by Bob Woodward
At 65, Keane resembled an aging linebacker and still spoke with a blue-collar accent tinged by the outer boroughs of New York City. He had risen from a Vietnam War paratrooper to Army vice chief of staff. Keane had had friends in the Bush administration as well. Known as the father of the Iraq surge, he had played effectively behind the scenes, not only for the 30,000-man surge but for the promotions of General David Petraeus, first to Iraq commander and then Central Command. Petraeus still called him “sir.” The two were as close as any in the Army brotherhood.
Keane now saw the same problems in Afghanistan that had compelled him to push on Iraq. He told Clinton, “The strategy in Afghanistan is wrong. And I had conversations with you about this in Iraq, so I’m telling you again. And not only that, but the leadership is wrong.”
“How bad?” Clinton asked.
McKiernan, the Afghanistan commander, was the wrong man for the job, Keane said. Too old-school. And McKiernan would not accept coaching from Petraeus. McKiernan was too cautious, conservative to a fault. He preferred more conventional operations, a counterterrorist approach designed to kill Taliban fighters. Counterterrorism would not be decisive, Keane said. It hadn’t been quite enough in Iraq.
High body counts alone cannot end an insurgency. The deaths often had the opposite effect, swelling an insurgency’s ranks as recruits joined to avenge what they deemed to be a family member’s murder. Insurgents do not fight on American terms. To cope with their disadvantages—no helicopters, no tanks, dented ammo and poor vision because they don’t have eyeglasses—they play by their own rules. They plant improvised explosive devices, spreading fear with the suddenness and randomness of each blast.
The only way out of Afghanistan, Keane indicated, was an intensive counterinsurgency geared toward protecting Afghans. When American troops take the risk of living among the Afghans they’re protecting, the population becomes personally invested in the cause. To beat an insurgency, there had to be safety and security. That meant adding troops to cover more of Afghanistan’s cities, villages and mountainous terrain.
The Taliban insurgency is an alternative to the existing Afghan government, a competitor for legitimacy and loyalty. This meant that the U.S. must help establish an Afghan government that the people endorse, a government capable of maintaining peace. Keane had heard that McKiernan was not interacting with provincial governors, which limited American influence on the Afghan political regime. Failure to perform a textbook counterinsurgency would doom the U.S. mission. Petraeus thought McKiernan would come around. Keane did not.
“I think he should be fired,” Keane told Clinton. “He’s got to come out of there. He’s not going to solve the problem. We’ve got to get new leadership in.”
“I’ve got to have you talk to Dick,” Clinton said. “Do you know him?”
“Dick” was Richard Holbrooke, the new special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. He had been the foreign policy consigliere in her presidential campaign. His new job entailed coordinating the entire government effort in the AfPak region. Holbrooke’s first assignment, 46 years ago, as a junior Foreign Service officer, had been in Vietnam. Now at 67, he was looking for one more big play. Though he insisted this was his last government job, if he somehow succeeded—and Secretary Clinton decided to move on—secretary of state might be his.
“No, I met him a couple of times, but I don’t know him,” Keane said.
The next day, Keane found Holbrooke at the State Department working out of a cubbyhole office, temporary quarters until there was space for his team. He looked distracted as Keane repeated what he had told Clinton the night before. Phones kept ringing, interrupting Keane mid-sentence.
Holbrooke, his blue eyes burning with intensity, was human evidence of Newton’s first law of physics—an object in motion tends to stay in motion. But after one last phone call, Holbrooke wound to a stop.
“By the way, Hillary wants to see you,” he told Keane. “I was surprised that she wanted to see you.”
“It doesn’t surprise me.”
Clinton greeted Keane with a bear hug, astonishing Holbrooke because—and he should know—Hillary rarely bear-hugged anyone.
Keane outlined his argument. “We’re relying on counterterrorism too much, and we have a very uneven counterinsurgency strategy. And we don’t have nearly enough forces to use a counterinsurgency strategy, either.” He had little faith in the current training efforts for the Afghan army. Keane was aware of Petraeus’s skepticism going back years and had recently been briefed about the subject as a member of the Defense Policy Board, an advisory committee for the secretary of defense composed of old government hands—including Henry Kissinger and three former defense secretaries, William Perry, James Schlesinger and Harold Brown. Because of Afghanistan’s shallow pool of officer candidates and high illiteracy rate, the Defense Policy Board was told it would take years to grow the Afghan army and police to a sufficient size.
“Hillary, this is rubbish,” Keane said. “We’re fighting Afghans, and the Afghans that we’re training and organizing just have to be a little bit better than the Afghans that they’re fighting. We’re not trying to build some military in the image of ourselves or in the image of the West or in the image of Europe.
“Don’t let people tell you we can’t do this,” Keane said.
Who should be McKiernan’s replacement? Clinton asked.
The officer Keane had in mind was Army Lieutenant General Lloyd Austin III, second in command in Iraq, but he needed a rest.
“Well, who else?” Clinton asked.
“There’s another guy named McChrystal,” Keane said.
“I’ve heard that name,” she said.
Army Lieutenant General Stanley A. McChrystal had led the secretive Joint Special Operations Command from September 2003 to August 2008. The gaunt runner who ate only one meal a day had essentially lived cocooned in a plywood box at Balad Airbase in Iraq for five years. During that time, he lived a vampirelike existence, rarely seeing the light of day. The stealth JSOC missions were usually at night. When JSOC had killed the Iraqi al Qaeda leader Abu al-Zarqawi in 2006, McChrystal accompanied his men to verify the burned remains. For the past five months, McChrystal had served as director of the Joint Staff of the Joint Chiefs, a high-profile job in which he interacted daily with Chairman Mullen and, often, Secretary Gates.
“He’s, without a doubt, the best candidate,” Keane said.
During an early 2007 visit to Iraq after the surge was announced, Keane had been impressed by McChrystal’s understanding that aggressive counterterrorism might not be enough to win. McChrystal set up an 11 P.M. videoconference for Keane about the latest missions by the classified forces in Iraq and elsewhere. It was extraordinary how McChrystal kept the enemy off guard, Keane thought. JSOC planned, prepared and executed missions without pause, using signals intelligence and even the “pocket litter” found after one attack to immediately launch the next assault. But Keane spotted the flaw in these successes.
“Stan, let me come at it differently for you,” he had told McChrystal. “What you’ve done here, purely in terms of taking out high-value targets, is significant. And your ratios of killed and captured to your own casualties is remarkable. And the efficiency and the effectiveness of these kinds of operations, you’ve reached a new level in the state of the art.
“That’s powerful, what it’s done, but what difference does it make strategically? We are losing. The Iraqi security forces are losing. We are losing. The government is fractured.”
McChrystal had organized a jaw-dropping counterterrorism campaign inside Iraq, but the tactical successes did not translate into a strategic victory. This was why counterinsurgency—blanketing the population in safety and winning them over—was necessary.
Keane respected the fact that McChrystal did not instantly become defensive.
“That’s a hell of a point,” McChrystal had said.
Shortly after being appointed special representative for Afgha
nistan and Pakistan, Holbrooke phoned Husain Haqqani, a casual acquaintance and the Pakistani ambassador to the U.S. since 2008. He invited him to lunch and was prepared to negotiate on the restaurant.
“I believe you are very media-savvy,” Holbrooke said. “You and I should have lunch, but we should have lunch somewhere public so it gets reported in the newspaper, if you don’t mind.”
“I don’t mind,” Haqqani said.
What about the Hay-Adams Hotel, across from the White House? They agreed on Friday, January 30.
The 52-year-old Haqqani, a former journalist, academic and adviser to the late Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, talked regularly with U.S. cabinet officers and top White House aides. His chipper English flowed into Urdu at the chime of his BlackBerry.
While teaching at Boston University in 2005, Haqqani published a 397-page book, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military, which exposed the Pakistani army and ISI’s entanglement with Islamic extremism.
Haqqani laughingly referred to himself as “Pakistan’s Mr. America.” Rivals and critics back home harbored a creeping paranoia that their ambassador was somehow conspiring with Washington. Haqqani dreaded the fallout of what would happen if the next terrorist attack against the U.S. was postmarked from Pakistan.
The northern view from the Hay-Adams Hotel second-floor dining room looks across Lafayette Square to the White House gates. In a touch of discretion, the elegant tables are spaced so that eavesdropping is nearly impossible. The Hay-Adams, as advertised, is a place to be seen, not heard.
Haqqani asked about the scope of Holbrooke’s new assignment.
Without missing a beat, Holbrooke confidently laid out his ambition. He hoped for nothing less than a successful end to the war in Afghanistan and a stable Pakistan and Afghanistan.
When it came to India—a country outside of Holbrooke’s portfolio but central to Pakistan’s concerns—Holbrooke said in his theatric baritone, “I will deal with India by pretending not to deal with India.”
Was Karzai the best man to lead Afghanistan under the current circumstances or were alternatives available? Holbrooke asked provocatively.
Haqqani maintained a diplomatic silence. Mutual friends had told him that Holbrooke possessed an incredible memory and that an economy of words was best.
Holbrooke said he understood Pakistan’s need to protest the drone strikes, since the government could not afford to be seen as complicit. But the protests should not fuel uncontrollable anti-Americanism.
The lunch ended after two hours. Holbrooke’s strength, Haqqani realized, was his fierce and desperate desire to succeed. It wasn’t clear to Haqqani who his primary contact would be on U.S. foreign policy toward Pakistan.
Yet Holbrooke had failed in one of his first missions—to get his tête-à-tête with Haqqani into the media. No journalists, bloggers or gossips reported on their lunch. Apparently, no one had noticed.
While Holbrooke and Haqqani lunched, about ten miles across the Potomac River a tall, academic 56-year-old sat reading in his Alexandria, Virginia, town house. Sprawled in his lap was his King Charles spaniel, Nelson, named after the celebrated British admiral. It was about 1:30 P.M. when the phone rang.
“Please hold for the president,” the operator said.
“Hey, Bruce, it’s Barack,” a familiar voice said.
Just ten days into the Obama presidency, Bruce Riedel felt certain he had dodged a recruiting call. He had done his time—29 years in the CIA, the Pentagon and the Clinton National Security Council staff—and he didn’t want another government job. Riedel had worked undercover for the CIA for 10 years, and had briefed three presidents. He had retired to the comparatively tranquil Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank where he was a senior fellow.
In 2007 Riedel had agreed to be the South Asia team leader for what was then Senator Obama’s long-shot presidential campaign. As “leader,” Riedel was at first the entire team. He was an expert in Islamic extremism, al Qaeda, its leader Osama bin Laden, Afghanistan and Pakistan. His main stipulation before joining the campaign was that he not be asked to return to government service.
“I know you don’t want to work full-time in government,” Obama said, “but here’s a proposition. Will you come into government for 60 days, work in the NSC, do a strategic review of Afghanistan and Pakistan?
“All my people are telling me you’re the person that I should ask to do this,” the president said. “You’ll work with General Jones. You’ll report directly to me, and it really will be 60 days.”
“I’ll call General Jones, sir. Can I think about it overnight?”
Sure, the president said. With Riedel, he would be guaranteed that his own man, someone trusted and experienced from the campaign team, would set the course in the neglected war.
Riedel knew he would accept. Four months earlier, he had published a book, The Search for al Qaeda, a 181-page treatise about the true national security threat: Pakistan, which he called “the most dangerous country in the world today, where every nightmare of the twenty-first century” converges—terrorism, government instability, corruption and nuclear weapons. The book described how the Pakistani military and its notorious spy agency, the ISI, had a direct hand in creating, supporting and bankrolling Islamic extremists. Even after 9/11, the ISI continued clandestine partnerships and lethal dabbling with al Qaeda, the Taliban and LeT, while simultaneously assisting the U.S.
He concluded that there was a “battle for the soul of Pakistan.” Riedel could answer the questions Obama and his national security team might have about al Qaeda, the Taliban, Afghanistan and Pakistan with three simple words: “Read my book.”
Obama was giving him the rarest of gifts, a once-in-a-lifetime chance to apply the insights of his career and convert them to an action plan. Others might or might not read his book, but he was now going to implement it.
The next Monday, February 2, Riedel went to the White House to see Jones and accept the job. He matched the description coined by the late CIA Director William Colby of a “gray man,” someone “so inconspicuous that he can never catch the waiter’s eye in a restaurant.”
Sixty days for the review was not much time as Riedel saw it, because of the time-consuming interagency bureaucratic process that required it to be vetted at all levels, including by cabinet officers. He would then have to consult with the Afghans, the Pakistanis, Congress, NATO allies and outside experts. He figured he actually had about 21 days to get a thorough draft together to help the president make what might be the most important decision of his presidency.
Shortly after, Doug Lute, the holdover war czar who was still the NSC’s top Afghanistan deputy, approached him at the NSC offices.
“Welcome,” said Lute, handing Riedel a cup of coffee. “Look, I know you’re only going to be here for a short period of time. All my guys have their feet on the ground. We’ll give you all the admin support. Don’t worry about computers, rooms, secretarial support. We’ll set up your meetings. You just tell us, you direct this, and we’ll make it happen. We’ll make this easy for you.”
Riedel made it clear that he wouldn’t need much help.
That next Wednesday was the first organizational meeting of the “Riedel review” committee, up in Room 445 of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. Lute had an allergic reaction to the room. It was where he had put in so much time on his own Afghanistan review, the one that now two administrations—Bush and Obama—had accepted politely and then ignored.
Seated around the table were Holbrooke and undersecretary of defense for policy Michèle Flournoy, the committee co-chairs. Riedel outlined what he knew about the project. Many of them wondered how the review could be delivered in just 60 days.
“By Friday, we’ll have the first draft of the report out to everybody for a first look,” Riedel said. That was two days away.
Lute was astounded. He had spent months digging, traveling, weighing, evaluating. Inside that very room, he had devoted more than 40 hours—a s
tandard workweek—fleshing out his own review. Now some former CIA man from the campaign was parachuting in to present a draft in two days. It was clear to him that the president would get a cut-and-paste from Riedel’s book.
9
Leon Panetta appeared for his CIA director confirmation hearings before the Senate Intelligence Committee on February 5, 2009, two weeks after the inaugural.
Outgoing Director Hayden was watching on C-SPAN from his office at the CIA headquarters when Panetta testified that the agency would no longer send suspected terrorists to another country “for the purposes of torture” because it was forbidden by the president’s new executive orders. Under questioning, he said he suspected the CIA sent people for interrogation to other countries using techniques that “violate our own standards.”
An angry Hayden wondered if Panetta had simply ignored their conversations last month about the word “torture.” He hit the button on the internal intercom system to the chief of the counterterrorism center, a senior officer still undercover.
“You watching TV?”
“Yeah.”
“How’s it going?”
“Not well.”
“Okay, no bullshit, have you ever—?”
“No.”
“You have always sought assurances?” Under CIA rules, they were supposed to ask the foreign government, intelligence service or police to make sure there would be no abuse or torture.
“Absolutely.”
“And beyond the assurances, you used all the tools available to an espionage agency to ensure they’re living up—”
“All the time.” The claim indicated that the CIA was using spies and communications intercepts from phones, computers and room microphones to ensure foreign intelligence services were not torturing the suspected terrorists dispatched to them by the agency.
“I’m not talking about your watch,” Hayden said. “I’m talking about forever.”
