TOMMY FRANKS' BIG MISTAKES: Vision Impaired
by Spencer Ackerman
Meeting retired General Tommy Franks can be an emotional experience. His craggy, battle-hardened face has an irrepressible habit of breaking into a warm, disarming smile. (An enraptured David Letterman was moved to compliment Franks on his "beautiful eyes.") As he traveled the country earlier this month promoting his new memoir, American Soldier, the commanding general of the two post-September 11 wars mixed a deeply felt patriotism with humanizing self-effacement. At the National Press Club last week, he effortlessly threaded a discursion about how he would have liked to subtitle his book "Ain't This A Great Country?" into an endearing admission that he once gave a speech on an aircraft carrier so long-winded that the ship's captain confessed he felt his hair growing. It's a winning combination. At a North Carolina book signing, one of the thousands of attendees waiting in line to shake Franks's hand compared seeing him to "meeting General Eisenhower."
That's certainly a comparison the Republican National Committee wants to encourage. While Franks has yet to formally endorse his commander-in-chief, he is scheduled to address the GOP convention in New York in primetime on September 2, just hours before George W. Bush accepts his party's renomination. The general will be a potent weapon in Bush's campaign to restore his tarnished image as a successful war president. After all, most Americans were introduced to Franks when the press-reticent general commented on the swift battlefield victories he reaped in Afghanistan and Iraq. As a result, Franks conjures up images of celebrations of Afghan children in the streets of Kabul and the fall of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad's Firdos Square.
Since Franks's July 2003 retirement from the Army, however, Americans have been treated to a disturbing new set of images from Iraq: the charred bodies of contractors lynched in Falluja, the black-masked militiamen of the Mahdi Army in Najaf, the unmuzzled dogs terrifying Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib. Whatever initial goodwill the Iraqis harbored for American forces is gone. In May, the final poll conducted for the now-defunct Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) found that over 80 percent of Iraqis distrust the continued U.S. presence in the country. And, in the last year, nearly 800 American troops have died and nearly 5,700 have been wounded there.
The situation in Afghanistan is little better. Even if the country is able to hold its twice-postponed national elections this year, it will still be in the hands of its various corrupt warlords. The Taliban, driven from Kabul and Kandahar but never destroyed, is steadily growing in strength. Its successful attacks on foreign aid workers have slowed reconstruction to a snail's pace. Al Qaeda's leaders--also driven from the country but never destroyed--are believed to be in the lawless tribal areas on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, carrying out or inspiring attacks around the world that have left hundreds murdered.
Franks is a symbol of these failures as much as he is a symbol of the initial military successes that preceded them. Although responsibility for the chaos in Iraq and Afghanistan surely flows more from Franks's superiors than from Franks himself, the general's decisions at the helm of Central Command (centcom) abetted and exacerbated many of their errors. In planning for both Afghanistan and Iraq, Franks focused on the major combat that began each conflict to the detriment of the counterinsurgency and stability operations that would prove crucial to prevailing. As a self-styled maverick, he disdained fellow generals who questioned his strategy and glommed onto administration officials whose ideas about warfare were seriously flawed, creating a feedback loop that reinforced their mistakes. America will be living with the consequences for years to come.
hen Franks sat down after September 11 to devise a plan for invading Afghanistan, he understood, according to American Soldier, that "America was through with half measures and pinpricks," like firing "million-dollar [Tomahawk missiles] into empty tents." Instead, he writes, "we were going to war--boots-on-the-ground war." But, mindful of the quagmire endured by a 620,000-strong Soviet army in the 1980s, Franks told his planning staff, "The question is whose boots, and how many pairs." Like Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Franks believed the Taliban could be routed and Al Qaeda destroyed with a minimal number of American troops. So he and his staff drew up a plan--a "unique page in military history"--to combine air power and a handful of unconventional forces (both Special Forces and CIA paramilitary teams) with the roughly 20,000 anti-Taliban warriors of the Afghan Northern Alliance. He divided his plan into four phases. The first three were preparation, initial combat operations, and finally "decisive" combat operations. Phase IV would stabilize the country, requiring "counterinsurgency and civil affairs military forces" deployed over "a three-to-five-year period."
The plan, launched on October 7, 2001, initially seemed to vindicate Franks's strategy. The Northern Alliance captured Mazar-e-Sharif from the Taliban on November 9 and pushed south, seizing the capital, Kabul, a week later, and the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar on December 6. Barely 300 Special Operations Forces and 100 CIA operatives comprised the U.S. ground component.
But, by early December, hundreds of jihadists, including Osama bin Laden, were girding for a final battle at a one-square-mile redoubt near the Pakistan border known as Tora Bora--providing perhaps the best, and last, opportunity to destroy Al Qaeda. It never happened. Franks relied on Afghan militiamen, not Americans, for the assault. While they promised to seal off Al Qaeda's retreat, the corruption and relative lack of skill among the Afghans allowed bin Laden and his men to flee across the Pakistan border, and U.S. bombing was unable to stop them. Bin Laden (who had used the U.S. retreat from Somalia in 1993 and years of insufficient U.S. retaliation to his '90s attacks as the basis for his critique of America as a paper tiger) claimed victory: "The U.S. forces dared not break into our positions, despite the unprecedented massive bombing. ... Is there any clearer evidence of their cowardice, fear, and lies regarding their legends about their alleged power?"
Hamid Karzai's new government saw the U.S. passivity in Tora Bora as a disaster. By the next month, Afghan officials were openly imploring Washington to use the Army directly against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. "If the Americans don't want to repeat the mistakes made at Tora Bora, they will have to send in more ground troops to complement their aerial strategy," Karzai's national security chief told The Telegraph. Engineer Ali, a top Afghan intelligence official, was no more sanguine: "With the current strategy of bombing from the air, the Al Qaeda fighters merely disperse in any direction they choose--often with the cooperation of locals." By mid-2002, numerous military and intelligence after-action reports concurred. "We fucked up by not getting into Tora Bora sooner and letting the Afghans do all the work," a senior U.S. counterterrorism official told The Washington Post. "We didn't put U.S. forces on the ground, despite all the brave talk."
Franks, however, was unfazed. As he flew to a Northern Alliance meeting on December 22, he reflected, "I knew that there was still hard fighting ahead in Afghanistan. But the main resistance had been shattered. The remnants of the Taliban and Al Qaeda were hiding in the snowy mountains of the southeast, subjected to relentless bombing." And, because of his optimism, Franks saw no need for the robust counterinsurgency envisioned in Phase IV. Only 8,500 American troops were deployed to Afghanistan in 2002, and Franks limited their activity to hunting Al Qaeda on the country's southeastern border rather than establishing security and fighting militants around the country. The Pentagon, evidently with Franks's consent, blocked the expansion of international peacekeeping forces from their Kabul base of operations. And no American forces were used for stability operations.
As a result, over the last two and a half years, the fundamentalists have grown in strength, mounting increasing attacks on American forces, assassinating foreign aid workers, and terrorizing the Afghan population. Last September, a Taliban spokesman explained their strategy to David Rohde of The New York Times: Bog the United States down in a guerrilla campaign for "ten or twenty years" that it showed no ability to adapt to. Warlords now control the country, not Karzai. Yet, to Franks, reviewing the Afghan campaign in 2002, "We had accomplished our mission."
ranks had so much faith in his Afghanistan strategy that he repeated it in Iraq. Again, the campaign was divided into four phases, with "stability operations" serving as Phase IV. And, once again, Franks showed comparatively little concern for the final phase. When he initially told Rumsfeld in February 2002 that Phase IV might require "as many as two hundred fifty thousand" troops, the defense secretary barely acknowledged the estimate. Franks got the message. So, when he briefed the National Security Council (NSC) on the invasion plan that August, and Rumsfeld said, "We will want to get Iraqis in charge of Iraq as soon as possible," Franks concurred: "At some point, we can begin drawing down our force. We'll want to retain a core strength of at least fifty thousand men"--as compared with the 150,000-man invasion force. While Franks pored over the minutiae of how to invade--positioning units, securing overflight agreements from neighboring countries, preparing "the whole alphabet soup of available Precision Guided Munitions"--he essentially shrugged his shoulders at what to do once Baghdad fell: "On one hand, larger Coalition military forces and martial law might be required to stay in country for years, in order to preserve security," he writes of his Phase IV deliberations. "On the other, the Iraqis might ... welcome the liberation and organize themselves swiftly to control Iraq without Coalition help."
Franks's invasion planning paid off in a three-week capture of Baghdad. But just as swift was the breakdown in law and order. Franks was unperturbed. When a British general reported to Franks that looting in Basra "was really revenge"--i.e., an expression of political fury likely to escalate--Franks replied, "Looks like we're winning the war, but violence like that is going to keep us here awhile." Similarly, when then-Major General David Petraeus of the 101st Airborne reported that Iraq was crawling with hidden ammunition while the 400,000-man Iraqi army "just walked home," Franks thought to himself, "I knew that would be a problem for Jay Garner's Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance."
But, despite his February 2002 troop estimate for Phase IV, he never asked for more boots on the ground to secure the country. Instead, he argued for more "wingtips on the ground"--"hundreds, perhaps thousands, of civilians from America and the international community"--and, to facilitate their arrival, Franks writes, he advised Bush to declare the end of "major combat operations," thereby drawing a bright line behind Phase III (and prompting the infamous mission accomplished banner flown during Bush's May 1, 2003, speech on the USS Abraham Lincoln). And, while Franks had expected an infusion of international troops for Phase IV that never materialized, neither their absence nor the continued deterioration of security led him to adapt his strategy. "There was a commonly held belief that civic action would not be possible in Iraq without security," Franks writes. "I would continue to argue that there could be no security without civic action."
As a result, there was neither. In the months before Franks left centcom in July 2003, the Baghdad murder rate jumped 35 percent. In May, what remained of the Baghdad police department received 260 reports of major property crimes; in June, it received 410. Instability spread around the country, preventing the CPA from rebuilding Iraq. (By the time the CPA disbanded in June, most of the $18.6 billion Congress appropriated for reconstruction remained unspent.) The deterioration of security and the lack of reconstruction had a debilitating effect on Iraqi hearts and minds, bringing many into the ranks of the various insurgent groups. As a fighter in Basra told The Scotsman last week, "We gave them the opportunity to develop Iraq. But, in fact, nothing has changed. Now, there is no electricity, no water, and even fewer jobs than before. ... We are fed up with the occupation." Yet Franks, whose early inability to provide security for Iraqis started the vicious circle rolling, has evinced no regret. When Ted Koppel noted to him that Phase IV of the Iraq war hasn't gone well, Franks replied, "I guess it's eye of the beholder."
ranks wasn't alone in his illusions about what constituted victory and what would be necessary to secure it. Writing about his insistence that Iraqi security would surely follow reconstruction--and that no change of strategy was necessary despite the growing discord in the spring of 2003--he notes, "I knew George W. Bush and Don Rumsfeld agreed with me." Indeed, at practically every crucial juncture in Iraq and Afghanistan, Franks ratified the assumptions of his civilian superiors. At a November 2001 NSC meeting, for example, Bush dismissed using American troops for peacekeeping in Afghanistan: "We don't do police work. We need a core coalition of the willing and then pass on these tasks to others."
Indeed, senior administration officials have taken to invoking Franks's name to defend their strategic mistakes. At an Aspen Institute forum last month, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was asked to respond to criticism from many in the military--most famously from former Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki--that the United States did not send enough troops to Iraq. "President Bush's senior military advisers for the war were not the chief of staff of the Army," Wolfowitz replied. "They were the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General [Richard] Myers, and General Franks, the combatant commander in Iraq. And General Franks's requirement was exactly what he got. And his estimate of what we needed postwar was about a quarter of what General Shinseki talked about in public."
In his book, Franks doesn't directly address Shinseki's February 2003 remark to Congress that "several hundred thousand soldiers" would be necessary to secure peace in Iraq. Indeed, he is utterly dismissive of the generals who head the services, calling them "Title X motherfuckers," in reference to the section of U.S. Code that governs their appointment. Nor does he answer any of the other military analyses that predicted much of the current Iraq morass, such as a widely read Army War College study ominously warning that "long-term gratitude is unlikely and suspicion of U.S. motives will increase as the occupation continues." (The study emphasized that Phase IV planning would be more important than Phase III preparations.) Franks, American Soldier makes clear, considers himself an iconoclast, and so ignoring the advice of his military colleagues was almost a point of pride. "I had been a maverick all my life. ... I was frequently on the outside of the Army's conservative mainstream," he writes.
In Rumsfeld, Franks found a kindred spirit, someone eager to frustrate the military consensus. Indeed, while Franks lauds Bush in American Soldier, he reserves his most effusive praise for the defense secretary. "Rumsfeld was no mere 'like-thinking affiliate,' as several service secretaries have been described," he writes, "but rather a leader who wanted to use his own ideas to bring about change." Franks emerged from his first meeting with Rumsfeld dazzled by the defense secretary's ideas about military modernization--"[H]e was in an orbit all his own"--making Franks perhaps the only general in the Army to gush over a secretary widely considered the service's visceral enemy. But Franks sees himself as much more like Rumsfeld than like his fellow Army generals. So, when it came to planning for the Iraq war, he was enthusiastic at the mandate he received: "This was a revolutionary concept way outside the box of conventional doctrine." And, when it became clear to Franks that Rumsfeld would disturb the military's "conservative mainstream" with his plans for restructuring Pentagon operations more generally, he said to himself, "Good for him."
But not good for the servicemen and women. In a recent interview with the military newspaper Stars & Stripes, a reporter mentioned just a few of their burdens: open-ended deployments, tour extensions, and the like. "That's a sad thing," Franks replied, "but wouldn't it be really sad if we were getting our people hurt and killed and not accomplishing something?" Thanks in part to the strategies he used in Afghanistan and Iraq, Franks's question grows less hypothetical by the day.
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