggled to gain visibility at higher echelons and was treated as a peripheral effort. Throughout this period, the amount of specific guidance it received and the amount of attention it garnered from NSC principals were minimal. Chollet recalls that U.S. planners engaged with European and Libyan actors who would ideally carry most or all the weight after hostilities ended, to help “invert the paradigm” of American dominance in Iraq.27 This entailed coordination with the National Transitional Council (NTC) headquartered in Benghazi as well as a Libyan rebel planning team in Doha, Qatar. The NTC embodied the visible hub of resistance to Qaddafi’s rule, and it consisted of “a heterogeneous mix of regime defectors, representatives of key tribes, former prisoners, human rights activists, lawyers, intellectuals, and others,” as Christopher Chivvis put it.28 On March 29, 2011, the NTC outlined an ambitious “Vision of a Democratic Libya,” followed weeks later by a “Roadmap for Libya,” which outlined

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grand goals for Libya’s path to democracy that strongly appealed to Western audiences. Yet the fact that the second document was originally drafted in English created consternation among Libyans and suggested that the NTC might be more focused on appeasing Western audiences than developing plans tailored to Libya’s specific situation.29 Nevertheless, U.S. planners sought to work with the NTC to construct plans to resume essential services and manage potential humanitarian crises, among many other tasks.30 In mid-July 2011, as a reflection of deepening ties and a rising level of confidence, the United States recognized the NTC as the official Libyan government. Throughout this period, however, postwar planning gained little traction at upper reaches of our government. In fact, senior U.S. officials were barely aware of the Q+1 task force’s existence. Whatever the potential merits of the task force’s planning efforts, it could not achieve meaningful results without receiving clear guidance and garnering the attention of NSC principals, including the president. The recollections of senior civilian and military leaders reflect little to no specific knowledge of the Q+1 effort or of any other postwar planning happening in the government. For example, Secretary of Defense Gates recalls the following: The short answer on Libya is there was no planning for post-conflict. The entire engagement and involvement was incremental and taken reluctantly . . . there was no discussion whatsoever of any post-conflict planning. . . . Because of the way the mission changed from the original intervention for a limited humanitarian purpose to regime change, there was not a single bit of post-conflict planning that I was aware of. . . . If it ever existed, it was at so low a level I don’t think it ever came to the attention of either Secretary Clinton or myself.31

U.S. AFRICOM Commander General Carter Ham also indicates that “I certainly do not recall personally having great awareness that there was a significant effort on post-conflict planning that was occurring, nor being a participant of it,” except for planning for military capacitybuilding programs.32 Further, Admiral James Stavridis, the EUCOM commander and supreme allied commander of NATO, recalls regarding postwar planning, “There was virtually none. This was simply because the political direction sort of stopped at the end of the NATO mission.

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There was no appetite, no interest in Washington in anything beyond ‘complete the NATO mission.’”33 Although some postwar planning was indeed undertaken by the Q+1 task force—and it embodied a useful first step—it never made it beyond the starting blocks in terms of getting the attention of senior civilian and military officials. One former official recalls that “there was a ton of it, but it wasn’t breaking through. . . . It just was not a priority. There was a lot, a lot of planning happening. . . . There was so much of it, it was nothing. We had no guidance. We had no interest from senior leaders.”34 Joint planning sessions took place with Libyan NTC representatives in Dubai to try to anticipate the need to restore essential services, provide stability, demobilize militias, collect loose weapons, facilitate strategic communications to outside audiences, and address other postwar issues. But this planning was undertaken almost exclusively by relatively junior personnel in the U.S. bureaucracy, “not with anybody that swung a heavy bat.”35 Because these efforts gained little influence and received little guidance (other than to minimize the U.S. role while presumably fostering a democracy), the Q+1 task force’s work was like running on a proverbial hamster wheel and had little strategic impact. Regarding the Defense Department’s role during this period, the Pentagon leadership hardly viewed Libya as a war as worth fighting, especially while it remained actively engaged in Iraq and Afghanistan, and while a widespread sense of war fatigue was still prevalent. Secretary Gates recalls that he stated repeatedly in meetings, “Can I just finish the two wars we’re already in before you go looking for new ones?”36 In this atmosphere the Pentagon did not devote substantial senior-level time or energy to developing a comprehensive plan for Libya’s future. The conflict also entailed an intersection of military combatant commands, for Libya’s location in North Africa put it in the newly formed U.S. AFRICOM’s area of responsibility, but once NATO took the reins, U.S. EUCOM became a key actor. Given this arrangement, as well as the prevailing desire to quickly disengage, there seemed to be little pressing need for any specific military command or Pentagon office to aggressively tackle postwar issues. In one mildly encouraging development, in late June 2011 the Pentagon oversaw a war-gaming exercise titled “Island Breeze” that reviewed various postwar contingencies for Libya. One senior defense official who

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attended Island Breeze recalls that it pulled together interagency actors from the Joint Staff and the NSC. However, following the war game there was little apparent follow-up action. It constituted a single tabletop exercise that “did not generate any larger plan,” and it was “very high-ended in terms of optimism of the ability of the Libyans to work it out.”37 Overall, as another senior U.S. military official candidly expressed, “We never answered the mail on Libya. We didn’t have a plan; there wasn’t any postwar.”38 Although there were mid-level efforts as reflected by Island Breeze and the Q+1 task force, these were treated as peripheral activities that did not gain momentum. These dynamics were aided by the fact that Libya’s NTC leadership gave self-assured signals that it could embark on a path to a stable, democratic Libya largely on its own. NTC officials repeatedly stated they did not want our military assistance on the ground because they could handle the aftermath themselves.39 Derek Chollet recalls that the Libyans indicated they “didn’t want outsiders—the UN, Europeans, the United States—coming in and telling them what to do. So there was kind of a confluence of view on that.”40 This amounted to pushing on an open door because President Obama had embarked on the conflict with no intention of getting entangled in Libya’s future. We accepted the NTC’s assurances and did not use our considerable wartime leverage to push for greater involvement. U.S. officials showed confidence in the ability of Libyan exiles to deliver on high-minded aspirations for democracy, despite unanswered questions regarding how much legitimacy and credibility they truly had among the Libyan people, particularly among the disparate militias involved in the fighting. With faint echoes of Iraqi exiles’ outsized role during the road to Iraq, the ability of Western-educated exiles to deliver on their promises was far from certain, yet they nonetheless constituted a cornerstone of our approach.41 The aforementioned “Roadmap for Libya,” which was nine pages in length, allotted only a single page to an actual road map for Libya’s future, which was an early warning sign of the lack of detailed planning.42 Yet our deference to Libyans seemed to take us off the hook for the postwar phase and allowed us to shift our attention to other priorities. As an outgrowth, despite the lofty rhetoric employed by Western and Libyan officials regarding a new, democratic Libya, the amount of high-level planning to facilitate such a transformation was sparse.

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In addition to the Libyans themselves, Europe emerged as another attractive candidate to oversee postwar Libya. The French and British had been early, aggressive advocates of military action, were geographically closer to Libya than the United States, and would presumably have a stronger vested interest in Libya’s future. Some officials hoped that Southern European countries, particularly Italy, Greece, and Turkey, also might take active roles, given that they were separated from Libya only by a body of water and could be affected by Libyan refugee flows.43 Hence, although there was no specific delineation of responsibilities, senior levels of the U.S. government assumed that a constellation of Europeans, Western-oriented Libyans, and the Arab League (which had pushed for UNSCR 1973 in the first place) could collectively handle Libya’s aftermath. This premise was widely accepted without being subject to careful analysis of what might happen if it proved wrong. As this assumption took hold, in July 2011 a U.S. delegation traveled to Tunis to make the case directly to Qaddafi regime officials that NATO’s military campaign would continue for as long as Qaddafi remained in power. At the time, Libyan officials on the receiving end expressed surprise that, after the 2003 rapprochement, the United States would so readily seek Qaddafi’s exit, particularly given the regime’s claims that it was fighting Al Qaeda militants who constituted a mutual enemy.44 Nevertheless, this encounter embodied a clear signal that the aftermath would likely entail a new Libyan state without Qaddafi in charge. The delegation sought to accelerate Qaddafi’s exit, but follow-up questions regarding a new post-Qaddafi order did not garner substantial seniorlevel attention. Following intermittent setbacks and frustrations in both the air campaign and events on the ground, battlefield progress took place. Rebel groups seized Tripoli in mid to late August, and then on October 20 a NATO air strike struck a convoy transporting Qaddafi near his hometown of Sirte. After briefly seeking shelter in a drainage pipe, the dictator was soon found and executed by local rebels. Images of a bloodied Qaddafi in his final moments emerged for the world to see, and despite the NTC’s requests for a proper Islamic burial, rebels then displayed Qaddafi’s corpse “in a local meat freezer, like a war trophy,” which embodied “an ominous sign of things to come,” as Alison Pargeter put it.45

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Upon Qaddafi’s death, President Obama gave a speech in which he hailed Libyans’ newfound “opportunity to determine their own destiny in a new and democratic Libya,” as well as “the great responsibility” of the Libyan people “to build an inclusive and tolerant and democratic Libya that stands as the ultimate rebuke to Qaddafi’s dictatorship.”46 This emphasis on a democratic Libya embraced the aspirations of NTC members who had interacted with select U.S. officials during the conflict, and also reflected traditional American democratic values. Days later, on October 31, 2011, the NATO air campaign formally ended. According to Lieutenant General Ralph Jodice (who served as the combined forces air component commander), upon Qaddafi’s death the military operation quickly shut down, and the prevailing sense was “everybody’s done.”47 Similarly, as a former senior defense official put it, “Once we got Qaddafi, everybody sort of went, ‘whew, OK, we’re done there.’”48 These events in late October 2011 marked the end of seven months of combat operations. They also signaled the end of the postwar planning window and the beginning of the implementation phase. There was a widespread sense of optimism and accomplishment. The feared humanitarian disaster had been averted at minimal cost in Western blood and treasure, and four decades of oppressive dictatorship had come to a close. Despite some occasional setbacks, it seemed to represent a successful conclusion to a limited conflict. However, it would soon become obvious there was no coherent plan for the day after. A more detailed look at the three postwar tasks helps us understand what went wrong.

To Protect Civilians or to Topple the Dictator? Task 1: Did we identify a clear, achievable political goal? If you ask U.S. officials directly involved in Libya to state our overall political goal, it tends to elicit dramatically different responses. On the one hand, some frame it as President Obama did at the war’s outset: a tightly focused intervention intended to avoid an urgent humanitarian catastrophe and save Libyan lives. From this perspective, we rapidly used limited means to achieve limited ends, it proved largely successful, and whatever happened after the fact was mainly the Libyans’ and Europeans’ responsibility. On

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the other hand, some civilian and military officials provide a different account, in which a subtle slippage of goals transpired. From this latter perspective, the war began defined in humanitarian terms, but repeated public statements that “Qaddafi must go” grew a life of their own and led to a tacit desire to depose Qaddafi with little thought about what might follow.49 The presence of these opposing views merits further analysis, for it directly affects whether we conclude that the political goal for Libya was clear and achievable or not. At the campaign’s outset, the desire to prevent an imminent humanitarian disaster was the main motivation for military action. UNSCR 1973, which was adopted on March 17, 2011, provided the basis for the intervention as it outlined three goals: (1) “protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack,” (2) “establish a ban on all flights in the airspace,” and (3) “ensure strict implementation of the arms embargo.”50 Multiple senior U.S. military officials emphasize that UNSCR 1973 provided a solid foundation for the use of military power, with an unambiguous focus on protecting Libyan civilians as our top priority. General Ham, who commanded AFRICOM at the time, recalls that early on there was a strong focus on the notion of “no more Rwandas,” so the initial military mission was “very, very clear to me—it was protect civilians. That was the mission.” General Ham further recalls that this humanitarian focus was reinforced in UNSCR 1973, in official military directives, and in private conversations he had with other senior officials, and that throughout this period “there was never any mention to me that this was targeting Qaddafi.”51 Similarly, Admiral Stavridis states, “There was never a desire particularly to topple Qaddafi. That was never part of the calculus. It was all about protecting the people of Libya.”52 These statements by the commanders of AFRICOM and EUCOM (dual-hatted as the NATO supreme allied commander) reflect a common goal in line with UNSCR 1973: to protect Libyan civilians. Such an understanding also aligns with multiple statements made by the president. In his March 18, 2011, remarks to announce the start of military action in Libya, President Obama emphasized the following: We will provide the unique capabilities that we can bring to bear to stop the violence against civilians, including enabling our European allies and Arab partners to effectively enforce a no fly zone. . . . I also want to be clear about

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what we will not be doing. The United States is not going to deploy ground troops into Libya. And we are not going to use force to go beyond a welldefined goal—specifically, the protection of civilians in Libya.53

This goal of protecting Libyan civilians was underscored again ten days later in a follow-up address in which the president stressed that “broadening our military mission to include regime change would be a mistake.”54 This emphasis on a narrow humanitarian mission that did not entail foreign-imposed regime change helped allay the concerns of Russia and China in the UN Security Council, which was crucial in allowing military intervention to proceed.55 Hence, the evidence considered thus far suggests that protecting Libyan civilians was our central goal and that foreign-imposed regime change was not part of the equation. If such a modest goal were adopted and regime change did not occur, it might require only a modest postwar plan, for it would not trigger the creation of a new political order. A corresponding approach might have focused on continued intelligence collection and monitoring for any future threat posed by Qaddafi’s regime, while keeping Western military assets (and diplomatic and economic leverage) poised to respond. In some respects we might have used the containment of Iraq during the 1990s as a rough template: a protracted effort that, while certainly imperfect, laborintensive, and subject to warranted criticism, partially limited the damage that Saddam could create. A loosely analogous plan for Libya would hardly have created a state of nirvana, might have become frustrating and taxing over time, and would have undoubtedly subjected the administration to criticism for leaving a dictator in power (similar to post–Gulf War critics who argued we should have toppled Saddam when we had the chance). But it could have at least helped maintain stability and facilitated ongoing monitoring of the humanitarian situation. Up to this point, it might seem that the overall goal to protect civilians was fairly clear. However, there was another side to the coin. First, we should acknowledge that UNSCR 1973’s central directive to “protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack” may initially seem straightforward, but upon closer inspection could be open to starkly different interpretations. At one end of the spectrum, one could adopt a strict interpretation that solely entailed protecting civilians in Benghazi from the immediate threat posed by Qaddafi’s fast-approaching forces.

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This narrow goal was essentially accomplished in the war’s opening days. But conversely one could adopt a far broader interpretation that entailed the need to reduce (or eliminate) Qaddafi’s future ability to threaten Libyan civilians. If one understood UNSCR 1973 in this more expansive manner, then the Qaddafi regime itself constituted the principal threat to civilians. That could imply a need to destroy his regime to ensure civilians’ safety for the foreseeable future.56 On March 3, 2011, the president seemingly opened the door for such broader interpretations as he stated that Qaddafi “must leave” and on March 28 reiterated that Qaddafi “needed to step down from power.”57 Secretary of State Hillary Clinton similarly stated on February 28 in Geneva that “Qaddafi has lost the legitimacy to govern, and it is time for him to go.”58 In mid-April, President Obama coauthored an op-ed with French President Sarkozy and British Prime Minister Cameron that asserted “it is unthinkable that someone who has tried to massacre his own people can play a part in their future government. . . . It would be an unconscionable betrayal,” and so for a peaceful future, “Qaddafi must go and go for good.”59 Further, on March 28 the president stated that “while our military mission is narrowly focused on saving lives, we continue to pursue the broader goal of a Libya that belongs not to a dictator, but to its people.”60 Even the name of the postwar planning task force itself— post-Q, or Q+1—underscored that the United States envisioned a new Libya without Qaddafi at its helm. Secretary Gates summarized this apparent dichotomy by stating that “the military mission authorized by the UN was to establish a no-fly zone and protect civilians, whereas the U.S. political goal was to get rid of Qaddafi.”61 Official statements, such as those reflected in the paragraph above, opened a schism between military and political goals that helped widen the space for different interpretations of the war’s underlying rationale. The administration’s statements indicated that the removal of Qaddafi was indeed a goal yet one that, at least on its surface, was not supposed to be achieved through Western military action. The president suggested it was up to the Libyan people to bring about such a political change. But the fact that Qaddafi’s exit was repeatedly emphasized at the intervention’s outset—and that the coalition launched missiles at Qaddafi’s compound and months later struck the convoy he was in, precipitating his death—fostered a natural connection between Qaddafi’s exit and the war

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itself. In the absence of close oversight and clear understanding, it could create space for military objectives to gain a momentum of their own and creep outward to align with the more ambitious political goal. There is little evidence that these crucial aspects were deliberated and clarified at the upper levels of the U.S. government. Vagueness regarding UNSCR 1973’s interpretation hovered over the entire war, rendering postwar planning far more difficult to undertake. Multiple pieces of evidence suggest that our military goals did in fact tacitly expand, in a way one could refer to as “mission creep,” without any deliberate strategic decision to do so. Within the intervention’s first few days, the Qaddafi regime’s air defense capabilities were crippled and the potential massacre at Benghazi was averted.62 The immediate crisis that had provoked UNSCR 1973 had dissipated. This theoretically could have signaled an early end to the military campaign (although if the campaign had ended here and Libyan civilians had later been massacred, it would have been highly problematic). But NATO’s campaign continued for seven more months, through the summer and into the fall, as increasingly expansive interpretations of “protect civilians” seemed to gain traction. As time elapsed, the military rules of engagement loosened, and the war widened in scope. The coalition initially targeted Qaddafi regime forces conducting offensive operations that represented a clear, immediate threat to civilians. Soon, however, the coalition ran out of such targets. Hence, the targeting focus expanded to include stationary targets. It then further expanded to include more active support to opposition forces on the ground, until eventually the coalition became perceived as the de facto “air force for the rebels.”63 General Ham states that “in my personal view, the mission tended to shift from protecting civilians over time to becoming supportive of the opposition forces” oriented against Qaddafi.64 Similarly, Derek Chollet recalls that “the military campaign evolved into more than preventing Qaddafi from threatening civilians. It became about helping the opposition win.”65 One former senior defense official recalls private discussions that conveyed the following mixed messages: There’s murmuring . . . people started whispering “You can’t target Qaddafi, but if you happen to hit a command and control site that Qaddafi’s in, that wouldn’t be all bad.” . . . People start to interpret that as “Go find

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Qaddafi and drop one on top of him.” . . . There was this evolution of “Qaddafi’s not a target; we’re not try to depose him as the leader of a sovereign nation” to “It’s OK to go find him and hunt him a little bit. If you happen to get him, it’s OK.”66

Robert Gates, who served as defense secretary for the first half of the Libyan conflict, recalls that the bombing of Libyan command and control sites to protect civilians was conducted with the implicit hope that Qaddafi would be in one of those sites, resulting in his death, although publicly “the fiction was maintained.”67 As an outgrowth, Gates recalls that the war “morphed, without anybody specifically saying so, into an attempt to get rid of Qaddafi.”68 Leon Panetta, who succeeded Gates midway through the conflict in July, reinforces this assessment, as Panetta conceded at one point “what everyone in Washington knew but we couldn’t officially acknowledge: that our goal in Libya was regime change.”69 The fact that two consecutive secretaries of defense characterize the Libya war in this way carries substantial weight. Further, when Secretary Clinton met with Libyan opposition leaders in the fall, she recalls in her memoir that she “assured them that NATO would continue its mission to protect Libyan civilians until the former dictator was found and fully defeated.”70 Operation Unified Protector concluded in October, just days after Qaddafi’s death, which seemed to reinforce the notion that, with Qaddafi’s removal, our underlying mission was complete.71 This book has uncovered no hard evidence that killing Qaddafi ever was an official, unequivocal U.S. military objective or that there was any deliberate effort to misinform the public. Instead, most evidence suggests that our officials simply slid into a broadening of goals without plainly acknowledging that they were doing so, without a transparent debate over the merits, and without a clear understanding of the lasting consequences for Libya. Although the overall mission remained couched in humanitarian terms, the United States continued to improvise and increasingly pushed (both militarily and diplomatically) to get Qaddafi out of power and pave the way for a democratic Libya. As one defense official recalls, “There was never any authority ever given to go hunt and kill Qaddafi, but we were probably doing everything in our power to get him without saying we were doing it.”72 As another official recalls, “As best I could tell, it wasn’t a strategy. We didn’t know what the end state

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was going to be. It wasn’t going to be ‘take Qaddafi out’; it ended up taking Qaddafi out.”73 This ambiguity regarding the war’s intended political end and how precisely it should tie in with military goals would render it all but impossible to develop a coherent strategy. Differing interpretations of the war’s desired outcome would introduce extraordinary complexity into postwar planning and make it difficult to assemble a coherent approach with a single end state. The recurring tension between whether to promote democracy or quickly get out was a key part of the problem. The president had no intention of making a major commitment to Libya, yet administration officials extolled the virtues of fostering a new, democratic Libya in Qaddafi’s shadow. President Obama underscored the merits of “an inclusive and tolerant and democratic Libya that stands as the ultimate rebuke to Qaddafi’s dictatorship.”74 Similarly, Secretary Clinton emphasized the need to “support the Libyan people as they pursue a transition to democracy.”75 Erica Kaster, who regularly attended post-Qaddafi planning sessions at the State Department on behalf of USAID, also recalls that fostering democracy in Libya was “absolutely” a part of planning discussions.76 Similarly, then-Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense James Schear recalls that across the interagency domain, “There was a strong interest and desire to establish a path toward democratization, starting with the setup of a parliamentary structure in Tripoli.”77 All these sentiments aligned with the NTC’s stated aspiration to establish “a civil society that recognizes intellectual and political pluralism and allows for the peaceful transfer of power through legal institutions and ballot boxes.”78 Yet, as illustrated in the previous chapters of this book, establishing a path to democracy for a country emerging from decades of repression usually requires steadfastness across multiple domains to build credible democratic institutions over time. Although senior officials articulated the lofty goal of a new Libyan democracy, the commitment to a quick exit also remained unassailable. Senior officials never reconciled the disconnect between them. If we wanted to establish a path to democracy, which embodied a laudable goal, then we would almost certainly need to grease the skids for a substantial and enduring international commitment. Otherwise, creating a new democracy would only be a wish, not a goal. Alternatively, we could keep Qaddafi in place, exit quickly (while keeping monitoring and surveillance assets in the area), and then brace for the

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inevitable blowback for keeping a dictator in power and merely restoring the status quo. Each path entailed different types of risk. The confusion over goals was repeatedly highlighted as a potential issue by multiple Obama administration officials, former officials, and outside scholars and observers at the time. Both Secretary Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mullen had serious reservations about the wisdom of intervening in Libya, in part because of skepticism about Libya’s relative importance (especially given ongoing U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq) but also because of uneasiness over the desired political endgame.79 Gates described himself as “adamantly opposed to intervening in Libya” and believed that “when you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging.” Among other concerns, Gates felt deeply uncomfortable with the overall rationale for the war and was concerned by the possibility of “mission creep.”80 Similarly, various op-ed pieces at the time raised serious questions about how a seemingly well-intentioned Western intervention might morph into regime change without a clear path for what might follow. On March 11, 2011, retired General Wesley Clark (who had commanded NATO and EUCOM during the Kosovo war) cautioned that a no-fly zone in Libya could become a “slick way to slide down the slope to deeper intervention.”81 Later in March, Gideon Rose questioned the United States’ vague political objectives in Libya, and similarly, in early April, Gary Bass authored a piece on Libya underscoring that “humanitarian interventions tend to use limited means, while flirting with maximalist goals,”82 a formulation that would aptly characterize the Libya war. These all constituted warning signs that our political goalposts could glide outward in the absence of strict discipline and oversight. We might rush our way into a conflict with little thought about what comes next. Most evidence suggests that regime change became a tacit goal but that our officials wanted the Libyans to cross this threshold themselves. This left unclear how exactly NATO’s humanitarian intervention was supposed to end and who would take charge of the day after. As Derek Chollet recalls, “There’s no question we got on a slippery slope to regime change.”83 The fact that opposing interpretations of the goal held sway at the uppermost levels of our government was a significant problem. Although some officials were convinced that the war was being waged strictly for humanitarian purposes, others believed that it was sliding

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toward facilitating Qaddafi’s removal by “stretching the Security Council mandate far beyond its justification in the principles of R2P,” as Christopher Chivvis put it.84 This lack of clarity would render planning exceptionally difficult to undertake in a coherent way, given the tremendous variance in possible outcomes. It would be like packing for a trip without knowing if it will be a weekend jaunt to the beach or a voyage to the Moon. The vagueness over our desired end state undermined postwar planning and would sidestep the tension between promoting democracy and getting out. Overall, our political goal was unclear, and if it was to topple Qaddafi and establish a democracy on the cheap (as substantial evidence suggests), then it was wholly unachievable as well. These issues would carry over to the second and third postwar tasks, creating additional problems. Task 2: Did we anticipate and seek to mitigate the foreseeable obstacles? We did not account for the most significant, foreseeable obstacles that could ensnare postwar Libya. Admittedly, in comparison to Afghanistan and Iraq, Libya embodied a somewhat easier situation to handle. As Derek Chollet indicates, “Libya had a lot going for it. It had a relatively small, homogenous population (fewer people than Tennessee) with a professional class; rich energy supplies; proximity and close ties to Europe; and a vast amount of international support and enthusiasm to help.”85 Further, Libya’s population was concentrated in its northern coastal cities along the Mediterranean (with distinct hubs in the East and West), while the rest of the country was mostly empty desert and oil fields. Its lack of major sectarian divides, its littoral access, and its relative wealth, among other aspects, fostered more favorable conditions than those in either Afghanistan or Iraq, and could help make postwar Libya more manageable. But although the scale of the postwar obstacles was more modest, this only made the mountain to climb less steep. Substantial obstacles remained. Our senior leaders did not make a concerted effort to acknowledge the lingering obstacles and mitigate the difficulties. U.S. officials repeatedly spoke of the need for Qaddafi to leave power, but regardless of how that were to transpire, Qaddafi’s exit would almost immediately create many challenges that received little sustained attention at upper levels of government. After decades of Qaddafi’s personalized rule, Libyan institutions were largely extensions of Qaddafi’s personal egotism.86 Therefore, a new Libyan government would likely have to be

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created almost from the ground up. Additional post-Qaddafi challenges would include the disarming and reintegration of militias and revolutionary brigades fighting Qaddafi’s regime, the management of Libya’s tribes and historical east-west tensions, the legacy of endemic corruption and nepotism, the recovery of a sea of weapons that had flooded Libya, and the development of legitimate political parties.87 Hence, although Libya’s baseline conditions were more favorable than those in Afghanistan or Iraq, and were closer to those in Kosovo in some ways, there were still major difficulties that needed to be confronted. In most instances our government had awareness of likely obstacles but did not take aggressive steps to try to deal with them. The default response was to defer these challenges to NATO partners, Arab states, or Libyans to pick up the tab. However, these actors lacked either the capacity, the legitimacy, or the drive to remain fully engaged. This underscored a recurring pitfall of this book in which obstacles are identified but not mitigated. One default response was to defer the challenges to the Libyans to figure out. Within Libya’s NTC, there were certainly many smart, well-educated people who showed a strong interest in moving toward Americanstyle democracy. Yet on the whole these Libyans had limited capacity and legitimacy on the ground. The removal of Qaddafi created a singular opportunity, but the extent to which Libyans could leverage this moment to disarm militias, secure their country, and establish new institutions without extensive outside help over a sustained period was very much in doubt. As one former official put it, The Libyans really were handed an opportunity and screwed it up, but it’s also like handing a five-year-old a power tool and then being surprised when they punch a hole in the wall. . . . They were starting from scratch. And to put all of the blame on them for not knowing how to do it, when they had absolutely no institutions, no civil service, nothing from which to draw upon in terms of expertise or know-how, it was a bit of a tall order. So yeah, I mean ultimately it’s their fault, but is that fair? I don’t know that it was a fair expectation for them to know how to do that.88

Libya’s lack of democratic traditions and plethora of armed groups would render it difficult even for smart, motivated, well-intentioned Libyans to pick up the ball and run with it, to forge a new democracy after four

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decades of autocracy. The NTC leadership expressed to Western policy makers precisely what we wanted to hear: Libyans will take care of things, so please stay out. But if the NTC demonstrated that it was not up to the task, there was no Plan B. We put our faith in those who expressed aspirations of a democratic Libya yet who had minimal capacity to assemble a functioning, representative government in Qaddafi’s long shadow and to grapple with the obstacles ahead. Some U.S. officials, including President Obama, hoped that Europe could help tackle the challenges. But despite the initial eagerness of France and Britain to embark on military action, neither nation firmly committed to take charge of postwar Libya. President Obama later acknowledged that “I had more faith in the Europeans, given Libya’s proximity, being invested in the follow-up,”89 and the major postwar obstacles were left unresolved. Overall, the lack of a firm hand on top would establish an unsteady course in which no overarching responsibility was established to manage the obstacles, and the world’s superpower orchestrating the intervention was disinclined to step up. As an outgrowth, postwar Libya remained an “orphan,”90 and this would plant the seeds for sizable problems. As highlighted earlier, the Q+1 task force did a respectable job trying to address various contingencies and focused mid-level attention on many legitimate challenges. However, its efforts never resulted in a coherent approach as its members struggled to have their voices heard. Libya could hope to avoid chaos only if there were some tangible steps to manage the obstacles involving tribes, militias, loose weapons, institutional deficits, and related areas. But the dominant view was that we could step back and allow others to sort most of these issues out. The United States placed virtually all of its eggs in the basket of regional and local actors. Yet without an organizing force at the center to take charge, it was conceivable (and even likely) that no one would fill the void. This was deeply unfortunate since the obstacles in Libya, while significant, were more manageable than those encountered in other recent war zones. Years later, during a town hall, President Obama candidly acknowledged that “I did a little too much counting on other countries to then stabilize and help support government formation, and now it’s kind of a mess.”91 Bureaucratic friction within our own government represented another obstacle that was not mitigated. The U.S. government was characterized by strong internal disagreements over the wisdom of intervention, and

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these frictions carried over to the postwar arena. Those strongly in favor of military action included U.S. Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice, as well as Samantha Power, who focused on moral arguments regarding the responsibility to protect (R2P) and the merits of humanitarian intervention, given the haunting memories of Srebrenica and Rwanda.92 Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was initially disinclined to get involved but, after engaging with European and Arab officials, became supportive of intervention. Yet Defense Secretary Gates felt so strongly about the illconceived nature of the war that he considered resigning, and refrained from doing so only because he had a few months remaining until his scheduled retirement.93 Early in the war, Gates admits being “furious” and “ranted with unusual fervor” when he told Admiral Mullen—who also was skeptical of intervention—“Don’t give the White House staff and NSS too much information on the military options. . . . They don’t understand it, and ‘experts’ like Samantha Power will decide when we should move militarily.” Shortly thereafter, Gates directed that “no military options were to be provided to White House or NSS staff without my approval, ‘especially any options to take out Qaddafi.’”94 This underscored friction regarding whether to intervene in Libya and whether deposing Qaddafi should be our goal, and it lessened the possibility that these same officials would sit down and develop a coherent plan. The path to war was characterized by sharp divisions between advocates of moral, humanitarian-focused policies on the one hand and less interventionist outlooks on the other. These fissures were not reconciled with respect to the war’s goals or end state. The tension-filled atmosphere hardly lent itself to rigorous, sustained discussion regarding how to craft and resource an effective approach. Hence, the crucial advantages and disadvantages of a quick exit as opposed to a long-term path to democracy were not weighed in a deliberate manner. As an outgrowth of the disagreements, one official recalls, “We could not generate a discussion about what’s next. It was sort of, ‘we’ll figure it out.’”95 The Pentagon’s leadership grew frustrated with the vagueness of the war’s rationale, to the point that Gates contends, “I think, frankly, people just didn’t know what they were doing” with respect to postwar Libya, so “nothing was ever done.”96 Although there was basic agreement that a democratic Libya would be a satisfying outcome, the question of how to attain such an

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outcome remained unanswered. Senior officials did not aggressively mitigate this obstacle, and it persisted unresolved. Overall, the postwar obstacles in Libya were somewhat more manageable than those in either Afghanistan or Iraq. But Libya was still far from easy. Postwar planning is difficult under almost any circumstances, and significant challenges still threatened to derail Libya’s future. Despite an awareness that major obstacles might arise—including a plethora of ragtag militias in a country flooded with weapons and a glaring lack of institutional capacity—our leaders did not aggressively seek to get ahead of them. Often, the recognition of obstacles resulted in a sense of passivity as the United States tacitly deferred them to other actors rather than attempt to get in front of them. We might have used our Kosovo strategy as a rough model by galvanizing international efforts through the UN and NATO to manage the foreseeable security and governance challenges. This could have embraced President Obama’s strong desire to promote multilateralism and burden sharing. However, we made little effort to do so, and we proved unwilling to spearhead such an effort. Task 3: Did we mobilize resources in a manner aligned with the goal? The postwar resources we mobilized were minimal and were more closely aligned with quickly getting out than promoting democracy. But even if a quick withdrawal embodied our central goal, we needed to commit at least a bare minimum level of resources to help fend off utter chaos. Unfortunately, a dearth of resources would increase the likelihood of a deeply disappointing outcome in Libya. One of the most significant resource domains entailed security— specifically, whether we would mobilize a multinational force to stabilize postwar Libya. From the beginning of the intervention, President Obama “was adamant that there would be no U.S. troops deployed. ‘No boots on the ground’ became a mantra,” as Hillary Clinton recalled in her memoir.97 In the case of Kosovo, President Bill Clinton had made a similar stipulation regarding the combat phase but then relaxed it for the postwar phase by publicly committing to a NATO Kosovo Force (with backchannel assurances that the U.S. commitment would not exceed 15% of the total force). The overall commitment to Kosovo had ultimately entailed a robust troop density of 23.3 troops per 1,000 inhabitants. But in the case of Libya, the mantra carried over directly from the war phase

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to the postwar phase. This essentially resulted in zero troops per 1,000 inhabitants for post-Qaddafi Libya. Throughout the seven-month military campaign, it remained widely understood—without substantial debate—that the United States would not lead a postwar stabilization force. This occurred despite the fact that select officials in the U.S. government seemed cautiously supportive of such an effort, such as Dennis Ross, who served as a senior director of the NSC.98 In his March 29, 2011, testimony before the U.S. Senate, Admiral Stavridis left the door open to mobilizing such a force, stating that “it’s quite clear that the possibility of a stabilization regime exists” based on the historical precedents established in Bosnia and Kosovo.99 To be sure, there were risks inherent in such an effort, such as the possibility that an outside presence could spark blowback. It would also have taken a serious investment of political capital, given that the original rationale for the intervention was strictly humanitarian in nature. Yet these pros and cons were not weighed and discussed at senior levels, and this reasonable option was dismissed out of hand without serious deliberation. Christopher Chivvis and Jeffrey Martini later outlined multiple types of stabilization forces that might have been feasible, such as a few thousand troops to secure Tripoli, or roughly 24,000 troops to secure other coastal cities as well, or roughly 60,000 troops or more to secure most of Libya at the high end. Our government could have considered options along these lines, based on the available information. A multinational stabilization force might have disarmed militias and maintained leverage over the tenuous post-Qaddafi transition. It could have been made up of U.S. and NATO forces alongside select Muslim-nation forces that might have also been persuaded to assist in order to facilitate burden sharing.100 Based on lessons from Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq, such a mobilization might have started the new Libyan government on more stable footing as it started to assemble its nascent leadership and institutions. This could have been couched as a way to preserve NATO’s credibility, to ensure regional stability, and to see through the Libya intervention to a favorable outcome, in accordance with U.S. interests and values. It would likely have necessitated a new UN resolution, alongside arm-twisting of the NTC to do so, and hence would have required a major political investment (both domestically and internationally). Admittedly, the UNSCR restriction on a stabilization force represented a notable barrier,

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as did the NTC’s stated desire to handle matters on its own. But we made no visible attempt to push back. We seemed to accept these barriers as insurmountable without probing to see if that were really the case, or assessing the cumulative impact. From the outset, Libyan rebels made clear their desire to take charge of their own fate,101 and the United States largely accepted that position at face value. As one official put it, “Everybody who worked on it at that time hides behind ‘the Libyans don’t want it,’ but we were in a position as the United States to insist that they do certain things.”102 Similarly, Ben Fishman notes that “we shouldn’t have said ‘OK’ to the Libyans so easily.”103 Although NTC members resisted an outside force, ultimately the NTC was “in a very weak position to say no to NATO” in the middle of the air campaign, while Qaddafi remained alive and while the NTC’s fate still hung in the balance.104 Yet it was assumed without rigorous debate that such a deployment would be unwelcome and unnecessary, and might stir up local resentments. No actor firmly took charge of assembling resources in the security realm, and the lack of resources reinforced our perceived lack of commitment to Libya’s fate. This would jeopardize the desired path to democracy. In the governance and economic domains, the mobilization of resources was also sparse. As previously indicated, Libyan ministries under Qaddafi were merely extensions of his persona. Thus, the creation of new Libyan institutions would need substantial assistance and oversight, and potentially even international management for some period, as had occurred in Kosovo under UNMIK. Yet the United States did not mobilize resources in a corresponding manner to support Libyan institutions. This set the stage for them to quickly flounder. General Ham notes the overriding “sense of goodwill across most of the country . . . created an opportunity that we failed to capitalize on,” and further, “a significant effort on helping them reestablish the institutions of government early on in the aftermath of the Qaddafi regime could have made a very significant difference, but I think we missed that opportunity.”105 On the economic front, many officials believed that Libya’s substantial oil resources could help the new government rapidly get its bearings. One senior U.S. defense official recalls that a prevailing view was “they have oil, which means they have money, which means as long as we get the oil back up, they’ll have a source of income and that money will help fix

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anything.”106 Yet despite the potential oil income, the desire to introduce democracy to a land unfamiliar with it still created vexing challenges after Qaddafi had suppressed social and political maturation for decades. The funding for postwar reconstruction was largely assumed away, with the presumption that oil could allow Libya to self-finance its postwar needs. This was strikingly similar to the Bush administration’s flawed thinking on Iraq, when officials such as Paul Wolfowitz had assumed that oil revenue would allow Baghdad to fund its own reconstruction and development. As indicated in table 1.2 in chapter 1, the development aid provided to Libya in its first year was less than half of that provided to Kosovo in absolute terms ($750 million versus $2.01 billion), and in per capita terms it was one-eighth that of the Kosovo amount ($119 versus $957 per inhabitant). As a related problem, minimal resources were assembled to help the new Libyan state physically secure its oil facilities, which would open the door for militias to seize them instead.107 It is true that getting the U.S. Congress to approve substantial funding for Libya would have been a tall order, given near-certain political resistance. It is certainly possible the Obama administration might have tried and come up short. However, there was no notable effort to even try. Overall, regardless of whether our goal was promoting democracy or quickly getting out, a new Libyan government would need international assistance to help get it off to a reasonable start, particularly in security, institutional, and economic realms. Such a mobilization did not occur. It is conceivable that we could have made greater efforts in each of these areas and still been unsuccessful, given the difficulties at hand. But senior levels of our government made little coordinated attempt. The deficits in security were an especially key shortcoming that would jeopardize the stability of a new Libyan state. This lack of resources increased the odds of a chaotic outcome and was entirely out of step with the often-stated goal of forging a new Libyan democracy.

Familiar Errors Why did we fail to craft a coherent postwar plan for Libya? First, the pathology of wishful thinking tends to lessen the perceived difficulty of

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creating a new democracy from scratch. Whenever wishful thinking is given a free hand, it undercuts officials’ willingness to tackle tough issues. This dynamic begins to account for our flawed handling of postwar Libya. The Arab Spring had a notable psychological impact on how U.S. officials viewed a post-Qaddafi landscape. Early 2011 was a dynamic moment when, to many observers, it truly appeared that the Middle East and North Africa might be transforming in a positive way. It can be easy in hindsight to forget or understate the extent of heady optimism in Washington at the time. As enormous protests unfolded and videos were transmitted via television and social media around the globe, President Obama gave remarks that reflected the perception of historic change under way across the Arab world. The president’s address on March 28 embraced a hopeful vision when he stated, “Born, as we are, out of a revolution by those who longed to be free, we welcome the fact that history is on the move in the Middle East and North Africa, and that young people are leading the way. Because wherever people long to be free, they will find a friend in the United States.”108 This particular remark reflected a degree of mirror imaging, as it likened the unfolding Arab protests to the American Revolution.109 In May 2011, President Obama mentioned the U.S. economic response would be similar to actions taken after the fall of the Berlin Wall,110 a universally recognized tipping point that enabled a cascade of democratic change to unfold. This implicitly advanced the notion that if we could just play a small role in nudging Qaddafi out of power, the long-oppressed Libyan people would be liberated and democratic revolutions might unfurl across the region. If we aligned ourselves with the Arab street, it could put us squarely on the side of liberal, democratic values and set conditions for a positive domino effect. General Anthony Zinni, the former CENTCOM commander who had warned about the difficulties of postwar Iraq years earlier, provided the following perspective on the U.S. approach to Libya: They became enamored with the Arab Spring, . . . and they really embraced the idea that the Arab Spring is now going to be the unleashing of democracy throughout the Middle East. And so on the heels of the Arab Spring, it was a great opportunity to really press, and you don’t have to do much, because liberation will come out of the streets . . . if you get rid of Qaddafi, it will all heal itself.111

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This notion that “it will all heal itself” in some ways resembled pre-2003 sentiments regarding Iraq and the starry-eyed notion that if we could just push Saddam out of power, events would naturally tilt in a democratic direction. The Arab Spring seemed to breathe new life into this problematic idea that limited military intervention can facilitate major political progress with little follow-up effort. Libya was not seen as strategically important, but it became an attractive way to follow through on the president’s memorable 2009 Cairo speech by demonstrating solidarity with the Arab street and riding the wave of freedom and democracy. It also became a way to quell criticism of the administration’s recent handling of events in Tunisia and Egypt, particularly its initially hesitant reaction to Hosni Mubarak’s continued rule. Hence, Libya symbolized an opportunity to remedy past errors and to get “on the right side of history,” which was a phrase repeatedly used by President Obama during his presidency.112 Such sentiments downplayed the need for robust planning since it appeared that we needed only to help nudge things along, and others would finish the job. If you assume that events will take on a life of their own, then detailed planning does not seem especially important. Additionally, the perception that this was not actually a U.S. war embodied another aspect tied to wishful thinking. The notion of “leading from behind” put confidence in European, Arab, and local actors to take charge, bolstered by a view that the United States was only an enabler of others. Robert Gates noted that “no one was really willing to admit to themselves that we were trying to bring about regime change,”113 so even as our goals tacitly expanded over time, senior officials remained fixed to a notion of minimal commitment. The idea that we could act as an engrossed observer hindered the recognition that the United States remained the world’s superpower and that if we did not spearhead a multinational postwar effort, in all likelihood no one else would. The allure of a newer, smarter method of warfare helped make it seem we could intervene at a fraction of the financial and human costs incurred in Iraq, with seemingly no lasting burden. We focused mainly on operational tasks such as establishing command-and-control relationships, conducting targeting, and synchronizing coalition military capabilities, among other wartime priorities—each of which certainly was important—yet this was accompanied by a dearth of coherent planning for what would follow. The focus on short-term operational aspects

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deferred difficult postwar trade-offs for someone else to figure out. This resurrected similar mistakes that had unfolded in Afghanistan and Iraq, as a first-term administration embraced magical thinking by papering over postwar difficulties. Our handling of intelligence gaps reinforced this wishful thinking. There was little cultural understanding of unfolding events on the ground, partly as an outgrowth of the closed nature of Qaddafi’s regime. After the 2003 rapprochement, we had reduced our intelligence focus on Libya, which hindered “the recognition that Libya was essentially a family-run business for forty-plus years, and with the removal of Qaddafi and his family there was no decision-making apparatus, there was no competency, and no mechanisms” for Libyan ministries to function, as General Ham put it.114 Hence, we underestimated the shallowness of Libyan institutions after four decades of one-man rule.115 We also had little knowledge of the exiles and various rebel groups and their ability to deliver on various postwar assurances, as well as the NTC’s actual degree of legitimacy across the country. Under Secretary of Defense Flournoy states that “we allowed ourselves to be highly persuaded and we probably gave too much stock and credibility to the folks we had access to . . . [it was] an elite that didn’t necessarily connect to the foot soldiers on the ground.”116 The prior linkages between select NTC members and the Qaddafi regime from which they had defected also helped undermine their standing in the eyes of many Libyans, exacerbating the legitimacy problem.117 Further, although U.S. officials knew that Libya had a more homogenous population that didn’t suffer from the sectarian schisms that plagued places such as Iraq and Syria, President Obama later noted that “the degree of tribal division in Libya was greater than our analysts had expected,”118 and one senior official conceded that the overall intelligence picture of Libya was “terrible. We didn’t focus on Libya. We had no spotlight on Libya, at a time when our intel was focused on a lot of other things, for good reason,” and further, “we didn’t have a clue what was going on in Benghazi” as the protests broke out.119 Intelligence gaps unfold in every war. For this reason, the way in which we respond to these gaps is crucial. Rather than aggressively trying to narrow the most obvious gaps and relying on careful assumptions, U.S. officials instead doubled down on the Libyan exiles and reinforced wishful thinking regarding what would happen after Qaddafi’s exit.

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In a tragic resurrection of mistakes in Iraq, the United States found itself drawn to the compelling narratives of exiles who were willing to talk to us about events in their homeland, a dependency that was exacerbated by a dearth of timely, on-the-ground intelligence. Flournoy recalls that “we spent too much time with exiles and expatriates and not enough time engaging the groups who [were] actually going to be empowered at the end of the fighting,”120 which contributed to a distorted picture of post-Qaddafi Libya. Admittedly, we did gain some intelligence from technical sources, we conducted some analysis of tribal politics in Libya, and we gleaned some insights from defecting Libyan officers.121 But many gaps remained unaddressed or downplayed, and deficits regarding Libyan institutions and the “human terrain” were routinely filled with wishful thinking. Like the Bush administration’s missteps in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Obama administration succumbed to an idealistic vision of what would unfold in the aftermath of military victory. Some of the same leaders who had been highly critical of the Bush administration for expecting democracy to flourish in Baghdad ironically fell victim to a similar pitfall. This pathology of wishful thinking helped undermine our postwar approach. Second, with regard to deficient learning, similar to how the Bush administration came into office with an “anything but Clinton” mind-set, the Obama administration also came into office with strongly held negative views about the Bush team’s policies. This would inhibit learning from the past and foster planning deficits that were eerily familiar. At nearly every step of its Libya decision making, the Obama administration seemed to be guided by the Iraq war and sought to proceed in a manner opposite to the course the Bush administration had taken. The U.S. approach became “to view the last war [in Iraq] as a negative example,” as Fareed Zakaria put it.122 The fixation on negative lessons became encapsulated by the administration’s maxim: “Don’t do stupid shit.” This phrase, which was similar to the Hippocratic oath to “First do no harm,” embodied a direct reaction to a war in Iraq that had lacked a sound rationale and a clear-eyed view of the consequences.123 The need to avoid unforced errors was certainly a key lesson to take away from Iraq. This pulled attention toward negative aspects of what to avoid, but it left unclear what the United States would actually do as the world’s superpower. After leaving her cabinet post, Hillary Clinton

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made a not-so-veiled critique of this approach by stating, “Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle.”124 The United States not only needed to identify actions to avoid—which by itself could induce passivity—but it needed to identify tangible actions we would actually undertake. The Obama administration’s learning from postwar Iraq was fairly narrow in scope, in that rather than acknowledging the need to conduct rigorous planning by building on historical cases, it mostly boiled down to “don’t do Iraq” or “don’t send troops to the Middle East.” This focused overwhelmingly on negative lessons, which limited the cognitive ability to tackle complex challenges in Libya. Though captivated by the need to avoid another Iraq, our officials seemed to learn little about what sensible approaches might work instead. This sidestepped deeper learning from earlier planning efforts such as in Somalia, Haiti, and the Balkans, as well as the Iraq surge, and the underlying reasons those efforts had been successful or come up short, in ways closely tied to the three planning tasks. Many aspects of the Iraq war did indeed reflect what not to do, but the overwhelming cognitive weight of Iraq induced a massive swing of the pendulum in the opposite direction. This contributed to strategic indecision. A quick handoff to local actors had already proven problematic in both Afghanistan and Iraq (involving actors such as Hamid Karzai and Ahmad Chalabi, respectively), but the Obama team did not explore why that was or how it could imperil the path to democracy. It would be inaccurate to say there was zero learning altogether. In some respects this constituted a form of overlearning. As mentioned in this book’s introduction, overlearning is when officials resolve “not to make the same mistake again but are likely to commit the opposite one,” in Robert Jervis’s words.125 The preoccupation with a narrow lesson to not repeat Iraq was not paired with positive lessons of what paths might work instead. This helped foster a dearth of action and a lack of rigorous analysis of sensible alternatives. The Obama administration became so fixated on not burning its hand on the stove that it backpedaled and tripped into the fireplace instead. Additionally, the administration came to view Libya as a unique case in which historical lessons seemed to have less relevance. Given Libya’s smaller population, lack of sectarian divisions, proximity to Europe,

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strong international support for intervention, and other encouraging aspects, many officials believed Libya was simply in a different category than Iraq and Afghanistan when it came to the ease of democratization, and hence it would be less susceptible to sharing in their fate. James Schear recalls that Qaddafi was perceived as a “low-hanging fruitcake” in the sense that he was an almost universally despised dictator who had behaved erratically for decades, and this should render a multinational solution easier to achieve. To further underscore Libya’s uniqueness, Schear recalls a prevailing view was that “Libya is to southern Europe as Haiti is to the United States,”126 which implied that Europe would have a uniquely strong reason to remain committed to Libya in a way that had not applied to either Afghanistan or Iraq. This was bolstered by the sense that while Iraq had embodied a dumb war, Libya would be a smart war. Libya did have several factors that made it more manageable, yet it still had challenges common to many postwar efforts that required careful forethought. Not everyone relied on history in such a narrow manner. As mentioned earlier, Admiral Stavridis briefly raised the useful historical reference point of Kosovo during his March 2011 congressional testimony, when he mentioned the potential use of an international stabilization force. Similarly, in private conversations about Libya, Hillary Clinton reportedly referred to Bosnia as a positive model to learn from, an episode in which we had made some missteps along the way but remained committed for an extended period. Secretary Clinton seemed to envision a more expansive, engaged role for the United States and the international community in Libya, based loosely on the 1990s interventions, as she helped assemble the Libya Contact Group of outside countries to support Libya’s road ahead, among other actions.127 Yet these analogies were outweighed by a more influential paradigm, advanced principally by the president and his closest advisors, that focused on the need to avoid an Iraq-like imbroglio at all costs. This helped pave the way for a tragically familiar state of affairs in which we would once again take part in toppling a regime with no coherent plan for what would come next. Although encouragingly this time U.S. troops would not be at the center of the maelstrom, the lack of clear decision making would help foster a similar vacuum. In Kosovo the United States had built on both negative and positive lessons from the 1990s and had identified recurring themes and challenges,

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rather than view Kosovo as an exceptional case. Yet in the case of Libya (as in Afghanistan and Iraq), the use of history was narrower in scope. It steered our policy toward what not to do, with little to say about what to do instead. In many ways Libya became seen as a unique historical moment untethered to the recent past. This narrow use of history undermined our readiness to grapple with recurring postwar challenges. It also reflected the recurring cognitive trap in which an administration feels it is innately smarter and cleverer than its predecessors. As a third pathology, underuse of the NSC also helps explain errors in postwar planning. The NSC did not take charge of synchronizing military and political considerations into a coherent strategy. Schear recalls that “there was really no concerted, major planning process” that took place in the interagency arena.128 Although the NSC eventually gained oversight of the Q+1 task force, the NSC principals did not invest themselves in the process, and they had little visibility of it. In most accounts of Libya planning, the role of National Security Advisor Tom Donilon is somewhat muted, at least when compared to Sandy Berger’s active role in that position in the late 1990s. The lack of senior-level deliberation regarding postwar Libya made it difficult for decisions on crucial postwar questions to ever break through. The reasons for this connect to broader trends involving the NSC during this period. National security decision making became increasingly centralized during the Obama administration as the NSC staff adopted an operational focus that hindered its crucial coordinating role. During this time, the NSC staff grew dramatically in size, from a historical norm of approximately one hundred people or fewer to more than four hundred. As it did so, it devoted greater time and energy to overseeing day-to-day operations rather than facilitating interagency coordination among the NSC principals and deputies.129 A small coterie of relatively young staffers took prominent roles in the president’s inner circle in ways that often rankled the NSC principals and sometimes gave them a sense of being powerless. This fostered a “parallel process” that “essentially cut out many in the NSC and the cabinet from the roles they were intended to play,” in the words of David Rothkopf, who authored a comprehensive history of the NSC.130 Panetta’s experience in leading the Pentagon was described as like “being installed in the driver’s seat of a car and finding that the steering wheel and brakes had been disconnected from the engine.”131 This

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centralization and the NSC’s operational focus rendered it difficult for principals and deputies to coordinate a coherent political-military strategy, or to shape the president’s key decisions. Accounts from former cabinet officials help illustrate these dynamics within the NSC. Defense Secretary Gates stated in rather blunt terms, “The controlling nature of the Obama White House and the NSS staff took micromanagement and operational meddling to a new level,” and he recalls various incidents of Donilon’s NSC staffers veering into routine operational matters, such as targeting priorities in Libya. Gates also recalls that the NSC became “an operational body with its own policy agenda, as opposed to a coordination mechanism.”132 His successor, Leon Panetta, advanced a similar view that, in his words, the “decision-making apparatus was centralized in the White House,” which had “the effect of reducing the importance of the cabinet members.”133 In a New York Times interview, Panetta described the decision-making process as follows: There were staff people who put themselves in a position where they kind of assumed where the president’s head was on a particular issue, and they thought their job was not to go through this open process of having people present all these different options, but to try to force the process to where they thought the president wanted to be. . . . They’d say, “Well, this is where we want you to come out.” And I’d say “[expletive], that’s not the way it works. We’ll present a plan, and then the president can make a decision.” I mean, Jesus Christ, it is the president of the United States, you’re making some big decisions here, he ought to be entitled to hear all of those viewpoints and not to be driven down a certain path.134

As another senior defense official noted, “Nobody listens to the State Department or the Defense Department. It’s all done inside the White House with people that are not equipped to make those kinds of decisions . . . we have had a less than optimum National Security Council system.”135 Derek Chollet, who oversaw Libya on behalf of the NSC, asserts that the NSC functioned somewhat better than in previous administrations, but still acknowledges: [W]hile Eisenhower empowered the National Security Council system . . . Obama never seemed to get his process to work as well as it could have. There always seemed to be an element of frustration that colored White

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House relationships with key cabinet players. After leaving office, Clinton, Gates, Leon Panetta and Chuck Hagel—who combined had well over a century of experience in Washington—all lamented how the White House handled decision-making.136

NSC principals believed that they were marginalized, or in some cases that they became a conduit for confirming prebaked decisions, rather than providing a forum for meaningful political-military coordination. This would make it more difficult to address the underlying trade-offs regarding Libya’s future, to handle the tension between promoting democracy and getting out, and to develop a coherent approach. As has been illustrated in previous chapters, the NSC’s dynamics often grow out of presidential leadership style. In this case the NSC’s evolution may have reflected President Obama’s implicit desire to avoid getting “boxed in” by the Pentagon (as he had felt during the 2009 Afghanistan deliberations), as well as his broader desire to fend off “establishment” foreign policy views that he believed were biased toward intervention.137 Chollet notes that the president “saw the Iraq War as a systemic failure in which the entire Washington establishment—Democratic and Republican politicians, foreign policy experts of all stripes, and the press—was responsible.”138 This may help explain why, regarding discussions over whether to take punitive military action against Syria for its chemical weapons “redline” violation, or whether to keep U.S. forces in Iraq beyond 2011, among other key foreign policy decisions, the recommendations provided by the secretary of state, secretary of defense, and senior military leadership seemed to have little connection to—and in fact might be the opposite of—the actual decisions arrived at by the White House.139 The president was predisposed to push away from what he viewed as a hawkish foreign policy establishment, and instead he repeatedly proved more comfortable with retrenchment, especially in the Middle East. The tendency toward White House centralization impeded the NSC’s ability to coordinate a coherent strategy. This made it difficult to undertake postwar planning for Libya in a meaningful way and to weigh the underlying trade-offs. Although ideally one would want to see an empowered NSC under a strong national security advisor vigorously coordinating political and military departments to shape presidential decisions—as occurred for Kosovo in the late 1990s—the NSC veered away from its core function.

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The NSC staff swelled in size, focused increasingly on operational matters, and was enveloped by the White House’s growing footprint. This hindered its ability to develop a coherent strategy for Libya. The fourth pathology entails crosscutting U.S. domestic political pressures that spur our leaders to withdraw quickly while still seeking to implant democracy. Polling at the time reflected a lack of enthusiasm for military involvement in Libya. A Gallup poll found significantly lower domestic public support for military action in Libya (47% approval in March 2011) compared to the invasion of Afghanistan (90% approval in October 2001) or the invasion of Iraq (76% approval in March 2003). In fact, the initial domestic support for military action in Libya was the softest out of any major U.S. military intervention in decades.140 With a reelection bid around the corner in 2012, the Obama administration had waded into treacherous political waters in even enmeshing itself in Libya in the first place. Thus, the prospect of undertaking a robust postwar effort may have seemed out of reach or, in military parlance, a bridge too far. Given that the public’s sobering reassessment of Iraq had helped catapult President Obama into office, it would entail substantial political risk for him to embark on a new commitment to postwar Libya. The president had come into office on a platform of extracting America from such wars, not starting new ones. These pressures tilted the administration toward a quick exit. Yet, as illustrated by aforementioned statements by the president, the secretary of state, and other officials, it was widely accepted that Qaddafi needed to exit and that a democratic Libya embodied the right outcome. Senior officials felt pressure to obtain statements from the NTC conveying its intent to establish a democracy, to help allay concerns about whether we were fighting for democracy or merely paving the way for a new dictator to emerge.141 Hence, although U.S. public opinion was predisposed toward a quick withdrawal, there was still an expectation of forging a path to democracy. These dueling pressures fueled ambivalence about how to proceed. Such crosscutting domestic pressures are a mainstay in nearly every limited U.S. war. It is up to senior officials to recognize and mitigate this by making tough decisions that usually create winners and losers. In the case of Libya, tough decisions were not made. Senior officials spoke of fostering a democratic Libya while they simultaneously remained committed

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to an absolute withdrawal. The administration sold the war to the public as a rapid emergency action to prevent a genocide but then had little idea what to do next and found itself gravitating toward more lofty ideas. This painted the administration into a rhetorical corner. By assuming minimal short-term risk and seeking to please all audiences, it increased the risk that Libya would falter in the near future. As is the case in every chapter of this book, there is no risk-free solution, despite a frequent desire to imagine one through magical thinking. If we truly wanted to promote democracy, then we had no choice but to invest meaningful political capital at home and abroad. Conversely, if the administration would never consider doing so, then that should have prompted it to leave Qaddafi in power (and, by extension, to accept the criticism that decision would spark) or to not intervene in the first place. We needed to align ends with means, but this never happened for Libya. In addition to the above elements, another explanation helps account for our poor planning for Libya—namely, a prevailing view that Libya simply was not that important. The United States had multiple other irons in the fire in early to mid 2011, both at home and abroad, and hardly wanted to assume the risk of a new, indefinite commitment in the perceived backwaters of Libya. In 2011, as the Libya crisis hit a crescendo, the United States was also managing unfolding events tied to the Arab Spring (including events in Syria), the status-of-forces deliberations for U.S. troops in Iraq, the secret planning for the upcoming Osama bin Laden raid, the response to Japan’s tsunami disaster, and a diplomatic crisis with Pakistan involving a detained American contractor, among other pressing issues.142 Given the many other issues swirling at the time and the almost universal agreement that Libya was “not at the core of our interests,” as the president said,143 the perceived need to disengage was strengthened. A common refrain echoed by many officials was that there was no “appetite” for a new, major commitment in Libya and that Libya was just not that important to U.S. interests.144 As an outgrowth, the degree of motivation for robust postwar planning was small. To bolster Libya’s seeming lack of importance, the Obama administration at the time was trying to disentangle itself from the Middle East as a whole. As events in Libya unfolded, the question of whether to completely withdraw our troops from Iraq (or, conversely, to push for a new status-of-forces agreement) was still churning, and it seemed to show how

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we could get stuck in the region far longer than anyone had anticipated. Obama strongly did not want to get bogged down in yet another Muslim country, particularly one that did not seem vital to our interests. This reflected a desire to turn the page on a decade of Middle Eastern wars and to free up resources for the intended pivot to Asia. Increased reliance on drones and special operations raids became perceived as low-cost tools to help enable a graceful exit from the region. But as the expression goes, you can choose to leave the theater, but the film reel keeps playing. Events in Libya would march on, potentially in a very negative direction, if the West helped eliminate Qaddafi’s regime only to abruptly depart. As a result, there might not be much to gain in Libya, but there certainly was a lot to lose. Ultimately, the United States seemed to care about Libya enough to try to save civilian lives and nudge Qaddafi out of power, but not enough to try to produce a decent lasting outcome. The above explanations help explain why adequate postwar planning did not occur, but one should also consider a few alternatives. First, is it possible that postwar planning was an impossible endeavor from the outset because the challenges in Libya were simply too big to overcome? From this perspective, creating a democracy in Libya might have been a nonstarter. However, despite many serious difficulties already described, in some ways Libya embodied one of the more manageable postwar landscapes in this book. Had we sought to mitigate the various challenges, invested political capital, and reframed Libya’s outcome as important to NATO’s credibility, it could have fostered a more adequate strategy. A secure, democratic Libya would not arise spontaneously largely because of the difficulty of introducing democracy to a land unfamiliar with it. So this left the United States—or no one—to assume a leading role. Given the skeptical opinions of Americans as reflected by polling data at the time, it would have entailed significant political risk on the part of the Obama administration to commit to a place that it deemed of only peripheral importance. Hence, if it found itself unwilling to do so, then that should probably have tipped the scales toward a narrow humanitarian goal (thereby leaving Qaddafi in power) or nonintervention (with a more aggressive pursuit of a diplomatic settlement). Both options would surely have created additional ripple effects of their own, some of which would have been quite negative. But if the Obama administration believed that a path to democracy was worth the risk, then it should have planned

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alongside its partners for a lasting commitment, while remaining mindful of the obstacles. The fact that this was not done was not because of the impossibility of devising such a plan. Instead, such high-level planning was not even attempted. Events took shape in the manner they did as an outgrowth of choices made, and especially not made. Related to this, is it possible that countries in the broader Middle East and North Africa simply cannot be democratized at acceptable cost, and this rendered postwar planning all but impossible to undertake? Well, despite a plethora of difficulties, Libya also had some encouraging characteristics upon which the United States could have capitalized, including a relatively small, homogenous, well-educated, geographically consolidated population, along with proximity to Europe. Further, the “generally pro-American” sentiments among some Libyans pushes back against the presumption that Muslim or Arab populations are wholly xenophobic toward the West.145 As the intervention unfolded, U.S. and British flags were reportedly being made and sold in Benghazi.146 Upon meeting with rebel fighters on Libyan soil in the fall of 2011, Hillary Clinton recalls crowds of Libyans cheering, enthusiastically shouting “USA!” and asking for photos with her.147 Libya did not embody a country that was universally anti-American or hostile to democracy. There were positive signs that some Libyans looked approvingly on the United States and sincerely wanted help in establishing a path to democracy, for they had no experience with it themselves. Hence, it is true that the broader Middle East and North Africa presented undeniable challenges, but there were also a few opportunities. These dynamics might have been incorporated into a coherent plan for Libya, had we earnestly sought to do so. Is it possible the amount of planning time embodies a key explanation? In other words, did the surprising nature of the conflict’s outbreak hinder our ability to conduct good planning? It is true that, like the case of Afghanistan, we were mostly caught flat-footed at the beginning of hostilities in Libya. However, after the first few chaotic weeks, there elapsed several months in which deliberate planning could have taken place. During this period, battlefield events quieted down, and Q+1 planning occurred among junior and mid-level officials but did not gain traction at higher levels. There was indeed time to conduct planning over the seven-month conflict, yet this time was not used effectively. It would have

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taken effort and leadership to push back against the natural momentum to focus on other priorities, but there is no reason to conclude that doing so was unfeasible. Although there were competing demands for the administration’s attention, we hardly exhausted all our resources. The minimal amount of senior-level effort devoted to postwar Libya suggests that it embodied an afterthought rather than a crucial priority the administration strongly wanted to tackle but simply lacked the time or ability to do so. After the initial fear of a massacre at Benghazi dissipated, there was more than ample time to address the three planning tasks. The fact that this did not happen does not boil down to the amount of planning time. Instead, the factors discussed earlier better account for what unfolded.

Aftermath Now we can briefly touch on the postwar events that actually transpired, and Libya’s subsequent outcome, to help complete the historical picture. Qaddafi’s death in October 2011 occurred at the close of NATO’s sevenmonth air campaign, and this was followed by a brief period of optimism and self-congratulation. Early on, there was progress on a few fronts that contributed to an initial sense of hopefulness. Quickly organized elections held in July 2012 delivered seemingly promising results, as an encouraging 62 percent of registered Libyans voted.148 However, the crucial security and governing institutions were not in place to handle a rapid democratic transformation. After a roughly eight-month “honeymoon” period from late October 2011 to July 2012, Libya descended into violence. The NTC demonstrated it had little influence over the disparate militias that had fought Qaddafi and that it could not handle the outpouring of long-suppressed tribal, geographic, Islamic, and other sentiments.149 Armed militias roamed Libya’s streets, loose weapons flooded the region, and rival governments sought to claim preeminence over an increasingly unstable country. During this period the United States continued to abide by the idea that it could limit itself by providing only those unique capabilities that others lacked, as it had done during the military campaign.150 Hence, we took the lead in narrowly construed efforts, such as helping recover a portion of the weapons and ammunition strewn across Libya

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(particularly shoulder-fired antiaircraft MANPADS missiles) and monitoring cleanup of a mustard gas storage site.151 But the United States did not act as the nucleus for postwar Libya in the way it had during the military campaign, and no other credible, legitimate actor took charge. General Ham, the commander of AFRICOM, recalls that “we took our eye off the ball too quickly. We said, OK, the civilians in Benghazi are safe; Qaddafi is dead. . . . Europe you got it, and we diverted our attention elsewhere,” whereas instead the United States might have, with some “additional attention and focus . . . helped Libya be in a very different place than it is today.”152 The September 2012 attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi resulted in the death of Ambassador Stevens and jarred the political tectonic plates in the United States. This attack catapulted Libya back into American headlines and became fodder for political attacks over an extended period.153 The resulting firestorm overshadowed the actual events still unfolding on the ground, and Libya’s future faded further into the background. The attack enflamed U.S. public opinion and made it even less likely any robust postwar effort would come together, as the already slim prospects for a renewed international commitment diminished even further. It is tragically ironic that the fierce U.S. domestic blowback generated by the 2012 Benghazi attack may have outweighed the risk that would have been incurred by simply mobilizing an international stabilization force from the start. The overall outcome in Libya proved deeply disappointing. Postwar Libya became plagued by an alarming degree of violence, political instability, rival governments, parallel security forces at odds with one another, fleeing refugees, worsening economic conditions, hundreds of armed groups with varying ideologies, loose stockpiles of arms and ammunition, uncontrolled borders, and the establishment of the single largest ISIS sanctuary outside Iraq and Syria, among other serious problems (including the Libyan prime minister’s kidnapping).154 President Obama would later candidly acknowledge that postwar Libya became “a mess” and in private reportedly referred to the situation more bluntly as a “shit show,” particularly in light of the creation of a major ISIS stronghold on the Libyan coastline.155 To NATO’s credit, we should note that the feared humanitarian disaster in eastern Libya did not occur, and the intervention successfully deposed Qaddafi with minimal expenditure of American resources, at

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a total U.S. price tag of roughly $1 billion.156 Also, unlike in Iraq and Afghanistan, the series of events did not result in the death of thousands of U.S. service members on foreign soil, which is an important point. However, the chaotic aftermath led President Obama to concede that the overall intervention “didn’t work,”157 as it unambiguously failed to bring about “an inclusive and tolerant and democratic Libya that stands as the ultimate rebuke to Qaddafi’s dictatorship” that he had articulated.158 As Libya devolved into a failed state and a deluge of weapons spilled beyond its borders, the West found itself striving to maintain a postwar Libya that was merely “unstable but not catastrophic,” in Dirk Vandewalle’s words.159 The resulting migrant crisis had a particularly significant impact on Europe. Postwar Libya fell almost completely off the rails, and this accounts for why President Obama regarded it as his administration’s biggest foreign policy misstep. Although in subsequent years the president still insisted he made the right decision in intervening, it is at least conceivable that he later regretted his decision but could not bring himself to publicly acknowledge it, so he put the blame more narrowly on the planning itself. All that being said, as in the previous cases, subsequent decisions regarding Libya still could make a difference. Libya’s chaotic aftermath, particularly the 2012 Benghazi attack, became political dynamite that lingered for years. But throughout the subsequent period of breathless accusations and selective outrage, a central, truly important puzzle was overlooked. The Libya conflict raised a crucial question that was eerily familiar in light of earlier errors in Afghanistan and Iraq: why did we once again fail to prepare for what would come next? This chapter has explored this puzzle and has provided explanations centered on the recurring pathologies, as well as Libya’s perceived lack of importance. These dynamics all connect back to the tension between promoting democracy and getting out, which represents the central trade-off that officials routinely ignore. The fact that this was a humanitarian intervention with seemingly low stakes, low public support, and an improvisational character helped lessen the chances that our leaders would confront the tough underlying choices. As an outgrowth, we developed no coherent plan for what would follow. We never marshaled what it would take to foster a viable way forward and never tackled the hard questions. Postwar Libya was not easy by any stretch of the imagination. But it represented a more manageable challenge than either postwar Afghanistan

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or Iraq. The military campaign shared a few similarities with both Kosovo and Afghanistan in that we orchestrated a low-cost air campaign in support of local ground forces with the benefit of widespread international support. There were many challenges that could unravel Libya’s postwar landscape. However, we had a plethora of previous post-conflict experiences that could have helped inform our way forward. A different approach might have improved the odds of a better endgame. What began as a no-fly zone to prevent a potential massacre in northeastern Libya expanded into a far grander project without laying the groundwork for what would follow. The case of Libya did not entail senior levels of the U.S. government striving to undertake postwar planning and falling short. Instead, it entailed a lack of effort altogether and a sidestepping of the tough underlying decisions. Ultimately, Libya was a war of choice. We could have chosen to stay out of Libya, allowed a potential massacre to unfold, and then braced ourselves for the inevitable Rwanda-like criticisms. Or we could have chosen to intervene with a strictly humanitarian goal, resigned ourselves to Qaddafi’s continued rule, and braced for the inevitable post–Gulf War-like criticisms. But another path was also possible. The United States could have declared that Qaddafi was no longer a legitimate leader and then announced that the coalition would take the plunge to create a new political order in Libya. This would have entailed spearheading an enduring international commitment in a manner roughly analogous to Kosovo. It would have required convincing the American public to (reluctantly) go along with a multinational stabilization force, entailing tens of thousands of troops from the United States, NATO, and Arab partners working together. Doing so could have sought to stabilize Tripoli, Benghazi, and other key cities during the turbulent transition window. We could have also strongly pushed the UN to govern Libya for an interim period—again, similar to Kosovo—in order to allow new Libyan institutions to gradually take shape out of Qaddafi’s shadow, in a way that embraced burden sharing. To be sure, this would have required a major diplomatic push to assuage Russia (like our effort during Kosovo) and to spearhead an international commitment lasting many years. Such an approach would have involved tangible costs, including political risk to President Obama’s reelection bid in 2012, with no guarantee of success. But it probably offered the only realistic path to

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democracy, which was the aspiration repeatedly articulated by Obama and other officials at the time. The president could have pitched such an effort as a successful example of multilateralism and burden sharing that would reinforce NATO’s relevance in the twenty-first century. And while this approach would have required U.S. leadership to pull off, it would not have required us to take exclusive ownership of Libya, satisfying Obama’s strong desire. From the conflict’s opening days, the central trade-offs were seemingly recognized by Secretary Gates, Admiral Mullen, and others who argued that, if not adequately addressed, the underlying vagueness (or gradual slippage) of goals might culminate in strategic failure. Yet we still tried to find an untenable middle ground that cherry-picked the most attractive elements from each path and combined them in a single risk-free approach. The resulting approach shot for the stars by striving to undertake a limited intervention that could save civilian lives, topple Qaddafi, and replace his regime with a new democracy but could do so in a way that required little sustained effort, leadership, or lasting commitment. This magical thinking was a deeply flawed approach for the world’s superpower. It paved the way for another instance of winning the battle but losing the peace. The most important “unique capability” that the United States possessed in Libya was our global leadership: our singular ability to mobilize and lead an international commitment over an extended period. This capability went unused in postwar Libya. Michael Hess, who was deeply involved in planning efforts for Bosnia, Kosovo, and Iraq, notes that “we had an administration that did not want to get involved. We wanted to stand back and let somebody else lead this. But there is nobody else who can lead this.”160 America’s approach centered on the optimistic idea that other actors would take charge once hostilities ended. It took solace in the key assumption that the Europeans, the Arab League, and Libyan rebels (known as “thuwwar,” self-described revolutionaries) would collectively pick up the pieces and lay the foundation for a democratic Libya as the Arab Spring swept across the region. Senior officials expected that “others were going to pick up the ball” and that a sharply limited intervention could “enable their success,” as Under Secretary of Defense Flournoy recalls.161 There was nothing inherently misguided about promoting

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multilateralism and burden sharing to enhance the intervention’s legitimacy; to the contrary, there is much to praise regarding such aims. These elements should have been integral to the postwar plan, just as they were in Kosovo. But when it came to securing the peace, a credible, legitimate actor needed to take charge of the overall effort in the critical early stages. As the world’s superpower, the United States failed to assume that leading role, and no one else did. And there was no fallback plan. Ironically, despite a fervent desire to proceed along a different course, the Obama administration ultimately made errors similar to those committed by the Bush administration. Like its predecessor, the Obama administration became swept up in wishful thinking, bolstered by the view that quickly unfolding events were historically unique. It severely underestimated the difficulty of implanting democracy after regime change, and it embraced heroic assumptions of what would unfold in a country that it did not see as inherently important. The excessive reliance on exiles, the lofty forecasts about oil, and other elevated predictions were strikingly reminiscent of the Bush administration’s dreamy visions of postwar Iraq. This is especially puzzling given that Barack Obama won the presidency in large part because of his strong opposition to the Iraq war. But this only underscores how similar dilemmas, particularly the trade-off tied to promoting democracy versus quickly getting out, can incapacitate an administration. We had a brief period of maximum leverage during the military campaign when local and international actors might have been persuaded to follow our lead. Yet the window of opportunity was squandered, increasing the odds that a debacle would unfold. In time, Libya’s perceived importance would grow as it descended into chaos, generating devastating effects locally, across the region, in Europe, and even domestically in the United States. As in Afghanistan and Iraq, our bungled handling of postwar Libya helped snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.162 The cumulative blowback from these three wars helped foster significant disenchantment by sizable parts of the U.S. public. Many Americans became justifiably disillusioned with the disappointing results of multiple conflicts in faraway lands, undertaken by administrations of both political parties. This provoked questions about whether the United States could ever use force effectively, and it deepened the calls for American retrenchment and isolationism.

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As major historical changes unfolded in subsequent years at home and abroad, our global leadership role was increasingly called into question. This even raised previously unthinkable questions such as whether America would continue to lead the post-1945 international order and whether we would still seek to uphold democracy in any capacity. As of this writing, the answer to both questions seems up in the air, a situation that would have been totally inconceivable just a few short years ago. With all this in mind, when we step back to take a holistic view of all of these recent wars, what broad lessons should we learn?

Conclusion To Learn or Not to Learn

In war the result is never final. Carl von Clausewitz, On War

Our accumulation of postwar debacles since 2001 has had staggering impacts. As a nation, we’ve found ourselves groping in the dark for a solution to the disasters we helped create. But in addition to the many costs previously described, our blunders in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya had another pernicious effect. They further polarized our national discourse and rattled confidence regarding America’s role in world affairs. The desperate search for answers helped open the door to arguments that perhaps the traditional pillars of our foreign policy should be dismantled or discarded. Hence, we have seen a revival of fringe attitudes regarding global affairs that had been mostly dormant since before America’s entry into World War II. Some have sought to cast off the liberal international order, painstakingly built, that helped underpin economic development, democratization, and the avoidance of major war in Europe and Asia since 1945. Previously unthinkable questions have garnered attention, such as whether we will continue to uphold this rules-based system that helped

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solidify our place as a global superpower for more than seventy years. At the same time, American democracy itself is currently confronting the most serious external and internal threats that it has faced in generations. Just as many Americans seemed to take for granted the ease of implanting democracy abroad, many have also taken for granted the ease of sustaining democracy here at home. In this dangerous landscape, the future seems highly uncertain. How did we get here? How did we get to this extraordinary historical moment, in which our commitment to democracy is now legitimately in question and America’s role in the world is subject to doubt? This state of affairs has multiple causes. But our repeated post-9/11 misadventures played a key role. For this reason, diagnosing the root cause of our postwar missteps is both extremely necessary and urgent. As an infantry officer who has led troops in combat over multiple deployments, I’ve seen some of the immediate life-and-death consequences up close in Afghanistan and Iraq. Because I’ve had skin in the game, perhaps I should acknowledge that I am not a totally dispassionate observer. I remain proud that my grandfathers fought the tide of fascism to defend our way of life, and I feel honored to have sworn an oath to support and defend the U.S. Constitution and to serve alongside countless brave and dedicated service members. Hence, I believe in America’s core ideals and principles, and I genuinely want to see our country succeed and make smart decisions. But tragically, we have repeatedly fallen short, especially in our recent wars. And this has triggered deeply damaging consequences. In a classic 1993 episode of The Simpsons, Sideshow Bob steps on a rake. The handle flips up and hits him in the face. Sideshow Bob adjusts his path and steps on another rake with a similar result. He then forges ahead again and again, and ultimately gets struck in the face nine times, oblivious to the fact that rakes litter the ground all around him. This scenario bears an uncanny resemblance to our actions in recent wars. Each initial battlefield victory created a unique chance for us to try to impose our will. But we made similar mistakes, again and again, across multiple wars and administrations. We focused on the battle instead of the endgame. In Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya we failed to develop a viable, coherent strategy, and there was an “inadequate level of attention paid to the ‘what after,’” as General Carter Ham put it.1 In the years that followed, Presidents Bush and Obama admitted to mishandling the postwar

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phase.2 But why did we step on the rake over and over? What were the “plans” that got us into these messes? Were there any plans at all? And what were the people in charge thinking at the time? These questions deserve a fresh set of answers. This book has sought to illuminate the crucial topic of postwar planning by offering a new theory and by integrating new, candid interviews with the participants themselves. It has also incorporated fresh analysis of declassified planning documents along with my own perspective as someone with experience on the ground. In this book I’ve proposed that common root causes were at work. First off, we did not invest nearly enough senior-level attention and energy into preparing for the day after. But to the extent we did think about what should happen next, a tension emerged between whether to promote democracy or to quickly pack up and go home. Rather than make difficult choices, we tried to do both. As the existing political order was swept away by the tide of war, we sought to obtain everything on our wish list and keep everyone happy. This created a chasm between maximalist ends and minimalist means. Our exercise in self-delusion helped unleash chaos over and over again. Today, this problem is more urgent than ever. A brief look at a few national security challenges reveals familiar dilemmas. For example, in the aftermath of battlefield victories against ISIS, what is our coherent strategy to secure the peace and prevent the emergence of a revitalized caliphate, or ISIS 2.0 or 3.0, in the years to come? What should the day after in Syria look like? What about if we toppled Kim Jong-un’s regime in North Korea, or the regime in Iran? Or in Venezuela? Do we have a clear-eyed view of what would follow and the challenges that would quickly emerge? It seems difficult to understand how anyone could be eager to undertake additional colossal projects in light of our recent track record and all we have gotten wrong. Yet we still occasionally hear casual discussion about some of these scenarios in ways that almost make it seem we have learned nothing, and we appear eager to step on the rake once again. There is a real danger that we will take our recent wars and cognitively try to flush them down the tubes. In Learning to Forget, David Fitzgerald addresses how that is precisely what the U.S. Army did after the Vietnam War. The Army sought to pivot in another direction and expunge much of what had been learned the hard way. We would pay a steep price for that

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decades later, in post-Saddam Iraq, when similar battlefield challenges arose and our forces were woefully unprepared.3 Today, a shift in focus to other shiny objects might provide a similar alluring opportunity for our nation to pivot to other challenges and thereby avoid reckoning with our recent past. Perhaps the most obvious way to escape this dilemma in the future would be to avoid regime change altogether. Particularly in the case of Iraq, this would have been the smartest course of action. However, during a crisis our leaders may feel enormous pressure to “do something.” A limited intervention may soon grow a life of its own. Our leaders may not realize when they cross the threshold of regime change and the repercussions that can generate. We need to think more seriously about what it truly takes to win the peace and let that inform our decisions about military intervention from the beginning. This book has not provided a cookie-cutter answer, but it has given us a blueprint to begin to figure things out. When deciding whether or how to use force, this book makes a unique contribution by proposing we should tackle three planning tasks to help bring ends and means into closer alignment. At first blush the tasks may appear elementary. Yet, as Clausewitz states, “Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult.”4 Kosovo was a rare case of modest success. It occurred after the Clinton administration had already endured the 1990s school of hard knocks. Over multiple arduous interventions, these officials became more pragmatic and willing to make hard decisions rather than abiding by a postwar pipe dream. But by the time 9/11 occurred, a new administration was in charge and proved eager to sweep previous lessons under the rug. The debacles in Afghanistan and Iraq came in quick succession and built on one another. Then years later in Libya, another administration fell victim to similar pitfalls while trying to pivot in the opposite direction. Our leaders need to confront trade-offs in an intellectually honest way. The case of Kosovo illustrates how we did a satisfactory job lowering our sights to more realistic aims. Tackling the three tasks in this way can help begin to translate battlefield victories into lasting political progress. Doing so will rarely entail a clean “victory” in the traditional sense that most Americans might imagine; it will usually be a long slog with no guarantees. Yet if such a protracted endgame is not palatable, then it might be best not to even embark on war in the first place.

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Was Kosovo simply “easy”? It certainly helped that Kosovo was located in Europe. It was also small in population and geography, and had a somewhat different type of coercive regime. Further, enforcing the peace was made easier by essentially partitioning the population, alongside the fact that our goals in Kosovo largely dovetailed with local desires. But hindsight bias can paper over the dilemmas we confronted in Kosovo that were like those confronted elsewhere. If we had sought to merely “liberate” Kosovo and step out of the way, its trajectory would have likely been far worse. In the next three war zones, we encountered vast difficulties, but we also had some opportunities. In Afghanistan we benefited from enormous freedom of action because of 9/11, with overwhelming support at home and abroad. In Iraq we had years to prepare and could have learned from our previous war against Saddam. And in Libya we had full knowledge of all that had gone wrong previously. But we failed to leverage these opportunities, and as an outgrowth, we helped create chaos.

What Should We Learn from All This? There is no paint-by-numbers method to guarantee postwar success. However, a few lessons can help inform our judgment on vital questions of war and peace. I hope the following insights might prove useful to all those who want us to do better and avoid future disasters. First, if there were any doubt about the difficulty of postwar planning, hopefully this book has dispelled it. Postwar planning is hard, and lasting success is rare. It is hard because it involves uncomfortable choices that we do not want to make, so the easy answer is to bypass the choices altogether. One former senior defense official stated that the Obama administration “never set any political objectives or goals [for Libya]; they never laid out a strategy. They always simply said ‘Give me options,’ . . . so you made up your own guidance; you guessed at it.”5 We routinely want to create a new democracy in the ashes of war but without undertaking the heavy lifting it takes to pull it off. The result is lofty rhetoric about forming a democracy without the planning and resources needed. Hence, we plan for a postwar cakewalk. When our prestige and leverage are at a high point near the end of major combat, it creates a fleeting window in which to shape the new

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order. Whether we take advantage of this moment generates lasting impacts. If we fail to do so, it is a huge missed opportunity, making the mountain to climb steeper and the odds of success smaller. This does not mean there will be a single, uninterrupted line from planning to outcomes. We are not all-powerful, and other factors can certainly affect outcomes too. It is also possible that one administration may get things mostly on track, but the next administration bungles the followthrough. To make matters worse, we often find ourselves going to war in “hard” places that already suffer from poor conditions, which heightens the difficulty. Because all of this is so tough, good outcomes will be rare, especially when the political stakes are not perceived as high. Second, we should beware of magical thinking. After 9/11, emotion acquired even greater sway over our national dialogue. In retrospect, it can be easy to forget just how swept up many Americans were by our quick military victory in Afghanistan. It can also be easy to forget the widespread optimism regarding the Arab Spring as we intervened in Libya. On the whole, we went into Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya with a starry-eyed attitude toward the postwar phase that could be described as hakuna matata (“no worries”). We eagerly embraced hubris multiple times. A senior defense official involved in Afghanistan and Iraq told me that “one of the most important things that you have to do is assume the worst possible outcome.”6 We should spend more time considering worst-case scenarios that entail a perfect storm of governance, security, and economic crises occurring simultaneously. Our leaders should not only identify the foreseeable obstacles but also develop concrete steps to head them off at the pass. This must include skepticism of too-good-to-be-true accounts provided by exiles, despite their occasionally positive intentions. We must also probe intelligence gaps rather than paper them over. In short, we should prepare for a postwar that is much harder than the war itself. Although it can be natural to hope for the best, you shouldn’t plan to climb Everest by packing shorts and flip-flops. It is wiser to prepare for the worst and then be pleasantly surprised if things are easier than expected. Or don’t bother trying to climb Everest at all. Third, we need to learn from history. A new administration often comes on board with implicit maxims of “anything but Clinton” or “anything but Bush” that prompt it to toss out the good along with the bad. We

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have been too eager to jettison earlier lessons, paving the way for doubling down on previous mistakes or making old mistakes in new ways. Even if major errors were made by the previous team, there were also usually at least some positive choices or useful course corrections that we should acknowledge as well. In Afghanistan we could have studied the recent 1990s interventions in detail, among other experiences. But instead we airbrushed them out of history with the notion that the pre-9/11 world represented “old think.” Iraq followed on the heels of Afghanistan, and our leaders doubled down on Afghanistan errors while also ignoring useful Gulf War lessons. In Libya our leaders should have closely studied all the above experiences, but they became transfixed by a desire to avoid another Iraq at all costs and rejected conventional wisdom as tainted by the foreign policy establishment. In whatever time is available, we should avoid the temptation to learn only from recent, negative events. In the case of Kosovo, our leaders did this fairly well. After a rocky road in the 1990s, Clinton administration officials learned about the need to craft achievable, sustainable outcomes, as well as how to improve interagency coordination. The Kosovo war occurred well into the Clinton administration’s second term, when it had relatively mature systems, substantial experience, and deeper understanding of the weight of its decisions.7 Similarly, by President Bush’s second term, key lessons began to seep in, which contributed to better decision making for the Iraq surge. But in other instances our leaders may not have such experience. So they will need to study history rather than think of themselves as smarter than everyone who came before. They might also tap into career civil servants and others who have relevant experience and insight. When a crisis looms, time to think is often limited, and leaders may struggle to think about history in a rigorous way. But it can be done. During the thirteen-day Cuban missile crisis, the Kennedy administration was able to briefly reflect on the outbreak of World War I, Pearl Harbor, the Berlin blockade, and other relevant historical events in mostly appropriate ways.8 When facing a crisis today, we should leverage history in a similarly thoughtful way. As a fourth lesson, we should empower our NSC. Postwar issues exist in a gray area between war and peace that puts our government

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in uncomfortable territory.9 Departments and agencies will usually try to move along separate paths. But for an endeavor as complex as postwar strategy, they must bring their efforts together. Unfortunately, in recent wars the NSC has failed in its vital role. In the Bush administration’s NSC, for example, the president conceded that “what started as creative tension had turned destructive,” Rumsfeld remarked that there were “far too many hands on the steering wheel,” and Powell reportedly expressed that the national security process was “not functional” when he submitted his resignation in 2004.10 Accounts from Obama administration officials, particularly Gates and Panetta, conveyed similarly negative sentiments. In more recent times the degree of incoherence at the NSC has soared to astonishing new heights. In contrast, the NSC of the late 1990s under Sandy Berger gets consistently high marks from officials at the time, in large part because of its discipline and the improvements made throughout that decade. The NSC may find that it discusses postwar issues on occasion but is not relied on to drive interagency decision making. This has been exacerbated by a “long-term trend of consolidation of decision-making power within the White House,” in the words of David Rothkopf,11 which magnifies the challenge. The solution is not to create parallel structures, or a shadow NSC, or other new ad hoc coordination bodies, all of which can be tempting. Such makeshift creations can foster an “Over to you, Jay”12 attitude, in which core issues are tossed to a peripheral entity as an afterthought. This type of “tag, you’re it” approach is likely to fail. It is also risky to hand the entire postwar effort to the Pentagon in an attempt to streamline accountability. Although the Pentagon will usually have a major postwar role, it demonstrated in both Afghanistan and Iraq planning that it is not inclined to integrate security efforts with other political, diplomatic, and economic lines of effort (unless perhaps we were to go to the extreme of creating a temporary MacArthur-like U.S. military dictatorship abroad, as we did in postwar Japan). In fact, in both Afghanistan and Iraq the State Department’s postwar assessment proved more prescient than that of the Pentagon. The structure is already in place, but the NSC needs to be empowered as the hub of coordination. NSC deputies and staff should develop a coherent strategy that the principals refine to guide the president’s decisions. Perfect harmony is not the goal; there should be healthy debate and

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disagreement. But if the NSC relinquishes this responsibility, it can result in compartmentalization and paralysis. The national security advisor has an especially tough job. If some officials refuse to cooperate, then he or she should go directly to the president to insist that intervention is needed to break the logjam and reassert the NSC’s authority. Failing to do so can allow dysfunction to become the norm. This can marginalize the NSC and doom the chances of a coherent strategy. Fifth, we must recognize that trying to please everyone will not work. Postwar strategy involves choices that create winners and losers. There may be some techniques to soften the blow slightly, but our leadership will eventually assume political risk whether it wants to or not. A former government official said that we’ve found ourselves “more than happy to sort of dust off our hands and call it a victory and move on,” which might please audiences in the short term but set the stage for serious long-term problems.13 The Eisenhower administration’s Project Solarium established rival teams in government to develop competing strategies. This was a useful way to frame trade-offs for the president. Although it is not the only approach that would work, there must be some deliberate effort to evaluate risks in a rigorous way. Other techniques such as red teaming, devil’s advocate, or murder boards might also be of some benefit, although leaders may sometimes come to perceive them as gimmicks and disregard their feedback.14 These policy choices are incredibly hard. Each choice can provoke a firestorm of criticism, and there is no obvious right answer because values and judgment come into play. However, there are certainly some wrong answers. One wrong answer is to glide cavalierly through these decisions and assume that everything will be easy. Another wrong answer is to cherry-pick the most alluring pieces of alternative paths and blend them into a fanciful wish list. Our leaders may try to engineer new offshoots that amount to “well, maybe” or “a little of both” or “let’s dip our toe in the water and see what happens.” Such indecisiveness increases the odds of disaster. It would be easy to adopt a naive view that domestic politics are inherently dark and nefarious, and that they must be stripped out of these decisions altogether. Yet democratically elected leaders will always be sensitive

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to politics because these pressures affect their own survival. The pressures will often be especially acute in limited wars because the public may question whether the war zone is worth an enduring commitment. With that said, the president can affect public opinion via the bully pulpit. Hence, if a president decides to embark on democratization, then he or she will need to craft a compelling story that braces the public for a long-term commitment and makes the sacrifices seem worthwhile. Conversely, if the administration decides to forgo democracy, then that will generate other political costs as well. A sixth lesson is we need to avoid check-the-block planning. Often we focus attention on immediate postwar tasks, such as avoiding humanitarian disasters, managing refugee resettlement, or repairing war damage. These short-term efforts are certainly important, but they cannot constitute the entirety of a postwar strategy. Doing so can confuse motion with progress by providing comfort that “sure, Mr. President, we’ve got Phase IV covered,” when in fact the planning is happening only at a superficial level. Rumsfeld’s “Parade of Horribles” memo was a textbook example of outlining a laundry list of things that could go wrong, but without deep thought as to how to address the underlying risks. Another check-the-block pitfall is to hand things off to an entity such as ORHA and assume it can just take the ball and run with it. Leaders must be deeply engaged because postwar strategy involves hard political choices. Forming a makeshift task force by gathering a handful of smart people, locking them in a room, and expecting them to come up with a good strategy in virtual isolation can create a false sense of accomplishment. Deliberations at middle tiers must feed into a broader process. As Leonard Hawley stated, “The planning has to be wrapped around the decision-making tree just like a vine wraps around the trunk of a tree— if it’s not part of the decision-making process, then it’s useless and it’ll be marginalized.”15 Hence, we should be wary of check-the-block planning—in both psychological and organizational forms—that sidesteps tough decisions. On a similar note, we must also beware of goal gliding and end slippage. Unforeseen events and new information should prompt fresh analysis of plans and assumptions. Minor changes are normal to deal with fluid conditions, but a change in the overall political goal should happen only with extraordinary care. As battlefield progress occurs, our confidence

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levels often rise, and leaders can be tempted to move the goalposts. By the time the foreign capital falls, the seemingly clear goal at the war’s outset may be hazy in the rearview mirror, and the allure of creating a new democracy on the cheap becomes more compelling than ever. This type of goal gliding or end slippage unfolded to varying extents in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya.16 Sticking with a consistent goal is easy in theory but tough in practice. A poker player might insist he will bet only a few dollars at the start of the night but, after winning a big hand, finds himself intoxicated and betting the farm. Presidents can also become trapped by their own rhetoric as they use elevated language to sell the war to a skeptical public, but before it sinks in that it will require a lasting commitment. In Kosovo we remained disciplined: we aimed for a modest target and were content to hit that target. Overall, Kosovo entailed a degree of strategic discipline similar in some ways to that exhibited during the Gulf War. As our attention gravitates toward short-term developments, we must strive to see the forest for the trees and diligently guard against goal gliding. If the end slips, the means will almost certainly need to change, and the obstacles that could get in the way will require renewed analysis as well. This cascade of changes across all three tasks suggests that a change in the overall goal should occur only with exceptional caution. This brings us to perhaps the most important lesson of all: we should be highly selective in choosing when to topple a regime in the first place and do so only when the conditions offer a reasonable chance of a decent outcome. Of the four wars discussed in this book, only Afghanistan could arguably be considered a war of necessity, largely because of the unprecedented nature of the 9/11 attacks. The other three were all wars of choice. We do not have the resources or political will to deploy to every hot spot around the world to decapitate regimes and establish democracy everywhere. That would be folly. Our discourse should foster spirited debate over whether going to war is worth the associated costs and risks, especially if we have little interest in investing in the endgame. Since 9/11, our threshold for going to war has been low. In 2011 alone we were engaged in three limited conflicts simultaneously (Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya) at various stages of execution, and we did not seem to have a coherent strategy for any of them. As mentioned in chapter 4, Robert Gates asked rhetorically regarding Libya, “Can I just finish the

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two wars we’re already in before you go looking for new ones?”17 There is a need for greater selectivity in order to avoid creating major new projects to manage while the existing efforts remain in limbo. International involvement of friends and allies is absolutely important and worthwhile, for burden sharing can help defray costs and enhance a mission’s legitimacy. Yet it can be a double-edged sword if it takes the pressure off us to develop a realistic plan. In Libya a senior defense official recalls, “We didn’t want to own this problem; we wanted it to be an international problem. We just wanted to break the glass and get the hell out of there.”18 We should not count on others to take the lead if we intend to take a pass ourselves. Once the world’s superpower is engaged militarily, it is not safe to assume that someone else will clean up our mess. Greater selectivity can preclude having to manage places like postwar Iraq in the first place so that we can concentrate more energy on fewer efforts over time. If we were only trying to manage postwar Libya by itself, that would have been a tall order, but postwar Libya stacked on top of Afghanistan on top of Iraq made it almost inevitable we would drop at least one ball, if not two or three. We also must be wary of the temptation to embark on war without acknowledging we are doing so. This can impede the realization that we crossed a threshold that should trigger postwar planning. In Libya, for example, our leaders embarked on a series of half-steps that ultimately added up to regime change. From the outset, we should be alert to such mission creep. The psychological dividing line between “war” and “postwar” can also be a related barrier that hinders our judgment.19 We must always keep in mind the endgame that we intend to achieve and how we will realistically get there. Throughout this process, the role of the president matters. If the 9/11 attacks had occurred on Bill Clinton’s watch, or if Al Gore had won the 2000 election, our actions in Afghanistan and Iraq almost certainly would have unfolded quite differently, among many other possible counterfactuals. The specific people confronting these challenges can make an enormous difference. Leaders set priorities, make choices, and drive the process forward. And ultimately, our national security apparatus answers to the president, who is the most important person at the top of the pyramid. As General Anthony Zinni put it, “I don’t think presidents have realized that that’s their obligation. When they make a decision, they have

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to follow that up with . . . the development of a strategy [and a national narrative]. . . . When that doesn’t happen, the military is forced to create one, and that has never worked out.”20 Presidents must recognize their inherent responsibility to deeply engage in strategy, to promote intellectually honest debate, and to make tough decisions. The postwar ship needs a reliable captain who is firmly in charge. When we do not have that, we are in trouble. And this brings us to our final lesson: securing the peace will take a while. As General Wesley Clark states, “There are only two kinds of plans . . . plans that might work and plans that won’t work. There’s no such thing as the perfect plan. You have to take a plan that might work and make it work.”21 Execution normally carries on for years or decades after the end of major combat, and in a certain sense, it is not a discrete event that ever truly “ends.” Promoting democracy generally cannot be attained by an arbitrary date or by simply holding elections on a rigid time line and then coasting on cruise control. It is a long-term enterprise. Yet it is where true, lasting “victory” usually lies. Even today, the fate of all four of these postwar landscapes could change significantly based on unfolding events. Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya could each experience major backsliding or progress, so subsequent events and choices still matter. Thus, we should avoid a fatalistic view that the cake is baked by the time the tyrant falls or a certain benchmark transpires. Our follow-through matters a great deal too, so we must remain responsive to changing local conditions.

A Few Myths It is also worth highlighting a few myths before wrapping things up. This book has implicitly dispelled a few misperceptions that many Americans have about this topic. The first myth is the idea that we can create a democracy fast and on the cheap, even in a fractured, repressed society. It would be deeply misguided to believe we were only inches away from creating a Jeffersonian democracy in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Libya and if we had just done one or two small things differently, the outcomes would have been glorious. In truth, establishing a viable path to democracy in any of these places would

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have taken a major, sustained commitment for any chance of a decent result, but our leaders didn’t acknowledge what would be required and never bothered to truly understand the local conditions. In the case of Kosovo, we showed up to the marathon start line as a world-class athlete: trained, tested, and ready to confront most of the challenges that might arise. But in the next three war zones, we showed up drunk, overconfident, and missing our running shoes while believing if we just sprinted a few seconds and handed off the baton, victory was assured. However, there was no one ready to take the baton from us. After toppling the regime, we found ourselves attempting a handoff to nobody. It is deeply unhelpful for Americans to continue to believe we can forge a democracy with minimal time and effort. It takes a robust, protracted effort to stabilize a broken, war-torn country; establish a functional civil society; and nurture legitimate, capable institutions over time. To even have a shot requires a clear, achievable goal; an honest assessment of the obstacles; and ample resources applied over the long haul. All of these elements must be tailored to the local conditions. And even then, it is possible we might still fail. If policy makers are willing to forgo democracy, then that also carries significant risks and runs counter to traditional U.S. values. But whatever our leaders decide, they should do so with an honest appreciation of the challenges, risks, and costs. Another myth is that in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya no postwar planning took place at all. In each chapter of this book, at least some planning occurred. In fact, in the case of Iraq an extremely substantial amount of planning occurred under ORHA, CFLCC, Joint Task Force IV, and other entities. The CENTCOM chief of plans correctly notes that “we lost weeks and months of our lives doing planning that everybody said we didn’t do. . . . It’s not that the planning wasn’t done.”22 However, the plethora of plans never reconciled the three tasks in a coherent way. Postwar planning may technically occur but be inadequate if it does not drive decisions on underlying issues. In the case of Kosovo, the planning did in fact drive such decisions. Thus, at least some planning occurs in nearly every case, but its adequacy and coherence are what vary. A third myth is that our leaders in recent wars must have been irrational, devious, or incompetent. It can be tempting to demonize those who were in charge at the time, and certainly, in multiple cases, they absolutely deserve fair-minded criticism. But this is not a simple story of good guys

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versus bad guys. With a few notable exceptions, our leaders have usually been intelligent, hardworking, capable people who want to see our nation succeed. It can be difficult to grasp how bright people could mishandle basic tasks. Yet that is precisely what happened. In each case discussed in this book, our leaders took what they believed at the time to be reasonable actions based on their preferences, experiences, and beliefs. But all too often a hodgepodge of muddled aims took shape, and those who did recognize the pitfalls found their voices drowned out. We should also remember that intelligence and good judgment do not always go together. Smart people can, and repeatedly have, made very bad choices. During the Vietnam War, highly intelligent, accomplished individuals such as Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy made grave errors that helped pave the way for disaster.23 This does not mean that anti-intellectualism or ignorance are virtues: it will take wisdom, good judgment, and learning to help manage these challenges. The underlying tension outlined in this book helps account for why intelligent people can make enormous mistakes. Another myth is that more planning time leads to better plans. At first glance, we might presume that our planning was bad for Afghanistan or Libya because we just didn’t have enough time to plan. But this does not stand up to scrutiny. In Iraq we had years to prepare, and our “plan” there was especially abysmal. Sociologist Lee Clarke wrote shortly after the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster that there were ostensible plans developed over time to deal with a potential oil spill. Yet the hollowness of these plans was soon revealed, along with the fact that they were “barely worth the paper they’re written on.”24 There seems to be little correlation between more planning time and better plans. It is true that a complete lack of advance warning may magnify some pressures, but after the initial crisis subsides, there are usually opportunities for us to refocus. In Afghanistan and Libya, after a few tense weeks at the outset, there were soon lulls on the battlefield. We then had windows of opportunity in which we could have refocused energy on postwar decisions. Unfortunately, we used these moments to shift attention elsewhere. We should resist the urge to divert attention to flashy new priorities and must maintain strategic discipline.

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Another myth is the idea that postwar planning for Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya represented “mission impossible.” Today, after witnessing chaos take hold, it is tempting to conclude that we were destined to fail from the outset, irrespective of the strategy devised. Was postwar planning for these places a lost cause, like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic? To be sure, what political scientists refer to as “selection effects” certainly made things harder for us. Put differently, we repeatedly invaded very tough places. So promoting democracy in any of these countries did indeed represent an enormous, sometimes even herculean, challenge. And it was made even more difficult when we started stacking up multiple postwar projects simultaneously. But what if we were truly willing to acknowledge the magnitude and complexity of each endeavor? Other paths might have been possible. We might have chosen to commit to an enduring path of democratization over time, working alongside the international community with a full recognition of the obstacles at hand. One might argue such a path was not feasible at an acceptable cost, which is probably true if we were to tackle multiple postwar efforts simultaneously. But if we had intervened in only one of these war zones (say, Afghanistan), the situation would have been more manageable. Further, the very notion of what constitutes “acceptable cost” can sometimes be shaped by those in power. This book has repeatedly highlighted the many immense difficulties at play. But it is also worth briefly considering a few of the mildly encouraging aspects. For example, Afghanistan entailed massive challenges that have been outlined in detail. But Afghanistan also benefited from a period of relative peace and stability, especially during its “golden age” in the 1960s and early 1970s, which partly defies the perception of its immutable backwardness and incurable violence, at least before decades of civil war ravaged the country. Iraq had a sizable middle class and decades of interaction and intermarriage between Sunnis and Shi’ites, which suggested that sectarian warfare was not inevitable. Further, Libya had a smaller, less ethnically diverse population, proximity to Europe, and strong international support for intervention. Promoting a stable, legitimate democracy would still undoubtedly be an extremely heavy lift in any of these cases, with no guarantees. Yet there were at least a few mildly favorable aspects among the myriad challenges.

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Were all these places bastions of anti-Americanism? It is true that many locals were shaped by years of anti-American propaganda and would fiercely resist any outside intervention. But there were also at least some modestly promising signs, ranging from the warm welcoming of Western troops in Kabul (with pleas by Afghan leaders for an even larger international presence), to celebrations that greeted select American forces as they entered Baghdad in April 2003, to cheering crowds of Libyans shouting “USA!” and requesting selfies with Hillary Clinton upon her visit in the fall of 2011. We should be very careful not to exaggerate this point since many other locals did not share this enthusiasm. Yet such cautiously positive sentiments are worth at least brief mention as well. Unfortunately, the tentative sense of goodwill in some quarters dissolved once it became clear that our long-term strategy was missing in action. And we lost the fence-sitters who might have been inclined to give us the benefit of the doubt. In Kosovo we recognized both pitfalls and opportunities, and developed an imperfect but generally coherent strategy. Our planning accounted for an array of local conditions, including ethnic grievances and potential meddling by Russia and Serbia. Thus, major pitfalls were largely surmounted in Kosovo (a place that is, like the other cases of this book, overwhelmingly Muslim). This should give us at least some guarded optimism that a tolerable outcome may be possible, even if local conditions vary. A sixth myth is that postwar planning is strictly the military’s job. The existing literature on postwar issues, particularly Nadia Schadlow’s War and the Art of Governance, sometimes zeros in on the military’s role. But our military cannot develop and implement a national strategy by itself. Our civilian leadership must take charge to integrate the broader political, military, economic, and diplomatic components together. Thus, it would be a mistake to put all the planning burden on our military’s shoulders. Just as Georges Clemenceau stated that war is too important to be left to the generals, the same principle applies to the postwar as well. Postwar planning has a significant military component, but it is ultimately a national policy challenge. However, we should not let our military completely off the hook. Senior military leaders should be expected to provide sound advice and recommendations, so they will need considerable strategic acumen. Yet in times of uncertainty, our military often falls back on what it knows

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best: operations and tactics. General Tommy Franks’s botched, shortsighted approach to Afghanistan and Iraq personifies this.25 Michael Hess recalls from his service at ORHA and the CPA that “Franks had no interest in the postwar. He did not care . . . [he] did not want to get involved in this at all.”26 As General Franks demonstrated, our military often focuses on winning short-term battles in spectacular fashion while dodging the knotty political implications. Military historian Russell Weigley described how during the U.S. Civil War, various Union generals vainly sought a single climactic battle which they assumed would win the whole war. They perceived “the battle,” “the campaign,” and “the war” as basically interchangeable. Yet Ulysses S. Grant proved to be one of the few outliers who could grasp the bigger picture, which helps explain why he gained Lincoln’s confidence.27 There is an enduring cultural tendency to focus on short-term military success, to the neglect of all that follows. A senior military officer admitted to me, “I was the military guy in this . . . and I did not spend a heck of a lot of time thinking about, OK, what’s going to happen next, because I thought that’s what [the] State Department will do.”28 It is worth remembering that over the course of two world wars, Germany’s military gained a reputation for being tactically brilliant but strategically inept, a reputation that the modern U.S. military should seek to avoid.29 Our military has created some opportunities for officers to explore strategic and academic assignments outside the traditional military realm in order to help broaden horizons and mitigate this hazard. But until promotion and selection boards clearly incentivize such pursuits, operational experience will continue to trump other factors, and the presence of strategic acumen among senior military leaders may only be a coin toss. Whether the military prioritizes deep strategic thinking—or the traditional culture of “jes’ plain soldierin’,” as General Wesley Clark put it30—will shape how effectively it contributes to postwar strategy. To put things in perspective, in U.S. wars since 2001, a grave tactical error might cost a dozen lives. But strategic blunders have cost us many thousands of lives. The seventh myth is that resources are all that matter. All too often our discourse tends to be shallow, focusing on dollars spent and the number of boots on the ground. This can contribute to incrementalism. Resources are indeed important, but they are only one leg of a three-legged stool. They are a necessary, but not sufficient, component of a coherent strategy.

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If we throw enough resources at a problem, will the problem go away? Although it is certainly wise to have extra resources to deal with unexpected challenges, by themselves they are not a panacea. The local conditions still matter a great deal. As a counterfactual, if we were to hold constant all other factors during the 2003 Iraq invasion but at the last minute we had parachuted in a half-million troops, would it have helped? The short answer is “possibly.” But if our overall goal for Iraq were still muddled, and if we still did not have a good handle on the underlying obstacles, then we might have squandered this additional combat power. Resources must be tethered to an overall strategy. A focus on means to the neglect of ends can be like obsessing over what to pack for a trip without ever deciding on the destination or a realistic route to get there. The final myth is a tricky one: the idea that the plans themselves are the root of the problem. After a postwar fiasco unfolds, our leaders often blame the plans. This claim usually has at least some merit. Years after the Libya fiasco, for example, President Obama accurately stated that our planning for the day after was not up to par. Yet bad planning usually represents the tip of the iceberg. What lurks beneath the surface is a failure to wrestle with deeper trade-offs. Hence, planning is absolutely important, but its ultimate importance does not derive from merely the physical plans themselves. The true importance derives from the ability to force uncomfortable decisions to the surface. Strategy involves making hard choices about priorities given finite resources, energy, and time. Failing to make such choices generally means failing to construct a viable strategy. Thus, the need to craft a viable, coherent strategy embodies the true root of the problem, and the physical plans are simply the most logical way to tackle it. Let’s step back for a moment and ask a broad question: is there something unique about the nearly twenty-year historical period that this book covers? Certainly, the end of the cold war era gave us substantial freedom of action. Then, after 9/11 our national power was amplified, which gave a sense that a new era had dawned. Meanwhile, American policy toward the Middle East grew increasingly militarized from the 1980 Carter Doctrine onward.31 This intersection of factors helped set the stage for frequent U.S. military interventions after 2001, especially in the broader Middle East. Psychological factors such as anxiety and overconfidence then helped further bolster these trends.32 Hence, over the last two decades

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we have intervened in complex societies even more cavalierly than we had previously, and with even less thought about the lasting consequences. In the modern age of robotics, targeted raids, private security contractors, cyber warfare, and other developments, we could once again find ourselves achieving battlefield gains at seemingly low cost (at least initially). However, this does not relieve us of the responsibility to plan for the endgame. If we just want to inexpensively prop up the status quo, or to “mow the grass” and contain the damage, that is one thing, and in some cases it could be the “least bad” way ahead. But doing so should foster no illusions that we will transform the political order in a lasting, positive way; instead, it can become a way to run on the treadmill indefinitely. As long as that choice is made with eyes wide open, it may be tolerable and even logical to pursue that course. But if we have cognitive blinders on, and expect a quick, glorious victory with no real price to pay, it might pave the way for disaster. In each case analyzed in this book, the United States placed sharp, self-imposed constraints on the means we would employ in war in order to help limit our role. But uniquely in the case of Kosovo, we established an achievable end aligned with our means, and then we loosened up the postwar constraints. To be sure, each time we go to war, our government is not obligated to pull a giant lever that launches massive efforts across all domains. But if our aim is to promote democracy in a broken land which has never experienced it, that is what it will usually take. Democratization is a long-term process, not an event, and it generally requires security and nurturing of institutions over time for any real chance of success. The logical alternative is to settle for something less from the outset and be willing to live with the consequences. Of course, another option is to not even pursue regime change at all, which is often the wisest choice of all. These choices involve enormous trade-offs, sometimes without obvious answers. But the core questions must be asked, and firm decisions must be made. The importance of a given country may not remain static over time. Occasionally our leaders may conclude that, after starting a war in a place such as Afghanistan or Libya, we simply do not care about the country’s future all that much, at least in comparison to competing priorities. Yet although there may not seem to be a huge amount to gain over the long haul, there could be a lot to lose. If a seemingly unimportant country such as Libya devolves into a cauldron of chaos, terrorists create a new

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sanctuary, refugees flood the region, human rights atrocities multiply, and domestic audiences feel unnerved, then its importance could rise sharply. Hence, we have reluctantly redeployed thousands of our troops back to familiar places to try to undo earlier blunders, long after our leaders had already suggested these wars were “over.” This underscores the need to make sound decisions from the outset, even if the stakes at the time do not appear high. Once invested, we may find it almost impossible to truly leave. More broadly, while the initial combat phase usually garners most of our attention, it is often just the easy part and represents the first inning of an enduring contest. Whether we make progress toward a clear, achievable outcome matters far more than what unfolds tactically and operationally in the short term. Sun Tzu emphasized the importance of carefully pre-positioning forces well before a battle takes place so that a favorable outcome becomes all but guaranteed.33 A similar principle should guide our postwar thinking. We should try to tilt the long-term odds in our favor long before the day after arrives. This cannot be treated as a mere afterthought. Clausewitz’s axiom about war and politics remains sound: “the political object is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and means can never be considered in isolation from their purpose.”34 In recent wars, at the moment that major combat ended, we were quick to pat ourselves on the back for a job well done and for minimizing our exposure and reducing costs in new, innovative ways. We focused on the mechanics of toppling the regime rather than on what would follow. And disaster repeatedly ensued. In more recent times, many of the core challenges of this book have grown more acute. Our policy making has become more plagued than ever by pipe dreams, mixed signals, and bluster rather than well-considered, reality-based policies. We continue to indulge in magical thinking and self-deception, believing that we can obtain wondrous solutions to vexing problems with little to no effort. Also, our learning remains abysmal, as we cavalierly discard valuable historical lessons that were previously learned the hard way. In many ways the recent level of disarray and incoherence makes that of the preceding period seem almost quaint by comparison. Democratic norms have been eroding as of late, and our commitment to democracy at home and abroad is currently in greater doubt than at

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any other time in living memory. There is little if anything normal about this. We have entered an almost surreal period in which the core ideals that America stands for are being seriously contested. Some seem willing to tolerate a gradual slide away from the democratic principles set forth in the U.S. Constitution, the very Constitution that service members like me take an oath to support and defend. Vital democratic cornerstones such as freedom of the press and freedom of speech (which are specifically protected by the First Amendment) are increasingly at risk. These developments are particularly disconcerting for someone like me who has repeatedly deployed into harm’s way to try to advance some of these ideals in other parts of the world. As of this writing, the U.S. campaign to promote democracy abroad has hit a low ebb, to put it mildly. Following our repeated missteps, the United States is tilting in a different direction that represents a massive discontinuity relative to the arc of our foreign policy since 1945. This is not about the usual Washington debates; it is about the integrity of the core principles and institutions that define this country. Modern America is at a moment of profound crisis in more ways than one. And at least for now the U.S. global leadership role seems vacant. Whether this is a temporary breakdown or a harbinger of worse things to come remains to be seen. But the current period seems to have shattered—at least temporarily—much of what was taken for granted about the U.S. role in the world. Falsehoods and disinformation play a role in this unsettling landscape. At multiple points in The Dark Knight film trilogy, members of the depraved League of Shadows tell Bruce Wayne/Batman that “theatricality and deception are powerful agents.” This seems to hold true today: learning from facts, research, and hard evidence is often in direct competition with propaganda, misdirection, and lies. As information is weaponized by those hostile to democracy, social media has helped many retreat into fact-free bubbles of confirmation bias and selective outrage. New technologies can allow us to dive deeper into rage-fueled virtual worlds of conspiracy and fantasy. These echo chambers degrade our national dialogue, embolden extremists, and make it even harder to discern the ground truth. Will we meet the challenge by learning from objective reality or plunge even deeper into tribalism and a post-truth abyss? It sometimes seems hard to be optimistic about democracy’s future unless you assume we have reached rock bottom and can only go up from here.

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However, we should realize a fundamental tilt away from democracy would transform what the United States is and what it has aspired to be. It would mean abandoning any lingering hope that America can be the world’s leading democracy and letting down our friends and allies. It would also likely mean a collapse of any remaining moral authority we have relative to countries such as Russia and China. In that sort of world, American values and ideals would mean little if anything. And our nation’s unique global standing—and the many benefits associated with it—would begin to wither away. There are many reasons for serious concern about the road ahead. At least for now, America seems to have lost its way, and extremists have been invigorated. But despite all the deeply troubling developments, our nation has survived very dark and divisive periods before, and there are glimmers of hope. On the positive side, our greatest missteps and tragedies as of late have mostly been self-generated. And because of that, we have the capacity to do better. As President John F. Kennedy stated, “Our problems are manmade—therefore, they can be solved by man.”35 Even if we cannot outright “solve” many of our most intractable problems, we can at least do a much better job managing them as we forge our way ahead. Further, the foundation of our national security establishment is not irreparably broken. The existing system can work, and indeed it has worked in the not-too-distant past. This provides reason for optimism. Specifically when it comes to matters of war and peace, we must realize that if we go to war to upend an odious regime, we are likely to inherit the messy aftermath. A coherent approach as outlined in this book can help us form a viable strategy that acknowledges this, instead of crafting a wish list. This can help us better anticipate the uncomfortable gray area between war and peace, and the notable trade-offs that we will encounter. Most importantly, this can also help clarify whether it is truly worth going to war in the first place. We cannot afford to continue to view Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya as isolated mistakes. Doing so prevents us from identifying common challenges that have confounded our leaders time and again, and fostered extremely harmful consequences. We must learn from the past and improve our decision making. Despite the perilous, dangerous situation we find ourselves in, over its history the United States has had a net positive impact on world affairs.

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Since 1945 the United States has led a remarkable international order that, while far from perfect, has provided meaningful benefits to the American people and millions of others around the world. Our nation has inspired countless people in remote corners of the Earth. We have also helped steer multiple post-conflict societies such as Germany, Japan, and South Korea in positive, stable directions. Hence, although we have certainly fallen short sometimes (such as in Vietnam), I remain incredibly proud for having had an opportunity to serve and make a small contribution to this exceptional country of ours. But now is no time for hubris or a sense of entitlement. This book has outlined in detail how our nation has committed serious gaffes, particularly in our recent past, which have had far-reaching negative impacts. If we want to preserve our unique superpower status, then we must comprehend how and why we made a mess of our recent wars. The underlying reasons behind these blunders must be clearly understood in order to prompt better decision making and to sustain confidence in core American democratic values and principles: values and principles that are increasingly under siege every day. The stakes could hardly be higher. We can (and must) make better choices. Continuing along the course of spiraling chaos is simply unthinkable. Whether we can learn from our past—while seeing the realities hiding in plain sight—will almost certainly shape how the next chapters of history unfold.

Note on Sources

The research for this book has relied mainly on four types of sources. The first—and perhaps most insightful—material used in this book consists of firsthand interviews. This book has entailed dozens of new interviews with senior and mid-level U.S. government officials involved in various aspects of postwar planning. These interviews included former cabinet secretaries, chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, other threeand four-star flag officers, and dozens of other civilian and military officials involved at different levels of our national strategy and planning. These interviews also included many mid-level civilian and military officials who were personally assigned responsibility for the conduct of postwar planning. In certain instances, if an official continues to actively serve in the government or provided information that could cause reputational harm, his or her comments have been incorporated on background by indicating the individual’s level of authority in nonspecific terms and withholding his or her name. This is the exception rather than

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the rule, however, and most citations have been attributed directly by both name and duty position. The second type of source consists of primary documents. To the maximum extent possible, this book has leveraged firsthand documents such as official planning concepts, orders (both draft and final versions), government briefings, official memoranda, typed and handwritten notes by U.S. officials, transcripts of presidential meetings and phone conversations, NSC principals/deputies meetings’ summaries of conclusions, official after-action reports, and other related primary documents to help reconstruct exactly what postwar planning was undertaken by whom, when, and why. Documentation relating to both civilian and military parts of the government has been used. One obvious barrier involves classification: all four wars took place in the last two decades, and some material remains classified. This book has not relied on any classified material whatsoever. However, it has incorporated some newly declassified documents to glean fresh insights that may not have been uncovered by previous scholarship. The third type of source consists of memoirs. Senior civilian and military officials are important actors in this book, and it is important to determine what they knew and when. Memoirs have helped give a sense of the thinking of the NSC principals, deputies, and other civilian and military officials at the time. With that said, we should approach memoirs with a prudent sense of caution and a recognition that they can reflect bias or self-serving narratives. But, as Robert Jervis astutely noted, although memoirs can have pitfalls, “They often are an important source because only the participants can tell us what they thought and how they thought, and even if they are consciously or unconsciously being defensive, if not deceptive, it is very hard for them to make up the story out of whole cloth.”1 At every possible opportunity this book has sought to triangulate memoirs with other sources to try to provide a more holistic and impartial account of what unfolded. In many cases, such efforts have validated the account provided in a given memoir; in other instances, they undercut it. This book has sought to draw appropriate conclusions and proceed accordingly. The fourth type of source used in this book is secondary sources, including historically based accounts of each of these four wars. This book builds on the previous scholarship of these conflicts by leveraging

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it in a comparative way. The amount of secondary literature on the Iraq war is particularly deep, while for the other three cases it is somewhat less robust but still useful. This book has sought to uncover insights from these secondary sources and has used those insights as a launching pad for further examination.

Further Reading

This book brings together and expands on the scholarship undertaken in multiple fields, including war termination, strategic planning, foreignimposed regime change, and psychology/learning. First, regarding war termination, Paul Pillar, H. E. Goemans, Dan Reiter, and other scholars have sought to explain how wars end, frequently through the use of bargaining theory. Bargaining theory builds on Thomas Schelling’s approach to analyzing conflict situations1 and advances a notion that war is inherently costly because it depletes money, lives, and political capital. The theory posits that a rational actor should prefer to reach a settlement that reflects the final outcome without incurring the costs of fighting.2 Put differently, states should intrinsically want to fast-forward to the final “deal” in a manner that bypasses the costs and risk assumed along the way. Yet in practice, such a peaceful settlement does not always materialize, and war still occurs, so a logical extension of this framework entails the identification of obstacles that prevent the realization of this settlement. Goemans and Reiter emphasize that barriers such as information asymmetries and

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commitment concerns help account for these bargaining breakdowns and the persistence of war.3 This approach to war termination builds on similar approaches to war initiation which emphasize that “war is costly and risky, so rational states should have incentives to locate negotiated settlements that all would prefer to the gamble of war,”4 as James Fearon put it, and thereby avoid hostilities in the first place. By extension, in cases in which war occurs, hostilities should theoretically continue until the belligerents can surmount the obstacles and achieve a settlement that resolves the underlying grievances. Several works provide useful case studies that explore empirical evidence related to war termination. Gideon Rose’s How Wars End analyzes major U.S. conflicts from World War I through the Iraq war to consider the conditions that precipitated the end of fighting. Additionally, Richard Caplan’s edited volume Exit Strategies and State Building highlights theoretical concepts of exit strategy alongside the specific cases of Senegal, Sierra Leone, Gaza, and Iraq, among others. These works often reinforce themes found in Fred Iklé’s Every War Must End regarding the inherent uncertainty and fog of war termination, as well as the domestic factors that can shape efforts to terminate conflicts in the post-Vietnam era. The literature on strategic planning also has salient insights. Daniel Drezner’s 2009 edited volume Avoiding Trivia highlights an array of challenges in U.S. strategic planning, including how bureaucratic dynamics often skew planning in a negative manner. In Drezner’s volume, Aaron Friedberg outlines why the United States’ ability to undertake strategic planning has deteriorated, and Amy Zegart underscores how bureaucratic turf wars, cultural divides, and related constraints have become more problematic over time. Zegart asserts pessimistically that “policy planning is likely to be more difficult in the twenty-first century than it was in the twentieth.”5 Further, Graham Allison’s Essence of Decision is a landmark work that provides three conceptual models through which one can analyze governmental decision making. It includes a rational actor model, an organizational process model in which organizations have certain tendencies and patterns of behaviors, as well as a governmental politics model of competitive bargaining among players that entails competition and compromise.6 Such models provide useful lenses to consider how planning and decision making take shape in various contexts and can help analyze processes related to postwar planning.

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There is also the literature on a range of areas one might loosely refer to as “postwar strategy.” The quantity of literature on this topic should be extremely voluminous, given the topic’s importance, and while that is not quite the case yet, there are some contributions.7 Some of these scholars have suggested the need to eliminate the cognitive barrier between “war” and “postwar,” and instead to envision them as part of the same continuum, which certainly embodies a worthy goal. My book seeks to build upon this literature by providing a comparative analysis focused mainly on postwar planning in recent conflicts. Additionally, the literature on foreign-imposed regime change and democratization is relevant. This literature highlights the many challenges states confront in nation building, occupation, and democratization, including in the aftermath of foreign-imposed regime change.8 They illustrate how certain preconditions can affect the degree of difficulty encountered during democratization, such as the level of economic development, the degree of democratic familiarity/experience, the level of ethnic/ religious/linguistic diversity, and the presence of a commonly perceived external threat to motivate an enduring commitment. The literature on the psychological biases of policy makers (particularly motivated reasoning) and learning is also relevant to this book. Robert Jervis outlines inherent difficulties in accurately perceiving unfolding events, with an emphasis on “political psychology” and the predispositions that can steer policy makers in problematic directions.9 Jervis counsels that policy makers should try “to make their assumptions, beliefs, and the predictions that follow from them as explicit as possible” because these aspects, alongside personal experiences and reliance on analogies, can strongly affect decision making.10 Additionally, Elizabeth Saunders delves into how leaders rely on causal beliefs that shape strategies of intervention.11 Other related works such as scholarship by Jonathan Mercer highlight the connection between psychology and rationality, while Aaron Rapport analyzes cognitive biases related to the Iraq war, and Richards Heuer delves into why people cannot completely escape biases and cognitive traps and should therefore seek to enhance self-awareness to recognize them.12 Additionally, Judith Goldstein and Robert Keohane explore the importance of ideas (including worldviews and principled beliefs) in shaping policy, and Keren Yarhi-Milo analyzes how leaders tend to weight vivid, salient impressions as well as preexisting beliefs.13 Overall, this

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diverse range of scholarship addresses how various psychological biases and causal beliefs can affect policy making, including during times of crisis and war. Finally, related to the literature outlined above, this book also seeks to build on the literature on learning. Yuen Foong Khong’s Analogies at War explores the use of historical analogies, particularly how their selective use can shape the manner in which policy makers cope with an overabundance of information. Khong examines the Johnson administration’s decision making and how reliance on the Korean War analogy facilitated a more interventionist policy in Vietnam. Other works also explore dynamics of how officials use history and analogies in ways that shape their judgment and learning.14 The collective scholarship regarding psychological bias and learning—alongside the aforementioned fields of literature—has helped inform this book’s analysis of why U.S. officials have cognitive difficulty anticipating postwar challenges.

Notes

Introduction 1. George W. Bush, Decision Points (New York: Crown, 2010), 128. 2. Pew Research Center, Public Sees U.S. Power Declining as Support for Global Engagement Slips, December 3, 2013, 4–5. 3. Regarding the overall cost of these wars, a 2016 study at Brown University that used a broad definition of war-related costs estimated a total price tag of $3.69 trillion, which rises to $4.79 trillion upon including future projected expenditures. See Neta C. Crawford, “US Budgetary Costs of Wars through 2016: $4.79 Trillion and Counting: Summary of Costs of the US Wars in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Pakistan and Homeland Security,” Costs of War, September 2016. Separately, a 2008 study estimated a $3 trillion price tag for the Iraq War alone. See Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes, The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008). A 2014 Congressional Research Service study that used a narrower conception of costs estimated a total cost of $1.6 trillion. See Amy Belasco, “The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other Global War on Terror Operations since 9/11,” Congressional Research Service, December 8, 2014. Although these estimates differ significantly from one another, largely depending on which direct and indirect costs are included, as of this writing it seems safe to conclude that the total cost of these wars is “trillions of dollars.” This is particularly true if we include future war-related costs such as treatment of wounded veterans, increased national debt interest payments, and other costs to be paid in the years and decades to come.

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4. U.S. Department of Defense, “U.S. Casualty Status for Operations Iraqi Freedom, New Dawn, Enduring Freedom, Inherent Resolve, and Freedom’s Sentinel,” last modified May 21, 2018, https://www.defense.gov/casualty.pdf. 5. When one of my patrols first learned of Hanan’s distressing ordeal, we engaged with her family over several months and, with terrific outside support, eventually coordinated for corrective surgery at the Johns Hopkins Burn Center to try to give her a chance to lead a quasi-normal life. But in a heartbreaking development late in the process, Hanan’s father insisted that he alone must accompany her to the United States because of her youth. This stipulation was a nonstarter as a result of security concerns regarding an adult Iraqi male entering the country even on a temporary basis. With the father unwilling to compromise and U.S. policy being inflexible, our intended way forward for Hanan could not come to fruition. As our unit’s deployment to Iraq concluded, Hanan’s father said he was looking into surgery at a Saudi Arabian hospital instead, a facility that was likely far inferior to Johns Hopkins. 6. See Gideon Rose, How Wars End: Why We Always Fight the Last Battle (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010); Dominic Tierney, How We Fight: Crusades, Quagmires, and the American Way of War (New York: Little, Brown, 2010); Dominic Tierney, The Right Way to Lose a War (New York: Little, Brown, 2015); Dominic Tierney, “Mastering the Endgame of War,” Survival 56, no. 5 (October-November 2014): 69–94; Aaron Rapport, Waging War, Planning Peace: U.S. Noncombat Operations and Major Wars (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015); Nadia Schadlow, War and the Art of Governance: Consolidating Combat Success into Political Victory (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2017). See also Nadia Schadlow, “War and the Art of Governance,” Parameters (August 2003): 85–94. Additional literature on the general topic of postwar challenges includes Fred Charles Iklé, Every War Must End, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); Isaiah Wilson III, Thinking beyond War: Civil-Military Relations and Why America Fails to Win the Peace (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Nora Bensahel et al., After Saddam: Prewar Planning and the Occupation of Iraq (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2008); Stephen Benedict Dyson, “What Really Happened in Planning for Postwar Iraq?” Political Science Quarterly 128, no. 3 (Fall 2013): 455–488; Daniel P. Bolger, Why We Lost: A General’s Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014). 7. David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, 20th anniv. ed. (New York: Ballantine Books, 1992), xi–xiv. 8. I thank Gary Bass for suggesting a figure of speech along these lines. 9. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 87. 10. One should acknowledge the Soviets’ role in helping defeat Germany and Japan, and the fact that they suffered enormous casualties during World War II which dwarfed those of the United States. The Soviet entry into the Pacific war on August 9, 1945, likely contributed to Japan’s ultimate decision to surrender, in conjunction with several other factors, such as the devastating Allied aerial bombing of Japanese cities, the Allied naval blockade, the rapidly approaching invasion of Japan’s home islands (Operation Downfall), and the use of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Gideon Rose argues that “Imperial Japan was dying from several causes simultaneously; which one [factor] actually finished the job was largely a matter of chance.” See Rose, How Wars End, 117–118. Yet the U.S. role was important in achieving victory in both Europe and Asia, largely as an outgrowth of America’s resources and massive industrial mobilization. John Thompson argues that “in the summer of 1942, following Japan’s sweeping victories in Southeast Asia and the German advances in the southern USSR and north Africa, the Axis Powers dominated one-third of the world’s population and mineral resources. The complete unraveling of this position within the next three years was very largely the product of American power.” See John A. Thompson, A Sense of

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Power: The Roots of America’s World Role (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), 195–199 (quotation on 198). 11. For more on the post–World War II order and why it has endured, see John G. Ikenberry, After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order after Major Wars (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 12. The phrase “pockets of dead enders” was used by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld during a June 18, 2003, press conference regarding Iraq. For his own account of another time that he referred to “dead enders,” see Donald Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown: A Memoir (New York: Sentinel, 2011), 674. 13. For use of the term “golden hour” in a postwar context, see James Stephenson, Losing the Golden Hour: An Insider’s View of Iraq’s Reconstruction (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2007). 14. Interview with a senior U.S. military official. 15. Roland Paris, At War’s End: Building Peace after Civil Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 6, 41. 16. Bruce R. Pirnie, Civilians and Soldiers: Achieving Better Coordination (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 1998), 54. 17. Tony Smith, America’s Mission: The United States and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy, expanded ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 13. 18. For more on how modern-day authoritarian leaders can cleverly use a democratic facade to their advantage, see William J. Dobson, The Dictator’s Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy (New York: Anchor Books, 2012); Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (New York: Crown, 2018); Madeleine Albright with Bill Woodward, Fascism: A Warning (New York: Harper, 2018), 118–119, 184–185. 19. Paul D. Miller, Armed State Building: Confronting State Failure, 1898–2012 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), 12. Along similar lines, Tony Smith asserts that “American democracy promotion has never been disinterested. At times it has effectively camouflaged relatively narrow nationalist, geostrategic, economic, or ethnoreligious concerns deemed important to this country but made more palatable by a veneer of high moralism.” See Smith, America’s Mission, 346. 20. For more on the postwar effort to democratize Germany, see James Dobbins et al., America’s Role in Nation-Building from Germany to Iraq (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2003), 3–23. For an account that emphasizes the importance of the mutually perceived Soviet threat during the occupation, see David M. Edelstein, Occupational Hazards: Success and Failure in Military Occupation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 28–39. 21. For a comprehensive account of the “revolution from above” and the U.S. occupation of Japan as a whole, see John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999). For repeated use of that specific phrase, see pages 69–84. 22. Rudolf V. A. Janssens, “What Future for Japan?”: U.S. Wartime Planning for the Postwar Era, 1942–1945 (Atlanta: Rodopi, 1995), 58–59. 23. For an overview of U.S. planning for postwar Japan, including the various committees established, the education of U.S. military officers on occupational duties and Japanese history, and a wide array of other efforts undertaken in the period from 1942 to 1945, see Janssens, What Future for Japan? 24. Janssens, What Future for Japan?, 45, 400. 25. Henry L. Stimson Diaries, vol. 50 (March 29, 1945), 207, cited in Gary Jonathan Bass, Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 150, 381. 26. Jack Levy famously asserted that the “absence of war between democracies comes as close as anything we have to an empirical law in international relations.” See Jack S. Levy,

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“Domestic Politics and War,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 18, no. 4 (Spring 1988): 662. This concept of a democratic peace relates to Immanuel Kant’s 1795 essay “Perpetual Peace,” in which Kant asserts that “the republican constitution also provides for this desirable result, namely, perpetual peace.” See Immanuel Kant, “To Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch,” in Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, trans. Ted Humphrey (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), 113. There is an extensive amount of related literature on the topic (too lengthy to list here) in recent decades that explores what exactly the “democratic peace” means, the precise circumstances in which it applies, and the cultural, normative, institutional, economic, and/or other factors that might drive it, among many other related research questions. 27. In the words of Jeremi Suri, “Everywhere Americans have gone since the Revolution they have tried to make nations with accompanying representative governments. . . . Americans have deployed their exceptional history in universalistic ways.” See Jeremi Suri, Liberty’s Surest Guardian: Rebuilding Nations after War from the Founders to Obama (New York: Free Press, 2011), 29. 28. Dobbins et al., America’s Role, 221. 29. Pew Research Center compared survey data over several years and found that “Americans like the idea of their government promoting democracy in other nations. But democracy promotion has historically lagged far behind other objectives among the public’s long-term foreign policy goals.” Pew Research Center, “Historically, Public Has Given Low Priority to Promoting Democracy Overseas,” February 4, 2011, http://www.pewresearch.org/2011/02/04/ historically-public-has-given-low-priority-to-promoting-democracy-overseas. I thank Dominic Tierney for suggesting this source. See also Tierney, How We Fight, 24–25. 30. For more on the coups in Guatemala and Iran, and how they related to the Eisenhower administration’s fear of communist encroachment as well as the desire to protect Western business interests, see Smith, America’s Mission, 191–199. 31. This statement is commonly attributed to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, although whether he actually used it is unclear. See David F. Schmitz, Thank God They’re on Our Side: The United States and Right-Wing Dictatorships, 1921–1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 3–4, 313. Cited in Elizabeth N. Saunders, “Transformative Choices: Leaders and the Origins of Intervention Strategy,” International Security 34, no. 2 (2009): 132. 32. Tierney, How We Fight, 8. 33. The memoirs of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith strongly push back against the idea that the Pentagon wanted to “anoint” Chalabi as Iraq’s new leader. However, their accounts are contradicted by several interviews with U.S. military and civilian officials conducted for this book, which almost universally indicate that installing Chalabi was indeed the Pentagon’s underlying desire. The role of Chalabi will be readdressed in chapter 3. 34. This sentence is used by David Edelstein as one of five lessons regarding exit strategies. See David M. Edelstein, “Exit Lessons,” Wilson Quarterly 33, no. 4 (Autumn 2009): 37. For similar sentiments regarding Iraq, see Leon V. Sigal, “A War without End,” World Policy Journal 24, no. 3 (Fall 2007): 1–7. 35. For a few examples of the desire not to foster dependency on the United States, see Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, 666–667, 678–679; Douglas J. Feith, War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism (New York: Harper, 2008), 149. For more on the “welfare” analogy, and how it can be particularly attractive to individuals on the political right, see Tierney, How We Fight, 47–48, 265. 36. Sam C. Sarkesian and Robert E. Connor, Jr., The US Military Profession into the Twenty-First Century: War, Peace and Politics, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2006), 153.

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37. The phrase “Afghanistan good enough” circulated at senior levels of the U.S. government as the Afghanistan conflict wore on. See Leon Panetta with Jim Newton, Worthy Fights: A Memoir of Leadership in War and Peace (New York: Penguin, 2014), 287–288. 38. Paris, At War’s End, 211. 39. Dominic Tierney asserts that Americans’ attitude regarding nation building is “put simply, we just don’t like it.” See Tierney, How We Fight, 36. 40. Interview with Colonel (retired) Paul Hughes, U.S. Army, on February 6, 2016. He served as the ORHA senior officer in the strategic plans and policy office, and later served with the CPA. 41. For more on U.S. democracy promotion in the 1990s and how Wilsonianism transformed into a “hard ideology” during that period, see Smith, America’s Mission, 349–360. 42. Interview with General (retired) Anthony Zinni, U.S. Marine Corps, on September 28, 2016. He served as the commander of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) from 1997 to 2000. 43. Interview with a senior U.S. official. 44. Smith, America’s Mission, 372. 45. Interview with a senior U.S. official. 46. Headquarters, Department of the Army, Field Manual 5–0: Army Planning and Orders Production (Washington, DC, 2005), 1–24. For more on backward planning or “reverse engineering” from the desired end state of a war to the beginning, see Rose, How Wars End, 284–285; Tierney, The Right Way, 305–308. 47. Interview with former Ambassador William Taylor on November 3, 2016. He coordinated U.S. assistance to Afghanistan in 2002–2003 and worked closely with then-Afghan finance minister (and later Afghan president) Ashraf Ghani. He later served as U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. 48. Clausewitz, On War, 80–81. 49. Russell F. Weigley, The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973). Dominic Tierney expands on Weigley’s concept by identifying an American “crusade tradition” that entails waging wars in maximalist fashion to vanquish evil. See Tierney, How We Fight, 13–33. 50. Interview with a former senior defense official. 51. Richard P. Rumelt, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters (New York: Crown Business, 2011), 42–43. 52. Andrew F. Krepinevich and Barry D. Watts, “Lost at the NSC,” National Interest (January/February 2009): 68 (emphasis in original). 53. Interview with a senior U.S. official. 54. Interview with U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Joseph Collins on October 18, 2016. He served in that capacity from July 2001 to July 2004. 55. Interview with a senior U.S. official. 56. For an insightful look at how the mere declaration of vague, soaring goals does not constitute a strategy because one must link goals to “coherent action” for them to have real meaning, see Rumelt, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, 45–57, 87. 57. Interview with former Ambassador James Dobbins on November 1, 2016. He served as assistant secretary of state for Europe; special advisor to the president and secretary of state for the Balkans; special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Kosovo, Bosnia, Haiti, and Somalia; and U.S. ambassador to the European Community. 58. Interview with General (retired) Carter Ham, U.S. Army, on October 6, 2016. He served as the commander of U.S. Africa Command from 2011 to 2013. 59. For his insights on uncertainty, difficulties in intelligence, and friction in war, see Clausewitz, On War, 101, 117–121.

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60. Dwight D. Eisenhower as quoted in Richard M. Nixon, Six Crises (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1962), 235. Cited in Aaron L. Friedberg, “Strengthening U.S. Strategic Planning,” in Avoiding Trivia: The Role of Strategic Planning in American Foreign Policy, ed. Daniel W. Drezner (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2009), 85. 61. Interview with a former senior defense official. 62. Interview with a senior U.S. official. 63. Interview with Colonel (retired) Michael Fitzgerald, U.S. Army, on June 29, 2016. He served as the CENTCOM chief of plans from May 2000 to August 2003. 64. Robert Jervis, Why Intelligence Fails: Lessons from the Iranian Revolution and the Iraq War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 138–139. 65. Robert Jervis, “Hypotheses on Misperception,” World Politics 20, no. 3 (April 1968): 470. 66. Interview with former Ambassador Gregory Schulte on December 21, 2016. He served as special assistant to the president for the Dayton Peace Accords beginning in July 1998. Although his official title emphasized Dayton, in practice he invested most of his time and energy in the NSC’s planning for Kosovo. 67. This relates to Allison’s model III of bureaucratic politics and the axiom that “where you stand depends on where you sit.” See Graham T. Allison, “Conceptual Models and the Cuban Missile Crisis,” American Political Science Review 63, no. 3 (September 1969): 707–711 (quotation on page 711). 68. U.S. Congress, National Security Act of 1947 (approved July 26, 1947). 69. For an analysis of the NSC from 1947 to the post–cold war era, including how it has evolved and changed in response to different personalities and bureaucratic rivalries, see David J. Rothkopf, Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power (New York: PublicAffairs, 2005). For more on the origins and evolution of the NSC, but in a manner that emphasizes continuity rather than change, see Amy B. Zegart, Flawed by Design: The Evolution of the CIA, JCS, and NSC (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). 70. Interview with Colonel (retired) Kevin Benson, U.S. Army, on June 10, 2016. He served as the CFLCC (Combined Forces Land Component Command) chief of plans. 71. Clausewitz, On War, 89; Henry Kissinger, World Order (New York: Penguin, 2014), 358. 72. William J. Durch, “Exit and Peace Support Operations,” in Exit Strategies and State Building, ed. Richard Caplan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 89. For more on domestic sentiments regarding war, perceptions of winning and losing, and the notion that the U.S. public is actually “defeat phobic” rather than casualty phobic, see Peter D. Feaver and Christopher Gelpi, Choosing Your Battles: American Civil-Military Relations and the Use of Force (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 135–144; Dominic D. P. Johnson and Dominic Tierney, Failing to Win: Perceptions of Victory and Defeat in International Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 73. Eva Bellin, “The Robustness of Authoritarianism in the Middle East: Exceptionalism in Comparative Perspective,” Comparative Politics 36, no. 2 (January 2004): 141. However, Bellin goes on to suggest that “none of these explanations is satisfying” (141) and instead emphasizes that “a robust coercive apparatus” embodies a better explanation for the lack of democracy in the Middle East and North Africa, as compared to the other frequently offered explanations. Bellin finds that “the will and capacity of the state’s coercive apparatus to suppress democratic initiative have extinguished the possibility of transition” and that this is what embodies “the region’s true exceptionalism” (143). 74. As such counterfactuals are used, they should reflect the dictum that the further we venture from the antecedent, the less certainty we should have, along with other cautions

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regarding the use of counterfactuals. See Jack S. Levy, “Counterfactuals and Case Studies,” in Oxford Handbook of Methodology, ed. Janet M. Box-Steffensmeier, Henry E. Brady, and David Collier (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 1–14. This idea relates to the “minimal rewrite of history” rule of counterfactuals, which Levy mentions on page 6. 75. Amy B. Zegart, “Why the Best Is Not Yet to Come in Policy Planning,” in Avoiding Trivia: The Role of Strategic Planning in American Foreign Policy, ed. Daniel W. Drezner (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2009), 115–117. 76. For more on the broader utility of crucial cases in political science, see Harry Eckstein, Regarding Politics: Essays on Political Theory, Stability, and Change (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 152–173. 77. Interview with Colonel (retired) Michael Hess, U.S. Army, on January 30, 2017. He conducted civil affairs planning for Kosovo and later went on to serve as ORHA’s humanitarian planner for Iraq and subsequently as Paul Bremer’s chief of staff. 78. Henry Kissinger, “To Settle the Ukraine Crisis, Start at the End,” Washington Post, March 5, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/henry-kissinger-to-settle-theukraine-crisis-start-at-the-end/2014/03/05/46dad868-a496-11e3-8466-d34c451760b9_story. html?utm_term=.8fb3b9428f6a. Also cited in Tierney, “Mastering the Endgame of War,” 70. 79. Robert M. Gates, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), 151. 1. Kosovo 1. Eliot A. Cohen, “Kosovo and the New American Way of War,” in War over Kosovo: Politics and Strategy in a Global Age, ed. Andrew J. Bacevich and Eliot A. Cohen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 38–62; Andrew J. Bacevich, “Neglected Trinity: Kosovo and the Crisis in U.S. Civil-Military Relations,” in War over Kosovo: Politics and Strategy in a Global Age, ed. Andrew J. Bacevich and Eliot A. Cohen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 155–188. 2. William J. Clinton, My Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 859. 3. David Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), 21–23, 241–242. 4. Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, 122–123, 129–131, 314–316; Richard Holbrooke, To End a War (New York: Random House, 1998), 69–70. 5. For a detailed day-by-day account of the negotiations at Dayton, see Holbrooke, To End a War. 6. Bruce R. Nardulli et al., Disjointed War: Military Operations in Kosovo, 1999 (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2002), 13; Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, 365. 7. Holbrooke, To End a War, 357. For more on Holbrooke and the lack of discussion of Kosovo at Dayton, see Tim Judah, Kosovo: War and Revenge (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 124–125. 8. Holbrooke, To End a War, 357. 9. David L. Phillips, Liberating Kosovo: Coercive Diplomacy and U.S. Intervention (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 4. For more on the historical importance of Kosovo, see Independent International Commission on Kosovo, The Kosovo Report: Conflict, International Response, Lessons Learned (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 33–34; Madeleine Albright with Bill Woodward, Madam Secretary (New York: Miramax Books, 2003), 378–380; Dominic Tierney, The Right Way to Lose a War (New York: Little, Brown, 2015), 279–280. 10. For a chart that depicts Kosovo’s shifting demographics over time, see Independent International Commission on Kosovo, Kosovo Report, 39.

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11. Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, 409–410; Phillips, Liberating Kosovo, 98–100, 102–106; Judah, Kosovo: War and Revenge, 193–194. 12. For more on the perceived need to preserve NATO’s credibility and U.S. global leadership, see Albright, Madam Secretary, 391; U.S. Department of Defense, Kosovo/Operation Allied Force After-Action Report, January 31, 2000, 4–6. 13. William M. Arkin, “Operation Allied Force, ‘The Most Precise Application of Air Power in History,’” in War over Kosovo: Politics and Strategy in a Global Age, ed. Andrew J. Bacevich and Eliot A. Cohen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 21. 14. Ivo H. Daalder and Michael E. O’Hanlon, Winning Ugly: NATO’s War to Save Kosovo (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2000), 103–104; Albright, Madam Secretary, 408; Judah, Kosovo: War and Revenge, 228–230; Adam Roberts, “NATO’s ‘Humanitarian War’ over Kosovo,” Survival 41, no. 3 (August 1999): 111. 15. Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, 460–461; John Norris, Collision Course: NATO, Russia, and Kosovo (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005), 26; Walter Isaacson, “Madeleine’s War,” Time, May 9, 1999. For Albright’s reaction to the Time article, see Albright, Madam Secretary, 410. 16. General Wesley K. Clark, Waging Modern War: Bosnia, Kosovo, and the Future of Combat (New York: PublicAffairs, 2001), 302–303, 309–313, 329–335. For a detailed account of the AH-64 deployment and issues related to Task Force Hawk, see Nardulli et al., Disjointed War, 57–97. For more on the friction and difficulties surrounding a potential ground invasion, see Norris, Collision Course, 109–119. 17. Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, 469–470; Norris, Collision Course, 61–64; Daalder and O’Hanlon, Winning Ugly, 137–141; Nardulli et al., Disjointed War, 36–37. 18. Cited in Judah, Kosovo: War and Revenge, 271; Daalder and O’Hanlon, Winning Ugly, 158. 19. James Kurth, “First War of the Global Era: Kosovo and U.S. Grand Strategy,” in War over Kosovo: Politics and Strategy in a Global Age, ed. Andrew J. Bacevich and Eliot A. Cohen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 74–77. 20. For an outline of several factors that may have caused Milosevic to capitulate, see Gregory L. Schulte, “Revisiting NATO’s Kosovo Air War: Strategic Lessons for an Era of Austerity,” Joint Forces Quarterly 71, no. 4 (2013): 17. 21. Michael G. Vickers, “Revolution Deferred: Kosovo and the Transformation of War,” in War over Kosovo: Politics and Strategy in a Global Age, ed. Andrew J. Bacevich and Eliot A. Cohen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 191–192. 22. Interview with Ambassador Schulte. 23. Interview with Ambassador Schulte. 24. Interview with Ambassador Schulte. 25. National Security Council, “Summary of Conclusions for Meeting of the NSC Deputies Committee,” Clinton Presidential Library, October 28, 1998, https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/16197, 127–128. 26. Interview with former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Leonard Hawley on December 6, 2016. Hawley was deeply involved in the Clinton administration’s Kosovo planning from 1998 to 1999, and he served on the White House National Security Council Staff. He oversaw U.S. political-military preparations and interagency planning for Kosovo. 27. For a chart that depicts the frequency by month of NSC principals and deputies committee meetings dealing with Kosovo, see Christopher Wall, Rebecca Lindgren, and Shane Quinland, NSC Decision Making and Operation Allied Force, https://sites.google.com/a/ georgetown.edu/nsc-decision-making-and-oaf/decision-types/deputies-vs-principals. The chart depicts a major peak in meeting frequency in October 1998, near the agreement to establish a

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Kosovo Verification Mission (KVM), with smaller peaks in January and February 1999. For declassified “summaries of conclusions” for dozens of NSC meetings throughout this period focused on Kosovo, see the Clinton Presidential Library at https://clinton.presidentiallibrar ies.us/items/show/16197. 28. Interview with Ambassador Schulte. 29. Albright, Madam Secretary, 410; Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, 476. 30. Interview with General (retired) George Casey, U.S. Army, on December 15, 2016. He served on the Joint Staff during the Kosovo war as deputy director for political military affairs for Europe. He later served as the Joint Staff J-5 during the planning for Iraq, commanded all coalition forces in Iraq from 2004 to 2007, and served as Army chief of staff. Interview with Ambassador Schulte. See also Norris, Collision Course, 135; Michael Mandelbaum, “A Perfect Failure: NATO’s War against Yugoslavia,” Foreign Affairs 78, no. 5 (September/October 1999): 5. 31. United Nations Security Council, United Nations Security Council Resolution 1244, June 10, 1999, http://daccess-ods.un.org/access.nsf/Get?Open&DS=S/RES/1244%20(1999)& Lang=E&Area=UNDOC; Independent International Commission on Kosovo, Kosovo Report, 259–260; Len Hawley and Dennis Skocz, “Advance Political-Military Planning: Laying the Foundation for Achieving Viable Peace,” in The Quest for Viable Peace: International Intervention and Strategies for Conflict Transformation, ed. Jock Covey, Michael J. Dziedzic, and Leonard R. Hawley (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2005), 48, 51–52. 32. National Security Council, “Summary of Conclusions for Meeting of the NSC Principals Committee,” Clinton Presidential Library, June 19, 1998, https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/16197, 11–12. 33. Interview with former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Hawley. 34. Interview with General (retired) Casey. 35. Interview with former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Hawley; United Nations Security Council, Report of the Secretary-General Pursuant to Paragraph 10 of Security Council Resolution 1244, June 12, 1999. 36. Interview with Ambassador Schulte. 37. For NSC discussion of a potential NATO stabilization force of approximately 36,000 service members in September 1998, see Samuel Berger, “Memorandum for the President, Kosovo: Preparing for an Ultimatum,” White House, September 24, 1998, https://clinton. presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/16195. See also Judah, Kosovo: War and Revenge, 220. 38. Interview with General (retired) Joseph Ralston, U.S. Air Force, on November 23, 2016. He served as vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1996 to 2000 and later served as supreme allied commander of NATO and as U.S. EUCOM commander. 39. Interview with Colonel (retired) Hess. He headed a team of civil affairs planners that worked on civil-military planning for a potential land invasion of Kosovo and then became a liaison element between KFOR, UNMIK, and other civilian agencies in the summer of 1999. 40. For a comparison of force ratios in Kosovo with those of other recent U.S. interventions, see James Dobbins et al., America’s Role in Nation-Building from Germany to Iraq (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2003), 136, 161. 41. There had been indications that OSCE might assume this mission instead of the UN. See Michael J. Dziedzic and Sasha Kishinchand, “The Historical Context of Conflict in Kosovo,” in The Quest for Viable Peace: International Intervention and Strategies for Conflict Transformation, ed. Jock Covey, Michael J. Dziedzic, and Leonard R. Hawley (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2005), 30; Hawley and Skocz, “Advance Political-Military Planning,” 42, 55.

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42. William J. Clinton, “Remarks by the President on the Situation in Kosovo,” White House, March 22, 1999, https://clintonwhitehouse6.archives.gov/1999/03/1999-03-22-re marks-by-the-president-on-the-situation-in-kosovo.html; cited in Daalder and O’Hanlon, Winning Ugly, 90. 43. Norris, Collision Course, 235–236; Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, 454; Cohen, “Kosovo and the New American Way of War,” 49–51. 44. Norris, Collision Course, 22–23. 45. This shorthand summary of NATO’s five conditions is outlined in Clark, Waging Modern War, 417–418. For the actual language used, see North Atlantic Treaty Organization, “Statement on Kosovo,” April 23–24, 1999, http://www.nato.int/docu/pr/1999/p99062e.htm. See also General Hugh Shelton with Ronald Levinson and Malcolm McConnell, Without Hesitation: The Odyssey of an American Warrior (New York: St. Martin’s, 2010), 371; Daalder and O’Hanlon, Winning Ugly, 102; Roberts, “NATO’s ‘Humanitarian War’ over Kosovo,” 103. 46. United Nations Security Council, Resolution 1199, September 23, 1998, https://doc uments-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N98/279/96/PDF/N9827996.pdf?OpenElement, 3. 47. See the first roughly two minutes of William J. Clinton, “Address on the Kosovo Agreement,” June 10, 1999, https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/ june-10-1999-address-kosovo-agreement. 48. Daalder and O’Hanlon, Winning Ugly, 38–40. 49. Norris, Collision Course, 135. 50. For a strong critique of the United States’ handling of this dilemma, see Mandelbaum, “A Perfect Failure.” 51. Interview with former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Hawley. 52. Interview with General (retired) Ralston. 53. Ben Crampton, “Kosovo,” in Exit Strategies and State Building, ed. Richard Caplan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 160–161. 54. Norris, Collision Course, 135. 55. Independent International Commission on Kosovo, Kosovo Report, 261. 56. Strobe Talbott, foreword to Collision Course: NATO, Russia, and Kosovo, by John Norris (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005), xii. 57. Mandelbaum, “A Perfect Failure,” 5. 58. Cohen, “Kosovo and the New American Way of War,” 48–50. See also the discussion of “no clear exit date or exit strategy” in Crampton, “Kosovo,” 159. 59. Interview with Ambassador Schulte. 60. Interview with former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Hawley. 61. Interview with General (retired) Casey. 62. Interview with Ambassador Schulte. 63. Interview with former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Hawley. 64. Interview with former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Hawley. 65. Dobbins et al., America’s Role, 111–112. 66. For an essay that implicitly outlines the merits of removing Milosevic, see Mandelbaum, “A Perfect Failure,” 4. It includes the following passage: “Removing Milosevic from office was by no means an impossible proposition. He was not popular with Serbs (the subsequent NATO assault temporarily increased his popularity), he did not exercise anything resembling totalitarian control over Serbia, and prolonged demonstrations in 1996–97 had almost toppled him. But NATO chose a different course.” 67. Albright, Madam Secretary, 411. 68. Interview with former Ambassador Marc Grossman on November 17, 2016. He served as U.S. assistant secretary of state for European Affairs from 1997 to 2000, after

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having served as U.S. ambassador to Turkey from 1995 to 1997. He later served as under secretary of state for political affairs. 69. Clinton, My Life, 855; Norris, Collision Course, 128–129; Clark, Waging Modern War, 325. 70. R. Craig Nation, War in the Balkans, 1991–2002 (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, 2003), 263. 71. Dobbins et al., America’s Role, 112. 72. Albright, Madam Secretary, 425–426; Dobbins et al., America’s Role, 112–113. 73. Nardulli et al., Disjointed War, 110. 74. Emma Sky, The Unraveling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq (New York: PublicAffairs, 2015), 152. 75. Nardulli et al., Disjointed War, 11. 76. Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, 43–44. 77. Interview with Ambassador Grossman. 78. Ben Lovelock, “Securing a Viable Peace: Defeating Militant Extremists—FourthGeneration Peace Implementation,” in The Quest for Viable Peace: International Intervention and Strategies for Conflict Transformation, ed. Jock Covey, Michael J. Dziedzic, and Leonard R. Hawley (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2005), 123–125. 79. William J. Clinton, “Address to the Nation on Airstrikes against Serbian Targets in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia,” March 24, 1999, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ ws/?pid=57305. 80. Clinton, My Life, 849. 81. Interview with General (retired) Casey. 82. National Security Council, “Summary of Conclusions for Meeting of the NSC Deputies Committee,” Clinton Presidential Library, February 7, 1999, https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/16197, 169–170. For earlier discussion of “a possible NATO-led force to help implement an interim settlement,” see National Security Council, “Summary of Conclusions for Meeting of the NSC Principals Committee,” Clinton Presidential Library, January 29, 1999, https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/16197, 60–61. 83. National Security Council, “Summary of Conclusions for Meeting of the NSC Deputies Committee,” Clinton Presidential Library, March 2, 1999, https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/16197, 193–194; United Nations Security Council, United Nations Security Council Resolution 1244. 84. Judah, Kosovo: War and Revenge, 270; Clinton, My Life, 855; Dobbins et al., America’s Role, 116. 85. The term “wild card” in reference to potential postwar obstacles was provided by Ambassador Schulte in an interview. 86. Interview with Ambassador Schulte. 87. Kurth, “First War,” 89–90; Phillips, Liberating Kosovo, 50; Daalder and O’Hanlon, Winning Ugly, 41–42; Clark, Waging Modern War, 57, 226. 88. Norris, Collision Course, 13–15. 89. For General Clark’s recollection of the events at Pristina airfield, see Clark, Waging Modern War, 375–403. See also Norris, Collision Course, 237–287; Clinton, My Life, 859; Daalder and O’Hanlon, Winning Ugly, 175–176. 90. Clark, Waging Modern War, 348, 351, 412, quotation on 348. 91. Clinton, My Life, 852, 854, 859. William J. Clinton, “Telephone Conversation with Russian President Yeltsin,” Clinton Presidential Library, April 19, 1999, https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/57569, 439–442. For a detailed account of the high-level diplomatic tensions and interactions between American and Russian officials throughout the Kosovo war, see Norris, Collision Course.

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92. Interview with Ambassador Grossman. 93. Albright, Madam Secretary, 413. 94. See Norris, Collision Course, for a detailed account of these trilateral diplomatic discussions. See also Nation, War in the Balkans, 259. 95. Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, 376, 441–443; Norris, Collision Course, 37–38. 96. Albright, Madam Secretary, 394–395; Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, 376–377. 97. Norris, Collision Course, 48–49; Clark, Waging Modern War, 109–114, 227, 311–313. For General Shelton’s repeated criticisms of General Clark that help reflect the tensions as Kosovo unfolded, see Shelton, Without Hesitation, 370–374, 382–383. 98. Shelton, Without Hesitation, 383; Clark, Waging Modern War, 273. 99. Clark, Waging Modern War, 127. 100. Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, 478–479; Clark, Waging Modern War, 408–411. 101. Nardulli et al., Disjointed War, 103. 102. Nardulli et al., 99. See also the NSC meeting documents cited earlier in this chapter. 103. Roberts, “NATO’s ‘Humanitarian War’ over Kosovo,” 118; Clinton, My Life, 855. 104. Phillips, Liberating Kosovo, 117; Nardulli et al., Disjointed War, 1. 105. For a visual depiction of the multinational brigade sectors, see Nardulli et al., Disjointed War, 102. 106. Norris, Collision Course, 227. 107. Interview with General (retired) Ralston. 108. Dobbins et al., America’s Role, 116. 109. Interview with Ambassador Dobbins. 110. Crampton, “Kosovo,” 159; United Nations Security Council, United Nations Security Council Resolution 1244. 111. United Nations Security Council, Report of the Secretary-General; United Nations Security Council, United Nations Security Council Resolution 1244; Independent International Commission on Kosovo, Kosovo Report, 100–101; Dziedzic and Kishinchand, “The Historical Context,” 30–31. 112. Interview with Ambassador Grossman; Dobbins et al., America’s Role, 113–114; Hawley and Skocz, “Advance Political-Military Planning,” 42, 55; Dziedzic and Kishinchand, “The Historical Context,” 30; Jock Covey, “Making a Viable Peace: Moderating Political Conflict,” in The Quest for Viable Peace: International Intervention and Strategies for Conflict Transformation, ed. Jock Covey, Michael J. Dziedzic, and Leonard R. Hawley (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2005), 101. 113. Interview with Colonel (retired) Hess. 114. Independent International Commission on Kosovo, Kosovo Report, 120. 115. Interview with Ambassador Schulte. 116. Interview with Michael Hurley on December 20, 2016. He served as NSC director of Southeastern European affairs from 1998 to 1999. 117. Curt Tarnoff, “Kosovo: Reconstruction and Development Assistance,” Congressional Research Service Report for Congress, June 7, 2001, 4. 118. Dobbins et al., America’s Role, 125. 119. Albright, Madam Secretary, 408; Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, 425. 120. Hawley and Skocz, “Advance Political-Military Planning,” 43. 121. Phillips, Liberating Kosovo, 68. 122. Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, 366–367, 398; Covey, “Making a Viable Peace,” 105–107; Clinton, My Life, 860. 123. Clinton, My Life, 552–553. For more on whether the intervention in Somalia should be seen in positive or negative terms (as well as the overall number of Somali lives saved),

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see Dominic D. P. Johnson and Dominic Tierney, Failing to Win: Perceptions of Victory and Defeat in International Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 205–241. For more on the Clinton administration’s reaction to Somalia, see Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, 260–265. 124. William J. Clinton, “Interview with Former President Bill Clinton,” CNN Larry King Live, June 24, 2004, http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0406/24/lkl.00.html; Johnson and Tierney, Failing to Win, 241. 125. Bruce R. Pirnie, Civilians and Soldiers: Achieving Better Coordination (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 1998), 64–68; Dobbins et al., America’s Role, 83–84; interview with former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Hawley. 126. Clinton, My Life, 685; interview with former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Hawley; interview with Ambassador Schulte. 127. Clinton, My Life, 860. In his telephone conversations with Yeltsin, Clinton repeatedly referred to Bosnia, or “the Bosnian model,” as a frame of reference for Kosovo. As one of several examples, in April 1999 when discussing a potential peacekeeping force, Clinton said, “If I could design it the best way I could, I would have it look like the work we are doing in Bosnia.” William J. Clinton, “Telephone Conversation with Russian President Yeltsin,” Clinton Presidential Library, April 25, 1999, https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/ items/show/57569, 449. 128. Holbrooke, To End a War, 368. 129. Interview with Ambassador Dobbins. 130. Interview with Ambassador Dobbins. 131. Interview with General (retired) Casey. 132. Interview with former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Hawley. 133. Interview with Ambassador Grossman. 134. Interview with Ambassador Schulte. 135. Clark, Waging Modern War, 151; Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, 399; Pirnie, Civilians and Soldiers, 64, 70, 74. For more on General Clark’s role at Dayton, see Holbrooke, To End a War. 136. Albright, Madam Secretary, 4, 8–9, 183–184, 192, 382; Norris, Collision Course, 13; Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, 378–380, 386. 137. Clinton, “Address to the Nation on Airstrikes.” 138. Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, 423–424. 139. Interview with General (retired) Ralston. 140. Interview with General (retired) Casey. 141. Interview with former Ambassador Thomas Pickering on November 29, 2016. He served as under secretary of state for political affairs from 1997 to 2000, and prior to that served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, among several other ambassadorships throughout his career. 142. Interview with Hurley. 143. Interview with former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Hawley. 144. National Security Council, Presidential Decision Directive PDD/NSC 56: The Clinton Administration’s Policy on Managing Complex Contingency Operations, May 1997. 145. National Security Council, 5, 7. 146. National Security Council, 3. 147. Interview with former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Hawley. 148. For a detailed examination of PDD-56, including the strategic context that helped bring it into existence, see Pirnie, Civilians and Soldiers. An NSC deputies committee meeting in late October 1998 directed that “an Executive Committee on Kosovo will be established in accordance with PDD-56” and provided further guidance on political-military planning for

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Kosovo, in accordance with PDD-56. See National Security Council, “Summary of Conclusions for Meeting of the NSC Deputies Committee,” October 28, 1998, 127–128. 149. Frank Newport, “New Poll on Kosovo Finds Underwhelmed Public,” Gallup, June 11, 1999, http://www.gallup.com/poll/3784/new-poll-kosovo-finds-underwhelmed-public.aspx. 150. Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, 371–376; Phillips, Liberating Kosovo, 93. For a rebuttal to the alleged “wag the dog” link between the impeachment events and the December 1998 bombing of Iraq, see Shelton, Without Hesitation, 365–368. For the president’s account of these near-simultaneous events in late 1998, see Clinton, My Life, 833–838. 151. Richard Sobel, “United States Intervention in Bosnia,” Public Opinion Quarterly 62, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 268; Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, 358–359. The Bosnia commitment also included a self-imposed one-year limit to help satiate domestic audiences, although this deadline later withered away. 152. Interview with General (retired) Ralston. 153. Dobbins et al., America’s Role, 112. 154. Interview with Admiral (retired) James Stavridis, U.S. Navy, on December 12, 2016. Admiral Stavridis has served as the U.S. EUCOM commander and supreme allied commander of NATO. 155. As cited in Norris, Collision Course, 58. 156. Independent International Commission on Kosovo, Kosovo Report, 206; Judah, Kosovo: War and Revenge, 286. 157. Dobbins et al., America’s Role, 128. 158. Roland Paris, At War’s End: Building Peace after Civil Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 213. 159. David M. Edelstein, Occupational Hazards: Success and Failure in Military Occupation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 149–150. 160. Crampton, “Kosovo,” 165–166; Edelstein, Occupational Hazards, 148–149. 161. Phillips, Liberating Kosovo, 211. 162. Phillips, 144–147; Crampton, “Kosovo,” 166; United Nations Security Council, Report of the Secretary-General on the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo, April 30, 2004, 1–5. 163. Crampton, “Kosovo,” 171–173; Phillips, Liberating Kosovo, 181–186. 164. Dobbins et al., America’s Role, 161. For additional quantitative comparisons between the post-conflict efforts in Kosovo and Afghanistan, see also 136, 146. 165. Dobbins et al., 126. 166. Tierney, The Right Way, 184; Phillips, Liberating Kosovo, 187. 167. Frud Bezhan, “Word on the Street Is That Kosovo Has a Love Affair with Americans,” Radio Free Europe, August 17, 2016, http://www.rferl.org/a/kosovo-love-affair-americansbiden-clinton-bush/27928807.html. 168. Interview with a senior U.S. official. 169. Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, 437–438. 170. For an outline of some of the most notable missteps and missed opportunities during the Kosovo war, see Daalder and O’Hanlon, Winning Ugly, 16–21. 2. Afghanistan 1. Condoleezza Rice, No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington (New York: Crown, 2011), 79. For more on the emotional shock and transformative nature of 9/11, see also George W. Bush, Decision Points (New York: Crown, 2010), 150–151, 179, 229. A recurring theme in Vice President Cheney’s memoir is that “the attacks of 9/11 had changed everything” (419), and its opening chapter highlights the shock of the 9/11 attacks. See Dick

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Cheney with Liz Cheney, In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir (New York: Threshold Editions, 2011), 1–10, 329–332, 419, 519, 522. As Cheney states, “I thought it probable that this was a conflict in which our nation would be engaged for the rest of my lifetime” (332). 2. Bush, Decision Points, 128. 3. Bush, 140–141; “Reaction from around the World,” New York Times, September 12, 2001, http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/12/us/reaction-from-around-the-world.html. Regarding candlelight vigils in Iran, see photo slideshow with captions at “Candle Power: Iran Mourns America’s Dead,” Time Europe, September 18, 2001, https://web.archive.org/web/ 20101115094604/http://www.time.com/time/europe/photoessays/vigil/2.html. The Pentagon also received offers of military and humanitarian support from other countries “within hours after 9/11.” See Douglas J. Feith, War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism (New York: Harper, 2008), 89. 4. Interview with a senior U.S. official. 5. North Atlantic Treaty Organization, “Statement by the North Atlantic Council,” NATO Press Releases, September 12, 2001, http://www.nato.int/docu/pr/2001/p01-124e.htm. 6. Gideon Rose, How Wars End: Why We Always Fight the Last Battle (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010), 240, 270. 7. This anecdote was recounted during an interview with former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Collins. 8. This was prior to the establishment of U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) years later, which would assume responsibility for the Horn of Africa from CENTCOM. 9. Interview with Colonel (retired) Fitzgerald. 10. Interview with former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Collins. 11. Interview with Colonel (retired) Thomas Fisher, U.S. Army, on June 29, 2016. He served as a planner at U.S. Central Command. Regarding the lack of an existing plan for an invasion of Afghanistan, see also General Tommy Franks with Malcolm McConnell, American Soldier (New York: ReganBooks, 2004), 250–251. 12. Donald P. Wright et al., A Different Kind of War: The United States Army in Operation Enduring Freedom, October 2001–September 2005 (Fort Leavenworth, KS: Combat Studies Institute Press, 2010), 317. 13. General Richard B. Myers with Malcolm McConnell, Eyes on the Horizon: Serving on the Front Lines of National Security (New York: Threshold Editions, 2009), 171–175. General Myers describes Phase IV as “the most nebulous” of all the phases outlined (173). See also Wright et al., A Different Kind of War, 46–47, 319. 14. Wright et al., A Different Kind of War, 46–47. 15. Wright et al., 191, 319. See also Seth G. Jones, In the Graveyard of Empires: America’s War in Afghanistan (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), 117–118. 16. Interview with Colonel (retired) Fitzgerald. 17. Interview with Colonel (retired) Fitzgerald. 18. Donald Rumsfeld, “Memo to Secretary of State George Shultz on ‘The Swamp,’” November 23, 1983, http://library.rumsfeld.com/doclib/sp/24/11-23-1983.%20Information%20 Memorandum%20From%20Rumsfeld%20to%20The%20Secretary.%20The%20Swamp.pdf, 7 (emphasis in original). 19. This theme relates to Rumsfeld’s observations of Vietnam and Lebanon. See Donald Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown: A Memoir (New York: Sentinel, 2011), 31, 99, 482–483. 20. Rumsfeld, 683. 21. Jack Fairweather, The Good War: Why We Couldn’t Win the War or the Peace in Afghanistan (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 25, 56; Dominic Tierney, The Right Way to Lose a War (New York: Little, Brown, 2015), 89.

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22. This vision of military transformation influenced Secretary Rumsfeld’s approach to both Afghanistan and Iraq. See Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, 293–296, 439; Wright et al., A Different Kind of War, 318; Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 34–35, 233; Sean Naylor, Not a Good Day to Die: The Untold Story of Operation Anaconda (New York: Penguin, 2005), 18–19. 23. Critical views of the Weinberger-Powell doctrine were not unique to the George W. Bush administration. One of the most vocal critics in the early 1990s was Secretary of Defense Les Aspin (who served during President Clinton’s first year in office). See Les Aspin, “The Use and Usefulness of Military Forces in the Post-Cold War, Post-Soviet World,” address to the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, Washington, DC, September 21, 1992. 24. Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, 293–294, 301–304. The phrase “frozen in time” is found on 301 and specifically refers to U.S. force deployments abroad, but the phrase seems to aptly describe the defense secretary’s view of the Pentagon as a whole. 25. Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, 293–294, 331. Rumsfeld’s recollection does not exactly align with the accounts of either President Bush or Vice President Cheney, both of whom indicate that Rumsfeld outlined a clear vision of military transformation in his initial interview with the president, which helped result in his selection as defense secretary in the first place. As President Bush states, “When I interviewed him, Don laid out a captivating vision for transforming the Defense Department. He talked about making our forces lighter, more agile, and more rapidly deployable. . . . Rumsfeld impressed me.” See Bush, Decision Points, 84. Cheney also indicates that Rumsfeld “outperformed the others in his interview . . . [and had] clearly spent time thinking about what should be done to transform the military into a modern fighting force.” See Cheney, In My Time, 299. 26. Bush, Decision Points, 197. 27. Ahmed Rashid, Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia (New York: Viking, 2008), 74–75; Bob Woodward, Bush at War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), 192–193. 28. Fairweather, The Good War, 25–27; Woodward, Bush at War, 219, 231. 29. James Dobbins et al., America’s Role in Nation-Building from Germany to Iraq (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2003), 131. 30. James F. Dobbins, After the Taliban: Nation-Building in Afghanistan (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2008), 19. For more on the initial flurry of NSC meetings, see Woodward, Bush at War. For more on broader terrorism-related concerns that also drew the attention of NSC principals during this time, see Rice, No Higher Honor, 98–108. 31. United Nations Security Council, Agreement on Provisional Arrangements in Afghanistan Pending the Re-establishment of Permanent Government Institutions (Bonn Agreement), December 5, 2001, http://peacemaker.un.org/sites/peacemaker.un.org/files/AF_011205_Agr eementProvisionalArrangementsinAfghanistan%28en%29.pdf; Mark Fields and Ramsha Ahmed, A Review of the 2001 Bonn Conference and Application to the Road Ahead in Afghanistan (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 2011), 5; Brian F. Neumann, Lisa M. Mundey, and Jon Mikolashek, The U.S. Army in Afghanistan: Operation Enduring Freedom, March 2002–April 2005 (Washington, DC: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 2013), 3. 32. Dobbins, After the Taliban, 74–75, 82–84, 91–92; Zalmay Khalilzad, The Envoy: From Kabul to the White House, My Journey through a Turbulent World (New York: St. Martin’s, 2016), 119–120; Fields and Ahmed, A Review of the 2001 Bonn Conference, 13–18; Jones, Graveyard of Empires, 275. 33. Dobbins, After the Taliban, 102–107, 124–125. 34. Dobbins referred to this development as “an abdication of White House responsibility.” See Dobbins, After the Taliban, 118–119.

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35. Interview with former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Collins. 36. United Nations Development Program, “Afghanistan: Donors Pledge $4.5 Billion in Tokyo,” ReliefWeb, January 22, 2002, http://reliefweb.int/report/afghanistan/afghanistandonors-pledge-45-billion-tokyo; Jones, Graveyard of Empires, 137; Bush, Decision Points, 207. 37. Robert M. Perito, “Afghanistan’s Police: The Weak Link in Security Sector Reform,” United States Institute of Peace Special Report, August 2009, 2; Fatima Ayub, Sari Kouvo, and Rachel Wareham, “Security Sector Reform in Afghanistan,” Initiative for Peacebuilding, April 2009, 9; Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, 483; Rashid, Descent into Chaos, 197, 204. For use of the phrase “adopt a ministry” plan, see Rice, No Higher Honor, 191. 38. Interview with Colonel (retired) Fitzgerald. 39. Dobbins, After the Taliban, 129–131; Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Little America: The War within the War for Afghanistan (New York: Vintage Books, 2012), 89. 40. United Nations Security Council, Bonn Agreement; Jones, Graveyard of Empires, 109–111; Milan Vaishnav, “Afghanistan: The Chimera of the ‘Light Footprint,’” in Winning the Peace: An American Strategy for Post-conflict Reconstruction, ed. Robert C. Orr (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2004), 250–251. 41. For more on this proposal for a stabilization force and the related U.S. bureaucratic debate, see Jones, Graveyard of Empires, 109–115, and Dobbins, After the Taliban, 107, 129–131. This proposed force size of roughly 25,000 would have represented only a quarter of the approximately 100,000 service members that the United States eventually deployed to Afghanistan in 2011. 42. Conor Keane, US Nation-Building in Afghanistan (London: Routledge, 2016), 90–91; Dobbins, After the Taliban, 124–125, 130–131. 43. Ian S. Livingston and Michael O’Hanlon, “Afghanistan Index, Also Including Selected Data on Pakistan,” Brookings, September 30, 2012, 4–5. Hannah Fairfield, Kevin Quealy, and Archie Tse, “Troop Levels in Afghanistan since 2001,” New York Times, http:// www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/10/01/world/middleeast/afghanistan-policy.html?_r=0. See also Bush, Decision Points, 207. For more on the relatively small military force employed at the outset, see Dobbins et al., America’s Role, 133. 44. Franks, American Soldier, 268. 45. For the discussion points of the November 27 meeting, see Donald Rumsfeld, “Rumsfeld-Franks Talking Points,” November 27, 2001, http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/ NSAEBB418/docs/3%20-%20Rumsfeld-Franks%20talking%20points%2011-27-01.pdf. See also Franks, American Soldier, 315; Bush, Decision Points, 234–235; Feith, War and Decision, 219–221; Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin, 2006), 32; Donald P. Wright and Colonel Timothy R. Reese, On Point II: Transition to the New Campaign: The United States Army in Operation Iraqi Freedom, May 2003–January 2005 (Fort Leavenworth, KS: Combat Studies Institute Press, 2008), 67; Woodward, Plan of Attack, 1–2, 30. 46. Wright et al., A Different Kind of War, 191. 47. This chapter identifies the conclusion of Operation Anaconda in mid-March 2002 as the end of major combat. Perhaps one could adopt a shorter time frame by selecting the fall of Kandahar on December 7, 2001, as an alternative end point, but doing so would sidestep the important encounter at Tora Bora as well as the fact that Operation Anaconda in March 2002 actually represented the largest U.S. maneuver battle to that point by a sizable margin. 48. Interview with a senior U.S. official. 49. Interview with Ambassador Taylor. 50. George W. Bush, “The Second Gore-Bush Presidential Debate,” Commission on Presidential Debates, October 11, 2000, http://www.debates.org/?page=october-11-2000-debatetranscript.

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51. Bush, Decision Points, 150–151. 52. George W. Bush, “Radio Address of the President to the Nation,” White House, September 15, 2001, https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/09/ 20010915.html. 53. George W. Bush, “Text: President Bush, Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi,” September 25, 2001, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/specials/attacked/transcripts/ bushtext_092501.html. Along similar lines, the president also reportedly said at an October 15, 2001, NSC meeting, “I don’t want to nation-build with troops. . . . There’s been too much discussion of post-conflict Afghanistan. We’ve been only at it for a week. We’ve made a lot of progress, we’ve got time. It may take a while.” See Woodward, Bush at War, 241. 54. George W. Bush, “Text: Bush on State of War,” October 11, 2001, http://www. washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/specials/attacked/transcripts/bush_text101101.html. For an op-ed written at the time assessing the seemingly shifting statements on nation building (and also containing the statement by Blair), see William Schneider, “Not Exactly a Bush Flip-Flop,” Atlantic, October 2001, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2001/10/ not-exactly-a-bush-flip-flop/377745/. 55. Bush, Decision Points, 397; Rice, No Higher Honor, 324–329. 56. Bush, Decision Points, 205. 57. Bush, 191, 194–195. 58. Interview with Andrew Wilder on November 16, 2016. He managed humanitarian and development programs in Afghanistan and Pakistan for more than ten years, and later served as vice president of Asia programs at the U.S. Institute of Peace. 59. For the White House’s bulleted list of Mrs. Bush’s efforts to improve the lives of Afghans, particularly women and children, see the White House of President George W. Bush, “Mrs. Laura Bush’s Leadership: First Lady’s Work Advances President Bush’s Agenda at Home and Abroad,” https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/infocus/bushrecord/factsheets/leadership.html. 60. Khalilzad, The Envoy, 149. 61. Ari Fleischer, “Press Briefing by Ari Fleischer,” White House, May 9, 2002, https:// georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2002/05/20020509-8.html. Ahmed Rashid suggests that “a hesitant Bush blew hot and cold over nation building.” See Rashid, Descent into Chaos, 173. 62. Khalilzad, The Envoy, 136–137. 63. Interview with Wilder. For a highly critical assessment of U.S. reliance on Afghan warlords and its repercussions, see Keane, US Nation-Building, 105–110; and Vaishnav, “Afghanistan: The Chimera.” Ahmed Rashid asserts that the U.S. government “employed a ‘warlord strategy’ in order to be relieved of Afghanistan’s security and political and human rights responsibilities.” See Rashid, Descent into Chaos, 133. 64. Interview with Wilder. 65. Interview with Ambassador Taylor. 66. Interview with Colonel (retired) Fitzgerald. 67. Interview with Colonel (retired) Fitzgerald. 68. Myers, Eyes on the Horizon, 174. 69. Interview with Wilder. 70. Wright et al., A Different Kind of War, 190. 71. George W. Bush, “President Outlines War Effort: Remarks by the President to the George C. Marshall ROTC Award Seminar on National Security,” White House, Office of the Press Secretary, April 17, 2002, https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/ releases/2002/04/text/20020417-1.html.

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72. Woodward, Bush at War, 124. 73. Interview with a senior U.S. defense official. 74. Keane, US Nation-Building, 165–166. 75. Along similar lines, the president asserted on October 7, 2001, that the United States would “defend not only our precious freedoms, but also the freedom of people everywhere to live and raise their children free from fear.” See George W. Bush, “Presidential Address to the Nation,” White House, Office of the Press Secretary, October 7, 2001, https://georgewbushwhitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/10/20011007-8.html. 76. For more on the Soviet experience in Afghanistan, see Jones, Graveyard of Empires, xxv–xxvii, 23–40. 77. Bush, Decision Points, 194; Cheney, In My Time, 346; Franks, American Soldier, 263. 78. Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, 681–682. 79. Cheney, In My Time, 347. 80. Dobbins, After the Taliban, 103. 81. For a look at the serious challenge of Afghanistan’s opium production and its array of political and economic effects before and after the U.S. invasion, see Rashid, Descent into Chaos, 317–337. 82. Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, 406; Feith, War and Decision, 140; Neumann, Mundey, and Mikolashek, The U.S. Army in Afghanistan, 4. 83. Interview with former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Collins. 84. As Rumsfeld states in his memoir, “I was convinced Karzai needed to learn to govern the Chicago way. In the 1960s, Mayor Richard J. Daley ruled Chicago—a city of many diverse and powerful elements—using maneuver, guile, money, patronage, and services to keep the city’s fractious leaders from rebelling against his authority.” See Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, 407. Notably, with regard to empowering Afghan warlords, Rumsfeld would state on April 22, 2002, “How ought security to evolve in that country depends on really two things; one is what the interim government decides they think ought to happen, [the other is] what the warlord forces in the country decide they think ought to happen, and the interaction between those two.” See Donald Rumsfeld, “Transcript: Defense Department Briefing,” April 22, 2002, https://wfile.ait.org.tw/wf-archive/2002/020422/epf102.htm. Also cited in Keane, US Nation-Building, 108; Rashid, Descent into Chaos, 134–135. 85. General Franks recalls briefing President Bush on Osama bin Laden’s possible presence at Tora Bora. See Franks, American Soldier, 308–309, 348. For more on bin Laden’s location at the time, see also Wright et al., A Different Kind of War, 114–115; Steve Coll, Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan (New York: Penguin Press, 2018), 108–109. 86. In the words of a special operator present at the engagement, “It was just over two months since 9/11, and for the most important mission to date in the global war on terror, our nation was relying on a fractious bunch of AK-47 toting lawless bandits and tribal thugs.” See Dalton Fury, Kill Bin Laden: A Delta Force Commander’s Account of the Hunt for the World’s Most Wanted Man (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2009), 209. General (retired) Anthony Zinni referred to the U.S. approach as “the rent-an-army trick.” Interview with General (retired) Zinni. For more on U.S. missteps at Tora Bora, including the unheeded requests for additional U.S. forces, see Thomas E. Ricks, The Generals: American Military Command from World War II to Today (New York: Penguin, 2012), 398–399. See also Nick B. Mills, Karzai: The Failing American Intervention and the Struggle for Afghanistan (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2007), 216–217, 230–231; Yaniv Barzilai, 102 Days of War: How Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda, and the Taliban Survived 2001 (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2013), 87–118.

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87. Jones, Graveyard of Empires, 96–97; Ricks, The Generals, 399; Wright et al., A Different Kind of War, 134–135. 88. Wright et al., A Different Kind of War, 119. 89. Jones, Graveyard of Empires, 280. For more on the ability of enemy networks to seek refuge after Tora Bora, reconstitute themselves over time, and then re-attack in Afghanistan, see Neumann, Mundey, and Mikolashek, The U.S. Army in Afghanistan, 4. 90. Coll, Directorate S, 102–108; Jones, Graveyard of Empires, 97. 91. Franks, American Soldier, 295. 92. Franks, 275–276; Woodward, Plan of Attack, 118–119. For a perspective that is highly critical of General Franks’s role during this interservice interaction, see General Hugh Shelton with Ronald Levinson and Malcolm McConnell, Without Hesitation: The Odyssey of an American Warrior (New York: St. Martin’s, 2010), 447, 482. 93. Rice, No Higher Honor, 92. For more on the initial confusion regarding who was in charge, particularly between Defense and CIA, see Woodward, Bush at War, 243–246. 94. Dobbins, After the Taliban, 130. See also Jones, Graveyard of Empires, 110–115. 95. Interview with Colonel (retired) Fitzgerald. 96. Bush, “President Outlines War Effort”; Wright et al., A Different Kind of War, 183. 97. Interview with Wilder. 98. Keane, US Nation-Building, 65–66; Dobbins, After the Taliban, 122–124. For more on the troubled path of the Afghan police in particular, see Perito, “Afghanistan’s Police.” 99. Dobbins, After the Taliban, 102–107. 100. Interview with Wilder. 101. Dobbins, After the Taliban, 107, 129–131. 102. Ahmed Rashid notes that “ISAF was proving to be a huge success, creating immense goodwill in Kabul. . . . When British soldiers patrolled the streets of Kabul, there would be an instant traffic jam. Hordes of well-wishers, including burqa-clad women and laughing children, crowded around them.” See Rashid, Descent into Chaos, 134–135, 196–197, quotation on 135. Zalmay Khalilzad similarly recalls Afghans’ desire “to see a much larger foreign role in stabilizing their country.” See Khalilzad, The Envoy, 131. 103. Naylor, Not a Good Day to Die, 55–56. 104. Bush, Decision Points, 207. 105. Interview with Wilder. 106. Chandrasekaran, Little America, 89. 107. Interview with former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Collins. 108. Interview with a senior U.S. official. 109. Interview with Ambassador Dobbins. 110. General Franks’s memoir is also noteworthy for its frequent focus on tactical and operational concerns, with less attention given to issues of strategy, which were apparently seen as Washington’s problem to solve. For just a few examples of this long-standing tactical and operational focus, see Franks, American Soldier, 116, 118, 252, 440–441. In one particularly interesting passage, Franks asserts that “training is as important to the Army as education is to civilian life” (173), a revealing analogy that implicitly downplays the importance of education for Army leaders. For more on the problematic tendency to emphasize tactics over strategy in Afghanistan, see Ricks, The Generals, 397–402 (see also 345–347 for a separate historical example of Army leadership prioritizing training over education). 111. Rose, How Wars End, 286–287. 112. Cheney, In My Time, 345; Joseph J. Collins, Understanding War in Afghanistan (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 2011), 48. 113. Franks, American Soldier, 211.

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114. Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, 369–370. 115. Wright et al., A Different Kind of War, 218, 325. 116. Interview with former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Collins. 117. Interview with Ambassador Dobbins. 118. Interview with former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Collins. 119. Dick Cheney, “Text of Dick Cheney’s Speech to the GOP Convention,” CBS News, August 2, 2000, http://www.cbsnews.com/news/text-of-dick-cheneys-speech. 120. Interview with Ambassador Schulte. 121. Interview with Ambassador Dobbins. 122. Regarding “old think,” see Donald Rumsfeld, “News Transcript: Secretary Rumsfeld Interview with CBS Evening News,” Department of Defense, October 9, 2001, http:// archive.defense.gov/Transcripts/Transcript.aspx?TranscriptID=2051. Regarding a new “paradigm,” see Franks, American Soldier, 395. President Bush perceived that “after the shock of 9/11, there was no legal, military, or political blueprint for confronting a new enemy that rejected all the traditional rules of war,” a statement that also implicitly downplayed the utility of studying and learning from pre-9/11 interventions. See Bush, Decision Points, 179. 123. Interview with General (retired) Casey. This passage relates to the availability heuristic outlined by Tversky and Kahneman, in which views are shaped by “the ease with which instances or associations could be brought to mind.” See Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, “Availability: A Heuristic for Judging Frequency and Probability,” Cognitive Psychology 5 (1973): 208. 124. Wright et al., A Different Kind of War, 15. For more on various explanations for the Soviets’ 1979 invasion, see Artyom Borovik, The Hidden War: A Russian Journalist’s Account of the Soviet War in Afghanistan (New York: Grove, 1990), 4–13. See also Anthony Arnold, Afghanistan: The Soviet Invasion in Perspective (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1985), 90–91, 96–97. 125. Jones, Graveyard of Empires, 17–37. 126. Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, 365–366. 127. Franks, American Soldier, 252, 271, 324, quotation on 271. Douglas Feith similarly recalls a desire “to keep the U.S. military presence—our ‘footprint’—small. We wanted to avoid resembling in any way the heavy-footed force the Soviet Union had imposed on the country in 1979.” See Feith, War and Decision, 76. For similar sentiments, see also Bush, Decision Points, 207, and Rice, No Higher Honor, 85–86. 128. Lester W. Grau, trans. and ed., The Bear Went Over the Mountain: Soviet Combat Tactics in Afghanistan (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 1996), 202–208, quotation on 207. See also Wright et al., A Different Kind of War, 322. For more criticism of reductionist and misleading interpretations of the Soviet-Afghan war, see Naylor, Not a Good Day to Die, 18; Jones, Graveyard of Empires, 131–132. 129. Cheney, In My Time, 346–347. 130. The president’s memoir notes that “America’s noninvolvement helped create a vacuum” after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989. See Bush, Decision Points, 186. 131. Dobbins, After the Taliban, 19. 132. See Rice, No Higher Honor, 108–110, for a brief outline of U.S. priorities in Afghanistan as the fighting seemed to be wrapping up in late 2001 and early 2002. The passage does not suggest that holistic postwar planning was being undertaken by the NSC during that period, outside of the limited aspects mentioned in the text. 133. Interview with Ambassador Schulte; Khalilzad, The Envoy, 115. 134. Interview with former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Hawley; Keane, US Nation-Building, 75; Shelton, Without Hesitation, 480–481. The Bush administration tinkered

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with a potential replacement for PDD-56, but it was never signed, and it was not used in either Afghanistan or Iraq planning. See Michèle Flournoy, “Interagency Strategy and Planning for Post-conflict Reconstruction,” in Winning the Peace: An American Strategy for Post-conflict Reconstruction, ed. Robert C. Orr (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2004), 107–108. 135. Interview with Ambassador Schulte. 136. George W. Bush, “Radio Address of the President to the Nation,” White House, September 29, 2001, https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/09/ 20010929.html. 137. Bush, Decision Points, 195. Rice states that as an outgrowth of President Bush’s interpretation of Vietnam, “He tended to accept the military’s representations—not unquestioningly, but with fewer probes than he would make later in his presidency.” See Rice, No Higher Honor, 96. Interestingly, this interpretation of Vietnam as a case of civilian micromanagement and the perceived virtues of a hands-off approach ran counter to Eliot Cohen’s Supreme Command, a book that President Bush indicated was on his reading list in mid-2002. See Dana Milbank, “Bush’s Summer Reading List Hints at Iraq,” Washington Post, August 20, 2002. In contrast to the president’s outlook reflected in the aforementioned statement, Cohen argues that Vietnam entailed “excessively weak civilian control.” See Eliot A. Cohen, Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), 175–185, quotation on 185. See also Gordon M. Goldstein, Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam (New York: Henry Holt, 2008), 226. 138. Bush, Decision Points, 194; Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, 369; Franks, American Soldier, 230–231. 139. Gallup polling reflects that roughly nine out of ten Americans supported U.S. military action in Afghanistan in late 2001 and early 2002. See historical polling data in Frank Newport, “More Americans Now View Afghanistan War as a Mistake,” Gallup, February 19, 2014, http://news.gallup.com/poll/167471/americans-view-afghanistan-war-mistake.aspx. 140. Vice President Cheney recalls that he emphasized during an NSC meeting that “time is not on our side” (emphasis in original) because Al Qaeda might launch follow-up attacks on the U.S. homeland, potentially using WMD. See Cheney, In My Time, 344–345. For additional perspectives on the perceived importance of speed in the war’s opening phase, see Rice, No Higher Honor, 94–96; Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, 391–394; Franks, American Soldier, 263, 296–299. 141. Bush, Decision Points, 136, 184, 198, quotation on 184. 142. Rice, No Higher Honor, 96 (emphasis in original). 143. Rice, 98–108, 113–115, quotation on 98. 144. Interview with Ambassador Dobbins. 145. Interview with Ambassador Taylor. 146. Interview with former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Collins. 147. For a fairly pessimistic view of the prospects of democratic transformation in Afghanistan, see Fairweather, The Good War, 331–333. For a somewhat more favorable perspective on the potential results of U.S.-led nation building and the notion that this is an inevitable burden the United States must manage, see Dobbins et al., America’s Role. 148. Khalilzad, The Envoy, 12, 111–112, 132, quotation on 132. See also Jeremi Suri, Liberty’s Surest Guardian: Rebuilding Nations after War from the Founders to Obama (New York: Free Press, 2011), 233. For a discussion of U.S. investments in the Helmand River Valley that entailed Americans living and operating reasonably comfortably in Afghanistan from the 1950s through the 1970s, see Chandrasekaran, Little America, 15–34. Chandrasekaran describes American teenagers playing tennis, swimming, watching movies, drinking lemonade, and eating ice cream together in Afghanistan.

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149. Interview with Ambassador Dobbins. 150. Rice, No Higher Honor, 78–79. 151. One critique that arose years later is that we might have tried reconciling with redeemable parts of the Taliban from the outset (by including them at the Bonn negotiations, for example) rather than marginalizing them. For a brief discussion of such a counterfactual, see Fairweather, The Good War, 28, 41–45; Khalilzad, The Envoy, 121. For more on the attempts by multiple Taliban leaders “to reach out to both Karzai and the United States” early on, as well as Vice President Cheney’s rejection of that proposal, see Coll, Directorate S, 140–142. 152. Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, 685–686, 690–691. 153. Wright et al., A Different Kind of War, 323. 154. Interview with Colonel (retired) Fitzgerald. 155. Interview with former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Collins. 156. For examples of a few “early successes” in multiple domains, see Jones, Graveyard of Empires, 134–150; Wright et al., A Different Kind of War, 203. 157. Hamid Karzai, “Transcript: Hamid Karzai’s Acceptance Speech,” November 3, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/03/world/asia/karzaitranscript.html; Fairweather, The Good War, 55, 192. 158. Interview with former U.S. Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Michèle Flournoy on August 10, 2016. 159. For a comprehensive look at the uneasy interplay between Pakistan’s I.S.I. and the United States during the Afghanistan war, see Coll, Directorate S. 160. For more on the unclear goals during the Obama administration’s surge in Afghanistan, see Chandrasekaran, Little America, 278–280, 339–349. 161. Bush, Decision Points, 183. 162. United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan and United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Afghanistan: Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict, Annual Report 2017, February 2018, https://unama.unmissions.org/sites/default/files/ afghanistan_protection_of_civilians_annual_report_2017_final_6_march.pdf, 1, 11. 3. Iraq 1. Paul Wolfowitz, “Victory Came Too Easily,” National Interest no. 35 (Spring 1994): 91–92. For more on the desire to overthrow Saddam’s regime in the 1990s, see Zalmay M. Khalilzad and Paul Wolfowitz, “Overthrow Him,” Weekly Standard, December 1997. 2. Michael R. Gordon and General Bernard E. Trainor, Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq (New York: Pantheon Books, 2006), 23. 3. Interview with multiple CENTCOM planners; Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 26; Donald P. Wright and Colonel Timothy R. Reese, On Point II: Transition to the New Campaign: The United States Army in Operation Iraqi Freedom, May 2003–January 2005 (Fort Leavenworth, KS: Combat Studies Institute Press, 2008), 67–68; Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 8. 4. Interview with General (retired) Zinni. 5. U.S. Central Command, Desert Crossing Seminar After Action Report, June 28–30, 1999, http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB207/Desert%20Crossing%20After%20 Action%20Report_1999-06-28.pdf; Tony Zinni and Tony Koltz, Before the First Shots Are Fired: How America Can Win or Lose Off the Battlefield (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 46–48; Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin, 2006), 20; Dominic Tierney, The Right Way to Lose a War (New York: Little, Brown, 2015), 71–72; Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 138–139; George Packer, The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 119.

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6. U.S. Central Command, Desert Crossing Seminar, 3, 10. 7. Zinni and Koltz, Before the First Shots, 47–48; Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 27, 146. 8. Richard A. Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror (New York: Free Press, 2004), 30, 230–232; Gideon Rose, How Wars End: Why We Always Fight the Last Battle (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010), 242. 9. Clarke, Against All Enemies, 230–232, 237–238; Woodward, Plan of Attack, 9–12; see also Dick Cheney with Liz Cheney, In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir (New York: Threshold Editions, 2011), 364–368. For more on the psychological disposition of the incoming Bush administration officials as it pertains to “unfinished business” and Iraq, see Packer, Assassins’ Gate, 9–11, 27–28, 39–40; Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 10–14. Gideon Rose also addresses the administration’s “preexisting fixation” with Iraq in How Wars End, 242, 252–253, quotation on 253. 10. Donald Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown: A Memoir (New York: Sentinel, 2011), 414–419, quotation on 416. See also Donald Rumsfeld, “Memo to Condoleezza Rice on Iraq,” July 27, 2001, http://library.rumsfeld.com/doclib/sp/293/2001-07-27%20To%20Con doleezza%20Rice%20re%20Iraq.pdf. 11. Condoleezza Rice, No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington (New York: Crown, 2011), 86; General Hugh Shelton with Ronald Levinson and Malcolm McConnell, Without Hesitation: The Odyssey of an American Warrior (New York: St. Martin’s, 2010), 441–445; Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, 346–347; Clarke, Against All Enemies, 30–33; Woodward, Plan of Attack, 24–26; Packer, Assassins’ Gate, 40–41; Ricks, Fiasco, 30–31; Rose, How Wars End, 253–254. 12. Rose, How Wars End, 240, 270. Rose argues that 9/11 fostered a “lack of constraints” and “extraordinary freedom of action.” 13. Interview with Colonel (retired) Fitzgerald; General Tommy Franks with Malcolm McConnell, American Soldier (New York: ReganBooks, 2004), 315, 329; Ricks, Fiasco, 32–33. 14. Interview with General (retired) Zinni; see also Zinni and Koltz, Before the First Shots, 48. 15. Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, 427–428; Shelton, Without Hesitation, 480; Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 52–53. 16. Donald Rumsfeld, “Beyond Nation Building,” Remarks at the 11th Annual Salute to Freedom, Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum in New York City, February 14, 2003, http://www. au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/dod/sp20030214-secdef0024.htm. 17. Interview with General (retired) Zinni; see also Zinni and Koltz, Before the First Shots, 30. 18. U.S. Central Command, RCC OPLAN 1003V, October 31, 2002; Joint Force Land Component Command, JFLCC OPLAN Cobra II, January 13, 2003; U.S. Central Command, Slide Compilation: 1003V Full Force—Force Disposition, August 15, 2002, http:// nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB418/docs/5%20-%201003V%20Full%20Force%20%20Force%20Disposition%20circa%208-02.pdf. 19. Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, 439–440; Shelton, Without Hesitation, 483; Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 96–101, 115–117; Woodward, Plan of Attack, 233–234; Rice, No Higher Honor, 189. 20. Franks, American Soldier, 391–392, 417; George W. Bush, Decision Points (New York: Crown, 2010), 235–236; Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, 429–430; Rice, No Higher Honor, 188; Cheney, In My Time, 383, 399–400; Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 374. 21. Interview with Colonel (retired) Benson. 22. Interview with Colonel (retired) Benson. See also Wright and Reese, On Point II, 72–73.

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23. Combined Forces Land Component Command, CFLCC OPLAN Eclipse II: CFLCC Stability Planning Phase IV PowerPoint Briefing, slide 18. 24. Interview with Colonel (retired) Benson. An interview with Colonel (retired) Fisher also reinforced the idea that CENTCOM intended to rely on the Iraqi Army to help secure the country. 25. Interview with Colonel (retired) Benson. 26. Wright and Reese, On Point II, 77–78. For more on the lack of understanding by U.S. military commanders of the overall Phase IV plan, see Third Infantry Division, Third Infantry Division (Mechanized) After Action Report: Operation Iraqi Freedom, 2003, 281, 289–290, 293, cited in Michael E. O’Hanlon, “Iraq without a Plan,” Policy Review no. 128 (December 2004/January 2005): 36. 27. U.S. Department of State, The Future of Iraq Project: Overview, 2003, http://nsar chive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB198/FOI%20Overview.pdf. For the full thirteen-volume study along with a short overview, see the National Security Archive, “New State Department Releases on the ‘Future of Iraq’ Project,” http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB198/ index.htm. For a brief firsthand account, see David L. Phillips, Losing Iraq: Inside the Postwar Reconstruction Fiasco (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 36–39. 28. Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 159. See also Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, 485–486; Douglas J. Feith, War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism (New York: Harper, 2008), 375–378; L. Paul Bremer III with Malcolm McConnell, My Year in Iraq: The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), 25. 29. U.S. Department of State, The Future of Iraq Project: Transitional Justice Working Group—the Road to Re-establishing Rule of Law and Restoring Civil Society, a Blueprint, 2003, http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB198/FOI%20Transitional%20Justice.pdf, 28–30. 30. Interview with Colonel (retired) Benson. 31. Woodward, Plan of Attack, 283–284. For more on State-DoD bickering regarding Iraq, see also Ricks, Fiasco, 102–104; Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone (New York: Vintage Books, 2007), 36–38; Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, 503–504. For Rumsfeld’s irritation at State-DoD bickering regarding Iraq, see Donald Rumsfeld, “Memo to Andrew H. Card Jr. on Press Reports,” April 7, 2003, http:// library.rumsfeld.com/doclib/sp/139/To%20Andrew%20H.%20Card%20Jr.%20re%20 Press%20Reports%2004-07-2003%20-%20Attachment.pdf. 32. Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 138; interview with Colonel (retired) Fitzgerald. 33. White House, National Security Presidential Directive/NSPD-24: Iraq Post War Planning Office, January 20, 2003, https://fas.org/irp/offdocs/nspd/nspd-24.pdf. 34. Feith, War and Decision, 316; Rice, No Higher Honor, 191–192. 35. General Richard B. Myers with Malcolm McConnell, Eyes on the Horizon: Serving on the Front Lines of National Security (New York: Threshold Editions, 2009), 225. 36. Interview with Colonel (retired) Fitzgerald; Wright and Reese, On Point II, 70–71; Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 143–144; Ricks, Fiasco, 79–80. For an excellent overview of the short, confused, and unproductive ten-week life span of Task Force IV, see Nora Bensahel et al., After Saddam: Prewar Planning and the Occupation of Iraq (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2008), 41–52. 37. Interview with Colonel (retired) Hughes. 38. Wright and Reese, On Point II, 71. 39. Zalmay Khalilzad, The Envoy: From Kabul to the White House, My Journey through a Turbulent World (New York: St. Martin’s, 2016), 159. 40. Bensahel et al., After Saddam, 67.

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41. Wright and Reese, On Point II, 71, 150; Franks, American Soldier, 524–525; Bremer, My Year in Iraq, 26; Feith, War and Decision, 377–378; Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life, 35–38; Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 472. 42. Bensahel et al., After Saddam, 66; Feith, War and Decision, 349–350. 43. Interview with Colonel (retired) Hughes. 44. Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 152–154; Ricks, Fiasco, 101–102. 45. Interview with Colonel (retired) Hess. In addition to his civil affairs planning work on Kosovo, described in chapter 1, Hess served as ORHA’s humanitarian planner and later served as Paul Bremer’s chief of staff. 46. Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, A Unified Mission Plan for Post-hostilities Iraq, draft, April 2003, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/yeariniraq/ documents/orha.html; Packer, Assassins’ Gate, 132; Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life, 38–39. 47. Interview with General (retired) Casey. See also Feith, War and Decision, 276–277; Myers, Eyes on the Horizon, 225. 48. Interview with Franklin Miller on January 26, 2016. He served as NSC senior director for defense policy from January 2001 to March 2005. 49. Bensahel et al., After Saddam, 21–23. For Feith’s recollection of a few IPMC and ESG focus areas, see War and Decision, 347–348, 360. 50. My interview with Miller indicated that the IIA concept was drafted by Miller’s team but then briefed by Feith’s office. For the draft three-page IIA “implementation plan” developed following the president’s approval, see Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Iraqi Interim Authority (IIA) Implementation Plan, April 29, 2003, which is reprinted in appendix 9 of Feith, War and Decision, 552–554. 51. David E. Sanger, “White House Approves a Plan to Administer a Postwar Iraq,” New York Times, March 15, 2003, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/15/world/threats-responsesfuture-white-house-approves-plan-administer-postwar-iraq.html. 52. Feith, War and Decision, 436–437. 53. Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life, 79–80. 54. Bush, Decision Points, 249. See also Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life, 84–85. 55. Interview with Miller. 56. Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, 491–494, quotation on 494. 57. For more on the establishment of the Pentagon’s postwar planning office, see Douglas J. Feith, “Memo to Donald Rumsfeld on Establishing the DoD Postwar Planning Office,” January 8, 2003, http://library.rumsfeld.com/doclib/sp/315/2003-01-08%20from%20Doug%20 Feith%20re%20Establishing%20the%20DoD%20Postwar%20Planning%20Office.pdf. 58. Interview with Colonel (retired) Hughes. 59. Bush, Decision Points, 256–257. 60. For more on the conflicting views toward postwar Iraq, see Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, 486, 490–492; Bremer, My Year in Iraq, 12, 112. Gordon and Trainor described the situation as follows: “The American political strategy for Iraq had been like a car hurtling down the road with many hands on the steering wheel as the vehicle fishtailed back and forth.” See Michael R. Gordon and General Bernard E. Trainor, The Endgame: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Iraq, from George W. Bush to Barack Obama (New York: Vintage Books, 2013), 8–10, 34. For more on the Pentagon’s favorable opinions toward Chalabi in particular, see Ricks, Fiasco, 104–105, 124, 154. 61. Interview with Colonel (retired) Fitzgerald. 62. Interview with Colonel (retired) Hughes. 63. Feith, War and Decision, 157. 64. Feith, 283–285; 368–370. Along similar lines, Vice President Cheney states that “we were there to liberate, not to occupy.” See Cheney, In My Time, 347.

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65. Rice, No Higher Honor, 187. 66. Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life, 34–35. 67. USAID mission director James Stephenson recalls being concerned “that we would ‘settle for Egypt,’ or an authoritarian state with a facade of democracy that was allied to the United States but was devoid of pluralism and any real political voice for its millions of young men and women.” See James Stephenson, Losing the Golden Hour: An Insider’s View of Iraq’s Reconstruction (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2007), 77. 68. Interview with a senior U.S. official. 69. Bush, Decision Points, 205, 397. 70. George W. Bush, “President’s Remarks at the United Nations General Assembly,” White House, September 12, 2002, https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/ releases/2002/09/20020912-1.html. 71. Rice further states that “the President believed that the use of U.S. military power had to be followed by an affirmation of the United States’ principles. If war occurred, we would try to build a democratic Iraq.” See Rice, No Higher Honor, 187. Similarly, Douglas Feith mentions that in private meetings, “President Bush had insisted that Iraqis should select their own leaders.” See Feith, War and Decision, 404. Rumsfeld states that “Bush often expressed his belief that freedom was the gift of the Almighty.” See Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, 498–500. Similarly, the president states in his memoir that he viewed the war on terror as analogous to “the clash between freedom and tyranny” during the U.S. Civil War. See Bush, Decision Points, 140. 72. Interview with General (retired) Zinni. 73. Interview with Miller. 74. Rice, No Higher Honor, 187. 75. Interview with a senior U.S. official; Woodward, Plan of Attack, 270. For various passages underscoring the importance of a rapid transition to the Iraqis, see Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, 488, 494, 510, 513. 76. George W. Bush, “President Bush Announces Major Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended,” White House, May 1, 2003, https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/ releases/2003/05/20030501-15.html. 77. Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, 497–499. 78. Packer, Assassins’ Gate, 46. 79. Interview with a U.S. defense official. 80. Interview with General (retired) Zinni. 81. Richard N. Haass, War of Necessity, War of Choice: A Memoir of Two Iraq Wars (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009), 256. Powell personally conveyed his concerns to President Bush during their August 5, 2002, meeting. Powell reportedly stated, “You will become the government. . . . You are going to be the proud owner of 25 million people. . . . You will own all their hopes, aspirations and problems. You’ll own it all. . . . It’s going to suck the oxygen out of everything. . . . This will become the first term.” See Woodward, Plan of Attack, 150–152, 270. For the president’s recollection of this discussion, see Bush, Decision Points, 238. For Powell’s recollection of it, see Colin Powell with Tony Koltz, It Worked for Me: In Life and Leadership (New York: HarperCollins, 2012), 209–211. 82. Powell, It Worked for Me, 210–212; Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 71. 83. For repeated references to the “bicycle seat” analogy and Iraq, see Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, 666–667, 678–679. Rumsfeld used the bicycle analogy with respect to Afghanistan as well. See Khalilzad, The Envoy, 139–140. 84. Feith, War and Decision, 149. 85. Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life, 58–59, 89. For more on Rumsfeld’s desire for Iraqi opposition groups to quickly take charge after Saddam, see Donald Rumsfeld, “Memo to

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Vice President Cheney on Supporting the Iraqi Opposition,” July 1, 2002, http://library.rums feld.com/doclib/sp/314/2002-07-01%20to%20VP%20Cheney%20et%20al%20re%20Supporting%20the%20Iraqi%20Opposition.pdf. For Cheney’s generally favorable views toward both Iraqi exiles and installing democracy, see Cheney, In My Time, 387–388. 86. Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, 486. 87. Feith, War and Decision, 402–413, 423–424; Rice, No Higher Honor, 193. 88. Douglas J. Feith, “Hearing before the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate,” 108th Congress, 1st Session, February 11, 2003, http://www.dougfeith.com/ docs/2003_02_11_Future_of_Iraq_SFRC.pdf, 16. 89. Interview with Colonel (retired) Fisher. 90. Interview with General (retired) Casey. 91. The NIC report also emphasized on the opening page that “the building of an Iraqi democracy would be a long, difficult, and probably turbulent process, with potential for backsliding into Iraq’s tradition of authoritarianism.” National Intelligence Council, Principal Challenges in Post-Saddam Iraq, January 2003, https://www.cia.gov/library/reading room/docs/DOC_0005674817.pdf, 5. See also Haass, War of Necessity, 254–255; Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 468. 92. Institute for National Strategic Studies at National Defense University, “Iraq: Looking Beyond Saddam’s Rule,” November 20–21, 2002, 2; interview with Colonel (retired) Hughes. More broadly, David Fitzgerald states that “studies from NSC to the State Department to CENTCOM and to the Army War College had described both the vast complexity of any occupation and the several hundred thousand troops needed to run it.” See David Fitzgerald, Learning to Forget: US Army Counterinsurgency Doctrine and Practice from Vietnam to Iraq (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), 125. 93. Feith, War and Decision, 332–335. Regarding the “Parade of Horribles” memo, Condoleezza Rice recalls that she “suspected that the Defense Department’s motive was really to issue a documented warning just in case the whole endeavor failed.” See Rice, No Higher Honor, 192. 94. Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, 294. See chapter 2 for more discussion of Rumsfeld’s vision of military transformation. 95. Powell, It Worked for Me, 209–211; Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 70–71. 96. Interview with a senior U.S. official; Woodward, Plan of Attack, 283–284. 97. Bensahel et al., After Saddam, 33, 63–64; Feith, War and Decision, 377–378, 386–389, quotation on 387; Haass, War of Necessity, 252–253; Phillips, Losing Iraq, 127–128; Ricks, Fiasco, 102–104. See also Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life, 37–38; interview with a senior U.S. official. 98. Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, 503–504; Feith, War and Decision, 250–252. See also Donald Rumsfeld, “Memo to Andrew H. Card Jr. on Press Reports.” 99. Bush, Decision Points, 87. See also Rice, No Higher Honor, 21–22. 100. Donald Rumsfeld, “Memo to Condoleezza Rice on Chain of Command,” December 2, 2002, http://library.rumsfeld.com/doclib/sp/1064/2002-12-02%20to%20Condolee zza%20Rice%20re%20Chain%20of%20Command.pdf. For Rice’s perspective on this dispute, as well as her broader relationship with Secretary Rumsfeld, see Rice, No Higher Honor, 18–22. 101. Bush, Decision Points, 89–90. Events ultimately came “nearly to the breaking point,” as Rice put it (see No Higher Honor, 22), but it wasn’t until after the 2004 election that the problem tapered off when Powell departed the administration out of frustration. 102. Interview with Colonel (retired) Fisher. 103. U.S. Central Command, Desert Crossing Seminar, 10. 104. Interview with Colonel (retired) Hughes.

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105. Rose, How Wars End, 245. 106. Rather than transporting them to Baghdad as the Pentagon had intended, the U.S. military actually transported Chalabi and the fighters to Nasariyah (in southeastern Iraq) instead. For more on the sequence of events involving Chalabi’s movement to Nasariyah, see Phillips, Losing Iraq, 136; Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 316–317; Packer, Assassins’ Gate, 140–141; Bensahel et al., After Saddam, 160–161. For Feith’s questionable version of events, which argues that the Pentagon’s intent was not to install Chalabi but rather simply to provide additional ground maneuver forces for the war effort, see Feith, War and Decision, 397–401. 107. Paul Wolfowitz, “Hearing before the Committee on the Budget, House of Representatives,” 108th Congress, 1st Session, February 27, 2003, http://usiraq.procon.org/files/ USIraq/DOD_budget_2004.pdf, 17–18. 108. Interview with Colonel (retired) Hughes. 109. Andrew Natsios, “Interview with Administrator for the US Agency for International Development, with Ted Koppel,” ABC News Nightline, April 23, 2003, http://pdf.usaid.gov/ pdf_docs/pcaab408.pdf. 110. Haass, War of Necessity, 251–252. 111. Phillips, Losing Iraq, 130. 112. Interview with Colonel (retired) Fitzgerald. 113. Interview with Colonel (retired) Fitzgerald; interview with a senior U.S. official. 114. Interview with Miller. 115. Interview with Colonel (retired) Hughes. Along similar lines, Michael Hess recalled in an interview with the author that “they viewed him [Chalabi] as their top-down guy and their quickest way to get out. . . . I sat in on a lot of those [ORHA] meetings where Chalabi was being forced on us. I mean, it was incredible . . . he was a detriment, but they kept forcing him on us.” Franklin Miller dismissed Rumsfeld’s account even more sternly by stating in an interview with the author, “Whatever he’s written is a series of lies designed to cover up and obfuscate the responsibility that he and Feith and Wolfowitz bear for the disaster of postwar Iraq.” 116. Interestingly, the Iraq war plan had serious flaws embedded within its own logic. Even if prewar assumptions regarding Iraqi WMD had proven entirely accurate, there was no coherent plan (and there were insufficient ground forces) to actually secure WMD sites themselves, so this major component of the plan would likely have failed on its own merits even if all had gone as expected. See Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 82–83, 503–504. 117. Franks, American Soldier, 441. See also Aaron Rapport, “The Long and Short of It: Cognitive Constraints on Leaders’ Assessments of Postwar Iraq,” International Security 37, no. 3 (Winter 2012): 148; Ricks, Fiasco, 79. 118. Franks, American Soldier, 440. Douglas Feith states that “General Franks gave far less attention to Phase IV planning than to planning major combat operations. Indeed, Franks would later signal his relative lack of interest in Phase IV operations by announcing his resignation approximately six weeks after his forces took Baghdad.” See Feith, War and Decision, 291. Similarly, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Myers recalls that “I had trouble that fall [of 2002] getting Franks to focus on Phase IV planning.” See Myers, Eyes on the Horizon, 225. 119. Packer, Assassins’ Gate, 142. After ORHA’s brief tenure, the notion that a quick transition to Bremer’s CPA could fix the deep, unresolved issues embodied a continuation of this problematic mind-set. 120. Franks, American Soldier, 399. 121. Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 80, 136; Franks, American Soldier, 354; Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, 463–464; Shelton, Without Hesitation, 487–488.

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122. Robert Jervis, Why Intelligence Fails: Lessons from the Iranian Revolution and the Iraq War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 140–142; Powell, It Worked for Me, 116–117. 123. Wright and Reese, On Point II, 152, 385–386; Bensahel et al., After Saddam, 211–215; Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life, 178–179; Bremer, My Year in Iraq, 61–64. Rumsfeld indicates that “pipes and wires in many facilities were literally being held together by duct tape and string.” See Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, 496. 124. Regarding prewar infrastructure conditions in Iraq, “Better information was available from government sources, individuals who had visited Iraq, and scholars of Iraq and the Middle East all resident in the United States.” See Bensahel et al., After Saddam, 214–215. 125. Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life, 90–91. 126. Interview with a CENTCOM military planner. 127. This is a condensed paraphrase of Woody Allen’s opening joke in Annie Hall (1977). Cited in Jervis, Why Intelligence Fails, 140. 128. David J. Rothkopf, Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power (New York: PublicAffairs, 2005), 403–404. 129. Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 93. For additional brief mentions of Kosovo’s seeming lack of relevance, see 139 and 152. 130. Haass, War of Necessity, 226–228, 279–293. For another example of the State Department’s unsuccessful attempts to influence postwar planning by building on various historical experiences, see Colin Powell, “Memo to Vice President Cheney on Postwar Government Models,” March 1, 2003, http://library.rumsfeld.com/doclib/sp/319/From%20 Colin%20Powell%2003-01-2003.pdf. 131. Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 495. 132. Robert C. Orr, “An American Strategy for Post-conflict Reconstruction,” in Winning the Peace: An American Strategy for Post-conflict Reconstruction, ed. Robert C. Orr (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2004), 296. 133. Franks, American Soldier, 314. 134. Haass, War of Necessity, 251. 135. Wright and Reese, On Point II, 569. 136. Douglas Feith states that “in developing the IIA concept, of course, we had in mind our recent experience in Afghanistan, where the United States immediately recognized an interim government of Afghans and never became an occupying power.” See Feith, War and Decision, 403. 137. Ricks, Fiasco, 16, 386. 138. Interview with Hurley. 139. For a brief discussion of some of the potential unintended consequences anticipated in 1990–1991, including the possibility that toppling Baghdad might create a power vacuum or might “Lebanonize” Iraq, see Rick Atkinson, Crusade: The Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993), 298–300, 452. A less readily acknowledged reason for keeping Saddam in power was to maintain Iraq as a useful regional counterweight to Iran. See Andrew J. Bacevich, America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History (New York: Random House, 2016), 132–133. An interview with a senior U.S. official buttressed the idea that it was prudent to allow Iraq to maintain some military capability at the end of the Gulf War in order to prevent Iran from extending its own influence. 140. George H. W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 489. 141. See 36-minute mark of Dick Cheney, “C-Span Interview at the American Enterprise Institute,” C-SPAN, April 15, 1994, https://www.c-span.org/video/?58277-1/life-careerdick-cheney.

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142. Rose, How Wars End, 257–258. 143. Cheney, In My Time, 388. For more on the possible reasons behind Vice President Cheney’s startling change in outlook from 1990–1991 to 2003, see Robert Jervis, “Review of Melvyn Leffler’s ‘The Foreign Policies of the George W. Bush Administration: Memoirs, History and Legacy,’” H-Diplo Article Reviews no. 405 (June 2013): 4. 144. Shelton, Without Hesitation, 481–482. 145. For more on the so-called “bridging” approach that characterized the NSC during this period, see Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, 325–329, 486–487, 631; Cheney, In My Time, 449; Packer, Assassins’ Gate, 111–112; Feith, War and Decision, 245, 249–250. 146. Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, 487. 147. Rice, No Higher Honor, 13–15. See also Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 147–148. 148. Interview with Colonel (retired) Hess. 149. Interview with Miller. 150. Interview with Colonel (retired) Hughes. 151. Interview with Miller. For more on Rumsfeld’s efforts to control information in ways that impeded the NSC, see Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 148. 152. Interview with a senior U.S. defense official. 153. In his memoir, Cheney recalls trying to get a job interning for Rumsfeld in 1968 when the latter was a young Republican congressman from Illinois. Although Rumsfeld declined Cheney’s request at the time, Cheney would later work for him during the Nixon administration, and they would ultimately develop a long-standing friendship, with each man senior to the other at different points in their respective careers. Even in late 2006, despite the spiraling chaos in Iraq, Vice President Cheney would unsuccessfully try to convince President Bush to keep Rumsfeld on board as defense secretary. See Cheney, In My Time, 41–42, 49–51, 62–63, 257–258, 442–443; Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, 240, 284–285, 709. 154. Rothkopf, Running the World, 406–408, 420–423. “Balkanization” is found in an interview quotation on page 406. “Mini-NSC” is an interview quotation attributed to Richard Haass found on pages 407 and 421. 155. Haass, War of Necessity, 251. 156. Bush, Decision Points, 260. 157. Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, 724. 158. For more on the influence of the November 2004 election on Bush administration views of Iraq, see Toby Dodge, “Iraq,” in Exit Strategies and State Building, ed. Richard Caplan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 242–243, 248. 159. General Eric Shinseki, “Hearings before the Committee on Armed Services, United States Senate,” 108th Congress, 1st Session, February 25, 2003, https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/ pkg/CHRG-108shrg87323/html/CHRG-108shrg87323.htm. Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz stated two days later in testimony before Congress that “some of the higher-end predictions that we have been hearing recently, such as the notion that it will take several hundred thousand U.S. troops to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq, are wildly off the mark.” See Wolfowitz, “Hearing before the Committee on the Budget,” 8. For a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s perspective on this public rebuke of General Shinseki, see Shelton, Without Hesitation, 483–484. 160. Interview with a U.S. military planner. 161. Domestic politics would continue to affect the postwar implementation. The apparent vetting of CPA officials to ensure political loyalty (with alleged questions such as whether applicants had voted for President Bush, and their stances on abortion) highlighted the ongoing salience of domestic politics during the conduct of the Iraq war. See Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life, 92–93, 103–104.

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162. For more on the key role that expectations play in influencing public opinion, see Dominic D. P. Johnson and Dominic Tierney, Failing to Win: Perceptions of Victory and Defeat in International Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 52–55, 279–281, 292. 163. For more on Project Solarium and its contemporary relevance, see Robert R. Bowie and Richard H. Immerman, Waging Peace: How Eisenhower Shaped an Enduring Cold War Strategy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Rothkopf, Running the World, 69–72; Tierney, The Right Way, 121–124; Zinni and Koltz, Before the First Shots, 53–54. 164. Rose, How Wars End, 274–276. See also O’Hanlon, “Iraq without a Plan,” 39–40. 165. Emma Sky, The Unraveling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq (New York: PublicAffairs, 2015), 152–153. 166. For more regarding the lack of inevitability and missed opportunities in Iraq, see Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 493–495, 506; Ricks, Fiasco, 4; and Sky, The Unraveling, xi, 359. 167. Interview with Colonel (retired) Hess. 168. Bensahel et al., After Saddam, xxvii. 169. Interview with Miller. 170. General Franks highlights “the extra stress involved in compartmentalizing the planning to help prevent leaks, which would derail the process. . . . Our people were isolated from each other, running on a treadmill in a vacuum” to try to maintain operational security. See Franks, American Soldier, 362. Feith also briefly suggests that secrecy may have helped hinder some postwar planning. See Feith, War and Decision, 317. 171. Colonel Kevin C. M. Benson, “OIF Phase IV: A Planner’s Reply to Brigadier AylwinFoster,” Military Review (March-April 2006): 62–63. 172. Bush, Decision Points, 258. 173. Coalition Provisional Authority, Order Number 1: De-Ba’athification of Iraqi Society, May 16, 2003, http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB418/docs/9a%20-%20 Coalition%20Provisional%20Authority%20Order%20No%201%20-%205-16-03.pdf; Coalition Provisional Authority, Order Number 2: Dissolution of Entities, May 23, 2003, http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB418/docs/9b%20-%20Coalition%20Provisional%20Authority%20Order%20No%202%20-%208-23-03.pdf. 174. L. Paul Bremer III, “Memo to Pentagon General Counsel William J. Haynes: Proclamation on Dissolved Institutions,” May 10, 2003, http://www-tc.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/front line/yeariniraq/documents/bremermemo.pdf. See also Bremer, My Year in Iraq, 39–40. For a reasonably sympathetic look at the CPA’s efforts to tackle a fundamentally “impossible task” given the poor hand it was dealt, see Rose, How Wars End, 248–250. 175. Wright and Reese, On Point II, 153–155, 181; Bremer, My Year in Iraq, 4; Ricks, Fiasco, 174–175, 179–181, 205; Bing West, No True Glory: A Frontline Account of the Battle for Fallujah (New York: Bantam Books, 2005), 23, 319. Confusingly, the president’s May 9, 2003, letter to Bremer that formally assigned him as presidential envoy stated, “You are authorized to oversee, direct, and coordinate all United States Government (USG) programs and activities in Iraq, except those under the command of the Commander, U.S. Central Command.” In practice, this meant that Bremer was nominally overall in charge, except he did not control the tens of thousands of U.S. service members in Iraq who would likely do much of the heavy lifting. See George W. Bush, “Letter from U.S. President George W. Bush to Ambassador L. Paul Bremer,” May 9, 2003, in The Occupation of Iraq, Volume 2: The Official Documents of the Coalition Provisional Authority and the Iraqi Governing Council, ed. Stefan Talmon (Portland, OR: Hart, 2013), 808. 176. Wright and Reese, On Point II, 145–146. 177. Franks, American Soldier, 530; Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, 502; Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 486; Ricks, Fiasco, 155–156.

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178. The exact Iraqi death toll stemming from the 2003 invasion and its aftermath is difficult to pin down. One study estimated 405,000 Iraqi deaths “attributable to the conflict” in the period from March 2003 to June 2011. See Amy Hagopian et al., “Mortality in Iraq Associated with the 2003–2011 War and Occupation: Findings from a National Cluster Sample Survey by the University Collaborative Iraq Mortality Study,” PLOS Medicine, October 15, 2013, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1001533. For a short discussion of a few studies (including the aforementioned one) that briefly highlights the difficulty of precise estimates, see Philip Bump, “15 Years after the Iraq War Began, the Death Toll Is Still Murky,” Washington Post, March 20, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/ politics/wp/2018/03/20/15-years-after-it-began-the-death-toll-from-the-iraq-war-is-stillmurky/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.1e247e47d589. 179. Powell, It Worked for Me, 207. 180. For an account of strategic decision making and the 2007–2008 surge in Iraq, see Peter D. Feaver, “The Right to Be Right,” International Security 35, no. 4 (Spring 2011): 87–125. For the president’s own account, see Bush, Decision Points, 355–393. 181. For more on how the “synergistic interaction between the surge and the Awakening” helps explain the decline in violence in Iraq, see Stephen Biddle, Jeffrey A. Friedman, and Jacob N. Shapiro, “Testing the Surge: Why Did Violence Decline in Iraq in 2007?” International Security 37, no. 1 (Summer 2012): 7–40, quotation on 10. For more on events in the Ameriyah neighborhood of Baghdad during the surge, see Bing West, The Strongest Tribe: War, Politics, and the Endgame in Iraq (New York: Random House, 2008), 295–300; Linda Robinson, Tell Me How This Ends: General David Petraeus and the Search for a Way out of Iraq (New York: PublicAffairs, 2008), 217–249; Nir Rosen, Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America’s Wars in the Muslim World (New York: Nation Books, 2010); Rod Nordland, “Some Progress Seen in Baghdad,” Newsweek, November 17, 2007, http:// www.newsweek.com/some-progress-seen-baghdad-96911. Nordland mentions that Al Qaeda “declared Ameriyah the capital of its Islamic State of Iraq.” 182. Bush, Decision Points, 248–249. 183. Interview with Colonel (retired) Hess. 184. Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 503; Packer, Assassins’ Gate, 119, 129. 185. Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, 327, 507. 186. For an excellent analysis of Bush administration memoirs that explores the “climate of fear” and the underlying motivations behind the Iraq war, as well as other major Bush policy decisions related to terrorism, see Melvyn P. Leffler, “The Foreign Policies of the George W. Bush Administration: Memoirs, History, Legacy,” Diplomatic History 37, no. 2 (April 2013): 190–216. 4. Libya 1. Ronald Reagan, “The President’s News Conference,” April 9, 1986, http://www.pres idency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=37105; Bruce Jentleson and Christopher Whytock, “Who ‘Won’ Libya? The Force-Diplomacy Debate and Its Implications for Theory and Policy,” International Security 30, no. 3 (Winter 2005/2006): 58. For more background on the Reagan administration’s 1986 strike on Libya, including whether one should consider it a U.S. “victory” or not, see William C. Martel, Victory in War: Foundations of Modern Strategy, rev. and expanded ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 199–214. 2. Possible drivers of the 2003 breakthrough include an increasingly multilateral approach toward sanctions, a plummeting Libyan economy, rising internal threats to Qaddafi’s regime, dropping regime change as U.S. policy toward Libya, and the “demonstration effect” of the 2003 Iraq invasion, among other factors that may have bolstered coercive diplomacy. See Jentleson and Whytock, “Who ‘Won’ Libya?”

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3. Alison Pargeter, Libya: The Rise and Fall of Qaddafi (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 189–190. 4. For more on the lack of U.S. reliance on Libyan oil because of local “political volatility” and related factors, see Ethan Chorin, Exit the Colonel: The Hidden History of the Libyan Revolution (New York: PublicAffairs, 2012), 273–274. 5. Kareem Fahim and David D. Kirkpatrick, “Qaddafi’s Grip on the Capital Tightens as Revolt Grows,” New York Times, February 22, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/23/ world/africa/23libya.html?pagewanted=all. 6. United Kingdom House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, Libya: Examination of Intervention and Collapse and the UK’s Future Policy Options, September 14, 2016, http:// www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201617/cmselect/cmfaff/119/119.pdf, 10, 14–15. 7. Interview with a former senior U.S. defense official. For an account that accentuates the likelihood of an impending massacre of Libyan civilians, see Chorin, Exit the Colonel, 207–208. 8. Robert M. Gates, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), 518–519. 9. Christopher S. Chivvis, Toppling Qaddafi: Libya and the Limits of Liberal Intervention (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 75. 10. David D. Kirkpatrick and Kareem Fahim, “Qaddafi Warns of Assault on Benghazi as U.N. Vote Nears,” New York Times, March 17, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/18/ world/africa/18libya.html?pagewanted=all; Hillary Rodham Clinton, Hard Choices (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), 371; Gates, Duty, 518. 11. Clinton, Hard Choices, 373; Gates, Duty, 519. 12. Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President on the Situation in Libya,” White House, Office of the Press Secretary, March 18, 2011, https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-pressoffice/2011/03/18/remarks-president-situation-libya. For repeated use of the term “unique capabilities” by various U.S. officials, see Clinton, Hard Choices, 374; Derek H. Chollet, The Long Game: How Obama Defied Washington and Redefined America’s Role in the World (New York: PublicAffairs, 2016), 100, 108. 13. Interview with Ben Fishman on February 2, 2017. He served as NSC director for Libya from April 2011 to September 2013. 14. Clinton, Hard Choices, 375. 15. For more on the president’s general views on burden sharing and multilateralism, see Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (New York: Three Rivers, 2006), 309–311. 16. Chollet, The Long Game, 108–109. 17. Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President in Address to the Nation on Libya,” White House, Office of the Press Secretary, March 28, 2011, https://www.whitehouse.gov/ the-press-office/2011/03/28/remarks-president-address-nation-libya. 18. United Nations Security Council, Resolution 1973, March 17, 2011, http://www. nato.int/nato_static/assets/pdf/pdf_2011_03/20110927_110311-UNSCR-1973.pdf, 3–4. 19. For the origin of the phrase “leading from behind” with regard to Libya, see Ryan Lizza, “The Consequentialist: How the Arab Spring Remade Obama’s Foreign Policy,” New Yorker, May 2, 2011, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/05/02/the-consequentialist. 20. Chorin, Exit the Colonel, 235–236. 21. Interview with former Under Secretary of Defense Flournoy. 22. Jeffrey Goldberg, “The Obama Doctrine,” Atlantic, April 2016, http://www.theatlan tic.com/magazine/archive/2016/04/the-obama-doctrine/471525. 23. Fareed Zakaria, “How the Lessons of Iraq Paid Off in Libya,” Time, September 5, 2011, http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2090374,00.html.

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24. For more on the similarities between the realist inclinations of President Obama and Secretary Rumsfeld, see David J. Rothkopf, National Insecurity: American Leadership in an Age of Fear (New York: PublicAffairs, 2014), 241. 25. Interview with a former U.S. government official. 26. Interview with a former U.S. government official. 27. Interview with Derek Chollet on November 1, 2016. He served as the senior director for strategic planning on the NSC staff in 2011. 28. Chivvis, Toppling Qaddafi, 32. 29. Interim National Council, “A Vision of a Democratic Libya,” March 29, 2011, http://www.aljazeera.com/mritems/Documents/2011/3/29/2011329113923943811The%20 Interim%20Transitional%20National%20Council%20Statement.pdf; Peter Bartu, “The Corridor of Uncertainty: The National Transitional Council’s Battle for Legitimacy and Recognition,” in The Libyan Revolution and Its Aftermath, ed. Peter Cole and Brian McQuinn (London: Hurst, 2015), 39–40. 30. Interview with Chollet. 31. Interview with former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates on July 11, 2016. 32. Interview with General (retired) Ham. 33. Interview with Admiral (retired) Stavridis. 34. Interview with a former U.S. government official. 35. Interview with a former U.S. government official. 36. Gates, Duty, 512. 37. Interview with a senior U.S. defense official. For more on Island Breeze, see Chivvis, Toppling Qaddafi, 145. 38. Interview with a senior U.S. military official. 39. Ian Martin, “The United Nations’ Role in the First Year of the Transition,” in The Libyan Revolution and Its Aftermath, ed. Peter Cole and Brian McQuinn (London: Hurst, 2015), 130–131; Chollet, The Long Game, 109; interviews with multiple U.S. officials. 40. Interview with Chollet. 41. Christopher S. Chivvis and Jeffrey Martini, Libya after Qaddafi: Lessons and Implications for the Future (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2014), 43–45. 42. Bartu, “The Corridor of Uncertainty,” 40. 43. Interview with a senior U.S. military official. 44. Chivvis, Toppling Qaddafi, 152–153. See also Chollet, The Long Game, 106–107. U.S. EUCOM Commander Admiral Stavridis testified before the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee on March 29, 2011, that U.S. intelligence detected “flickers” of Al Qaeda presence among the Libyan opposition. See the 57-minute mark of the testimony of Admiral James Stavridis, “U.S. Operations in Libya,” C-SPAN, March 29, 2011, https://www.c-span.org/ video/?298726-1/us-operations-libya. 45. Pargeter, Libya, 244–247, quotations on 245; Chivvis, Toppling Qaddafi, 167–168. 46. Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President on the Death of Muammar Qaddafi,” White House, Office of the Press Secretary, October 20, 2011, https://www.whitehouse.gov/ the-press-office/2011/10/20/remarks-president-death-muammar-qaddafi. 47. Interview with Lieutenant General (retired) Ralph Jodice, U.S. Air Force, on January 4, 2017. He served as the combined forces air component commander for Operation Unified Protector. 48. Interview with a former senior defense official. 49. Barack Obama, David Cameron, and Nicolas Sarkozy, “Libya’s Pathway to Peace,” New York Times, April 14, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/15/opinion/15iht-edlibya 15.html. 50. United Nations Security Council, Resolution 1973, 3–4.

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51. Interview with General (retired) Ham. 52. Interview with Admiral (retired) Stavridis. 53. Obama, “Remarks by the President on the Situation in Libya.” 54. Obama, “Remarks by the President in Address to the Nation on Libya.” 55. Frederic Wehrey, “NATO’s Intervention,” in The Libyan Revolution and Its Aftermath, ed. Peter Cole and Brian McQuinn (London: Hurst, 2015), 110. 56. For more on the ambiguity surrounding UNSCR 1973 and how “the interpretation of that mandate would become a central controversy of the war,” see Chivvis, Toppling Qaddafi, 4, 90–91, 116–117. 57. Barack Obama, “The President on Libya,” White House, March 3, 2011, https:// www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/03/03/president-libya-violence-must-stop-muammar-gad dafi-has-lost-legitimacy-lead-and-he-m; Obama, “Remarks by the President in Address to the Nation on Libya.” 58. Hillary Rodham Clinton, “Clinton: Qaddafi Must Go,” CBS News, February 28, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36F9KVpYrSo; Clinton, Hard Choices, 364–365. 59. Obama, Cameron, and Sarkozy, “Libya’s Pathway to Peace.” This op-ed and Russia’s reaction to it are mentioned in Chivvis, Toppling Qaddafi, 118. 60. Obama, “Remarks by the President in Address to the Nation on Libya.” 61. Gates, Duty, 521. 62. Clinton, Hard Choices, 375. 63. Interview with a former senior defense official. Northern and Pack also suggest that “over the course of the summer, the coalition eventually became the rebels’ air force.” See Richard Northern and Jason Pack, “The Role of Outside Actors,” in The 2011 Libyan Uprisings and the Struggle for the Post-Qaddafi Future, ed. Jason Pack (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 115. 64. Interview with General (retired) Ham. 65. Chollet, The Long Game, 104. 66. Interview with a former senior defense official. 67. Interview with former Secretary Gates. “The fiction was maintained” is a statement attributed to Secretary Gates on the same topic, found in Jo Becker and Scott Shane, “Hillary Clinton, ‘Smart Power’ and a Dictator’s Fall,” New York Times, February 27, 2016, https:// www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/us/politics/hillary-clinton-libya.html?_r=0. 68. Interview with former Secretary Gates. 69. Leon Panetta with Jim Newton, Worthy Fights: A Memoir of Leadership in War and Peace (New York: Penguin, 2014), 354. In July 2011 Secretary of Defense Panetta stated to the press during a trip to Afghanistan, “In Libya, I do intend to bring down the regime of Qadhafi. That seems to me to be extremely important to our ability to try to get the best result we can in Libya.” See Leon Panetta, “Transcript: Media Availability with Secretary Panetta en Route to Afghanistan,” U.S. Department of Defense, July 8, 2011, http://archive.defense. gov/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=4849. He then stated in a speech in August, “It’s clear that the regime forces are collapsing and that Gadhafi’s days are numbered.” See American Forces Press Service, “NATO Partnership in Libya Serves as a Model, Panetta Says,” U.S. Department of Defense News, August 23, 2011, http://archive.defense.gov/news/newsarticle. aspx?id=65119. 70. Clinton, Hard Choices, 379. 71. Operation Unified Protector was due for reauthorization in the fall, which would likely have been highly contentious, so the timing of Qaddafi’s death was helpful, given the doubts over the operation’s continued viability. 72. Interview with a former senior defense official. 73. Interview with a senior U.S. official.

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74. Obama, “Remarks by the President on the Death of Muammar Qaddafi.” 75. Hillary Clinton, “Remarks of Secretary Clinton at the Human Rights Council in Geneva,” U.S. Mission to the United Nations in Geneva, February 28, 2011, https://geneva. usmission.gov/2011/02/28/sec-clinton-hrc-geneva-2011. 76. Interview with Erica Kaster on November 16, 2016. She served in the USAID Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI). She attended meetings at the U.S. State Department regarding post-Qaddafi planning and assembled an after-action review of the U.S. government’s response to the Libyan revolution. 77. Interview with James Schear on February 18, 2016. He served as U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for partnership strategy and stability operations from 2009 to 2013. 78. Interim National Council, “A Vision of a Democratic Libya,” 1. 79. Chivvis, Toppling Qaddafi, 40, 44–47, 57; Chorin, Exit the Colonel, 210, 234. 80. Gates, Duty, 182, 512, 521. 81. Wesley K. Clark, “Gen. Wesley Clark Says Libya Doesn’t Meet the Test for U.S. Military Action,” Washington Post, March 11, 2011, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/ content/article/2011/03/11/AR2011031103244.html?utm_term=.07b5c796db7f. 82. Gideon Rose, “Tell Me How This One Ends,” Washington Post, March 27, 2011; Gary J. Bass, “Why Humanitarian Wars Can Go So Wrong,” Washington Post, April 8, 2011, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-humanitarian-wars-can-go-so-wrong/2011/04/ 04/AFgHYI4C_story.html?utm_term=.27acec3db62c. 83. Interview with Chollet. 84. Chivvis, Toppling Qaddafi, 63. 85. Chollet, The Long Game, 108. 86. Dirk Vandewalle, “Libya’s Uncertain Revolution,” in The Libyan Revolution and Its Aftermath, ed. Peter Cole and Brian McQuinn (London: Hurst, 2015), 20–23. 87. Pargeter, Libya, 250–255; Clinton, Hard Choices, 379. 88. Interview with a former U.S. government official. 89. Goldberg, “The Obama Doctrine.” 90. For use of the term “orphan” with respect to postwar planning and Iraq, see Gideon Rose, How Wars End: Why We Always Fight the Last Battle (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010), 245. 91. Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President at PBS NewsHour Town Hall Discussion with Gwen Ifill for Elkhart, IN Residents,” White House, Office of the Press Secretary, June 2, 2016, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2016/06/02/remarks-presidentpbs-newshour-town-hall-discussion-gwen-ifill-elkhart. 92. Chorin, Exit the Colonel, 215–216, 275; Chivvis, Toppling Qaddafi, 49–52, 67. 93. Gates, Duty, 522. 94. Gates, 512, 515. 95. Interview with a senior U.S. official. 96. Interview with former Secretary Gates. 97. Clinton, Hard Choices, 372. 98. Scott Shane and Jo Becker, “A New Libya, with ‘Very Little Time Left,’” New York Times, February 27, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/us/politics/libya-isis-hillaryclinton.html. 99. See the 65-minute mark of Admiral Stavridis’s testimony before the U.S. Senate. Stavridis, “U.S. Operations in Libya.” 100. Chivvis and Martini, Libya after Qaddafi, 69–76. 101. Ben Fishman, “How We Can Still Fix Libya,” Politico, February 28, 2016, http:// www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/02/libya-intervention-hillary-clinton-barack-obama213686.

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N o te s to P age s 181–189

102. Interview with a former U.S. government official. 103. Interview with Fishman. 104. Chivvis and Martini, Libya after Qaddafi, 75–76. 105. Interview with General (retired) Ham. 106. Interview with a former senior defense official. 107. Chivvis and Martini, Libya after Qaddafi, 53, 57. 108. Obama, “Remarks by the President in Address to the Nation on Libya.” 109. The pitfall of mirror imaging was raised during multiple interviews with U.S. officials regarding Libya. 110. Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President on the Middle East and North Africa,” White House, Office of the Press Secretary, May 19, 2011, https://www.whitehouse.gov/ the-press-office/2011/05/19/remarks-president-middle-east-and-north-africa. 111. Interview with General (retired) Zinni. 112. Becker and Shane, “Hillary Clinton, ‘Smart Power’ and a Dictator’s Fall.” The phrase “on the right side of history” is one repeatedly used by President Obama, including during the Arab Spring as he described U.S. policy toward Egypt. See Barack Obama, “The President’s News Conference,” February 15, 2011, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index. php?pid=88991. 113. Interview with former Secretary Gates. 114. Interview with General (retired) Ham. 115. United Kingdom House of Commons, Libya: Examination of Intervention and Collapse, 26–27. 116. Interview with former Under Secretary of Defense Flournoy. 117. Pargeter, Libya, 245, 249. 118. Goldberg, “The Obama Doctrine.” Ben Fishman recalls that Libya benefited from “a small population that had none of the sectarian divisions of Iraq or Syria.” See Fishman, “How We Can Still Fix Libya.” 119. Interview with a senior U.S. official. 120. Interview with former Under Secretary of Defense Flournoy. 121. Interview with former Secretary Gates; interview with General (retired) Ham; Wehrey, “NATO’s Intervention,” 109. 122. Zakaria, “How the Lessons of Iraq Paid Off in Libya.” 123. For more insights on the Obama administration’s thinking regarding “don’t do stupid shit” and foreign affairs more broadly, see Goldberg, “The Obama Doctrine.” 124. Secretary Clinton was quoted in an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg in 2014. See Goldberg, “Hillary Clinton: ‘Failure’ to Help Syrian Rebels Led to the Rise of ISIS,” Atlantic, August 2014, http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/08/hillary-clintonfailure-to-help-syrian-rebels-led-to-the-rise-of-isis/375832. 125. Robert Jervis, Why Intelligence Fails: Lessons from the Iranian Revolution and the Iraq War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 138–139. 126. Interview with former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Schear. 127. For references to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s perceived lessons from Bosnia and their applicability to Libya, as well as her attempts to assemble a more robust international effort to support postwar Libya (including via the Libya Contact Group), see Becker and Shane, “Hillary Clinton, ‘Smart Power’ and a Dictator’s Fall”; Shane and Becker, “A New Libya.” 128. Interview with former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Schear. 129. Chester A. Crocker et al., The National Security Council Reform Project: A Foundational Proposal for the Next Administration, Atlantic Council, July 2016, 10–13. Rothkopf, National Insecurity, 9, 204–208.

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130. Rothkopf elaborates as follows: “As the NSC became more operational throughout the Obama years . . . it faltered and was unable to perform its core functions of strategic planning, coordinating policy development, and overseeing policy implementation.” See Rothkopf, National Insecurity, 346. 131. David Samuels, “The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama’s Foreign-Policy Guru,” New York Times, May 5, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/magazine/theaspiring-novelist-who-became-obamas-foreign-policy-guru.html?_r=2. 132. Gates, Duty, 482, 522, 587. Gates also describes “an NSS always eager to micromanage the Pentagon” (452). He indicates that “I was fed up with the NSS’s micromanagement” (482). See also 584–588 for Gates’s overall thoughts on the Obama administration’s NSC and how it compared with other NSCs he’d been involved with. 133. Panetta, Worthy Fights, 375–376. 134. Samuels, “The Aspiring Novelist.” 135. Interview with a senior U.S. defense official. 136. Chollet, The Long Game, 210. 137. For more on the president’s perception that he had been “boxed in” or “jammed” by the U.S. military during the 2009 Afghanistan surge deliberations, see Gates, Duty, 350, 364–370, 378, 555; Panetta, Worthy Fights, 252–255; Jack Fairweather, The Good War: Why We Couldn’t Win the War or the Peace in Afghanistan (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 284–290. For General McChrystal’s perspective of these events, see General Stanley McChrystal, My Share of the Task: A Memoir (New York: Penguin, 2013), 342–361. For more on the president’s skeptical views on the foreign policy establishment as a whole, see Samuels, “The Aspiring Novelist.” 138. Chollet, The Long Game, 28. For more on the idea that the U.S. foreign policy “blob” should be held responsible for the Iraq war and other failed interventions, see Stephen M. Walt, The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018). 139. As one prominent example among others, on the question of whether to maintain U.S. troops in Iraq past 2011, Defense Secretary Gates, his successor Leon Panetta, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and senior U.S. military leaders all supported keeping U.S. troops in Iraq to help maintain stability. However, the White House policy decision went in the opposite direction. See Panetta, Worthy Fights, 392–394, 398–399, 414; Gates, Duty, 555. James Jeffrey, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq in 2011, stated in an interview that “Hillary Clinton was a lion for keeping troops there . . . she was a strong advocate for keeping troops there past 2011.” See Josh Rogin, “Hillary Clinton Pushed Obama to Keep Troops in Iraq,” Daily Beast, June 18, 2014, http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/06/18/hillary-clintonpushed-obama-to-keep-troops-in-iraq.html. For more on the Washington internal debate on this topic, see Michael R. Gordon, “In U.S. Exit from Iraq, Failed Efforts and Challenges,” New York Times, September 22, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/world/middlee ast/failed-efforts-of-americas-last-months-in-iraq.html. 140. Jeffrey M. Jones, “Americans Approve of Military Action against Libya, 47% to 37%,” Gallup, March 22, 2011, http://www.gallup.com/poll/146738/americans-approvemilitary-action-against-libya.aspx. 141. Interview with a former U.S. defense official. 142. Panetta, Worthy Fights, 309–310. 143. Goldberg, “The Obama Doctrine.” 144. The notion of no “appetite” for a U.S. postwar commitment in Libya came up during interviews with multiple U.S. officials. See also Chivvis and Martini, Libya after Qaddafi, 5. 145. Chivvis and Martini, Libya after Qaddafi, 79.

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146. Interview with Kaster. 147. Clinton, Hard Choices, 378–379. 148. Martin, “The United Nations’ Role in the First Year,” 136; Clinton, Hard Choices, 381. 149. Vandewalle, “Libya’s Uncertain Revolution,” 18–20. 150. Interview with Chollet. See also Chollet, The Long Game, 108. 151. Chivvis and Martini, Libya after Qaddafi, 6; Northern and Pack, “The Role of Outside Actors,” 140; interview with a former senior U.S. defense official. 152. Interview with General (retired) Ham. 153. Chollet, The Long Game, 112–114. 154. United Kingdom House of Commons, Libya: Examination of Intervention and Collapse; Fishman, “How We Can Still Fix Libya.” 155. Goldberg, “The Obama Doctrine.” 156. Chollet, The Long Game, 101. 157. Goldberg, “The Obama Doctrine.” 158. Obama, “Remarks by the President on the Death of Muammar Qaddafi.” 159. Vandewalle, “Libya’s Uncertain Revolution,” 28. 160. Interview with Colonel (retired) Hess. 161. Interview with former Under Secretary of Defense Flournoy. 162. I thank Doyle Hodges for suggesting this expression. Conclusion 1. Interview with General (retired) Ham. In the context of our interview General Ham was referring specifically to Libya, but I would suggest that the same criticism applies to all three wars. 2. For President Bush’s acknowledgment of mistakes in handling postwar Afghanistan and Iraq, see George W. Bush, Decision Points (New York: Crown, 2010), 207, 210– 211, 258. For President Obama’s acknowledgment of mistakes in handling postwar Libya, see Thomas L. Friedman, “Obama on the World: President Obama Talks to Thomas L. Friedman about Iraq, Putin and Israel,” New York Times, August 8, 2014, https://www.nytimes. com/2014/08/09/opinion/president-obama-thomas-l-friedman-iraq-and-world-affairs.html; Barack Obama, “President Barack Obama on ‘Fox News Sunday,’” Fox News Sunday, April 10, 2016, http://www.foxnews.com/transcript/2016/04/10/exclusive-president-barackobama-on-fox-news-sunday. This interview with Chris Wallace also provides the epigraph for chapter 4. 3. David Fitzgerald explores the relationship between historical memory and military doctrine. Regarding Vietnam, he carefully analyzes a wide array of U.S. Army publications, military school curricula, and other documents to discern what Army officers were discussing at specific post-Vietnam periods. Fitzgerald makes a compelling case that “the neglect of counterinsurgency manuals and the deletion of counterinsurgency from the syllabi of the various service schools, coupled with the striking absence of discussion of the Vietnam War in either the Army’s field manuals or education system, signaled that the Army would rather move on from its traumatic experience in Vietnam. In this sense, perhaps the most salient lesson of Vietnam for the Army of the 1970s was that it should not speak of its experience of defeat in Indochina. . . . The silences in the various field manuals and course curricula were a way of limiting the discourse on the lessons of Vietnam, or privileging a certain narrative of the war.” See David Fitzgerald, Learning to Forget: US Army Counterinsurgency Doctrine and Practice from Vietnam to Iraq (Stanford, CA: Stanford University

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Press, 2013), 58. Later in the book, Fitzgerald explores how Vietnam’s legacy affected the U.S. Army’s approach to Iraq. 4. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 119. 5. Interview with a former senior U.S. defense official. 6. Interview with a senior U.S. defense official. 7. Interview with Ambassador Schulte. 8. For more on how Kennedy administration officials relied on history during the Cuban Missile Crisis, see Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers (New York: Free Press, 1988), 1–16. The book highlights an array of useful techniques and “mini-methods” regarding how to use history rigorously, such as to delineate what is known, unclear, and presumed; spelling out likenesses and differences; and using the Goldberg rule to ask “What is the story?” For more on how historical analogies can shape major policy decisions, see Yuen Foong Khong, Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). 9. Interview with Ambassador Dobbins. 10. Bush, Decision Points, 89; Donald Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown: A Memoir (New York: Sentinel, 2011), 507; David J. Rothkopf, National Insecurity: American Leadership in an Age of Fear (New York: PublicAffairs, 2014), 45–46, quotation on 46. 11. Rothkopf, National Insecurity, 207–208. 12. George Packer, The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 142. 13. Interview with a former U.S. government official. 14. For more on “devil’s advocate” and similar role-playing techniques, along with their drawbacks, see Charlan Nemeth, Keith Brown, and John Rogers, “Devil’s Advocate versus Authentic Dissent: Stimulating Quantity and Quality,” European Journal of Social Psychology 31 (2001). Cited in Robert Jervis, “Reports, Politics, and Intelligence Failures: The Case of Iraq,” Journal of Strategic Studies 29, no. 1 (February 2006): 15–16. 15. Interview with former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Hawley. 16. The potential pitfall of “ends creep” was highlighted in an interview with Ambassador Gregory Schulte. 17. Robert M. Gates, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), 512. 18. Interview with a former senior U.S. defense official. 19. For more on the utility of considering “war” and “postwar” as two interrelated parts of the same continuum, see Nadia Schadlow, “War and the Art of Governance,” Parameters (August 2003): 85–94; Isaiah Wilson III, Thinking beyond War: Civil-Military Relations and Why America Fails to Win the Peace (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 20. Interview with General (retired) Zinni. 21. General Wesley K. Clark, Waging Modern War: Bosnia, Kosovo, and the Future of Combat (New York: PublicAffairs, 2001), 312 (emphasis in original). 22. Interview with Colonel (retired) Fitzgerald. 23. For more on how exceedingly bright, highly educated U.S. officials made enormous mistakes when it came to Vietnam, see David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (New York: Ballantine Books, 1992). See also Gordon M. Goldstein, Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam (New York: Henry Holt, 2008); H. R. McMaster, Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam (New York: HarperPerennial, 1998).

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24. Lee Clarke, “Oil-Spill Fantasies,” Atlantic, November 1990, https://leeclarke.com/ docs/Oil_spill_fantasies.pdf, 65. 25. Thomas E. Ricks, The Generals: American Military Command from World War II to Today (New York: Penguin, 2012), 348–353, 397–405. 26. Interview with Colonel (retired) Hess. 27. Russell F. Weigley, The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), 135–145. For more on Lincoln’s interaction with Grant and other Union generals, see Eliot A. Cohen, Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002) and James M. McPherson, Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief (New York: Penguin, 2008), among other works on the topic. These books by Cohen and McPherson (pages 54 and 7, respectively) also highlight Clemenceau’s quotation in the preceding paragraph of the main text. 28. Interview with a senior U.S. military officer. 29. For further insights regarding how Germany’s performance in World War II demonstrated “tactical and operational prowess . . . [but] strategic incompetence,” see Andrew F. Krepinevich and Barry D. Watts, “Lost at the NSC,” National Interest (January/February 2009): 65–67. 30. Clark, Waging Modern War, 25. 31. For more on the militarization of U.S. policy toward the Middle East since 1980, see Andrew J. Bacevich, America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History (New York: Random House, 2016). 32. For more on the elevated role of emotion—especially fear—after 9/11, see Rothkopf, National Insecurity, 3–4. Suri refers to “fearful and overconfident Americans” following initial battlefield victory in Afghanistan. See Jeremi Suri, Liberty’s Surest Guardian: Rebuilding Nations after War from the Founders to Obama (New York: Free Press, 2011), 238–239. For more on how American overconfidence has clouded postwar judgment, see Dominic Tierney, “Mastering the Endgame of War,” Survival 56, no. 5 (October-November 2014): 69–94. 33. In one of many figures of speech involving the natural world, Sun Tzu states that “it is a matter of strategic positioning (hsing) that the army has this weight of victory on its side, in launching its men into battle, can be likened to the cascading of pent-up waters thundering through a steep gorge.” See Sun Tzu, The Art of Warfare, trans. Roger Ames (New York: Ballantine Books, 1993), 116. 34. Clausewitz, On War, 87. 35. See the 6-minute mark of John F. Kennedy, “Commencement Address at American University,” John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, June 10, 1963, https://www. jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/BWC7I4C9QUmLG9J6I8oy8w.aspx. Note on Sources 1. Robert Jervis, “Review of Melvyn Leffler’s ‘The Foreign Policies of the George W. Bush Administration: Memoirs, History and Legacy,’” H-Diplo Article Reviews no. 405 (June 2013): 2. Further Reading 1. Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960). 2. Paul R. Pillar, Negotiating Peace: War Termination as a Bargaining Process (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983).

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3. H. E. Goemans, War and Punishment: The Causes of War Termination and the First World War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 24–28; Dan Reiter, How Wars End (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 211. 4. James D. Fearon, “Rationalist Explanations for War,” International Organization 49, no. 3 (1995): 380. 5. Amy B. Zegart, “Why the Best Is Not Yet to Come in Policy Planning,” in Avoiding Trivia: The Role of Strategic Planning in American Foreign Policy, ed. Daniel W. Drezner (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2009), 113; Aaron L. Friedberg, “Strengthening U.S. Strategic Planning,” in Avoiding Trivia: The Role of Strategic Planning in American Foreign Policy, ed. Daniel W. Drezner (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2009), 84–97. 6. Graham T. Allison, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971). 7. See Nadia Schadlow, “War and the Art of Governance,” Parameters (August 2003): 85–94; Nadia Schadlow, War and the Art of Governance: Consolidating Combat Success into Political Victory (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2017); Aaron Rapport, Waging War, Planning Peace: U.S. Noncombat Operations and Major Wars (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015); Isaiah Wilson III, Thinking beyond War: Civil-Military Relations and Why America Fails to Win the Peace (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Nora Bensahel et al., After Saddam: Prewar Planning and the Occupation of Iraq (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2008); Stephen Benedict Dyson, “What Really Happened in Planning for Postwar Iraq?” Political Science Quarterly 128, no. 3 (Fall 2013): 455–488; Dominic Tierney, “Mastering the Endgame of War,” Survival 56, no. 5 (October-November 2014): 69–94; Dominic Tierney, The Right Way to Lose a War (New York: Little, Brown, 2015). 8. See James Dobbins et al., America’s Role in Nation-Building from Germany to Iraq (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2003); David M. Edelstein, Occupational Hazards: Success and Failure in Military Occupation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008); Alexander B. Downes and Jonathan Monten, “Forced to Be Free? Why Foreign-Imposed Regime Change Rarely Leads to Democratization,” International Security 37, no. 4 (Spring 2013): 90–131. 9. Robert Jervis, Why Intelligence Fails: Lessons from the Iranian Revolution and the Iraq War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 150–153. 10. Robert Jervis, “Hypotheses on Misperception,” World Politics 20, no. 3 (April 1968): 463. 11. Elizabeth N. Saunders, “Transformative Choices: Leaders and the Origins of Intervention Strategy,” International Security 34, no. 2 (2009): 119–161. 12. See Jonathan Mercer, “Rationality and Psychology in International Politics,” International Organization 59, no. 1 (2005): 77–106; Aaron Rapport, “The Long and Short of It: Cognitive Constraints on Leaders’ Assessments of Postwar Iraq,” International Security 37, no. 3 (Winter 2012): 133–171; Richards J. Heuer, Psychology of Intelligence Analysis (Central Intelligence Agency: Center for the Study of Intelligence, 1999). 13. See Judith L. Goldstein and Robert O. Keohane, “Ideas and Foreign Policy: An Analytical Framework,” in Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions, and Political Change, ed. Judith Goldstein and Robert O. Keohane (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 8–10; Keren Yarhi-Milo, Knowing the Adversary: Leaders, Intelligence, and Assessment of Intentions in International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014). For more on how emotion can impact judgment, see Janice Gross Stein, “Psychological Explanations of International Decision Making and Collective Behavior,” in Handbook of International Relations, 2nd ed., ed. Walter Carlsnaes, Thomas Risse, and Beth A. Simmons (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2013).

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14. See Ernest R. May, “Lessons” of the Past: The Use and Misuse of History in American Foreign Policy (London: Oxford University Press, 1973); Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers (New York: Free Press, 1988); Jack S. Levy, “Learning and Foreign Policy: Sweeping a Conceptual Minefield,” International Organization 48, no. 2 (Spring 1994): 279–312. With regard to learning and military organizations, see John A. Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); David Fitzgerald, Learning to Forget: US Army Counterinsurgency Doctrine and Practice from Vietnam to Iraq (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013).

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Index

Page numbers in italics refer to tables. Afghan Interim Authority, 76–77 Afghanistan, 219, 222, 256 n148; baseline conditions, 25–26, 30, 85–86, 101, 103, 218; civil war in, 87, 103. See also Soviet-Afghan war —postwar planning, 69–108; overview, 31–34; amount of planning time, 103; anticipating and mitigating obstacles, 22, 30, 85–89, 103, 106, 218; compared to Kosovo, 70, 80, 86, 101–3; compared to Libya, 161, 176, 179, 188, 198–99; democratization and nation building, 74–77, 81–84, 87, 89–92, 107–8, 252 n53; development aid, 56; effectiveness of, 70–71, 101–4, 203–4,

225; governance, 69–70, 76–77, 80–81; intelligence gaps, 94–95, 134; interagency coordination, 88–89; Iraq war planning and, 100–104, 107, 114, 145, 150, 154; learning and, 95–98, 209; myths about, 216; NSC and, 76–78, 80, 98–99, 255 n132; opportunities in, 207, 217; political goal, 20, 80–85, 106; rapid withdrawal, as goal, 74, 81, 84; resource mobilization, 73, 90–92, 106; security and, 77–79, 89, 91–92, 210, 251 n41, 254 n102; 9/11 attacks and, 6, 70–72, 103, 213; wishful/ magical thinking and, 92–94, 185–86, 208

298

I n de x

Afghanistan (continued) —war: aftermath and outcomes, 104–8, 215; civilian casualties, 108; counterterrorism, 74, 80–84, 91, 95; initial troop density, 54; international support for, 72, 102, 106–8; lessons learned from, 108, 122, 136–38, 180, 187; light footprint in, 73, 81, 255 n127; military goals, 73–75, 83–85; military victories, 1–2, 106, 136, 276 n32; peacekeeping and stabilization forces, 77–79, 89, 91–92, 210, 251 n41, 254 n102; public opinion on (see United States domestic politics) Afghan warlords, 79, 83–84, 87, 91, 252 n63, 253 n84 Ahtisaari, Martti, 51 Albania, 41, 44, 48. See also Kosovar Albanians Albright, Madeline, 35, 39, 47, 50–51, 57–58, 60 Allison, Graham T., 240 n67 Al Qaeda: Afghanistan and, 1, 73–74, 79–81, 84, 92, 107, 114; Iraq and, 149, 267 n181; Libya and, 166, 269 n44; Pakistan and, 87–88; WMD and, 256 n140 Arab League, 159, 161, 166, 200 Arab Spring, 22, 27, 158, 161, 183–84, 200, 208, 272 n112 Aspin, Les, 250 n23 Ba’ath Party, 116, 120, 137, 147 Balkans: compared to Vietnam, 62; democracy promotion in, 46; ethnic groups in, 87; ethnic violence in, 37–38, 48, 67; lessons learned from, 28, 60, 187; obstacles in, 22; U.S. public opinion and, 143 Bass, Gary, 174 Bellin, Eva, 30, 240 n73 Benghazi, 22, 158–59, 169–71, 185, 195–99; attack on U.S. embassy in, 155–56, 197–98. See also Libya

Benson, Kevin, 29, 115–17 Berger, Sandy, 39, 61, 63, 98, 189, 210 bicycle seat analogy, 125, 261 n83 bin Laden, Osama, 79–80, 88, 253 n85 Blair, Tony, 64, 82, 97 Bonn Agreement (2001), 76–78, 80, 84, 87, 90–92, 94, 106–7, 257 n151 Bosnia: ethnic groups in, 37–38, 48, 59; lessons learned from, 32, 46, 54, 58–62, 95–97, 136, 145, 188, 247 n127; U.S. public opinion on, 63, 248 n151 Brahimi, Lakhdar, 76 Bremer, Paul, 119, 122, 139, 147–48, 263 n119, 266 n175 Bundy, McGeorge, 217 Bush, George H. W., 48, 67, 137 Bush, George W., 66, 142–43, 204, 210, 250 n25; “axis of evil” speech, 128; on freedom, 82, 253 n75, 261 n71; Marshall Plan analogy, 84–85, 90; “mission accomplished” speech, 2, 121, 124, 142; nation building and, 123–24; 9/11 attacks and, 71–72, 81–82, 100, 107, 255 n122; Vietnam War and, 256 n137. See also Afghanistan; Iraq Bush, Laura, 82 Cameron, David, 170 Canada, 72 Carter Doctrine (1980), 221 Casey, George, 96, 243 n30; Iraq and, 119, 127; Kosovo and, 40–41, 46, 49, 60–61 casualties. See human costs Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 88–89 Chalabi, Ahmad, 16, 121–22, 125, 129, 131, 133, 135, 151, 187, 238 n33, 263 n106, 263 n115 Chandrasekaran, Rajiv, 122, 256 n148 Chechnya, 50 check-the-block planning, 212

I n d ex Cheney, Dick: on 9/11 attacks, 248 n1; Afghanistan and, 86, 95, 97, 99, 256 n140; Iraq war and, 140–41, 152, 260 n64; Persian Gulf War and, 137–38; Rumsfeld and, 140–41, 250 n25, 265 n153 Chernomyrdin, Viktor, 51 China: Afghanistan and, 72; Kosovo and, 44, 50, 58; Libya and, 169 Chivvis, Christopher, 162, 175, 180 Chollet, Derek, 162, 165, 171, 174–75, 190–91, 269 n27 Clark, Wesley, 35, 39, 51–52, 58, 60, 174, 215, 220 Clarke, Lee, 217 Clausewitz, Carl von, 9, 20, 25, 29, 203, 206, 223 Clemenceau, Georges, 219 Clinton, Bill, 35, 62, 66, 143; Iraq and, 112, 114; U.S. military interventions and, 37, 46, 58–60, 95, 135–36, 206, 209; Yeltsin and, 51, 247 n127. See also Kosovo Clinton, Hillary: on Bosnia as model, 188; critique of Obama administration, 186–87; Iraq and, 273 n139; Libya and, 159, 163, 170, 172–73, 178–79, 195, 219 Coalitional Provisional Authority in Iraq (CPA), 10, 18, 119, 147–48, 220, 263 n119, 265 n161 Cohen, Eliot, 45, 256 n137 Cohen, William, 51–52 cold war and post-cold war era, 18, 31, 36–38, 66, 94, 221 Collins, Joseph, 73, 77, 87–88, 93, 95, 101, 104 Combined Forces Land Component Command (CFLCC), 115–18, 121, 125, 127, 130, 144, 147, 216 Combined Joint Task Force 180, 79 Connor, Robert E., 17 counterfactuals, 4, 67, 214, 221, 240 n74 counterinsurgency, 50, 148–49, 274 n3

299

counterterrorism, 74, 80–84, 91, 95, 110, 253 n86. See also terrorism Cuba, 72, 209 Dayton Accords (1995), 37–38, 44, 57, 59–60 Defense Department, 29, 210; Afghanistan and, 72, 77, 80–81, 88–89, 99; Iraq and, 117–29, 133, 140–41, 152, 238 n33, 262 n93; Libya and, 161, 164–65. See also interagency coordination democracy: defined, 12–13; liberal, 13, 45, 203–4; in Middle East and North Africa, 27, 30, 110, 124, 183, 195, 240 n73; undermining of, 15–16; in United States, 203–4, 223–26 democracy promotion, 11–18; in the Balkans, 46; in fragmented societies, 10–11, 21–22; by Great Britain, 18; as long-term enterprise, 21, 32, 215; post-WWII successes, 13–14; requirements of, 215–16, 222; in Serbia, 46. See also Afghanistan; Iraq; Kosovo; Libya democratic peace, 14, 237 n26 Dempsey, Martin, 40 Desert Crossing (war-gaming exercise), 113–14, 127, 130–31, 136, 138, 145, 150 development aid, 56, 182 disinformation, 224 Dobbins, James, 24, 239 n57; Afghanistan and, 77–78, 87, 89, 91, 93, 95–96, 98, 100, 250 n34; Bosnia and, 59; Kosovo and, 54 domestic politics. See United States domestic politics Donilon, Tom, 189–90 Eclipse II (Iraq postwar plan), 116, 127, 147 Edelstein, David, 16 Egypt, 123, 151, 158, 184, 261 n67, 272 n112

300

I n de x

Eisenhower, Dwight, 26, 144, 190, 211 elections, 12–13, 46, 196. See also democracy promotion emotion, 4, 208, 276 n32. See also fear ends creep, 275 n16 end slippage, 212–13 ethnic violence, 37–38, 41, 48–49, 59, 65, 67 Europe: Kosovo and, 55, 63–64; Libya and, 166, 177, 188, 200; migrant crisis, 198 fear, 100, 110, 152, 253 n75, 276 n32 Feith, Douglas, 116, 118, 120–22, 125–26, 133, 140, 238 n33, 255 n127, 261 n71, 263 n115, 263 n118, 264 n136, 266 n170 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry Regiment, 148–49 1st Cavalry Division, 33, 131 Fisher, Thomas, 73, 249 n11, 259 n24 Fishman, Ben, 159, 181, 272 n118 Fitzgerald, David, 205, 262 n92, 274 n3 Fitzgerald, Michael, 27, 74, 84, 90, 104 Flournoy, Michèle, 105, 160, 185–86, 200 4th Infantry Division, 115 France: Afghanistan and, 72; Kosovo and, 43, 53; Libya and, 159–60, 166, 177 Franks, Tommy, 220, 263 n118; Afghanistan and, 74, 79, 86, 89, 93–94, 96–97, 99–100, 253 n85, 254 n110; Iraq and, 109, 117, 133–36, 148, 263 n118, 266 n170 Free Iraqi Fighters, 131 Future of Iraq Project, 117, 127–29, 145 Garner, Jay, 118, 122, 134, 147 Gates, Robert, 32; Iraq and, 273 n139; Libya and, 158, 163–64, 170, 172, 174, 178, 184, 190–91, 200, 210, 213; NSS and, 178, 273 n132 genocide, 37, 158, 193

Germany: Afghanistan and, 72, 78, 91, 104; Kosovo and, 43, 53; Libya and, 159; military strategy, 220; World War II and post-war occupation, 9, 13–14, 116, 137, 226, 236 n10 goal gliding, 212–13 Gordon, Michael R., 136, 260 n60 Gore, Al, 51, 95, 214 Grant, Ulysses S., 220 Greece, 166 Grossman, Marc, 51, 60, 244 n68 Guatemala, 15 Haass, Richard, 76, 89, 132, 136, 141 Hadley, Stephen, 76 Haiti, 28, 32, 37, 46, 59–62, 96, 136, 187 Halberstam, David, 8, 48, 60, 68 Ham, Carter, 24, 163, 168, 171, 181, 185, 197, 204, 239 n58, 274 n1 Hanan (Iraqi civilian), 6, 34, 236 n5 Hawkins, Steven, 118 Hawley, Leonard, 40–41, 45–47, 60–62, 212, 242 n26 Hess, Michael, 42, 119, 139, 145, 151, 200, 220, 241 n77, 243 n39, 260 n45, 263 n115 Hill, Christopher, 44 Holbrooke, Richard, 38, 44, 58–59 Hughes, Paul, 17–18, 118, 122, 132–33, 140, 239 n40 human costs (casualties), 3–6, 34, 108, 150, 153, 184, 235 n3, 236 n5, 267 n178 humanitarian intervention: in Iraq, 118, 120; in Japan, 13; in Kosovo, 38, 42–43, 48; in Libya, 2, 157–61, 167–75, 178, 193, 197–99. See also moral obligations human rights, 12–13, 123 human rights atrocities, 158, 162, 223 Hurley, Michael, 55, 61 Hussein, Saddam, 1, 21, 125, 133–34, 137, 146, 184, 264 n139; capture of, 109–10; Persian Gulf War and, 112

I n d ex information: democracy and, 224; global revolution in, 9–10 insurgencies, 50; in Iraq war, 112, 144–46, 148–49, 153 intelligence gaps, 22–23, 208; overlearning and, 27–28. See also Afghanistan; Iraq; Kosovo; Libya interagency coordination: Defense Department and, 29; NSC and, 210–11; State Department and, 88–89, 99; White House and, 29, 189–92. See also Afghanistan; Iraq; Kosovo; Libya International Conference on Reconstruction Assistance to Afghanistan (Tokyo, 2002), 78, 90–91, 106–7 International Independent Commission on Kosovo, 65 International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), 79, 91, 254 n102 Inter-Services Intelligence (I.S.I.), 105 Iran: Afghanistan and, 72, 77; Iraq and, 128, 130, 137, 264 n139; Persian Gulf War and, 264 n139; revolution in, 97; U.S. coups in, 15 Iraq: airstrikes on (1998), 62; attitudes toward America, 219; baseline conditions, 21, 30, 128, 134–35, 145, 153, 218, 262 n91; exiles, 117, 122, 129, 165; infrastructure, 134–35, 264 nn123–24; Iran and, 128, 130, 137, 264 n139; oil revenue, 132–33, 182; security forces (Iraqi), 116, 147, 149, 151; weapons of mass destruction (WMD), 110, 134, 143–44, 148, 152, 263 n116. See also Hussein, Saddam; Persian Gulf War —postwar planning, 109–54; overview, 31–34; ambiguity in, 120, 124, 126, 152; amount of planning time, 112, 146; anticipating and mitigating obstacles, 22, 30, 48, 127–30, 134–35, 143–44, 218; compared to Libya, 161, 176, 179,

301

188, 198–99; democratization and nation building, 116, 121–46, 148, 151, 261 n67, 262 n91; development aid and, 56; Eclipse II plan, 116, 127, 147; economic resources and, 131–33, 182; effectiveness of, 6, 152–54, 203–4, 225; executive steering group (ESG), 119–21; governance and, 119, 131; humanitarian needs and, 118, 120; intelligence gaps, 134–35; interagency coordination, 29, 117–21, 128–30, 137–41, 146; learning and, 135–38, 209; myths about, 216; neoconservatism and, 123, 137; NSC and, 120–21, 123, 138–41, 144, 146, 152; opportunities in, 207; “Parade of Horribles” memo, 127–28, 212, 262 n93; Persian Gulf War and, 110, 112; political goal, 18, 20, 121–27, 139, 153–54; rapid withdrawal and, 121–27, 132, 141–43, 148; reconstruction and, 120; regime change, 111–13, 136, 154 (see also Hussein, Saddam); resource mobilization, 116, 130–32, 221, 265 n159; secrecy and, 146, 266 n170; security and, 119, 131, 210; wishful/ magical thinking and, 27, 132–35, 184–86, 208 —war: aftermath and outcomes, 146–54, 215; attempts to undermine democracy in, 15–16; casualties, 5, 267 n178; counterinsurgency surge (2007–2008), 148–49; deBaathification, 116, 120, 147; ground invasion plan (Cobra II), 115–16; IED (improvised explosive devices) attacks, 3, 6, 149; initial troop density, 54; insurgencies, 112, 144–46, 148–49, 153; lessons learned from, 169, 180, 186–87; liberation and, 122; light footprint in, 115, 119, 122, 126–27, 130; looting, 117, 127–28, 130, 146–47; military goals, 122–27, 133–34, 143; military

302

I n de x

Iraq (continued) victories, 1–2, 121; Obama and, 160, 191, 201; occupation and, 122–23; peacekeeping and stabilization forces, 130–31, 146–53; planning for, 79, 112–21, 263 n116; public opinion on (see United States domestic politics); sectarian violence, 117, 127–28, 130, 144–45, 148; withdrawal from, 149, 193, 273n139. See also Bush, George W.; Coalitional Provisional Authority in Iraq (CPA) Iraqi Army, 120, 135, 147, 259 n24 Iraqi Interim Authority (IIA), 120–21, 126, 137, 260 n50, 264 n136 Iraq Liberation Act (1998), 112 Iraq political-military cell (IPMC), 119, 121 Iraq Relief and Reconstruction working group, 120 Iraq Study Group, 153 ISIS, 5, 149–50, 197, 205 Islam, 97, 102 Islamic State of Iraq, 149, 267 n181 Island Breeze (war-gaming exercise), 164–65 Italy, 43, 53, 78, 166 Ivanov, Igor, 50 Japan: Afghanistan and, 72; World War II and, 9, 13–14, 210, 226, 236 n10 Jeffrey, James, 273 n139 Jervis, Robert, 28, 187 Jodice, Ralph, 167, 269 n47 Joint Chiefs, 52, 127 Joint Staff J-5, 40, 49–50, 119, 243 n30 Joint Task Force IV, 118, 121, 216 Kahneman, Daniel, 255 n123 Kant, Immanuel, 238 n26 Karzai, Hamid, 69, 77–78, 87, 91, 93–94, 104–5, 187, 253 n84 Kaster, Erica, 173, 271 n76

Kennedy, John F., 209, 225 Khalilzad, Zalmay, 83, 254 n102 Kissinger, Henry, 29, 32 Korea, 31 Kosovar Albanians, 36, 38, 41, 44–45, 47–48, 57, 65–66 Kosovo: baseline conditions, 57, 63–64, 66–67, 153, 207; international protectorate status, 42–43, 47, 76; Serbs in, 37–38, 48, 58, 65 —postwar planning, 35–68; overview, 31–34; ambiguity in, 45–47; amount of planning time, 64; anticipating and mitigating obstacles, 48–52, 67; compared to Afghanistan, 70, 80, 86, 101–3; democratization, 36, 45–47, 66, 216; development aid and, 56, 182; economic reconstruction, 42, 55; effectiveness of, 25, 36–37, 56–64, 68, 206–7, 219; governance and, 42, 49, 55, 181; intelligence gaps, 58; interagency cooperation, 52, 61–62; learning and, 58–62, 209, 247 n127; NSC and, 40–41, 45, 50, 61–62, 67, 141, 242 n27, 247 n148; political goal, 41–48, 55, 65–67, 213, 222; resource mobilization, 53–56, 67, 90; as slippery slope, 45–47; wishful/magical thinking and, 57–58 —war: aftermath and outcomes, 65–68, 215; air campaign, 35, 37–39, 53; compared to Libya, 199; compared to Vietnam War, 46, 67, 143; ethnic violence in, 38, 41, 48–49, 65; ground invasion, 39; humanitarian needs, 38, 42–43, 48; initial troop density, 54; lessons learned from, 95–97, 135–36, 145, 150, 179–80, 188–89; peacekeeping and stabilization forces, 42, 49–50, 53–55, 78–79, 144, 179–80; public opinion on (see United States domestic politics) Kosovo Force (KFOR), 42, 49–50, 53–55, 65, 131, 179–80

I n d ex Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), 38, 50, 58 Krepinevich, Andrew, 21 Kurth, James, 39 Kuwait, 115 leaders, U.S.: civilian, 219–20; competence of, 216–17 learning, in postwar planning: deficient, 27–28, 223; disinformation and, 224; importance of, 96, 208–9, 225. See also specific countries and wars Levy, Jack, 237 n26 liberation, 17, 122. See also democracy promotion Libya: 17 February Revolution, 158; attitudes toward America, 195, 219; baseline conditions, 25–26, 156–58, 175–76, 187–88, 194–95, 218, 267 n2, 272 n118; elections (2012), 196; exiles, 165, 185–86, 201; institution building, 185; mirror imaging and, 183, 272 n109; oil revenue, 181–82, 201; rebels, 181, 200, 270 n63; strategic importance to U.S., 158, 174, 184, 193–94, 198, 201, 222; WMDs and, 157–58. See also Benghazi; NATO; Qaddafi, Muammar —postwar planning, 155–202; overview, 31–34; ambiguity in, 170–75, 178, 200; amount of planning time, 195–96; anticipating and mitigating obstacles, 49, 157, 175–79, 194–95, 218; compared to Afghanistan and Iraq, 161, 176, 179, 188, 198–99; compared to Kosovo, 199; democratization and nation building, 160–61, 165, 167, 173, 175–79, 192–93, 198–200; development aid, 56, 182; economic resources and, 181–82, 201; effectiveness of, 7, 154, 201, 225; governance, 181–82; intelligence gaps, 185–86; interagency coordination,

303

161–65, 177–79; learning and, 186–89, 209; mission creep and, 171, 174; multilateralism and, 200; myths about, 216; NSC and, 159, 162–63, 165, 189–92; NTC and, 162–65; opportunities in, 207, 217; political goal, 20, 156–57, 167–75, 184, 207; Q+1 task force, 161–65, 170, 177, 189, 195; rapid withdrawal and, 161, 173–75, 178–79, 192–93, 214; regime change, 4, 21, 157, 168–75; resource mobilization, 157, 179–82; security and, 179–81, 197, 199; wishful/ magical thinking and, 27, 182–85, 193, 200–201, 208 —war: aftermath and outcomes, 196–202, 215; human costs, 184; as humanitarian intervention, 157–61, 167–75, 178, 193, 197–99; initial troop density, 54; “leading from behind,” 160–61; light footprint, 161; military goals, 170–71, 173, 184; military victories, 2, 156, 166–67; mission creep, 214; no-fly zone, 174; peacekeeping and stabilization forces, 179–81, 196–99; public opinion on (see United States domestic politics); as slippery slope, 160, 174 Libya Contact Group, 188 Lockerbie bombing (1988), 158 MacArthur, Douglas, 13, 210 Mandelbaum, Michael, 45, 244 n66 Martini, Jeffrey, 180 McNamara, Robert, 217 Middle East: challenges in, 64, 102–3, 145; democracy in, 27, 30, 110, 124, 183, 195, 240 n73; U.S. policy toward, 193–94, 221–22 Miller, Franklin, 119–20, 124, 133, 140, 146, 260 n50, 263 n115 Miller, Paul, 13 Milosevic, Slobodan, 37–42, 45, 47, 53, 57–58, 67, 244 n66

304

I n de x

mirror imaging, 15, 45, 183, 272 n109 mission creep, 16, 214 Mitrovica, Kosovo, 57 moral obligations, 5–6, 175, 178, 225 Mubarak, Hosni, 123, 184 Mullen, Michael, 174, 178, 200 multilateralism, 137, 159, 200–201 Myers, Richard B., 84, 118, 249 n13, 263 n118 myths (about postwar planning), 215–26 National Defense University 2002 report on Iraq, 127–28 National Intelligence Council 2003 report on Iraq, 127–28, 262 n91 National Security Council (NSC): empowering, 209–11; learning and, 60; underuse of, 28–29. See also Afghanistan; Iraq; Kosovo; Libya National Transitional Council (NTC), 162–65, 173, 176–77, 180–81, 185, 192, 196 nation building, 15–17. See also democracy promotion NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization): Afghanistan and, 106; Article V (invoked after 9/11), 72, 102; credibility of, 64, 67, 180, 194, 200; Iraq and, 150; Kosovo and, 36–39, 41–42, 49–50, 53–55; Libya and, 159–61, 163–64, 166–67, 171–72, 179–81, 196; military capability, 40; Milosevic and, 244 n68 Nazi Germany, 9, 13, 37, 137 neoconservatism, 123, 137 Nicaragua, 15 Nordland, Rod, 267 n181 North Africa, 64, 164; democracy in, 30, 183, 195, 240 n73 Northern, Richard, 270 n63 Northern Alliance, 73 NSPD-24 (National Security Presidential Directive), 117, 140

Obama, Barack: Afghanistan and, 105; Arab Spring and, 183, 272 n112; election of, 156, 192, 201; Iraq war and, 160, 191, 201; multilateralism and, 159, 179; NSC and, 189–92, 210, 273 n130, 273 n132. See also Libya obstacles, anticipating and mitigating, 19, 21–23, 208. See also Afghanistan; Iraq; Kosovo; Libya occupation, 17, 114, 142. See also democracy promotion Office of Management and Budget (OMB), 55 Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), 118–19, 121, 125, 129, 131, 134, 139–41, 147, 212, 216, 220, 263 n115 Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization (S/CRS), 161 Office of the Vice President (OVP), 140–41 Operation Allied Force, 49 Operation Anaconda, 1, 79, 92, 104, 251 n47 Operation Desert Fox, 113 Operation Enduring Freedom, 74, 85 Operation Odyssey Dawn, 159 Operation Unified Protector, 159, 172, 270 n71 Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), 55 Orr, Robert C., 136 outcomes, 9, 25. See also Afghanistan; Iraq; Kosovo; Libya overlearning, 27–28, 187 Pack, Jason, 270 n63 Packer, George, 125 Pakistan, 87–89, 103, 105 Panama, 31 Panetta, Leon, 172, 189–90, 210, 270 n69, 273 n139

I n d ex Pardew, James, 40 Pargeter, Alison, 166 Paris, Roland, 17, 65 pathologies in postwar planning, 26–30; Afghanistan, 92–104; Iraq, 132–46; Kosovo, 57–63; Libya, 182–96, 198 peacekeeping forces. See Afghanistan; Iraq; Kosovo; Libya; NATO Persian Gulf War, 31, 114, 150; Iran and, 264 n139; Iraq War and, 110, 112; lessons learned from, 7, 137–38, 199, 213 Pew Research Center, 2, 238 n29 Phillips, David, 58 Pickering, Thomas, 61, 247 n141 Poland, 159 political goals, identification of, 19–21. See also Afghanistan; Iraq; Kosovo; Libya postwar planning: overview, 6–11; amount of time for, 9, 30, 217; baseline conditions and, 25–26; best practices, 68; certainties and, 25; choices in, 221–22, 225; civilian leadership and, 219–20; defining success in, 32; learning from mistakes in, 203–15; military leaders and, 219–20; myths about, 215–26; security and, 22; tasks of, 19–26, 206; tension in, 11–18, 26, 205 (see also democracy promotion; withdrawal, rapid). See also pathologies in postwar planning Powell, Colin, 262 n101; Afghanistan and, 75–76, 78, 89, 91; Iraq and, 117, 125–26, 128–29, 134, 136, 144, 148, 261 n81; Persian Gulf War and, 137; “Pottery Barn rule,” 6, 125 Power, Samantha, 178 president, office of: interagency coordination and, 29, 189–92, 210; role in postwar planning, 214–15

305

Presidential Decision Directive 56 (PDD-56), 61–62, 98, 139, 247 n148, 256 n134 Pristina airfield, 50–51 Project Solarium, 144, 211 propaganda, 219, 224 public opinion. See United States domestic politics Q+1 task force, 161–65, 170, 177, 189, 195 Qaddafi, Muammar: death of, 2, 166–67, 172, 196, 270 n71; governance by, 21, 157–59, 182, 185; removal of, 1, 161–62, 168–78, 193–94, 197, 270 n69 quagmire, 16, 53, 138 Racak massacre, 38, 41 Ralston, Joseph, 45, 53, 61, 63, 243 n38 Rambouillet negotiations, 38, 42, 47–48 RAND, 15, 47, 54–55, 66 Rapport, Aaron, 7 Rashid, Ahmed, 252 n63, 254 n102 Reagan, Ronald, 157 regime change, 4, 21–22; selectivity in, 206, 213–14, 222 Reimer, Dennis, 52 resource mobilization, 19, 23–24; myths about, 220–21 responsibility to protect (R2P), 175, 178 Rice, Condoleezza: Afghanistan and, 89, 98–100, 102; Iraq and, 122, 124, 129, 138–41, 261 n71, 262 n93, 262 n101; 9/11 attacks and, 71; on Vietnam War, 256 n137 Rice, Susan, 178 “Roadmap for Libya” (NTC), 162, 165 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 13–15 Rose, Gideon, 7, 94, 131, 144, 174, 236 n10, 258 n12

306

I n de x

Ross, Dennis, 180 Rothkopf, David, 141, 189, 210, 273 n130 Rumelt, Richard, 21 Rumsfeld, Donald: Afghanistan and, 74–75, 79, 81, 83, 86, 88, 93–94, 96–97, 99, 103, 253 n84; aversion to nation building, 114–15; bicycle seat analogy, 125, 261 n83; Cheney and, 140–41, 250 n25, 265 n153; Iraq and, 114–15, 118, 120–22, 124–29, 133, 136, 139–42, 144, 152–53, 237 n12, 238 n33, 261 n71, 263 n115, 264 n123; “light footprint,” 161; on military capabilities, 250 nn24–25; NSC and, 210; “Parade of Horribles” memo, 127–28, 212, 262 n93; “pockets of dead enders,” 10, 237 n12 Russia: Kosovo and, 41, 44–46, 50–52, 67, 219; Libya and, 169, 199 Rwanda, 46, 59, 158, 178, 199 al-Sadr, Muqtada, 148 Sanchez, Ricardo, 148 Sarkesian, Sam C., 17 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 159, 170 Schadlow, Nadia, 7, 219 Schear, James, 173, 188–89, 271 n77 Schulte, Gregory, 28, 40, 42, 46, 50, 95, 240 n66, 245 n85, 275 n16 Scowcroft, Brent, 98, 138 secessionist movements, 44 September 11, 2001 attacks (9/11), 138, 148, 248 n1, 249 n3, 255 n122, 258 n12, 276 n32; Afghanistan and, 6, 70–72, 103, 213; Bush and, 71–72, 81–82, 100, 107, 255 n122 Serbia, 36, 40–41, 43, 46–47, 50, 67, 219, 244 n66 75th Ranger Regiment, 33, 109–10 Shelton, Hugh, 52

Shi’ites, 48, 144, 148 Shinseki, Eric, 131, 142, 150 al-Sistani, Ali, 135 Skocz, Dennis, 40 slippery slope, 16, 45–47, 160, 174 Smith, Tony, 12, 19, 237 n19 Somalia, 28, 31–32, 37, 46, 58–62, 96–97, 187 Somoza García, Anastasio, 15 South Korea, 226 Soviet-Afghan war, 73, 96–97, 255 n127, 255 n130 Soviet Union, 236 n10 Srebenica, 158, 178. See also Bosnia stabilization forces. See Afghanistan; Iraq; Kosovo; Libya; NATO State Department, 40, 77, 161, 210, 220; Afghanistan and, 107; Future of Iraq Project, 117, 127–29, 145; interagency coordination, 88–89, 99 (see also interagency coordination); Iraq and, 121–22, 128–29, 135–37, 152; learning and, 135–36; Libya and, 161–62 Stavridis, James, 63, 163, 168, 180, 188, 248 n154, 269 n44 Stephenson, James, 261 n67 Stevens, Christopher, 155, 197 Stimson, Henry, 14 Sunni Awakening, 149 Sunnis, 48, 128, 130, 144 Sun Tzu, 223, 276 n33 Suri, Jeremi, 238 n27, 276 n32 Syria, 150, 191, 197 Talbott, Strobe, 45, 51 Taliban: military campaign against, 1, 73–74, 80–81, 84, 92, 95, 108; negotiations with, 107, 257 n151; resistance to, 73; resurgence of, 105; Soviet-Afghan war and, 97; warlords and, 79, 91 Taylor, William, 84, 101, 239 n47 Tenet, George, 134

I n d ex terrorism, 5, 110, 222–23. See also counterterrorism; September 11, 2001 attacks Thompson, John, 236 n10 Tierney, Dominic, 7, 15, 66, 239 n39, 239 n49 Tora Bora encounter, 88, 99, 251 n47, 253 n85 Trainor, Bernard E., 136, 260 n60 Tripoli, 180, 199 Tunisia, 158, 184 Turkey, 166 Tversky, Amos, 255 n123 “Unified Mission Plan for Post-Hostilities Iraq” (ORHA), 119 United Kingdom (UK), 18; Afghanistan and, 72, 78; Kosovo and, 43, 53; Libya and, 159–60, 166, 177 United Nations: Afghanistan and, 76, 102; Iraq and, 131, 144, 150; Kosovo and, 41–42, 44–45, 50, 55, 65–66, 181; Libya and, 160, 166, 168–71, 179–80, 199; UNMIK (UN Mission in Kosovo), 42, 55, 65–66, 181 United States: attitudes toward, 66, 195, 219; Civil War, 220; credibility, 5, 64, 150–51; democracy in, 203–4, 223–26; exceptionalism, 15; global leadership role, 200–204, 224–26; national security and strategic interests, 13, 158, 174, 184, 193–94, 198, 201, 205, 213–14, 222–23, 237 n19 —domestic politics, 2–3, 16–17, 29–30, 151, 180, 201, 211–12, 238 n29, 239 n39; Afghanistan and, 4, 73, 99–100, 108, 192, 256 n139; Iraq and, 3–4, 16, 111, 141–44, 151, 192, 265 n161; Kosovo and, 50, 62–63; Libya and, 4, 174, 180, 192–93, 197, 201, 273 n144 —military action: costs of, 5–6, 235 n3 (see also human costs); military goals and objectives, 20–21; role of military

307

leaders in, 219–20 (see also Defense Department); twenty-first-century warfare and, 75, 222; wars of choice, 213–14. See also Afghanistan; Bosnia; Haiti; Iraq; Kosovo; Libya; Persian Gulf War; Somalia; Vietnam War U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), 159, 163–64, 168, 197, 249 n8 USAID: Afghanistan and, 77; Iraq and, 132, 137; Libya and, 173; Office of Transition Initiatives, 40, 55 U.S. Army manuals and training, 20, 254 n110, 274 n3 U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM): Afghanistan and, 72–74, 80, 84, 86, 89, 93; Iraq and, 113–15, 117–18, 122, 125–26, 134, 148, 216, 259 n24, 266 n175 U.S. European Command (EUCOM), 163–64, 168, 269 n44 U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP), 50 Vandewalle, Dirk, 198 V Corps, 148 Vickers, Michael, 40 Vietnam War: comparisons to, 46, 62, 67, 143; lessons learned from, 16–17, 31, 205–6, 217, 226, 256 n137, 274 n3 “Vision of a Democratic Libya” (NTC), 162 Wallace, Chris, 155 war, politics and, 9, 223 Warrick, Tom, 129 Watts, Barry, 21 weapons of mass destruction (WMD), 110; Al Qaeda and, 256 n140; Iraq and, 110, 134, 143–44, 148, 152, 263 n116; Libya and, 157–58 Weigley, Russell, 20, 220, 239 n49 Weinberger-Powell doctrine, 17, 75, 250 n23 West Germany, 13–14 Wilder, Andrew, 84, 92, 252 n58

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I n de x

Wilson, Woodrow, 12, 66 wishful/magical thinking, 11, 27, 208, 223. See also Afghanistan; Iraq; Kosovo; Libya withdrawal, rapid, 11, 16–18, 62–63. See also Afghanistan; Iraq; Libya Wolfowitz, Paul, 112, 127, 132, 137, 182, 263 n115, 265 n159 World Bank, 55 World War II, 9, 13–14, 116, 236 n10

XVIII Airborne Corps, 79 Yeltsin, Boris, 51, 247 n127 Yugoslavia, former, 37–38. See also Balkans; Bosnia; Kosovo; Serbia Zakaria, Fareed, 161, 186 al-Zarqawi, Abu Musab, 148 Zinni, Anthony, 18, 113–14, 124–25, 183, 214, 239 n42, 253 n86