Obama’s Wars

by Bob Woodward

  “Why’d you put that in the PDB?” he asked.

  “This is a threat to the United States,” Blair said. “I’m worried about it, and I think you ought to know.”

  “What can we do about it?” asked the ever practical Emanuel.

  “I can’t tell you anything to do right now,” Blair answered. “If we knew more about it, we would’ve caught them. But maybe there’s some defensive actions we can take.”

  “You’re just trying to put this on us, so it’s not your fault,” Emanuel retorted.

  “No, no,” Blair replied, “I’m trying to tell you. I’m the president’s intelligence officer and I’m worried about this, and I think I owe it to him—and you—to tell him.”

  Blair was insulted. The White House chief of staff was not only accusing him of a brazen act of ass covering but of ducking responsibility. Blair viewed his willingness to bring bad news as a strength, a sign of loyalty. He was accepting responsibility. The warning was an important reminder that a domestic terrorist strike was one of the greatest threats to the country, its economy and Obama’s presidency.

  Though toned down, the item echoed the notorious PDB headline given to President Bush a month before the 9/11 terrorist attacks that said, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” An inescapable part of Bush’s legacy was that he had not acted quickly or seriously enough against the terrorist threat.

  “Wow,” Blair thought as he left the White House, “we come from different planets on this one.”

  Increasingly, he saw a fault line in the administration. Emanuel’s “us” meant Obama and his team of political advisers in the White House. The military leaders and former four-stars, such as Jones and himself, were outsiders.

  Over the next several months, separate FBI investigations ed to the arrest of two U.S. residents who had been trained by al Qaeda or an affiliate in Pakistani safe havens. The first FBI investigation, called Operation High Rise, was triggered by a single alert Central Intelligence Agency analyst examining intercepts. On September 19, 2009, agents arrested Najibullah Zazi, 24, in Denver. He was an al Qaeda operative who was planning to detonate up to 14 backpack bombs aboard New York City subway cars.

  A tip from British intelligence launched a second investigation called Operation Black Medallion. Chicago resident David Coleman Headley, 49, was arrested for plotting a terrorist attack in Europe. His business partner ran an immigration and travel agency, which had an office in New York’s Empire State Building. That gave him 24/7 access to the building that was possibly the most iconic terrorist target in Manhattan.

  Blair figured the U.S. had dodged two bullets because of a single CIA analyst and British intelligence. Was there a third terrorist in the United States, as suggested by the PDB?

  Soon, new intelligence showed that some 100 Westerners, including many with U.S. passports or visas, were being trained in Pakistani safe havens. U.S. intelligence had lost track of too many of those people. Al Qaeda had adapted since the 9/11 attack that had killed 3,000 people. It was now aiming for smaller operations that might only require one man and one bomb.

  When I later asked the president about these intelligence reports, he said, “I won’t get into the weeds on this.”

  But he added, “What you’ve seen is a metastasizing of al Qaeda, where a range of loosely affiliated groups now have the capacity and the ambition to recruit and train for attacks that may not be on the scale of a 9/11, but obviously can still be extraordinarily … One man, one bomb … which could still have, obviously, an extraordinary traumatizing effect on the homeland.”

  On Tuesday June 2, Stan McChrystal sat down in a wood-paneled Senate chamber for his confirmation hearing. He had deep-set eyes, jutting ears, straw-colored hair and practically no trace of fat. In his prepared remarks, McChrystal suggested that the president might need to send even more troops to Afghanistan.

  “A key component of resourcing is people,” he told the Senate Armed Services Committee, “and more than 21,000 additional U.S. military personnel will have deployed to Afghanistan by October of this year. You might properly ask if that is enough. I don’t know. It may be some time before I do.”

  The media did not seem to pick up on McChrystal’s meaning, but National Security Adviser Jim Jones did. McChrystal had confirmed what Jones was hearing from his contacts inside NATO. Just three months after the Riedel review, a campaign for more troops by McChrystal and Mullen was underway, though the Pentagon had officially committed to holding forces at the current level for a full year, at which point the new strategy—and the impact of 21,000 more troops—could be evaluated.

  Jones called Gates and Mullen into his White House office.

  “Hey guys, we just went through this,” he said. “We told the president, we won’t bother you for another year. Troops haven’t even gotten there. We don’t have an assessment on how they’re doing. And now I’m hearing these drumbeats about more troops or things are going to hell in a handbasket, the situation is critical.”

  Gates’s and Mullen’s response was, in essence, this is something we think is coming. We’re going to have to deal with it sooner rather than later, because Stan is saying things are going badly.

  Jones wanted to put some order to it all, some definition. What he was getting was a cacophony of opinions. Inside the White House, people were assuming that the Pentagon was trying to force the president’s hand.

  Jones flew to France with the president that weekend for the 65th anniversary of D-Day. During the ceremony, he went to a quiet section of the American Cemetery in Normandy. Standing alone amid thousands of marble headstones, Jones missed the ceremony.

  As President Obama spoke, Jones pulled out his cell phone to talk to Gates.

  They had gone through the whole Riedel review, Jones reminded him. They had gone through all the numbers, briefed the president and the congressional leadership, and teed up the public. The military had given its advice. Obama had supported it.

  “And now we got the new team running around saying, the sky is falling,” Jones said. “How do we get this back in the box so that what we said to the president in March doesn’t sound like we didn’t mean it?”

  Jones pitched Gates on a way to defuse the tension. Let McChrystal have two months—60 days—to deliver a commander’s assessment of Afghanistan, rather than campaign for more troops behind the president’s back.

  “Look, it makes perfect sense to me the new commander would come in and make an assessment,” Jones said. “He has to—it’ll be on his watch. He has to make his assessment. Make an assessment. But let’s knock off the chatter, in NATO and other places, before the president has a chance to be consulted. And if at the end of 60 days, he wants to come in and say whatever he wants to say, and you want to back him up, there’s a certain logic and order to this. But absent that, this is crazy.”

  Gates agreed to the plan. McChrystal should put his thoughts down in a written report for the president.

  After the ceremony, Jones told Obama about the assessment. The Pentagon is unhappy and McChrystal is worried about Afghanistan, he said.

  That next Monday, June 8, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell was asked why the Pentagon had yet to announce any measurements of success for Afghanistan. Instead of answering that question, Morrell seized the moment to announce that McChrystal would lead an assessment to “get a ground-eye view of what’s going on” and recommend “what changes in the strategy should be made.”

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  For six years both as Marine commandant and NATO commander, General Jones had gone to Afghanistan to make his own assessments. He suggested to the president that he go again, evaluate how the strategy was working and send a message to the generals on the ground to stop agitating for more troops. Jones wanted to get to General McChrystal early. “Generals always want more force,” he said.

  Jones invited me to travel with him at the end of June for what would be a six-day trip to Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. I accepted.

 
Taliban and insurgent attacks in Afghanistan were escalating, reaching an all-time high of more than 400 attacks during one week in May. Though that did not rival the violence in Iraq, which had peaked at 1,600 attacks in one week two years earlier, it signaled an alarming trend.

  Jones and a traveling party of about 40, including his staff and Secret Service protection, took off Sunday night, June 21, from Andrews Air Force Base in a giant C-17 cargo plane that can carry 160,000 pounds. The plane came equipped with about 100 standard airline seats and dozens of bunks. Jones occupied a security pod in the center of the cargo hold that contained a well-appointed office and several bunks.

  During an hour-long conversation mid-flight, he laid out his theory of the war. First, Jones said, the United States could not lose the war or be seen as losing the war.

  “If we’re not successful here,” Jones said, “you’ll have a staging base for global terrorism all over the world. People will say the terrorists won. And you’ll see expressions of these kinds of things in Africa, South America, you name it. Any developing country is going to say, this is the way we beat [the United States], and we’re going to have a bigger problem.” A setback or loss for the United States would be “a tremendous boost for jihadist extremists, fundamentalists all over the world” and provide “a global infusion of morale and energy, and these people don’t need much.”

  Jones went on, using the kind of rhetoric that Obama had shied away from, “It’s certainly a clash of civilizations. It’s a clash of religions. It’s a clash of almost concepts of how to live.” The conflict is that deep, he said. “So I think if you don’t succeed in Afghanistan, you will be fighting in more places.

  “Second, if we don’t succeed here, organizations like NATO, by association the European Union, and the United Nations might be relegated to the dustbin of history.”

  Third, “I say, be careful you don’t over-Americanize the war. I know that we’re going to do a large part of it,” but it was essential to get active, increased participation by the other 41 nations, get their buy-in and make them feel they have ownership in the outcome.

  Fourth, he said that there had been way too much emphasis on the military, almost an overmilitarization of the war. The key to leaving a somewhat stable Afghanistan in a reasonable time frame was improving governance and the rule of law, in order to reduce corruption. There also needed to be economic development and more participation by the Afghan security forces.

  It sounded like a good case, but I wondered if everyone on the American side had the same understanding of our goals. What was meant by victory? For that matter, what constituted not losing? And when might that happen? Could there be a deadline? What was the role of protect-the-people counterinsurgency, the Petraeus strategy highlighted in the Riedel report but not embraced directly in President Obama’s speech?

  The next day, Tuesday, June 23, I attended the last 15 minutes of Jones’s meeting with President Karzai. Sensitive intelligence reports on Karzai claimed he was erratic and even “delusional.” “Off his meds” was a common description, while high on “weed” was a description by others. Jones said that several months earlier President Obama had told Karzai that he must get his act together. Curtailing corruption had to be Karzai’s first goal. As I entered the spacious office inside the Arg-e-Shahi presidential palace, Karzai was exceedingly gracious and warm. He wore his signature lamb’s wool cap and mentioned right off his familiarity with my book Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981–1987, about Reagan’s CIA director, William J. Casey.

  His interest in the CIA did not surprise me, given his brother’s ties to the agency.

  I asked Karzai what he might do differently if he won a second term as president in the election, which was two months off.

  “I would become a figure of unity,” he said, casting himself as a statesman. “I would not become a political player. I would not become a member of a party.

  “I would bring the U.S. to the table on the peace process with the Taliban. President Obama announced this on March 27, and we haven’t seen much movement on this. In fact the United States is dragging their feet.”

  Jones shook his head, as did the new U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, retired three-star Army General Karl Eikenberry.

  They knew the Taliban currently felt it had the upper hand and would be in no mood to negotiate. But Karzai, as he often did, placed the blame on the Americans.

  That night, we flew into the heart of the Taliban insurgency in Helmand province, southern Afghanistan. Here was the war without the filter of a Situation Room briefing. The cool evening air hit my face as the plane’s rear loading ramp was lowered. Jeeps, trucks and buses wheeled around the airfield. Flashing lights pierced the darkness to a dizzying effect. The noise and clamor of it all felt surreal, yet the manic scene seemed to unfold in slow motion. All that was missing was the haunting and elegiac theme music from Oliver Stone’s movie Platoon, Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings. We boarded a bus to take us from the airfield to Camp Leatherneck. The moment was exhilarating and frightening.

  Helmand is the largest of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces, but is sparsely populated and accounts for about half of the country’s poppy harvest. Locals call the area the Desert of Death because of its scorching heat (up to 116 degrees) and an annual rainfall that averages less than four inches. A strong headwind can pick up the fine dustlike sand in a blast that is blinding and choking.

  I was given luxury quarters in an air-conditioned tent with one of Jones’s senior staffers. In the middle of the night I awoke in desperate search for a washroom. With no mountains or high ground surrounding the camp, it is supposedly safe from sniper and mortar fire. I wrapped a towel around my waist. As far as I could see, the concrete T-wall shielding the base might be the only option. I stopped there first, but finally found a small washroom a football field away. A sign on the door said, “Commanding General and Master Sergeant Only.” I used it anyway, and padded back, anticipating a random shot into the camp, but there was none. I took a sleeping pill, but I would not call the next several hours restful as I lay with my eyes closed. My mind raced. What would it be like to spend a full year here? How do I show reverence for those who did? What were the real dangers? Suppose the commanding general caught me using his toilet? Did anyone understand this war? Why was 12 percent of the U.S. troop presence in an area with less than one percent of the population? What did protecting the population mean here?

  During the night, Jones said he had read Gordon Goldstein’s book about the Vietnam War, Lessons in Disaster, and reached Lesson Three on page 97, “Politics Is the Enemy of Strategy.” Goldstein records how President Johnson’s focus on winning the 1964 election blotted out any urgency to reconsider the American strategy in Vietnam. “The preemptive concern: win, win, win the election, not the war,” recalled Johnson’s then national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy.

  Some 9,000 Marines, which included forces that President Obama ordered into the war, had built Camp Leatherneck across a hardscrabble plain where there had been desert six months earlier. It is a sprawling encampment of small and large tent-style facilities, canopied warehouses and fenced-in storage areas in the middle of a desolate wilderness 370 miles from the capital of Kabul.

  In the morning, the commander, Brigadier General Lawrence Nicholson, a compact and small-framed Marine, stood outside the tents with Jones and several others.

  I joined them, and I will never forget what happened next.

  “We lost a Marine last night,” Nicholson said with stoic regret.

  There was a long silence.

  Corporal Matthew Lembke, age 22, from Tualatin, Oregon, had both his legs blown off by an improvised explosive device (IED) while on patrol in Now Zad, a ghost town in Helmand that had been abandoned three years earlier. Taliban fighters, land mines and the howls of wild dogs had replaced the 10,000 to 35,000 people who once lived there. The British troops who were previously garrisoned at the site had summarized life in Now Zad for the U
.S. Marines by spray-painting onto a wall: “Welcome to Hell.”

  Lembke was assigned to a company of fewer than 300 that patrolled Now Zad. This was not counterinsurgency. There was no population to protect. It was an aimless stalemate in the town. I asked a number of Marines what had happened. A trusted senior civilian adviser to Nicholson said that not a single member of the Afghan National Army (ANA) had been with the Marine company. Without any Afghans, no one spoke the language, nor could anyone supply the “eyes and ears” for the patrol. “If we had several ANA in Now Zad, we might not have lost that Marine,” the civilian said.

  General Nicholson echoed this thought to Jones. He said in the six months that he built Camp Leatherneck and brought in the 9,000 U.S. Marines not a single additional member of the Afghan forces was assigned to him. He said he needed “Afghanistan security forces—all flavors,” soldiers, police, border guards and other specialists.

  Lembke was airlifted out of Afghanistan and later died at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland on July 10. I can only imagine the sense of danger and uncertainty that must have accompanied Lembke and the Marines trying to patrol a ghost town when the mission is to protect and live among people who weren’t there. What intelligence did they have about the danger? How many Taliban held the town? How deadly were the Taliban in Now Zad?

  No one could answer these questions, which only led to additional questions. Had the military thought through its plan? Did they know what they were doing? This led to the hardest questions of all: What about Corporal Lembke’s sacrifice? What did it mean in terms of the overall war effort?

  The Oregon governor honored Lembke by ordering the flags at public institutions to be flown at half-mast. Lembke was the 104th Oregonian to die in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.*

  Later that morning, Nicholson led Jones into a makeshift air-conditioned command headquarters for a 30-minute briefing. Nicholson and his senior staff, 20 Marine colonels and lieutenant colonels, arrayed themselves around a table made of new unfinished plywood about the size of three Ping-Pong tables.