Hard Choices

by Hillary Rodham Clinton

  Following the meeting with Thein Sein and the unscheduled stop at the pagoda, we were at Suu Kyi’s house and she was welcoming the President into what had once been her jail and was now a hub of political activity. She and I embraced like the friends we had become. She thanked the President for America’s support for democracy in Burma but cautioned: “The most difficult time in any transition is when we think that success is in sight. Then we have to be very careful that we are not lured by a mirage of success.”

  The end of Burma’s story is yet to be written, and there are many challenges ahead. Ethnic strife has continued, raising alarms about new human rights abuses. In particular, spasms of mob violence against the Rohingya, an ethnic community of Muslims, rocked the country in 2013 and early 2014. The decision to expel Doctors Without Borders from the area and not to count Rohingyas in the upcoming census brought a barrage of criticism. All this threatened to undermine progress and weaken international support. The general elections in 2015 will be a major test for Burma’s nascent democracy, and more work is needed to ensure that they will be free and fair. In short, Burma could keep moving forward, or it could slide backward. The support of the United States and the international community will be crucial.

  It is sometimes hard to resist getting breathless about Burma. But we have to remain clear-eyed and levelheaded about the challenges and difficulties that lie ahead. Some in Burma lack the will to complete the democratic journey. Others possess the will but lack the tools. There is a long way to go. Still, as President Obama told the students at Yangon University that day in November 2012, what the Burmese people have already achieved is a remarkable testament to the power of the human spirit and the universal yearning for freedom. For me, the memories of those early days of flickering progress and uncertain hope remain a high point of my time as Secretary and an affirmation of the unique role the United States can and should play in the world as a champion of dignity and democracy. It was America at our best.

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  PART THREE

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  War and Peace

  7

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  Af-Pak: Surge

  President Obama went around the table asking each of us for our recommendation. Should we deploy more troops to join the eight-year-old war in Afghanistan? If so, how many? What should their mission be? And how long should they stay before coming home? These were some of the hardest choices he would have to make as President. The consequences would be profound for our men and women in uniform, our military families, and our national security, as well as the future of Afghanistan.

  It was three days before Thanksgiving 2009, after 8 P.M. The President was sitting at the head of the long table in the White House Situation Room, flanked by his National Security Council. I sat next to National Security Advisor Jim Jones on the President’s left, across the table from Vice President Biden, Defense Secretary Bob Gates, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen. In front of us the table was covered with papers and binders. (After months of watching the Pentagon brass come to our Situation Room meetings with flashy PowerPoint presentations and colorful maps, I asked the State Department to get more creative with its briefing materials. Now there were plenty of colored maps and charts to go around.)

  This was my third meeting of the day at the White House with President Obama and the ninth time since September that the senior national security team had assembled to debate the way forward in Afghanistan. We looked at the challenge from every conceivable angle. Finally we zeroed in on a plan to surge thirty thousand U.S. troops to Afghanistan by the middle of 2010, supplemented by an additional ten thousand from our allies. They would implement a new approach, focused on providing security in Afghanistan’s cities, bolstering the government, and delivering services to the people, rather than waging a battle of attrition with the Taliban insurgents. There would be a full progress review at the end of the year, and we would begin to draw down troops by July 2011. How many and how fast would be up for discussion but would likely be dictated by conditions on the ground.

  The team was divided about the merits of this plan. Secretary Gates and the military strongly supported it; Vice President Biden opposed it just as strongly. By now the main arguments were well reviewed, but the President wanted to hear where we each stood, one more time.

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  Afghanistan, a mountainous, landlocked country located between Pakistan to the east and Iran to the west, is home to about 30 million of the poorest, least educated, and most battle-scarred people on earth. It has been called the “Graveyard of Empires” because so many invading armies and would-be occupiers have foundered in its unforgiving terrain. In the 1980s the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan supported an insurgency there against a Soviet puppet government. In 1989 the Soviets withdrew, and with that victory American interest in the country waned.

  After a period of civil war in the 1990s, the Taliban, an extremist group with medieval cultural views, seized control of Afghanistan under the leadership of a one-eyed radical cleric named Mullah Omar. They imposed severe restrictions on women in the name of Islam: women were forced to stay out of public view, required to wear full burqas, covering them completely from head to toe with only a mesh-covered opening for their eyes, and avoid leaving their homes unless accompanied by a male family member; girls and women were banned from schools and denied social and economic rights. The Taliban inflicted severe punishments on women who violated their rules, ranging from torture to public execution. The stories that filtered out of the country were horrifying. I remember hearing about an elderly woman who was flogged with a metal cable until her leg was broken because a bit of her ankle was showing under her burqa. It seemed hard to believe that human beings could be capable of such cruelty, and in the name of God.

  Sickened by what was happening, as First Lady I began speaking out in an effort to rally international condemnation. “There probably is no more egregious and systematic trampling of fundamental rights of women today than what is happening in Afghanistan under the iron rule of the Taliban,” I declared at the UN’s International Women’s Day celebration in 1999.

  The Taliban also gave safe haven to Osama bin Laden and other al Qaeda terrorists. Many of these fanatics, who had come from elsewhere, put down deep roots in the region after fighting the Soviets. In response to the bombings of our embassies in East Africa in 1998, the Clinton Administration used cruise missiles to strike an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan where intelligence reports said bin Laden would be. He managed to escape. Then came the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. After the Taliban refused to turn over bin Laden, President Bush ordered the invasion of Afghanistan and backed a rebel group called the Northern Alliance to oust the Taliban from power.

  The swift victory in overthrowing the Taliban regime in Afghanistan soon gave way to a long-running insurgency, as the Taliban regrouped in safe havens across the border in Pakistan. As a Senator I visited Afghanistan three times, first in 2003, when I had Thanksgiving dinner with our troops in Kandahar, and then again in 2005 and 2007. I’ll never forget the words of one American soldier I met: “Welcome to the forgotten front lines in the war against terrorism.” The Taliban took advantage of the Bush Administration’s preoccupation with Iraq and began reclaiming territory across Afghanistan that it had initially been forced to cede. The Western-backed government in Kabul appeared corrupt and feckless. Afghans were hungry, frustrated, and frightened. There weren’t enough U.S. troops to secure the country, nor did the Bush Administration appear to have a strategy for reversing the downward slide.

  During the 2008 campaign both then-Senator Obama and I called for a renewed focus on Afghanistan. It would take more troops, I argued, but also a comprehensive new strategy that addressed Pakistan’s role in the conflict. “The border areas between Pakistan and Afghanistan are among the most important and dangerous in the
world,” I said in a speech in February 2008. “Ignoring these realities of what is happening on the ground in both Afghanistan and Pakistan has been one of the most dangerous failures of the Bush foreign policy.” Attacks on American troops and those of our allies continued to climb, and 2008 became the deadliest year yet in Afghanistan, with nearly three hundred Coalition forces killed in action.

  When President Obama came into office in January 2009, he found a request waiting from the Pentagon asking for thousands of additional troops to block the Taliban’s expected summer offensive and provide security for the upcoming Presidential elections. We discussed the proposal in one of our first National Security Council meetings after the inauguration. Despite our campaign pledges to put more resources into the war in Afghanistan, it was reasonable to ask whether it made sense to deploy more troops before we had time to decide on a new strategy. But the military logistics necessary to deploy those forces by the summer necessitated a quick decision.

  The President approved the deployment of seventeen thousand troops on February 17. He commissioned a strategy review led by Bruce Riedel, an experienced CIA analyst with extensive knowledge of the conflict, along with Michèle Flournoy, the third-ranking official at the Defense Department, and Richard Holbrooke, our Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. In the report they delivered in March, they recommended that instead of viewing them as two distinct issues, Afghanistan and Pakistan should be approached as a single regional challenge, shorthanded to Af-Pak, and that we should place greater focus on training Afghan troops to perform tasks being handled by us and our allies. In response President Obama deployed four thousand additional U.S. military trainers to work with the Afghan National Security Forces. The Riedel review emphasized the need to use “all elements of national power” in a fully resourced counterinsurgency campaign. “Not just on the military side,” Riedel explained, “on the civilian side, as well.” That included more intensive regional diplomacy and expanded economic development, agricultural support, and infrastructure construction. Much of that work would fall to the State Department and USAID.

  The President announced his military and civilian strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan on March 27. He set a narrow goal for the war: “To disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future.” By refocusing so specifically on al Qaeda, as opposed to the Taliban insurgents who were the ones doing the vast majority of the fighting, the President was linking the war back to its source: the 9/11 attacks. He also raised the possibility of a peace and reconciliation process that would bring willing insurgents in from the cold while isolating the hardcore extremists.

  Although there were now about sixty-eight thousand U.S. troops in Afghanistan, the summer fighting went badly. The Taliban insurgency continued to gain strength, and the security situation deteriorated. Reports indicated an increase in Taliban fighters over the previous three years from seven thousand to twenty-five thousand. And attacks on NATO forces rose, with more than 260 fatalities from June to September, compared to fewer than a hundred deaths over the four prior months. In May the President removed the commanding general in Afghanistan and replaced him with Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal. Secretary Gates explained that the switch was needed to bring “fresh thinking” and “fresh eyes.” Then, in August, the Afghan Presidential election was marred by widespread fraud. In September General McChrystal asked the President to consider deploying more troops. He warned that without more resources, the war effort would likely result in failure.

  That was not what the White House wanted to hear. So before he would even entertain the Pentagon’s request, the President wanted to be sure we thought through every option and contingency. He launched a second comprehensive strategic review, this time leading it himself. Starting on a Sunday in mid-September and continuing throughout the fall, President Obama regularly convened his top national security advisors in the White House Situation Room to debate the tough questions presented by a war that was on its way to becoming the longest in American history.

  General McChrystal, with the support of General David Petraeus, the commander of all U.S. forces in the region, eventually presented three options: deploy a small additional force of around ten thousand troops to bolster training of the Afghan Army; send forty thousand troops to fight the Taliban in the most contested areas; or dispatch more than eighty thousand to secure the entire country. The generals were savvy bureaucratic warriors, and, like characters in the Goldilocks story, they often would present three options in answer to any question, expecting that the middle one would end up being favored.

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  General Petraeus proved to be an effective advocate. He was clear-thinking, competitive, and politically savvy, and his arguments were informed by hard-learned lessons from Iraq. The troubled legacy of that war loomed large over our debate about Afghanistan.

  Petraeus had taken command of the failing U.S. effort in Iraq in early 2007, in the middle of another deadly insurgency. He presided over the surge of more than twenty thousand additional American troops that deployed to some of the most dangerous parts of the country. In January 2007 President Bush announced the Iraq surge in a prime-time speech to a skeptical nation.

  His decision to send more troops was something of a surprise, because a respected bipartisan panel, the Iraq Study Group, had issued their report recommending handing over more responsibility to Iraqi security forces, drawing down U.S. troops, and launching more intensive diplomatic efforts in the region. President Bush essentially chose to do the opposite. In his speech he mentioned regional diplomacy and doing more to encourage reconciliation among Iraq’s fractured sects and political factions, but most of the emphasis was on the security more U.S. troops could provide.

  I doubted that was the right decision at that time. After years of blown calls and missed opportunities, there were questions about the ability of the Bush Administration to manage a major escalation. The next night I left for a trip to Iraq with Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana and Congressman John McHugh of New York, a Republican who went on to serve as Secretary of the Army under President Obama. It was my third visit to Iraq as Senator; I had last been there in 2005 with Senators John McCain, Susan Collins, Russ Feingold, and Lindsey Graham. I wanted to see with my own eyes how things had changed and to talk to our troops and commanders to get their perspectives on the challenges we faced.

  I also had other reasons to be skeptical. My lack of confidence in the Bush Administration went back to the fall of 2002, when it was boasting of ironclad intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. After weighing the evidence and seeking as many opinions as I could inside and outside our government, Democrats and Republicans alike, I voted to authorize military action in Iraq if the diplomatic efforts, meaning the UN weapons inspections, failed.

  I came to deeply regret giving President Bush the benefit of the doubt on that vote. He later asserted that the resolution gave him the sole authority to decide when the clock had run out on weapons inspections. On March 20, 2003, he decided that it had, and he launched the war, with the UN weapons inspectors pleading for just a few more weeks to finish the job. Over the years that followed, many Senators came to wish they had voted against the resolution. I was one of them. As the war dragged on, with every letter I sent to a family in New York who had lost a son or daughter, a father or mother, my mistake became more painful.

  Five years later President Bush asked us to trust him again, this time about his proposed surge, and I wasn’t buying it. I didn’t believe that simply sending more troops would solve the mess we were in. Our military is the best in the world, and our troops give their all to succeed in whatever they’re asked to do. But putting the burden on them alone, without an equally robust diplomatic strategy, wasn’t fair and wasn’t wise. We needed both if we were going to get at the heart of the underlying challenges: the sectarian conflicts that were te
aring the country apart, as well as the regional rivalries playing out inside Iraq. Most in the Bush Administration seemed to have little interest in that sort of work, including confronting or engaging Syria or Iran, even though they were a big part of the underlying challenges we faced in Iraq. In 2003 the United States went to war in Iraq with only half a strategy, with Colin Powell’s State Department all but shut out of postwar planning. We weren’t going to get out with only half. Later, when I got to the State Department myself as Secretary and saw the expertise of the career professionals there, I was even more appalled that they had been largely excluded by the Bush Administration.