Most Americans probably know of him only as a secondary character in the sweeping drama of David H. Petraeus’s affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell. But Gen. John R. Allen, who announced Tuesday that he would retire from the Marine Corps rather than become the top commander of NATO, was for more than a year and a half the commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan. And when he said farewell to the job recently, he made clear that he wanted to be remembered for more than his bit role in that scandal.
After receiving a medal for his service, just before turning over his command to a fellow Marine, Gen. Joseph Dunford, General Allen surprised some in the audience by declaring unequivocally: “This campaign is successful. We are winning. We are winning.”
During a news conference with a small group of reporters later, General Allen expanded on his confident description of the war – one, polls suggest, that is not shared by many Americans.
“There is no, in the Napoleonic sense, there is no decisive battle,” he said. But he said he saw daily evidence that the Afghan National Security Forces, or A.N.S.F., were getting better. “I see it contributing to the end state, which ultimately is the A.N.S.F. moving into the lead and creating space ultimately for the government of Afghanistan to get up on its feet,” he said.
“We’re not done,” he added. “But I’m comfortable that the trajectory is moving us in the direction we ultimately want to go.”
Asked if widespread corruption by the Afghan government had irreparably undermined its credibility with the people and pushed them toward the Taliban, General Allen acknowledged concerns.
“I think we all have to recognize the limits of the capacity of the Afghan people and the government at this particular moment,” he said. “We’re coming out of 33 years of conflict. Coming out of an environment where the school system was largely decimated or devastated, whichever D-word you want to apply to it.”
The key to the government’s continued stability – and to an international willingness to continue providing it aid – will be its ability to hold a safe and credible presidential election in 2014, General Allen said.
“We’ve reached the point where the rhetoric, while it was encouraging, isn’t enough anymore,” he said. “The rhetoric has to be accompanied by action. The rhetoric has to be accompanied by real and meaningful reform. Reform that reduces the capacity of the criminal patronage networks to grip and weaken institutions of state. Reform that genuinely takes care of the rights of minorities, and particularly the rights of women.”
During his tenure, General Allen had more than his share of crises: a video of Marines urinating on Taliban corpses; the burning of Korans by American soldiers; civilian deaths in allied airstrikes; the massacre of 16 civilians, in which an American soldier has been charged; and a spate of insider attacks by Afghan forces on NATO troops.
He also had to work hard to repair frayed relationships with President Hamid Karzai, who clashed openly with Mr. Petraeus, General Allen’s predecessor as head of international forces in Afghanistan. As The Times’s Matthew Rosenberg noted in a recent article, General Allen established an amicable enough relationship that Mr. Karzai called him to offer condolences while the general was on home leave in Virginia last year for his mother’s funeral.
As Mr. Rosenberg tells it, General Allen had not told anyone in the Afghan government before flying home to bury her. Then, while eating with his family in the Shenandoah Valley, he got a phone call from President Karzai.
“So I’m in the parking lot, it’s just surreal,” General Allen said. “Talking to the president of Afghanistan, who is gripped with emotion saying words to the effect that our mothers are so precious to us.”
A transcript of the interview that accompanied that article, in which General Allen described how he dealt with the Koran burnings, the Panjwai massacre and other crises, can be found here.
As if juggling all that were not enough, General Allen’s reputation came under a cloud when e-mails between him and a socialite in Tampa, Fla., Jill Kelley, emerged during the investigation of General Petraeus’s affair with Ms. Broadwell. After a lengthy review of those e-mails, the Defense Department’s inspector general cleared General Allen of any wrongdoing. The decision allowed President Obama’s nomination of General Allen to become the top NATO commander and head of the United States European Command to proceed.
But during his farewell at his headquarters in Kabul on Feb. 10, General Allen sent what might have been a signal about his plans to retire. He closed his remarks with generous praise of his wife, noting that many generations of her family had served in the military and that she had patiently endured 29 moves with him during 35 years of marriage. General Allen told The Washington Post that he was retiring to help his wife, Kathy, cope with chronic health problems.
