Obama’s Wars

by Bob Woodward

  “What happened in Iraq?” he asked of counterinsurgency’s most recent test case. Was the surge plus the Sunni Awakening, when tribes left the insurgency and joined the government, a strategic decision? There had been sufficient infrastructure in Iraq for that decision to have coherence, he said. “We have to make sure that there’s similar infrastructure in Afghanistan. I do recognize that it would be difficult to execute a counterterrorism plus strategy without a good foothold in Afghanistan. That intuitively makes sense, because without it you’re not going to get good intelligence.”

  Referring to the next session, he said, “I want to start with Secretary Clinton on the Pakistan/al Qaeda question, and have a discussion about a realistic end state in that.”

  The president then doled out homework assignments. This meeting had concentrated on the McChrystal assessment. He wanted to take a step back.

  “We’re going to begin with interests,” Obama said, “and then figure out what it is we want to accomplish, how we’re going to do it and eventually get to resources. We don’t want to talk about troops initially.”

  I don’t even want to see the troop request that McChrystal’s preparing, Obama said. It would only obscure the debate he wanted to have about their real “interests.”

  Holbrooke left the Situation Room thinking that some of the real issues had not been discussed at all. The March Riedel report was flawed. Riedel had presented it in a one-hour Air Force One meeting alone with the president. No one else had been there—not Jones, not Donilon, not Emanuel, not himself. There was no note taker. Four or five people should have been on that plane and in the meeting.

  In the Bush administration one of the problems had been the very private sessions that Bush had with Vice President Cheney, who could present his arguments and whisper in the president’s ear. Cheney’s ideas did not have to be tested, and they were given undue influence.

  Holbrooke blamed Jones, who he thought was weak and not proactive enough in protecting the president. He was not the counterweight to Gates, Mullen and Petraeus he was supposed to be.

  More importantly, Holbrooke believed the Riedel report and the Sunday meeting had not acknowledged a central truth: The war—or the American role in the war—would not end in a military victory, but nearly all the focus had been on the military. There had been little discussion of reconciliation—how the warring parties could be brought together diplomatically. That might be far off, but it had to be planned. How could the Taliban insurgents be lured off the field? Maybe it was a fantasy. But they had to sincerely try.

  The Saudis were already acting as secret intermediaries with elements of the Taliban, but the White House was not seriously engaging the issue. This was the only end for the war in Holbrooke’s estimation. How could they not at least consider it?

  Holbrooke largely agreed with Biden. He saw the vice president emerging as the administration’s George Ball, the deputy secretary of state who had opposed the Vietnam escalation. But the length of Biden’s presentation undermined his message, Holbrooke told others.

  Like Biden, Holbrooke believed that even if the Taliban retook large parts of Afghanistan, al Qaeda would not come with them. That might be “the single most important intellectual insight of the year,” Holbrooke remarked hours after the first meeting. Al Qaeda was much safer in Pakistan. Why go back to Afghanistan, where there were nearly 68,000 U.S. troops and 30,000 from other NATO counties? And in Afghanistan, the U.S. had all the intelligence and surveillance capability, plus the capability to dispatch massive ground forces, not just Special Operations Forces but battalions of regular troops and the CIA’s 3,000-man pursuit teams.

  Astonishingly to Holbrooke, that key insight had neither been in Riedel’s report, nor had it been discussed that Sunday morning. Where was the no-holds-barred debate? The president had told them not to bite their tongues. Holbrooke had to bite his because he worked for the secretary of state, who was unsure of what course to recommend. But where were the others?

  Petraeus had not been invited to attend the White House meeting. Instead, the CentCom commander was in Tampa, conducting a halftime reenlistment ceremony at the Buccaneers-Cowboys football game. He thought his exclusion from the meeting was ridiculous. Petraeus was the combatant commander in Afghanistan and Pakistan and recognized as the father of modern counterinsurgency—the strategy under review.

  He received a synopsis the next day, Monday, September 14, from General Lute, who had attended. They spoke at 8:30 A.M. for half an hour on a secure personal Tandberg video. Petraeus agreed that Pakistan was important but not all-important. What they did in Pakistan also depended on what they did in Afghanistan.

  For Petraeus, war was about initiative and momentum. Regaining the initiative on the ground in Afghanistan was crucial, as was regaining the initiative inside the Situation Room. With one session down, he believed that Mullen was all in on McChrystal’s approach and that Gates was increasingly persuaded.

  In the message war, Petraeus had allies outside the administration who shared his beliefs and trusted his judgment. On Monday, September 14, a long op-ed appeared in The Wall Street Journal written by Senators Graham, Lieberman and McCain. Under the headline “Only Decisive Force Can Prevail in Afghanistan,” the senators said they would stand with Obama if he gave McChrystal what the general said he needed. They did not disclose that McChrystal had told them he would need seven to eight brigades. Echoing Petraeus, they wrote, “More troops will not guarantee success in Afghanistan, but a failure to send them is a guarantee of failure.”

  15

  Admiral Mullen appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee for his confirmation hearings for a second two-year term as chairman on Tuesday, September 15, two days after the first strategy session. He had carefully drafted a three-page opening statement and gone over it with Navy Captain John Kirby, his public relations assistant. He would try to preempt any questions in the opening.

  Knowing the sensitivity of the troop issue, Kirby had sent a copy of the statement to McDonough at the White House, drawing attention to the line that said McChrystal’s strategy of a properly resourced counterinsurgency “probably means more forces.”

  As all nominees do, Admiral Mullen had promised to give the committee his honest conclusions and not hedge his testimony. It was not unusual for the Pentagon to give the White House a heads-up about what senior officials planned to tell Congress, but Kirby was effectively asking for approval.

  McDonough okayed the statement. The “probably” made it ambiguous enough. More forces could be interpreted as the almost inevitable addition of more U.S. troops for training the Afghan army.

  But when Obama heard about Mullen’s testimony, he let his staff know how unhappy he was. Mullen was publicly endorsing the McChrystal strategy. “The Taliban insurgency grows in both size and complexity,” he had told the senators. “That is why I support a properly resourced, classically pursued counterinsurgency effort.” Had Mullen ignored what Obama said just two days earlier? Had the president not told everyone, including Mullen, that none of the options looked good, that they needed to challenge their assumptions, and they were going to have four or five long sessions for debate? What was the president’s principal military adviser doing, going public with his preemptive conclusion? The chairman was poking his finger in the president’s eye.

  Later that day around 6 P.M., Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell was waiting in the lobby outside the White House Situation Room when Emanuel and Tom Donilon emerged from the NSC principals meeting. They were furious.

  The president is being screwed by the senior uniformed military, they told Morrell. The generals and admirals are systematically playing him, boxing him in.

  Filling his rant with expletives, Emanuel said, “It’s bullshit that between the chairman and Petraeus, everybody’s come out and publicly endorsed the notion of more troops. The president hasn’t even had a chance!”

  Morrell realized that Mullen could have ducked the controversy at
his hearings with a simple feint: “My job is to be the principal military adviser to the president of the United States and secretary of defense, and I owe them my counsel first and privately before I offer it to you all. I am happy to come back at a later point and give you what I offered … but I don’t think it’s appropriate to share it with the committee before.”

  Morrell concluded it was all part of Mullen’s “compulsion to communicate,” to enhance the prominence and stature of the chairman’s position, after it had been emasculated by his two predecessors in the Rumsfeld era. The chairman had a Facebook page, a Twitter account, YouTube videos and a Web site called “Travels with Mullen: Conversation with the Country.”

  Mullen himself then stepped into the lobby and discovered that he was the topic of a heated powwow. Jones joined them.

  Emanuel and Donilon attempted to tone down their approach by asking him, How are we supposed to deal with this? You did this, what should we say?

  “It’s going to be the lead story on all the evening news,” Emanuel said. “It’s going to be double black headlines above the fold on every single newspaper.”

  As they were standing there, McDonough passed by. Mullen looked at McDonough as if he, the NSC chief of staff, would come to his defense. But McDonough continued on without a word.

  Mullen was surprised they were giving him hell. The fears about headlines were overblown. The White House knew in advance what he was going to say. No specific troop number was in his testimony. He had been as amorphous as he could be. At his confirmation hearing, he must tell the truth. And the truth was that he embraced the general notion of a counterinsurgency. “That’s what I believe.” What was his alternative?

  Why use “probably”? Donilon asked pointedly. Wouldn’t “I don’t know” have been better?

  Mullen let them seethe. “I just took it,” he said later.

  “Mullen: More Troops ‘Probably’ Needed,” read the headline at the top of The Washington Post front page the next morning.

  Afterward, Jones called Mullen to ask how he was doing.

  “I don’t know, you tell me,” the admiral replied.

  “Losing altitude,” Jones said.

  Obama asked retired General Colin Powell, the former secretary of state and chairman of the Joint Chiefs, to come for a private meeting in the Oval Office on September 16. A nominal Republican, Powell had given Obama an important endorsement during the presidential campaign. Nearly 25 years older, Powell had 35 years in the U.S. Army, and many had thought he would be the first black president. But Powell had chosen not to run in the 1990s, even when his poll numbers had skyrocketed.

  “It isn’t a one-time decision,” Powell told the president about Afghanistan. “This is the decision that will have consequences for the better part of your administration. Mr. President, don’t get pushed by the left to do nothing. Don’t get pushed by the right to do everything. You take your time and you figure it out.”

  Also, don’t get pushed by the media, he advised. Take your time, get all the information you need and make sure you are absolutely comfortable with where you come down.

  “If you decide to send more troops or that’s what you feel is necessary, make sure you have a good understanding of what those troops are going to be doing and some assurance that the additional troops will be successful. You can’t guarantee success in a very complex theater like Afghanistan and increasingly with the Pakistan problem next door.

  “You’ve got to ensure that you’re putting this commitment on a solid base, and the base is a little soft right now,” he said, referring to Karzai and the widespread corruption in his government.

  During this period, I had been conducting interviews for this book about what McChrystal’s classified assessment said. It was the basis for both Petraeus’s and Mullen’s controversial statements, yet no one outside of a tight-knit inner circle had actually read it. My sources said that McChrystal’s analysis addressed a devastating conundrum: eight years of war with little to no progress.

  There is a popular impression that insiders with political motivations simply hand over sensitive documents to journalists, with reporters waiting at their desks to be used as the tools of someone else’s agenda. No one offered to leak or provide me a copy of the McChrystal assessment. Through several interviews, I developed an understanding that the assessment was filled with troubling news. I used each interview to try to pry out a little more.

  In mid-September, after a nearly two-hour interview, I asked one person, “You’ve got a copy of the McChrystal report here?”

  “Yeah, it’s on my desk,” was the answer, and that person photocopied the report for me.

  The person put no restrictions on using the assessment, but the interview had taken place as part of the long-range research for this book. I did not get a chance to read the report until Friday night, September 18.

  With a red pen in hand, I went through the 66-page confidential assessment. On the second page of the “Commander’s Summary,” I underlined a passage I had not anticipated finding: “Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near-term (next 12 months)—while Afghan security capacity matures—risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible.” In other words, the U.S. could lose the war by September 2010.

  A culture of can-do pervades the U.S. military, and generals rarely talk about the “no longer possible,” especially in writing. But this report was sent directly to the secretary of defense. I had to reread the passage, and I put a red check mark by it.

  As I continued, it was clear the report was much more than a routine battlefield assessment. There was a desperate urgency to it. This is a cry from the heart, I realized. McChrystal said his forces were “poorly configured” to conduct protect-the-population security.

  I underlined, “Pre-occupied with the protection of our own forces, we have operated in a manner that distances us—physically and psychologically—from the people we seek to protect.” It baldly said that “we run the risk of strategic defeat” because of operations that cause civilian casualties. I circled the notion of “strategic defeat,” which could mean losing the war. “Defeat”? Generals just do not normally talk this way.

  Then on the fourth page of the report’s summary, my red pen darted under a sentence that blew the whistle on McChrystal’s own command: “Almost every aspect of our collective effort and associated resourcing has lagged a growing insurgency—historically a recipe for failure” in counterinsurgency. There was that word again, “failure.” I then read that the Afghan security force “will not have enough capability in the near-term given the insurgency’s growth rate,” so he proposed a “bridge capability” of more coalition troops.

  Next, the pen went under, “The status quo will lead to failure …” I got the message, and I wondered how this assessment had gone over with Gates, who, after all, had been secretary of defense for the last 20 months—secretary of defense in a losing war, according to Gates’s own new commander on the ground.

  Gates had told the president back during the first months of the administration, after the president had authorized 21,000 more troops, that he hoped there would be no more troop requests.

  Although McChrystal’s assessment did not include a troop request, there was definitely going to be a large one. Other sources were telling me it would be 40,000 or more, as a middle option.

  “We cannot succeed simply by trying harder,” I read. “The entire culture—how ISAF [International Security Assistance Force] understands the environment and defined the fight, how it interacts with the Afghan people and government, and how it operates both on the ground and within the coalition—must change profoundly.” Commanders rarely report on the need for “change.” Instead, they order it.

  McChrystal said that accomplishing his mission required “defeating the insurgency, which this paper defines as a condition where the insurgency no longer threatens the viability of the state.” He used some form of the word
“defeat” 14 times.

  I underscored this sentence: “The weakness of state institutions, malign actions of power brokers, widespread corruption and abuse of power by various officials, and ISAF’s own errors, have given Afghans little reason to support their government.”

  Insurgents had “a Taliban ‘shadow government’ that actively seeks to control the population and displace the national government and traditional power structures.” This was new to me and it indicated that the insurgents had penetrated deeper into the various provinces than I had imagined.

  Because of “inadequate intelligence,” McChrystal could not say precisely how much of Afghanistan, beyond a “significant portion,” was controlled or contested by insurgents. That was a startling indictment of the intelligence shortcomings.

  The report went on to describe the three major Taliban insurgent groups that loosely coordinated with each other: the Quetta Shura Taliban, the Haqqani network, and Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin. The Quetta Shura Taliban had established an alternative government in direct competition to Karzai’s authority. “They appoint shadow governors for most provinces, review their performance, and replace them periodically,” the report said. “They install ‘shari’a’ [Islamic law] courts to deliver swift and enforced justice in contested and controlled areas. They levy taxes and conscript fighters and laborers.”

  McChrystal laid out his initial plans for an ISAF future offensive, saying that coalition forces would “focus on critical high-population areas that are contested or controlled by insurgents, not because the enemy is present, but because it is here that the population is threatened by the insurgency.” He then divided the Afghan provinces into three groups based on the extent of insurgent presence and listed the order in which he might launch an offensive.

  The assessment featured a grim four-page appendix on the Afghan prison system, which had become “a sanctuary and base to conduct lethal operations” against the Afghan government and ISAF troops. “There are more insurgents per square foot in corrections facilities than anywhere else in Afghanistan,” it said.