Obama’s Wars

by Bob Woodward

  The team discovered that some 70 percent of the intelligence requirements were enemy-centric, and some experts said that they had to widen the aperture to focus on the people they wanted to protect. Who are they? Who are their leaders? What do they really want? Security? Jobs? To be left alone?

  One senior member said, “What kind of message does it send to the Afghans when Americans are not allowed to travel on foot through an allegedly safe Kabul and the Italians cannot walk on foot through Herat?”

  On top of all that, the war was increasingly Americanized. NATO had grown into a fig leaf that gave the cover of an international effort. A team member asked the Dutch commander in the south if the Americans might ask his troops to stay past their scheduled 2010 withdrawal date. “When we told them we were leaving, they said, ‘Thank you for your service,’” Dutch Major General Mart de Kruif recalled, as if their departure was welcome.

  Some on the review team figured the war could be fully Americanized in a year or two. The last thing U.S. generals wanted was more NATO forces wandering through Afghanistan, requesting air support to attack suspicious-looking Afghans. The Americans would prefer that the NATO allies provided money and trainers for the Afghan security forces.

  At the first interim progress review on July 4, the team told McChrystal nothing but bad news. We could run the finest counterinsurgency campaign in world history and still fail because of the weak and corrupt Afghan government, several members concluded.

  McChrystal looked as if he’d been hit by a train. “Thanks so much for that,” he said.

  The general claimed that the U.S. could beat the Taliban with one hand tied behind its back. But the enemy was not the problem, protecting the people was. That’s why several team members stressed the importance of intelligence about the population.

  The U.S. and its allies must not accidentally kill civilians, even when air strikes were appropriate under the rules of engagement, McChrystal said. A smart tactical move that killed an innocent civilian would be a strategic mistake.

  “You may be technically right and long-term stupid,” McChrystal said.

  The next day, the team flew to Herat, the western regional command overseen by the Italian army. From past visits, some on the team knew that the restaurant on base served an amazing lobster risotto. The Italians had sent an Afghan chef to culinary school back in their home country and were flying in the lobsters. The Italians might have been in Afghanistan, but against the principles of counterinsurgency they refused to be of Afghanistan.

  The Italian commanding general, Rosario Castellano, an ebullient, muscled paratrooper, told the team his thoughts about McChrystal’s inquisitive nature.

  “This McChrystal,” Castellano said, “he asks these questions. He asks me my name. I say Rosario Castellano. This McChrystal, he asks me, ‘Why?’” The new commander questioned everything.

  But for the most part, the team seldom got satisfactory answers to its questions. When they asked Castellano how he would use additional troops, the Italian general struggled for 10 minutes and then replied, “This is a silly question.”

  NATO allies could help train and teach the Afghan police and army, but the impression was that many of the European armies stationed in Afghanistan had not expected to be in combat.

  It became painfully obvious how removed the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), McChrystal’s command, was from Afghans the next day in the northern region. Stuck in armored vehicles, the team could only catch periscope-like glimpses of Mazar-i-Sharif’s streets through four inches of bulletproof glass and a two-inch-by-four-inch window.

  The team was similarly sheltered in Kabul. They stayed in a contractors’ compound guarded by Nepalese Gurkhas. The British transported them in two armored Toyota Land Cruisers. Under orders of the British government, they wore body armor, even for the 15-minute ride to ISAF headquarters. McChrystal, despite being the most powerful man in Afghanistan, did not have the authority to tell the British sergeant in charge of the convoy that team members didn’t have to put on body armor. Only the British did. It was a sovereignty issue.

  The Toyotas raced around Kabul. The drivers honked their horns rather than step on the brakes, madly changing lanes, swerving through traffic and accelerating at every opportunity. The theory was that erratic driving reduced the chances of a roadside attack. Afghans who didn’t jump out of the way could be plowed down. After one of the SUVs ran a bicyclist off the road, Andrew Exum, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security and a former U.S. Army Ranger, asked the driver, “What are you doing, man?”

  “You can’t be too careful. Could’ve been a bomb, sir,” was the response. But this kind of commute left Afghans on the street visibly angry. The team could see how an emphasis on force protection was causing the coalition to lose the Afghan people. Exum wrote a onepager for McChrystal about aggressive driving and armored vehicles entitled “Touring Afghanistan by Submarine.”

  McChrystal soon became the chief traffic cop and issued a written directive to all his troops in the theater “to drive in ways that respect the safety and well-being of the Afghan people.”

  The commanding general seemed to stay calm despite the daily frustrations. If a subordinate officer flubbed briefings at morning updates, he refused to yell as other generals might have. McChrystal did not consider a drop or increase in Taliban attacks to be a reliable measure of progress. During one conversation about a troublesome province, the review team’s well-respected coordinator, Army Colonel Chris Kolenda, noted, “You know, sir, violence dropped 90 percent when my battalion was there.”

  “Chris, violence dropped 90 percent when General Lee surrendered at Appomattox,” McChrystal responded.

  One outspoken member of the team believed McChrystal should not base his strategy on “what ifs” and “if onlys” as the U.S. had appeared to be doing. What if we increase Afghan forces? If only we can reform Karzai … If only we can improve agriculture … What if we secure the ring road around the country?

  Such an approach was not reality-based. “It was hope-based, which is to say, in wartime, illusion-based,” a team member explained to Josh, my assistant.

  Some of the team encouraged McChrystal to bargain with the White House, to come in high. But McChrystal was not interested in that. He was prepared to say, as a team member outlined it, “This is what I need. If you don’t give it to me, here are the risks. And if you don’t give it to me, I won’t resign, but I might not win.”

  The Pentagon received McChrystal’s classified assessment of the Afghanistan War on Monday, August 31. Secretary of Defense Gates was responsible for giving a copy to the president. The document was so sensitive that even members of the review team who had helped draft parts of it and held security clearances could not obtain a copy.

  Senior Pentagon and administration officials who were familiar with the substance of the report provided a basic overview for newspaper articles printed the next day. The Washington Post called the report “a sobering assessment” that is “expected to pave the way for a request for more American troops.” The New York Times warned, “An expanded American footprint would also increase Mr. Obama’s entanglement with an Afghan government widely viewed as corrupt and illegitimate.” But the meaning of the report was interpreted and sifted for journalists by their sources. The actual assessment remained confidential, deepening the mystery as to whether the characterizations were fully accurate. What did it actually say?

  Mullen revered McChrystal, and had made him director of the Joint Staff—his previous assignment—in part so that the Senate confirmation could wipe away the role McChrystal had played in the cover-up of the 2004 friendly-fire death in Afghanistan of Corporal Pat Tillman, who had left the NFL to be an Army Ranger. McChrystal had signed off on the Silver Star recommendation that suggested Tillman had been killed by the enemy, a choice he regretted.

  The issue resurfaced during McChrystal’s confirmation hearings for ISAF. McChrystal assured the Senate Ar
med Services Committee that he had recommended the Silver Star with the best of intentions, but he had been too hasty in the investigative process. “What we have learned since is, it is better to take your time, make sure you get everything right with the award, and not rush it,” he told the committee.

  When McChrystal’s assessment came in, Mullen embraced it. “Are you worried that you are too invested in McChrystal?” asked Navy Captain John Kirby, Mullen’s special assistant for public affairs. Did it appear that the chairman was too pro-McChrystal? “Are you losing your objectivity?” pressed Kirby, who had been with Mullen for the last 10 years. His job was to make sure some of the tough questions got addressed before they were raised in the media. “Suppose you’re wrong, and he fails?”

  “Then,” Mullen replied, “I’ve got to leave because I put him there.”

  • • •

  In August, members of the Senate Armed Services Committee—Senators McCain, Lindsey Graham, Joseph Lieberman and Susan Collins—went for the standard congressional recess tour of the Afghanistan war zone.

  McChrystal told them that President Obama wanted to choose from options A, B and C. And that’s what he would get, the general explained.

  “There’s only one option the president should consider,” McCain said, “and that’s the winning option.” This business of multiple options was crap. “Don’t water this down. Stand your ground. You go into the president, just tell him, ‘Here’s how you win.’”

  No, McChrystal said, he would provide options.

  “You’re getting political pressure,” McCain said. “They are putting you under political pressure?”

  “No,” McChrystal said. “I can say what I want.”

  But McCain would not hear of it. He smelled political pressure coming from the White House.

  McChrystal insisted that wasn’t so. He walked the senators through how he could use six or seven brigades more, explaining where and how he might deploy them.

  Graham was piecing the puzzle together. It was clear that McChrystal was coming in with an assessment that was grim and he was asking for substantially more troops—seven brigades meant tens of thousands of troops, depending on how the enablers were counted.

  Graham stayed behind for about 10 days to serve his reserve time as Colonel Graham, though everyone knew his day job. McChrystal briefed him some more, as did the generals with the 82nd Airborne in Regional Command West and the Marines in the south. The briefings troubled Graham. He heard al Qaeda mentioned only once, causing him afterward to write a strong memo and talk with Petraeus and McChrystal.

  Their messaging strategy was a disaster, Graham said. “America is worried about al Qaeda attacking,” but their briefings were all about the insurgent Taliban. “Americans understand that Taliban are bad guys, but what drives the American psyche more than anything is, are we about to let the country that attacked us once attack us twice? And your briefings have absolutely no emphasis on al Qaeda. This is a huge mistake.”

  The briefings soon changed. Al Qaeda became part of the regular message.

  McChrystal passed word to Gates that he was going to need 40,000 more troops. Gates was stunned. He had been at the CIA in the late 1970s and the 1980s when the Soviets invaded and occupied Afghanistan with 110,000 troops. He was a Soviet specialist and noted that with the advantage of no restraints and no rules of engagement to protect innocent Afghans the Soviets had been unable to win. They had ruthlessly killed perhaps 1 million Afghans, driven millions more from the country and almost destroyed Afghanistan. How could adding more U.S. troops, essentially duplicating the Soviet numbers, get the job done? he asked McChrystal.

  The general said his forces would protect the people and demonstrate they were in Afghanistan to help. The Petraeus model from Iraq could be applied to Afghanistan.

  After long discussions, Gates found the argument very compelling. “I’ll get you as many troops as I can for as long as I can,” the secretary told McChrystal. “And you’ve got battle space over there, and I’ve got battle space over here.” He would have to fight in Washington to get the troops, but he made it clear he would support McChrystal’s request for 40,000.

  14

  Petraeus read a September 2 column by David Ignatius, a columnist for The Washington Post and the author of several well-crafted spy novels. He had spent many hours with Ignatius, a skilled reporter who traveled to Iraq, Afghanistan and other hot spots regularly, often with senior military, including Petraeus.

  But what was this? Petraeus read an unwelcome headline, “A Middle Way on Afghanistan?” Ignatius trotted out the line that this could be “Obama’s Vietnam.” He cited the difficulties the British Empire had had despite “all its troops, wealth and imperial discipline.” But worse, Ignatius took a swipe at Petraeus’s counterinsurgency strategy. “There is little hard evidence that it will work in a country as large and impoverished as Afghanistan. Even in Iraq, the successes attributed to counterinsurgency came as much from bribing tribal leaders and assassinating insurgents.” Obama’s decision on Afghanistan would amount to a “roll of the dice.”

  Petraeus was incredulous. In the fight for the hearts and minds of the American public—and the president—the message war was a deadly serious competition. The best way to counter Ignatius was to call the competition, so Petraeus phoned another Post columnist, Michael Gerson. He later claimed he was unaware that Gerson had been the chief speechwriter for President George W. Bush and the celebrated author of some of Bush’s most saber-rattling post-9/11 speeches.

  Rebutting Ignatius’s critique, Petraeus told Gerson that adding troops for “a fully resourced, comprehensive counterinsurgency campaign” was the only way. There was no guarantee, he said, the war strategy “will work out even if we apply a lot more resources. But it won’t work out if we don’t.” In no uncertain terms, Petraeus was saying the war would be unsuccessful if the president held back on troops.

  Obama and several of his staffers were furious. It angered Obama that Petraeus was publicly lobbying and prejudging a presidential decision. Bush’s former speechwriter must be a go-to guy for Petraeus, already suspect as a “Bush General.” As far as Obama was concerned, there were two times in recent history when a president faced major decisions on war—LBJ in 1965 when the Vietnam generals asked for escalation and 2003 when President Bush decided to invade Iraq. Both presidents had failed to drill down into the reasoning, the alternatives and the full consequences. Obama was determined not to repeat that mistake, and a preemptive strike in the public relations war by General Petraeus was distressing.

  Denis McDonough read the Gerson column and understood the president’s frustration. He thought of how much easier it had been to maintain message consistency in the presidential campaign, where there were fewer players in the know and everyone was united by the goal of electing Obama. McDonough e-mailed Colonel Erik Gunhus, Petraeus’s spokesman, to express his irritation. Strategy and resource issues were precisely what the president wanted to debate and consider. It was not helpful to have the combatant commander pontificating in a newspaper about what the strategy must be and the certainty of defeat without the addition of a lot more troops.

  Petraeus figured all presidents had a protective inner circle. Before Petraeus had appeared on Sunday morning TV shows, Axelrod participated in a conference call to help shape what the general would say. The suggestions by Obama’s senior adviser were often unsophisticated and political. Petraeus told one of his senior aides that he disliked talking with Axelrod, whom he called “a complete spin doctor.”

  The general felt as though he had been relegated to the bench by the president. Use me, Petraeus wanted to tell Obama. Use me. Make me part of the team. At one point, he had told Emanuel, “Rahm, I want to win. I can be your lead sled dog here.”

  “Yeah, okay,” Emanuel said. “We’re all in this together.”

  Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon spokesman, weighed in after the Gerson piece, telling Petraeus to stay quiet. The White Hous
e was upset because it looked like the generals were trying to box in the president. Morrell asked to be the military’s single point of contact for all media interviews, effectively forbidding Petraeus from appearing on the Sunday morning television talk shows anymore. So Petraeus went to ground, but in his ongoing back-channel dialogue with Senator Lindsey Graham he hinted that the South Carolina Republican and some other pro-military senators ought to weigh in publicly.

  On the evening of Saturday, September 12, Vice President Biden sat on Air Force Two, studying his notes about Afghanistan and Pakistan. The vice president had flown to Los Angeles to raise funds at a Beverly Hills luncheon for Senator Barbara Boxer and, separately, eulogize two firefighters who had died in the recent California wildfires.

  Joining him was Tony Blinken, his national security adviser, so that they could prepare for the first of several three-hour NSC sessions to discuss and debate the McChrystal assessment. Gates had proposed the meetings. The first one was scheduled for the next morning.

  Biden had spent five hours hashing out an alternative to McChrystal that he dubbed “counterterrorism plus.” Instead of a troop-intensive counterinsurgency, the plan focused on what he believed was the real threat—al Qaeda. Counterterrorism put an emphasis on shutting down terrorist groups by killing or capturing their leaders. Biden thought al Qaeda could be deterred from returning to Afghanistan without having to embark on the costly mission of protecting the Afghan people.

  Al Qaeda, he reasoned, would always take the path of least resistance and not come back to its former home as long as:

  1. The U.S. maintained at least two bases—Bagram and Kandahar—so Special Operations Forces could raid anywhere in the country;