Obama’s Wars

by Bob Woodward

  More to the point, it seemed that the president was not buying his counterinsurgency argument.

  Petraeus met Holbrooke—his civilian counterpart and “wingman”—on M Street at La Chaumière. It was a Georgetown institution and Holbrooke lived a few blocks away. With its wood-beamed ceiling and central stone fireplace decorated with wine bottles, the restaurant resembled a French country inn. By 9 P.M. on Thursday, March 26, the crowd was thinning out.

  Petraeus and Holbrooke huddled intently, reviewing each line of Obama’s speech. Holbrooke had what he said were important edits about the Afghan police. As the restaurant cleared out, Petraeus suddenly jumped to his feet to greet the elderly woman passing by their table.

  “Helen Thomas,” he said, in a courtly display of military manners and charm. “It’s David Petraeus. It’s so good to see you.”

  There was the 88-year-old columnist for Hearst newspapers, the scourge of ten presidents and their press secretaries.

  “What the hell are you doing in Afghanistan?” she asked. Not even a hello. Why escalate the war? she prodded. “This is Vietnam all over again.”

  No, Petraeus said, trying to respond.

  But Thomas barged into his answers with more questions, some of which she recalled later in an interview. “Come on, don’t give me that stuff.” “What’s your exit strategy?” “How are you going to solve this?” “What are you talking about?” “And anyway, what are you screwing around in Iraq for? You know it’s going to hell when we leave.” “What are we going to do? Are we going after al Qaeda?”

  About her conversation with Petraeus and Holbrooke, she later reflected, “They had very soothing words. Everything is going to be fine. They were very confident. But I am passionate about Vietnam. I feel it is a repeat of Vietnam—impossible terrain, [the Afghans] are fighters. The Russians spent 10 years and they pulled out and no one called them cowards.

  “Petraeus was not bragging,” explained Thomas. “All I know, I didn’t feel reassured.”

  As Obama’s foreign policy speechwriter, Ben Rhodes, 31, read the president’s final edits to the text. Rhodes, who had moved from the campaign to the NSC, thought Obama did not fully own the strategy in the speech. The young would-be novelist, who had set aside his literary ambitions to craft political rhetoric, was a diligent note taker. Obama had been frustrated that he had to commit 17,000 troops to Afghanistan before the Riedel review was completed. And as part of the speech, Obama announced that another 4,000 would be sent to train the Afghan security forces.

  At 9:40 the next morning, Obama calmly took the stage in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House. Sporting a crimson tie and flanked by his cabinet, advisers and a row of American flags, the president said the mission was to “disrupt, dismantle and defeat al Qaeda.

  “Multiple intelligence estimates have warned that al Qaeda is actively planning attacks on the United States homeland from its safe haven in Pakistan,” Obama said. “And if the Afghan government falls to the Taliban or allows al Qaeda to go unchallenged, that country will again be a base for terrorists who want to kill as many of our people as they possibly can.”

  The president continued, “For the Afghan people, the return to Taliban rule would condemn their country to brutal governance, international isolation, a paralyzed economy and the denial of basic human rights to the Afghan people, especially women and girls.”

  A Washington Post editorial praised the plan with the headline: “The Price of Realism.” A New York Times editorial entitled “The Remembered War” commended Obama for taking a “good first step toward fixing the dangerous situation that former President George W. Bush created when he abandoned the necessary war in Afghanistan for the ill-conceived war of choice in Iraq.”

  The speech surprised Army Colonel John Wood, who since 2007 had been a senior director for Afghanistan on the National Security staff and reported to Lute. Wood popped into Denis McDonough’s office.

  McDonough, a foreign policy adviser for the Obama presidential campaign, managed strategic communications for the NSC. Wood said he was impressed by how strong the speech was with a counterinsurgency push to protect common Afghans. That had not been in the Rhodes draft.

  “I thought that was much better than the version I saw yesterday,” Wood said.

  Those changes had been made personally by the president, McDonough said.

  But Obama had not committed to the full troop request made by the military. McKiernan’s request for more troops at the end of the year was still pending.

  “No,” Obama had told Rhodes. “We’ll revisit this after the election” in Afghanistan. That was five months away in August. He wanted to wait to see where they were after the presidential election, and how the 21,000 he ordered to Afghanistan were doing. “We’re not making any more troop decisions right now.”

  Secretary of Defense Gates seemed comfortable with the decision, telling Fox News two days later, “My view is there’s no need to ask for more troops, ask the president to approve more troops, until we see how the troops we—he already has approved are in there, how they are doing.”

  The troop issue troubled Lute. It was a leap of faith by the Riedel review to believe that a fully resourced counterinsurgency could somehow equate to what McKiernan had requested. As they knew, the math disproved that. And Lute knew that McKiernan had requested troops based on when they became available from Iraq, instead of based on mission requirements. The U.S. desperately needed more trainers in Afghanistan, for example, but McKiernan had asked for them to arrive when they became available in five months.

  “Look, sir,” Lute said to the Afghanistan commander, “just tell us what you need when you need them, not when Mother Army is telling you they’re available.”

  McKiernan didn’t really respond.

  There was a fundamental trade-off on resources between Iraq and Afghanistan that Lute felt should be addressed. This had been masked by how the requests were made. But the trade-off had never been presented to Bush, and was not being presented clearly to Obama.

  On Thursday, May 7, Pakistani President Zardari and his 20-year-old son, Bilawal, an Oxford University student, stepped into the Oval Office for a meeting with Obama. This was a chance for the two presidents to forge a personal connection. The U.S. was hosting a trilateral summit with Afghanistan and Pakistan.

  Obama greeted them warmly, calling himself an enormous admirer of Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister who was Bilawal’s mother and Zardari’s late wife. He recalled visiting Pakistan with college friends and learning to cook keema and dal, a lentil chili.

  “We do not begrudge you being concerned about India,” Obama said. “I know that many Pakistanis are. But we do not want to be part of arming you against India, so let me be very clear about that.”

  “We are trying to change our worldview,” Zardari said, “but it’s not going to happen overnight.”

  Obama turned to the Swat Valley, a former tourist region in the northwestern part of Pakistan. About three months earlier, the Pakistani government signed a cease-fire that ceded control of the region to an Islamic extremist group that was forcing people to obey religious Sharia law. But these extremists—who were allied with the Pakistani branch of the Taliban—broke the cease-fire and continued to gain control of more territory. When they came within 60 miles of the Pakistani capital of Islamabad and close to the nuclear weapons stored in Tar-bela, the Pakistani army finally snapped to action and counterattacked.

  “You’ve made progress in Swat,” Obama said, “but there was a time we were all concerned you guys would do deals.” The cease-fire had let the extremist groups subvert the Pakistani government’s legitimacy. “It also gives the wrong impression that nobody is in charge,” Obama said.

  “If I had sent the military in without mobilizing public opinion, it would not have succeeded,” Zardari tried to explain. “Once I showed that these guys are not well-meaning people, that even after they had an agreement to enforce Isla
mic law, that they really want power and not Islam, I was able to turn public opinion around.”

  Obama recognized that the Pakistani government was showing more resolve than it had before. Progress was evident by the move into Swat, and by the CIA having averaged a drone strike every three days for the past month.

  The president then escorted Zardari and his son around the Rose Garden. As they walked, Obama draped his arm around the son’s shoulders.

  Later Obama told me that the operation in Swat was an important step by the Pakistanis, one that “you would not have seen two or three years ago.” The Pakistanis had sent 15,000 troops in one of the largest operations against the Taliban.

  One evening during the trilateral summit, Zardari had dinner with Zalmay Khalilzad, the 58-year-old former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq and the U.N. during the Bush presidency.

  Zardari dropped his diplomatic guard. He suggested that one of two countries was arranging the attacks by the Pakistani Taliban inside his country: India or the U.S. Zardari didn’t think India could be that clever, but the U.S. could. Karzai had told him the U.S. was behind the attacks, confirming the claims made by the Pakistani ISI.

  “Mr. President,” Khalilzad said, “what would we gain from doing this? You explain the logic to me.”

  This was a plot to destabilize Pakistan, Zardari hypothesized, so that the U.S. could invade and seize its nuclear weapons. He could not explain the rapid expansion in violence otherwise. And the CIA had not pursued the leaders of the Pakistani Taliban, a group known as Tehrik-e-Taliban or TTP that had attacked the government. TTP was also blamed for the assassination of Zardari’s wife, Benazir Bhutto.

  “We give you targets of Taliban people you don’t go after,” Zardari said. “You go after other areas. We’re puzzled.”

  But the drones were primarily meant to hunt down members of al Qaeda and Afghan insurgents, not the Pakistani Taliban, Khalilzad responded.

  But the Taliban movement is tied to al Qaeda, Zardari said, so by not attacking the targets recommended by Pakistan the U.S. had revealed its support of the TTP. The CIA at one time had even worked with the group’s leader, Baitullah Mehsud, Zardari asserted.

  Khalilzad listened calmly, even though the claims struck him as madness. The U.S. was using the Taliban to topple the Pakistani government? Ridiculous. But Khalilzad knew Afghanistan’s President Karzai also believed in this conspiracy theory, more evidence that this region of the world and its leaders were dysfunctional.

  Despite Zardari’s claims, Pakistani government officials had received top secret CIA briefings about drone strikes against Baitullah Mehsud’s TTP. A March 12, 2009, attack against a Mehsud compound killed more than two dozen militants, who quickly retrieved the remains of their fallen comrades. And on April 1, another five militants linked to Mehsud, including an al Qaeda trainer, died in a drone strike, according to a CIA briefing given to Pakistan in April. Around 30 were killed in those two CIA attacks to help protect the Pakistani political and military establishment.

  Almost everything about Afghanistan was troubling Mullen. As Obama was giving intense focus to the war, Mullen was feeling more personal responsibility. Afghanistan had been marked by “incredible neglect,” he told some of his officers. “It’s almost like you’re on a hunger strike and you’re on the 50th day, and all of a sudden you’re going to try to feed this person. Well, they’re not going to eat very quickly. I mean, every organ in the body is collapsing. The under-resourcing of Afghanistan was much deeper and wider than even I thought. It wasn’t just about troops. It was intellectually, it was strategically, it was physically, culturally.”

  Perhaps the biggest missing resource was leadership, in Mullen’s view. Obviously, Afghanistan needed absolutely the best commander. And for all his skills and experience, the general who currently held that post, David McKiernan, was not the best.

  “I cannot live when I know I have a better answer,” Mullen said, “when kids are dying every single day.”

  The chairman of the Joint Chiefs realized that the solution to Afghanistan was right before his eyes, walking through the ringed hallways of the Pentagon. Army Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal had been director of the Joint Staff for more than seven months. The Joint Staff director was essentially the chairman’s deputy. It was the premier assignment for a three-star, an almost certain path to four-star rank. Among McChrystal’s predecessors in the post were DNI Dennis Blair, former CentCom commander John Abizaid and the current Army chief General George Casey.

  McChrystal was already a legend within the Joint Staff. He worked harder than anyone, fixing problems rather than complaining about them. He was open-minded and carried out all requests and orders seamlessly. He skipped lunch, staying at his desk and munching instead from a plastic container of large, salt-encrusted Bavarian pretzels. McChrystal started the Pakistan Afghanistan Coordination Cell, which brought officers with multiple deployments in Afghanistan into the Pentagon so their experiences could inform Washington.

  Gates, who often worked with McChrystal, agreed he was the man for the job. He and Mullen told the president they wanted to replace McKiernan. Obama said he would approve whoever the secretary and Mullen recommended.

  Gates told others in the White House, This is my test for the president, whether I’m going to succeed here. I’ve got to have the best team on the field.

  In late April, Admiral Mullen arrived in Afghanistan and told McKiernan in a private meeting that it was time for him to retire.

  You’ll have to fire me, McKiernan responded.

  McKiernan had given his word to Afghan officials that he would be there for two full years. He would not break it. Perhaps he had not thumped his chest enough, bragged to the Pentagon leaders, or charmed the visiting congressional delegations. Some of his advisers wondered if maybe McKiernan should have been more of a public presence. Other commanders seemed to benefit from media exposure.

  At a Monday, May 11, Pentagon press conference, Gates’s voice quivered slightly as he announced that McChrystal would be the new Afghanistan commander.

  “Our mission there requires new thinking and new approaches from our military leaders,” he said. “Today we have a new policy set by our president. We have a new strategy, a new mission. … I believe that new military leadership also is needed.”

  Gates listed the questions he expected McChrystal to answer as the new commander: “How do we do better? What new ideas do you have? What fresh thinking do you have? Are there different ways of accomplishing our goals?”

  When Riedel heard the questions Gates had posed, he wondered what the hell was going on. Just six weeks earlier, he had completed the strategy review, the president had given his speech and Gates had embraced it fully. Were they starting over again?

  Petraeus was in Washington that day to attend a National Security Council meeting on terrorist detainees. He watched the press conference on television. As Gates and Mullen were speaking, Petraeus stood to go answer some e-mails. He agreed with the change, but a member of his staff reported that he looked “ashen.” McKiernan had been his immediate superior during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Generals were expendable. Center stage one day, gone the next.

  A week later, Obama met for 10 minutes in the Oval Office with McChrystal.

  On the choice of McChrystal, Obama later recalled to me, “Well, it was ultimately my decision.” But he was relying on Gates’s and Mullen’s judgment. “They felt that the best person to do the job at this stage was General McChrystal,” Obama said. “You know, I had not had a person-to-person conversation with him.”

  “Did you have any feeling you’re picking your Eisenhower, to a certain extent, for your war?” I asked. “Did you feel you were sufficiently involved in that decision at that point, picking your Eisenhower?”

  Obama challenged the comparison. “A, I don’t want to analogize myself to FDR,” he said. “B, I don’t want to analogize the Afghan effort to World War II.”

  “But it
is your war,” I said.

  “But what I will say is,” the president said, “is that given the time frames we were operating under, it was important for me to satisfy myself that this was the best person we had available.”

  Lute understood the rationale for installing McChrystal. But the addition of 21,000 troops included a Marine brigade of 9,000 that McKiernan was dispatching to Helmand province. Less than one percent of the Afghan population lived where the Marines were going. Lute asked McChrystal, How high would the cost be to pull those Marines out and commit them to Kandahar, the cradle of the Taliban movement?

  It would be crippling, McChrystal said, because it would break the confidence with the Afghan people in Helmand.

  So the Marines stayed. They had sacked the Afghanistan commander but kept his plan.

  On May 26, 2009, one of most sensitive reports from the world of deep intelligence appeared in the TOP SECRET/CODEWORD President’s Daily Brief. Those who wrote the PDB had learned to craft careful headlines that did not sensationalize their findings, and in some cases even downplayed them. The headline on this item read, “North American al Qaeda trainees may influence targets and tactics in the United States and Canada.”

  This report, and another highly restricted one, said that at least 20 al Qaeda converts with American, Canadian or European passports were being trained in Pakistani safe havens to return to their homelands to commit high-profile acts of terrorism. They included half a dozen from the United Kingdom, several Canadians, some Germans and three Americans. None of their names was known.

  DNI Dennis Blair thought the reports were alarming and credible enough that the president should be alerted. He personally edited the PDB each night before briefing it to Obama the next morning.

  Rahm Emanuel summoned Blair to his office in the corner of the West Wing after the al Qaeda report had been briefed.