Obama’s Wars

by Bob Woodward

  Yes, Gates said, they had to focus on governance—the Afghan national government, the provinces, the local districts and the tribes. They had to help the ministries of the central government that were worth supporting, he said. Afghanistan had to get beyond its failed-state status—a giant task.

  All three admitted that they were being dragged down with terms like counterterrorism and counterinsurgency. The public didn’t understand what those words meant. There were too many labels. They also agreed that McChrystal’s mission had to be reframed with realistic goals and time limits.

  They also skirted the troubling question: What precisely were they trying to do?

  Later that day at 3:30 P.M., Obama gathered his team for a three-hour review and discussion of Pakistan.

  Lavoy again began by summarizing the intelligence picture. Pakistan suffered from the enduring we’re-with-you, we’re-not-with-you schizophrenia, the continuing dominance of the military-intelligence complex, and President Zardari’s political weakness.

  The consensus inside the intelligence community was that Afghanistan would not get straightened out until there was a stable relationship between Pakistan and India. A more mature and less combustible relationship between the two longtime adversaries was more important than building Afghanistan, Lavoy said.

  Lavoy revisited the Bush years. “We had engaged Musharraf as though he was Pakistan, which he was.” But with Musharraf out of office and living in London, the U.S. still had not done enough to build relations with other political entities. Deep Pakistani mistrust of American intentions persisted.

  Mullen pointed out that the robust military-to-military programs with Pakistan had grown to nearly $2 billion a year for training, equipment and other enterprises. Relations were getting better. The admiral was spending a lot of time with General Kayani, improving trust between the countries.

  The real issue was whether U.S. soldiers could conduct operations on the ground in Pakistan. That had traditionally been the red line, but it was the crux of the problem that had to be solved. If they wanted to go to the center of gravity to solve the security problem, that was what they would have to do. But no one raised that issue that day.

  Panetta passed around a list proposing the expansion of ten CIA counterterrorist activities. Adding more Predator drones inside Pakistan was one. Another was increasing the size of the areas in which Pakistan permitted drone strikes. There were also suggestions for opening new facilities in Pakistan, working through the ISI to develop more sources within the tribes and embedding U.S. military advisers in Pakistani operational units. Most of the activities would be carried out with Pakistani consent.

  Let’s do it, Obama said, approving all the actions on the spot. It was unusual to get an immediate order from the president, particularly since the review sessions had been, up until that point, all talk and no decisions.

  Sorting out the budget for how much was being spent on Pakistan was difficult. Jones jotted a note to himself to get a sense of the outstanding requests for resources and equipment in both the white, open world and the black, covert world.

  The president returned to India. “We need to move aggressively on India-Pakistan issues in order to try to reduce the tensions between the two countries.”

  Secretary Clinton addressed the consequences of not engaging with the Pakistani public for the past several years, contributing to America’s unpopularity there.

  “There hadn’t been much public diplomacy in recent years,” she said. The history of the United States abandoning the region after the Cold War still hung over everything.

  Meanwhile, “the U.S. relationship with India is growing steadily,” she said, which to say the least was characterized as a negative in Pakistan. When the Pakistani media ran negative stories, there was not enough pushback. Where was a “counter-propaganda plan?” she asked.

  “There’s been lack of sufficient funding, people, concepts, structures and authorities,” said Petraeus, chuckling. “Other than that, we’re doing great.”

  For much of the Bush presidency, U.S. policy had coddled Musharraf and disregarded the 170 million people in Pakistan. Clinton wanted a decision on multiyear, civilian assistance for Pakistani infrastructure, energy and agriculture, in addition to media outreach.

  Biden spun a hypothesis about how a Pashtun leader in Afghanistan influenced Pakistan. It contained enough what ifs that some in the room were quickly confused. Petraeus later told others that the vice president tended to get lost in his own verbiage, erecting straw-man arguments that he could then easily demolish.

  The session was grinding to a halt. Obama read through a list of specific questions about how to convince Pakistan that it was in their interest to change.

  “There’s no clear answer yet with regard to what induces Pakistan to make a strategic shift in our direction,” he said.

  “Why can’t we have straightforward talks with India on why a stable Pakistan is crucial?” Obama asked. India is moving toward a higher place in its global posture. A stable Pakistan would help that.

  Among his other questions were: Would the addition of U.S. troops in Afghanistan make Pakistan more or less cooperative? Because of Pakistani corruption, is there a way to funnel U.S. aid directly to the people for whom it’s intended?

  Speaking by video, Ambassador Anne Patterson tried to address the aid question. “We need to give Pakistanis some control over projects, although mobilizing the civilian sector would be a good thing to do.”

  Obama ended by saying he wanted to improve the U.S. image in Pakistan.

  In one discussion about the tensions between Pakistan and India, Holbrooke introduced a new angle. “There’s a global warming dimension of this struggle, Mr. President,” he said.

  His words baffled many in the room.

  There are tens of thousands of Indian and Pakistani troops encamped on the glaciers in the Himalayas that feed the rivers into Pakistan and India, he said. “Their encampments are melting the glaciers very quickly.” There’s a chance that river valleys in Pakistan and perhaps even India could be flooded.

  After the meeting, there were several versions of one question: Was Holbrooke kidding?

  He was not. Holbrooke subsequently detailed his concerns in a written report. The diplomat—sensing he was on the outs with Obama—was trying as hard as he could to say something distinctive that would impress the president. He had talked about tripling the number of civilian experts in Afghanistan to 1,000 by the end of the year, calling it “the biggest civilian surge in history.” And Holbrooke had routinely cited what he considered to be major progress in restoring Afghanistan’s agricultural economy. Donilon eventually had to tell him to give the NSC something more than a list of activities and issues. The president wanted a comprehensive strategy from Holbrooke’s office, Donilon said.

  It wasn’t until well into the Obama presidency that Holbrooke learned definitively how much the president didn’t care for him. When the president had announced Holbrooke’s appointment a couple of days into the administration, the two had a private moment.

  “Mr. President, I want to ask you one favor,” Holbrooke had said, expressing gratitude for the highly visible assignment. “Would you do me the great favor of calling me Richard, for my wife’s sake?” It was her preference. She disliked the name “Dick,” which the president had been using.

  At the ceremony, Obama referred to Holbrooke as “Richard.” But later, the president told others that he found the request highly unusual and even strange. Holbrooke was horrified when he learned that his request—which he had repeated to no one—had been circulated by the president.

  Petraeus thought the back-and-forth at these sessions was useful on some level, but it was dragging on. Intellectual exploration had its limits. Sensing the drift at the meeting, he wrote optimistically in his small black notebook: “There will be a recommitment to Afghanistan.”

  18

  McChrystal finally had a chance to present his troop options to
principals only—Obama was not present—at 10:30 A.M. on Thursday, October 8. His face, earnest and somber, appeared on one of the flat-panel monitors hanging on the Situation Room wall. It was 7 P.M. in Kabul.

  His briefing contained 14 slides.

  The general stuck to his main point: Conditions inside Afghanistan were much worse than he had anticipated and only a fully resourced counterinsurgency would remedy things.

  Jones interjected testily that there were essential questions that had not yet been answered. The U.S. still had a long way to go on managing the Afghan-Pakistan border. He circled and starred in his notebook, “It will be impossible to implement ANY Afghan strategy that does not address the safe havens in Pakistan.”

  What about the will of the Afghan security forces to fight? Jones asked. What about the will of the Afghan people? What about the potential for reforming local, regional and national governance? They were kidding themselves if they thought adding troops was the solution.

  “The plan is not executable without change in governance—fundamental changes,” Jones said.

  McChrystal listed his three options. The first called for 10,000– 11,000 troops, mainly for training the Afghan security forces. The middle one would add 40,000 troops for protecting the population, while the last one would double that to 85,000 for the same purpose.

  Each option was illustrated on a map of Afghanistan filled with blue bubbles, or “inkblots,” over the areas where the troops would be stationed. The bubbles grew larger and more numerous as the numbers increased.

  None of the blots spread along the border with Pakistan. It was blank space, open country for the Taliban insurgents. The missing bubbles underscored a fundamental weakness in the plan, Jones thought. There’s a mismatch between our core objectives and our understanding of the troop request as it currently exists, he wrote in his notebook.

  And even with 85,000 more troops—apparently an overshot to make the 40,000 seem more appealing—the U.S. could only protect 60 percent of the population. A full counterinsurgency was impossible with these options. So how could McChrystal presume to “defeat” the Taliban?

  The “defeat” goal had been nagging nearly everyone, including Holbrooke, who didn’t consider it necessary or achievable. He had chastised McChrystal about this the other day.

  What did defeat mean? Holbrooke asked again.

  It means degrade, McChrystal said, stopping the Taliban from taking over substantial parts of the country. This was a major tweak of the definition, which had previously been interpreted as destroying the Taliban, almost literally obliterating them.

  So, Clinton asked, if the mission is reduced to degrade, can you do it with fewer troops?

  “No, ma’am,” the general said. He was sticking to 40,000.

  Obama awoke that next morning to learn that he had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The president called his foreign policy speech-writer Ben Rhodes, who was now the NSC director of strategic communications. Could Rhodes help fashion a few words?

  The 32-year-old Rhodes called his lunch date to cancel. Before entering the world of politics, the native of Manhattan’s Upper East Side had aspired to write novels. He had published one short story, “The Goldfish Smiles, You Smile Back,” about an office worker who climbs the corporate ladder thanks to his exceptional note taking. “My notes are so impressive that they have taken on the form of ideas … I capture other people’s words in a manner that not only organizes them, but inserts a clarity and purpose that was not present in the original idea,” reads one passage in the story. Rhodes basically did a similar thing for the president, recording Obama’s thoughts and words before enhancing them with additional “clarity and purpose.”

  Obama appeared at a podium by the Rose Garden at 10:30 A.M. His sentiments were grounded in hard realities, rather than the idealism of many other Nobel laureates.

  “We have to confront the world as we know it today,” he said. “I am the commander in chief of a country that’s responsible for ending a war and working in another theater to confront a ruthless adversary that directly threatens the American people and our allies.”

  It was a revealing turn of phrase. U.S. troops weren’t fighting in Afghanistan. They were “working” in a “theater.”

  The full NSC session with the president was scheduled for 2:30 that afternoon. It was their fourth meeting. Petraeus had flown in from his hometown of Cornwall, New York, where a road had been named for him the day before.

  The president opened the meeting by asking everyone to tell him what they thought should be done with the war.

  As usual, Lavoy, the soft-spoken DNI expert, was up first. He had been gaining immense credibility with most in the room. Some even seemed to anoint him as the review’s oracle. Lavoy was very good, but others believed that no group charged with such immense responsibility should rely too heavily on one person, no matter how informed he might be, particularly when most of them knew relatively little about Pakistan.

  Pakistan was obsessed with India, Lavoy reminded them again. The Indians have a $1 billion aid program in Afghanistan, for example, that the Pakistanis think pays for intelligence. Each year, a thousand Afghan agricultural students study in India. The Pakistanis say that means a thousand spies. According to the CIA, it probably only meant a few spies. The Pakistanis also thought the head of Afghan intelligence, Amrullah Saleh, who had been with the Northern Alliance, an ethnic Tajik pre-9/11 group that fought the Taliban, was an Indian agent.

  There also was concern that India funded separatist movements in various regions of Pakistan, most notably among the natives of Baluchistan, the same desolate province where some of the Afghan Taliban were camped.

  Lavoy said that the Pakistanis were accommodating the U.S. to a degree, but they had continuing reservations about American commitment. They know they’re indispensable to us and our effort in Afghanistan. Pakistan has changed its behavior because of U.S. counterterrorist actions and, more importantly, by actions of extremists against the Pakistani government. This has led to the political and popular support for Pakistan’s recent military operations in the tribal areas.

  The Pakistanis, however, Lavoy said, see some risks to a larger U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan. Taliban fighters and refugees entering Pakistan help extremists in Pakistan justify their own attacks in the name of religion.

  Afghanistan and Pakistan have contradictory interests, Lavoy continued reminding them. While Karzai wants increased U.S. and NATO presence, Pakistan would view a strong Afghan national government as aligned with their archenemy, India, thereby basically surrounding and isolating Pakistan. The Pakistanis, especially the army and the ISI, worry about having too many U.S. troops. Karzai worries about having too few.

  Citing sensitive intelligence, he said, Pakistan was making a halfhearted effort against the insurgents, all the while allowing safe havens for al Qaeda. To make matters worse, the intelligence suggests that money alone won’t influence the Pakistanis to do more because they’re probably getting payments from other countries with competing interests, like Saudi Arabia and China.

  I’ve been up at night reading the intelligence reports, Obama said at one point. On one early page, it said—as Lavoy had noted—that Pakistan was overwhelmed with concern that the United States would pull out of Afghanistan and the region as it had done before.

  Much later, Obama said, the report warned that Pakistan dreaded having a large Afghan army on its border that might be in an alliance with India. One of the U.S. objectives is to build that army.

  How do you explain the contradiction? Obama asked. What exactly was Pakistan worried about—too much or too little? “What am I to believe?”

  Mr. President, they’re both true, Lavoy answered. That was the nature of Pakistan. Clinton, Holbrooke and Gates all said that they basically agreed with Lavoy. There was abundant evidence for both cases. Holbrooke later told others he saw the president playing a lawyer’s game. Any lawyer could spot a surface contradiction
.

  Next, McChrystal made a 30-minute, 14-slide presentation of his assessment and troop options that had been rehearsed the day before.

  When he got to the slide stating the goal—to “defeat” the Taliban—there was now a little blue box off to the side of the chart. It read, by defeat, we mean that the Taliban no longer would be an effective threat to the Afghan government, that they could not succeed as an insurgency.

  Reversing himself from his position at the rehearsal, McChrystal said that if the mission is modified, then the request for resources would be different. But he presented exactly the same options—10,000–11,000, 40,000 and 85,000.

  McChrystal emphasized the importance of training the Afghans. The army and police should have a combined strength of 400,000 by 2013. The 400,000 target had originated during the Riedel review in March. The Afghan army currently had about 100,000 soldiers, while the police totaled about 80,000—a more than doubling would be required.

  Ultimately, Afghanistan can only be stabilized by the Afghans, McChrystal said. Improved governing and dealing with corruption were also key.

  His pitch for a counterinsurgency was textbook. The objective of a 400,000-man Afghan security force corresponded perfectly with the preferred counterinsurgency ratio of 40 to 50 people for each soldier or policeman. But some felt McChrystal diminished the quality of his presentation by using the charts, PowerPoint slides and maps as a crutch.

  The question was put to McChrystal: If you’re doing a population-centric strategy, General, why the discrepancies between where the people live and where you have or want to commit troops? Not all of the bubbles overlapped with the population density map.

  McChrystal said they had to have forces in the production centers and around the lines of communication. If they did not connect the population centers, they would be like Fort Apache—vulnerable islands out there by themselves.