by Bob Woodward
Blinken was in the doubters’ camp. “How do you leave?” he asked.
• • •
Back in Washington, Biden hauled Graham into the transition headquarters to meet with Obama on Wednesday, January 14.
He told Obama the major headline from the trip. “If you ask ten of our people what we’re trying to accomplish here, you get ten different answers,” he said. “This has been on autopilot.”
We can’t be on autopilot, Obama responded. We need to get a grip on this and that’s going to be the first order of business.
The CIA briefing on the region and the conversation in Pakistan was disheartening, Biden said. We have our work cut out for us, but I support sending more troops in.
Floated in the media that day was the appointment of Richard Holbrooke as the State Department’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. Hillary Clinton would likely select her friend Holbrooke, a 67-year-old veteran diplomat best known for resolving the Bosnian War in 1995, to handle Karzai and Zardari.
“He’s the most egotistical bastard I’ve ever met,” Biden told Obama, “but he’s maybe the right guy for the job.” Though absorbed with being a hero, Holbrooke was so committed to succeeding that he would focus his extraordinary talent, energy and ego on the assignment and might just pull it off.
“We know your view about Holbrooke,” Obama said, cutting Biden off and turning to Graham.
“I talked to Senator McCain,” Graham said. “I just think Afghanistan’s going to take a lot more resources. And Pakistan is double dealing.” He thought Biden’s tough approach with Karzai was necessary. “I would urge you, Mr. President,” he said, though Obama was six days away from inauguration, “to deal with Karzai from a distance. And pick your engagements with him wisely and let the pressure build to push for better governance. And at the end of the day, you can count on me and Senator McCain … and others to stand by you as we try to turn around Afghanistan.”
Obama smiled but didn’t betray his thoughts.
Graham said that it was essential that Obama show progress in the next year—better governance in Afghanistan, prosecutions for corruption, send people to jail, or an Afghan army that could go through the door first in a raid. Without those game changers, he said, “You’re going to lose the public.” Traction for the 2010 midterm congressional campaigns would take hold and Republicans would be running against Obama, just as the Democrats did against Bush. “Your responsibility for Afghanistan will be solidified in a year. And if this thing is bumping along, I can tell you now that the Republican Party will not walk off a cliff for another unpopular war. And I may be the only guy standing on the cliff with you.”
“Thanks,” the president-elect said.
“Mr. President, we’re losing this battle,” Graham said. “Your assessment of the importance of Afghanistan is dead-on. And your assessment of we’ve taken our eye off the ball is right.” As senators, they had disagreed about sending more troops into Iraq, since Graham believed winning in Afghanistan would be impossible if we lost in Iraq. But now Graham was encouraging Obama to reset things in Afghanistan.
As Obama, Biden and Graham headed for a news conference, Obama pulled Graham aside to thank him.
“Mr. President,” Graham said, “this is not your war. This is our war.”
7
On Tuesday, January 20, inauguration day, David Axelrod encountered President Bush on the platform at the Capitol. As Obama’s chief campaign strategist and now his senior adviser, Axelrod had repeatedly criticized Bush.
“Mr. President, I was on television this morning,” said Axelrod.
“I don’t watch television,” Bush snapped back.
“Well, I’m going to tell you what I said,” Axelrod continued calmly. “I said you conducted this transition like a true patriot and we really appreciate it.”
“Oh, that’s great,” the president said, warming. “Listen, you’re in for the ride of your life and you just sort of hang on and really enjoy it.”
The day before, Rahm Emanuel—Axelrod’s friend for more than 25 years—had told him there were contingency plans to cancel the inaugural. Credible intelligence showed that a group of Somali extremists planned to attack Obama by setting off explosives.
“We might have to shut this thing down,” Emanuel had said. “We would have to be prepared for that.”
An inaugural attack never occurred. The attention instead was squarely on the speech. What would Obama say? One of the people wondering was General Jones, who as Obama’s national security adviser ought to know. But he had not seen a draft. “I had asked,” he said, almost trembling. Emanuel and the political operatives would not show it to him. It was not a happy beginning given Obama’s promise to ask Jones his “opinion or judgment before I do anything.” But Jones knew the Obama team was still in campaign mode, which hopefully would end when they all settled into the White House. Still, being kept in the dark about the speech was insulting.
In his address, Obama devoted one sentence to the wars: “We will begin to responsibly leave Iraq to its people and forge a hard-earned peace in Afghanistan.”
As Obama spoke, General Petraeus was again in Afghanistan. He had spent the past week visiting its neighboring countries, trying to line up safe supply routes into the war zone. Getting supplies into Afghanistan was hard. Most traveled through Pakistan, but a gauntlet of Taliban insurgents lurked along the Khyber Pass, the mountainous road linking the countries. Petraeus had explored alternative routes that bypassed Pakistan by entering Afghanistan from the former Soviet republics in the north.
On the evening of January 20, his C-17 lifted off the tarmac in Kabul, bound first for refueling in Germany and then Washington.
When the plane landed in Germany, Petraeus took one of his brutal five-mile runs, hoping to avoid sleep medication for the transatlantic flight. He was racing the sun to be at the new president’s first meeting on Iraq.
Obama called his national security team to the Situation Room at 4:15 P.M. on January 21. Located in the basement of the West Wing, the Situation Room is a high-tech bunker.
Many of the senior officials and White House staffers had been up late partying at the inaugural balls the night before, and they showed it. Not the president.
Opposing the Iraq War had been central to Obama’s rise, causing some members of the Bush administration, including Gates, to fear what the new president might do. During the campaign, Obama had promised to remove all combat troops from Iraq within 16 months of becoming president, by the middle of 2010. But several Bush administration decisions made such a quick withdrawal unlikely. These decisions would prevent what Bush officials considered to be a precipitous withdrawal.
The key decision was installing Petraeus at CentCom. Second was appointing Army General Raymond Odierno, who had been Petraeus’s deputy and had received much of the credit for helping stabilize Iraq, as the overall commander in Iraq. The third was the Status of Forces Agreement signed by Bush little more than a month before Obama’s inauguration. It said U.S. combat forces would not be out until the end of 2011.
At the January 21 meeting, Obama directed that he wanted three options.
He commissioned a 60-day review, saying, “I want to do a thorough review in Iraq and I want to figure out how we’re going to get to where we want to be.” There had been no forewarning about this assessment to the continuing NSC staff who would be conducting it. Among the options they were to consider at the president’s request was the 16-month withdrawal.
After the meeting, Petraeus was about to board his plane and return to Central Command headquarters in Tampa. Sorry, he was told, on Friday the president and the National Security Council would talk about the war that wasn’t faring well—Afghanistan—and he had better stay in Washington.
With an extra day in Washington, Petraeus spent the afternoon of Thursday, January 22, on the red-brick campus of the National Defense University, going over an internal review of the entire Central Command r
egion. He liked to joke about the Pentagon’s abuse of PowerPoint, the software program that often tortures audiences with its tedious, jargon-laden slides. But after about four months of work, the CentCom regional review had reached an epic length of 1,000 PowerPoint slides.
A team of 80 was drilling down on the Afghanistan component of the review, including Derek Harvey from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). The 54-year-old retired Army colonel had been among Petraeus’s most trusted intelligence advisers in Iraq, a country Harvey first explored during the 1980s by taxicab.
Harvey approached intelligence with the step-by-step methodology of a homicide detective. Intelligence analysts tend to rely on secret reports—human agents, intercepted electronic communications, and pictures from satellites and drones. Harvey “widened the aperture,” studying prisoner interrogations, battlefield reports, and reams of enemy documents—financial records, propaganda and Taliban communiqués. By sifting through the enemy’s paper trail, he pieced together clues that others might miss.
What have you dug up? Petraeus asked him.
“It is the blind leading the blind,” Harvey said. The U.S. remained dangerously ignorant about the Afghan insurgency. Basic questions had gone unasked over the course of the war: Who is the enemy? Where are they? How do they see the fight? What are their motivations?
“We know too little about the enemy to craft a winning strategy,” Harvey said, implying that the current strategy put America on the path to defeat and—unless the intelligence gaps were filled—a new strategy would be futile.
Harvey said the Afghanistan commander, General David McKiernan, believed the reconciliation successes—making peace with elements of the insurgency—from Iraq could not be duplicated in Afghanistan, so he had not directed intelligence collection toward economic, social and political issues of the Afghan tribes and villages. But having reconciliation efforts was likely the only way out of the war. McKiernan had also complained to Harvey that he barely had the military resources to fight the insurgency, saying, “I don’t have enough to do my own job.”
Harvey was willing to concede that Afghanistan was a Band-Aid effort. More than seven years into the war, the Director of National Intelligence—the agency established to coordinate intelligence across the government—had yet to hire a mission manager for Afghanistan and Pakistan. Petraeus wrote the new DNI, Blair, asking him to remedy the situation. He then followed up personally until the matter was resolved. A former CIA officer was appointed as an associate DNI. But that wasn’t nearly enough.
What Harvey had told him was a forehead-smacking moment for Petraeus. The problem was obvious. He needed to fix the intelligence shortcomings immediately. Shuffling things among the DNI, CIA, NSA, DIA and other agencies would only prolong the problem.
Petraeus decided to create his own intelligence agency inside Cent-Com. Regional commands in Europe and the Pacific had intelligence divisions. CentCom should too.
Can you draft plans for an agency modeled on your approach? Petraeus asked Harvey.
Soon, Harvey was appointed director of the new Afghanistan-Pakistan Center of Excellence based at CentCom headquarters in Tampa, Florida. Petraeus rearranged funds within CentCom to cover the projected $108 million in annual expenses, leaving Congress unaware of the center’s existence for several months.
Harvey was trying to revolutionize intelligence collection. Most intelligence agencies rotated their staff through two-year postings. The center would commit its analysts to five-year assignments, with the goal of having them gain fluency in Dari and Pashto, the primary languages spoken in Afghanistan.
Harvey threw his life into the job. He started each morning at 4 A.M., worked 15-hour days, and rarely slept through the night. The obsession came at a personal cost. Harvey’s wife filed for divorce. One of his three sons was having trouble. As a result, friends worried about Harvey’s health.
Harvey preferred sources that gave him a feel for the ground. Valuable insights came from unclassified material, such as the weekly summaries of engineers in Afghanistan who oversaw bridge and road projects. He also regularly logged on to Harmony, a government site that posted translated copies of enemy documents.
A counterinsurgency strategy relied on rock-solid intelligence. It meant breaking down a province village by village; and knowing a village house by house. Tracking the relationships among tribal elders, mullahs, farmers and opium merchants mattered as much as spotting the enemy. When the objective was to protect the population, soldiers had to distinguish between whom to defend and whom to shoot. Insurgents had the advantage, since they looked like civilians.
American intelligence analysts tracked 90 distinct categories of information from Afghanistan. Harvey wanted to expand that to 500. The insurgency’s resources, leadership, financing, freedom of movement, popular support and group cohesion all had to be measured. No such metrics had existed before, and huge disparities existed among the reports from the international coalition in Afghanistan. Out of more than 40 U.S. allies, only the Romanian soldiers stationed in Zabul province consistently recorded what Harvey wanted to know. So Harvey fashioned uniform questionnaires.
He then color-coded Afghanistan based on the data. Information about the international coalition was blue. The insurgents were red. The Afghan army and police were green. And the Afghan people were white. Harvey could chart the relationship between the Taliban and Afghan people by checking where red overlapped with white. He plotted the information on maps, searching for patterns amid the mountains, valleys, villages. As he parsed the data, Harvey concluded that the war could be won, but the U.S. government would have to make monumental long-term commitments for years that might be unpalatable with voters.
“I think Afghanistan is doable, it’s not sellable,” Harvey concluded.
On Friday, January 23, at 11:20 A.M., the president took his seat in a large black leather chair at the head of the Situation Room conference table for his first National Security Council meeting on Afghanistan.
“I have campaigned on providing Afghanistan with more troops, but I haven’t made the decision yet,” Obama said. “When we send them, we need to announce it in the context of a broader strategy.” He planned to reorient U.S. foreign policy and the approach to terrorism, he said. The military will, of course, be a piece of our national security but not the overwhelming driver of how we achieve our goals.
General Lute, Admiral Mullen and General Petraeus each had either finished or were completing strategic reviews of Afghanistan and Pakistan. All the reviews should be gathered together, Obama said. As he saw it, there was no coherent strategy. The ultimate strategy must explain the logic for adding more troops and show how the fight would be carried out going forward.
“I’ve got to lay this out to the American public,” the president said.
The Afghanistan War would be a priority, Obama said, but the economic crisis needed most of his attention as president. “I want you to feel free to speak your mind.”
Petraeus had carefully scripted what he wanted to say. He had been a little offended during the presidential campaign, when it seemed to him as if a bidding war had developed over who could get out of Iraq the fastest and who could do the most for Afghanistan. So he warned, “This is going to be very difficult. It is going to get harder, much harder before it gets easier.”
Petraeus continued, “We cannot achieve our objectives without more troops.” By his understanding, the objective was to prevent Afghanistan from again becoming a sanctuary for transnational extremists such as al Qaeda. You can’t just do counterterrorism with drone strikes and infantry raids, you have to do counterinsurgency to stabilize the country and that is a whole host of tasks, he said. American soldiers had to protect Afghans. The local government must deliver services to the people. And the Afghan National Army and National Police need to expand in size.
The U.S. should fulfill McKiernan’s pending request for 30,000 more troops, Petraeus concluded.
Mullen said he su
pported fulfilling the McKiernan request.
Obama asked for clarification. “Do you have to have all of this now?”
No one answered before Vice President Biden nearly erupted.
“We have not thought through our strategic goals!” he complained. Everyone should agree to a strategy before the president ordered up more troops. “We’ve got to put together the decisions that he has to make,” he said.
Obama, Biden and chief of staff Rahm Emanuel raised more questions about the proposed troop increase. Where does this lead? Where are we going with this? Is this the beginning of a larger ramp-up? This needs to be done in connection with a strategy and not in isolation.
Petraeus thought these questions indicated that Obama’s political advisers realized that the Afghanistan War would continue into the 2012 election. The war would not be settled in one or two years. The president already seemed to understand this, Petraeus thought, but it seemed to have just dawned on the other folks who had run his presidential campaign.
The president had to leave for another engagement and excused himself.
Biden and Emanuel stayed on. Petraeus said that they would need to build additional infrastructure and push more supplies into Afghanistan, a very complicated, time-consuming process. He was going to move forward on the 30,000 new troops, he said.
“Hold on,” Emanuel said. “The president hasn’t made any decisions and I want that to be absolutely clear. General, I appreciate you’re doing your job, but I didn’t hear the president of the United States give that order.”
8
A few days after the inaugural, retired Army General Jack Keane phoned the new secretary of state. Keane had built a friendship with Hillary Clinton after she was elected to the Senate from New York and joined the Armed Services Committee. With both West Point and Fort Drum located in New York, Clinton had a vested interest in the Army. She had charmed Keane, who was impressed with her willingness to do the homework to understand the military.
