by Bob Woodward
Headlined, “Key in Afghanistan: Economy, Not Military: Preventing Another Iraq,” the article, datelined from Camp Leatherneck, said that Jones had told the U.S. military commanders on the ground that “the Obama administration wants to hold troop levels here flat for now and focus” on a strategy of economic development, improved governance and increased Afghan participation.
The second paragraph said, “The message seems designed to cap expectations that more troops might be coming, though the administration has not ruled out additional deployments in the future.” It reported in detail Jones’s warning that a request for more troops would likely give President Obama a “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” moment.
The sixth paragraph stated: “The question of the force level for Afghanistan, however, is not settled and will probably be hotly debated over the next year. One senior military officer said privately that the United States would have to deploy a force of more than 100,000 to execute the counterinsurgency strategy of holding areas and towns after clearing out the Taliban insurgents. That is at least 32,000 more than the 68,000 currently authorized.”
In the Oval Office that morning, the president told Jones, Axelrod and several others that it was the precise message he wanted to convey. As far as he was concerned, they had just started to implement the Riedel review and talk of more troops was premature.
At the Pentagon, the reaction was radically different.
“Jim,” Admiral Mullen told Jones in a phone call, “you just capped us.” By “cap,” Mullen meant that Jones had put a limit on how many troops the U.S. would send to Afghanistan.
“No, I didn’t,” Jones said.
“Bullshit,” said the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
“I don’t think of it that way,” Jones said. “My problem with it, as I told you before, is that I think it’s not fair to the president to take the decision that he took in March, decide before you ever even got the 21,000 troops there that things are going so bad you need another 40,000 to 80,000.”
“That’s a cap,” Mullen said, unconvinced. The admiral had some sympathy for Jones, who he felt was trying to manage the political pressures that were coming not from the president but from Emanuel, Axelrod, Lippert and Donilon.
But Jones wanted to drive the point home, so that Mullen would stop pushing for more troops until McChrystal’s 60-day assessment was finished. “Stick with what you’ve got because the rest of it is just kind of innuendo and kind of loose talk.
“Mike,” he continued, “think very hard about your role in all of this. Because you’re on the record as having done certain things, recommending certain things. You got everything you wanted. Now you’re on the record of going around NATO and ginning up allies before the president’s even agreed on these others, whatever it is you’re doing. I’ll tell you as a friend, that’s a risky position to be in.”
Jones thought Mullen understood.
Afterward, Mullen called Petraeus.
“It’s a cap,” the chairman said.
When McChrystal called Mullen to inquire what the article and Jones’s warning meant, the chairman made it clear.
Oh, it was a cap, he said. Clearly, the president was sending them a message. “I get that,” Mullen said. “There’s no question about that.”
Mullen then gave an interview to Ann Scott Tyson of The Washington Post and claimed that it was not a cap. McChrystal had been told he had full latitude to make his assessment and say, “Here’s what I need,” he said. “There were no preconditions. He’s been told, ‘In this assessment, you come back and ask for what you need.’”
McChrystal spoke with General Lute at the NSC about the pressure on troop levels.
“Look, I haven’t even put pen to paper yet in terms of my assessment,” McChrystal said. He thought Jones “was on a traveling road show to go out and sort of sense this from the bottom up,” not to pass on a message from the White House.
“I don’t need the national security adviser coming out here and telling me what to do,” McChrystal said.
At his daily briefing, press secretary Gibbs basically backed up Jones. “I think there are several hundred years of evidence that military might alone is not likely to solve all of your problems in that country,” Gibbs said. “The onus is also going to have to be on the Afghans to improve their security situation.” He added, “But if we don’t get good governance and improvement in governance, if we don’t get an increase in development and a change in the economy, I think the president and I think General Jones would agree that no amount of troops are going to leave that country in a situation that is sustainable.”
Gates was upset. He told his staff that it was probably best to let him, as secretary of defense, handle these communications to the ground commanders through the military chain of command.
Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon spokesman, sent a stern e-mail to McDonough at the National Security Council that in effect said, Don’t do this, leave it to Gates.
It was evident that Whiskey Tango Foxtrot was never going to stop the Pentagon and the generals. Rather, WTF was a clarion call to plan, mobilize and launch a counteroffensive. A growing divide existed between the White House and the Pentagon just four months after the Riedel review, when the president had unveiled a new strategy. In a column for The Weekly Standard, conservative writer Bill Kristol suggested that Jones was in over his head and that Obama was on the path of a “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot presidency.”
* Five months later, December 4, 2009, about 1,000 U.S. Marines, British and Afghan troops swept into Now Zad—a tacit acknowledgment perhaps that back in June the U.S. command did not know the extent of the danger and problem in that village in the rugged valley. On the first day of the offensive into Now Zad, no U.S., British or Afghan deaths were reported, but several Taliban were killed.
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During the three months after the Riedel review, General Lute was trying to shape the 3 Ds—“disrupt, dismantle and defeat”—into an actual policy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. With Riedel returned to his think tank, Lute was getting back into the game. But working from his catacomb West Wing basement office, he still felt on the outs.
Members of his shop privately described the Obama administration in Afghan terms. “Tribes” populated the presidency, reflecting its divisions. The Hillary tribe lived at the State Department. The Chicago tribe occupied Axelrod’s and Emanuel’s offices. The campaign tribe at the NSC—led by chief of staff Mark Lippert and strategic communications director Denis McDonough, both former Obama campaign aides—seemed to flaunt their personal relationships with the president and often circumvented Jones as the national security adviser. Lute’s team dubbed them the “insurgency.”
Lute had been shut out by Lippert. It was as though Lippert suspected Lute of manning a Pentagon outpost deep inside the White House. When Obama visited Iraq in April, Lippert kept Lute in the dark, practically running the trip himself from his BlackBerry.
Lute had lost Iraq from his job portfolio. The three-star Army general was no longer the war czar, having been demoted from deputy national security adviser to coordinator for Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Lute was now drafting the Strategic Implementation Plan (SIP) for executing the Riedel review. This was a chance to reassert himself in the NSC system. Lute felt the plan should correct a flaw in the Riedel review. It had been rushed, in his opinion, a crash project that failed to discuss the “means” to carry out the new Afghanistan and Pakistan strategy. What would it cost in dollars? How many troops might really be needed? How much civilian support was required to improve governance and reduce corruption? What were the timelines? The review didn’t have answers. The SIP would.
By mid-July, Lute was reading the final pieces of feedback about the 40-page draft of the SIP. Gates’s memo concerned him. The mission in Afghanistan could not be to “disrupt” the Taliban, Gates wrote. This needs to be “defeat.”
Lute instantly grasped the magnitude of Gates’s recommendation, whi
ch had been pushed by the Pentagon for months and exhibited the strong influence of Petraeus and his COINistas, the true believers in counterinsurgency. This single verb reinterpreted the whole Riedel review, broadening the narrow intention of defeating al Qaeda to include the Afghan Taliban. The review had instructed the military to conduct a comprehensive, “fully resourced” counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, but it didn’t state the purpose or effects of that campaign. Was it to disrupt, dismantle or defeat the Taliban?
Defeating the Taliban would take more troops, money and time than disrupting would. “Defeat” suggested an unconditional surrender—total capitulation, victory, winning in the fullest sense of the word, utterly destroying the Taliban.
Lute thought this upped the ante. He walked upstairs to see Jones.
“I want to highlight this to you, because it is different and it’s significant,” he said, explaining Gates’s last-minute suggestion. “Of the potential action verbs here, they’re boxing, they’re designing for themselves the largest mission, the most expansive mission, to defeat the Taliban.”
That’s not a big deal, said Jones. Verb choice didn’t register with him as a first-order concern. Jones was eager to get the implementation plan out, because McChrystal was in the middle of his own review and the SIP was supposed to be his guiding light. As Jones saw it, “defeat” would get the military to take full ownership of the strategy.
Lute next went to Donilon, the deputy national security adviser, who had a more sensitive political ear than Jones.
When Donilon heard it was Gates making the bid, he too said he was okay with the change.
The classified SIP was signed by Jones and sent to the Pentagon on July 17. Paragraph 3A of the SIP began “Defeat the extremist insurgency …”
Lute spoke by Tandberg, the videoconference phone, with Petraeus every Tuesday and with McChrystal every Friday. Adding “defeat” pleased both generals. It precisely defined the mission. Petraeus had never gotten anything this exact for Iraq.
But back in Lute’s office, one of the Afghanistan directors—one of his own tribe—noted that for a goal this extravagant they should have found an acronym that spelled out GULP instead of SIP.
There was no speech, press briefing, White House statement, news leak or public discussion of this dramatic expansion of the war aims, a classic example of mission creep. The “defeat” mandate sat there as explicit guidance for McChrystal, who as the new commander was asking his own basic questions: What are my orders? And what do I need to carry out my orders?
Richard Holbrooke, the special representative, was pessimistic about the August 20 elections in Afghanistan.
“If there are 10 possible outcomes in Afghanistan,” he told the National Security Council over the summer, “nine of them are bad.” Holbrooke added, “They range from civil war to irregularities.”
But in public, Holbrooke downplayed his concerns, saying at a news conference that he wasn’t “unduly upset” by complaints about Afghan voter registration. He then compared the Afghan presidential race to the litigation-prone 2008 Minnesota Senate election, as if to say all political contests had their problems.
As soon as the Afghan polls closed on August 20, there were widespread reports of fraud. Many State Department and U.N. officials in Kandahar had not left their quarters to visit polling centers out of security concerns. Insurgent attacks did not stop the national election, but some international monitors noted that many of the troops added by Obama in February, ostensibly for election security, had deployed to Helmand province, where a sliver of voters lived. The Afghan National Police barred one group of monitors from checking the tallies in Kandahar, the city controlled by Karzai’s half-brother, Ahmed Wali. A major backer of one failed presidential candidate lamented to a monitor, “The only reaction to this election is to buy an automatic rifle and prepare for war.”
The day after the election, August 21, Holbrooke and Ambassador Eikenberry went to see Karzai in Kabul. The first three hours went fine, until they turned to the future and what life might be like for Karzai if he was reelected.
“Well, I have been reelected,” Karzai said.
Eikenberry and Holbrooke noted that all the votes had not yet been counted.
It was settled, Karzai said, it was over.
“Mr. President,” Holbrooke said, “what would you do if there was a runoff?” Under the Afghan constitution, if no one received at least 50 percent of the vote, the top two candidates would have to stand in another election.
“That’s not possible,” Karzai said, his mood darkening. “I know what the people chose. No one wants a runoff. No one. And no one believes in a runoff. No one.”
“Mr. President,” Holbrooke said, “we’re not saying we want it. I just want to know, if no one gets to 50 percent, will you be okay with that? Will you do a runoff?”
“It is not possible,” Karzai said.
After the meeting, Karzai called the State Department operations center and said he wanted to talk to Secretary of State Clinton or President Obama.
The president, who was vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard, got word of this and reached Eikenberry by secure phone.
“Mr. President,” Eikenberry said, “we had this meeting. Karzai’s trying to go around us. Karzai thinks we’re supporting a runoff. We’re not.” He explained what had happened, how Karzai had become defensive, insisting a runoff was impossible. “I recommend strongly you not take the call.”
Obama agreed. He would stay out of it. Eikenberry and Holbrooke should continue to try to handle Karzai.
Two days later, Eikenberry, Holbrooke and General McChrystal had dinner with Karzai.
“Mr. President,” Eikenberry said, “you’re not going to talk to the president or the secretary of state. Just not going to. I recommended against it, and here’s why. You misunderstood our position. We are not supporting a runoff.” The United States was supporting the Afghan constitutional process—whether there is a first-round victory or a runoff. “And that’s our position.”
The intelligence showed that Karzai was increasingly delusional and paranoid. Even Karzai’s own people were telling that to Eiken-berry and Holbrooke.
“You guys are opposing me,” Karzai answered. “It’s a British-American plot.”
In August, I asked my assistant Josh Boak, a former Chicago Tribune reporter, to conduct background interviews with members of General McChrystal’s strategy review team who had recently returned from Afghanistan. We wanted to find out what was happening on the ground. How was the war going? What was working? What wasn’t?
The idea behind the team had come in part from Petraeus’s 2007 playbook for Iraq. Bring Ph.D. and other think tank experts into a war zone to assess the situation, just as a troubled corporation might hire outside consultants. Part of the strategy was public relations. As scholars at the Brookings Institution, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Council on Foreign Relations, the RAND Corporation and elsewhere, these experts regularly churn out books, position papers and op-ed pieces that could help explain any changes in strategy to the public. And once the team’s weeks-long stint in Afghanistan ended, individual members could continue to advise the war effort as “Afghan Hands.” The 14-person team also included European researchers, military officers and a Pentagon representative.
It was an experienced group of analysts who were willing to challenge the assumptions of high-ranking generals. Josh interviewed half a dozen of them on background to get a sense of what they were seeing on the ground and what they were advising McChrystal (see chapter notes for a list of team members).
McChrystal’s staff had hastily organized the review team in June. One member admitted that signing on was an embarrassing confession to the rest of Washington—a city that values being overly busy—of having a blank calendar. Others frantically rearranged their summer schedules.
Many had been to Afghanistan before, yet few felt they had seen the country as it truly was. Their visits wer
e largely confined to military bases, military transports and military PowerPoint slides.
In a windowless conference room at his headquarters in Kabul on June 25, McChrystal gave the team three guiding questions for their review: Is the mission achievable; if so, what needs to be changed to accomplish the mission; and are more resources necessary to complete the mission?
McChrystal told the group to be pragmatic and focus on things that would actually work. He came across as open-minded, one team member said. The four-star general had previously commanded U.S. Special Forces, leading missions into Afghanistan and Iraq that wiped out terrorists and insurgents. He seemed to have arrived at a counterinsurgency strategy by trial and error, after learning firsthand that America could not simply kill its way out of the war.
The review team traveled across Afghanistan on a fixed-wing aircraft over the next several days, visiting cities and bases in the southern and eastern regional commands.
They found that the military understood relatively little about the Afghan people. It could not measure how the Taliban’s propaganda campaign of fear and intimidation affected the population. McChrystal could order a counterinsurgency strategy, but many of the soldiers from the 42-nation coalition lived on bases designed to isolate them from average Afghans. The intelligence collection was in shambles. “We could already be losing Kandahar,” one team member said, “but we don’t know it because we don’t have enough contact with the population to know what the hell is going on in the city.”
A counterinsurgency plan, in theory, also involved deploying civilian specialists, who as a whole did not exist, at least not in numbers that could be sent to Afghanistan. The specialists had to be passably fluent in Afghan languages such as Dari and Pashto, or discover a reservoir of native translators that billions of dollars and thousands of soldiers had yet to divine. It required a total immersion in Afghan society and tribes. “The kind of COIN doctrine that they’re talking about requires a level of local knowledge that I don’t have about my hometown,” one member said.
