Obama’s Wars

by Bob Woodward

  Jones knew it well. As Marine commandant for four years, he too had been one of the chiefs.

  “I’m not uncomfortable,” Cartwright said. “I got it that maybe I’m not in the mainstream here.” But Biden’s notion of a hybrid option with 20,000 was not crazy. It might be the right answer. How could they be afraid of presenting the president with choices? Mullen wasn’t a war fighter, Cartwright noted. He hadn’t done this stuff before. He had never been in combat. So Cartwright said he was going to stand his ground.

  “I understand where you are,” Jones said. “I don’t disagree with you.”

  It was the president who could circumvent the system. When he learned of the option, Obama instructed Gates and Mullen that he wanted the hybrid option presented to him.

  At a principals meeting without the president, the DNI analyst Peter Lavoy was beginning to display a level of confidence that some found high-handed.

  “The whole world is waiting to find out what happens in this room,” he said.

  “That’s not right,” Jones angrily interjected. “Don’t say that. The world has to participate in this.” Afghanistan was a NATO operation and 41 other nations were involved. U.S. allies should be consulted. “We’ve got to get more out of NATO,” he said. “And the world shouldn’t wait for us.”

  “Jim,” said Blair, Lavoy’s boss, “when did NATO ever lead if we don’t lead?”

  The two started to argue, and Clinton and Holbrooke stepped in, saying the U.S. should have a rollout plan to explain the president’s eventual decision to everyone—first NATO and the allies, of course, and Congress and the public.

  The principals’ afternoon rehearsal on Tuesday, October 13, was mostly devoted to civilian efforts in Afghanistan.

  We will know the election outcome in a few days, Holbrooke said. It was possible that Karzai might not have to compete in a runoff, since his rival, Abdullah Abdullah, was willing to have some kind of coalition government.

  But Holbrooke wasn’t entirely sure about Karzai. As the election drama played out, Holbrooke had warned others that the Afghan president was threatening to reject the commission’s finding that he received less than 50 percent of the vote. How could you give troops to Afghanistan if the government had lost its democratic legitimacy? That would play right into Taliban propaganda.

  Holbrooke said more emphasis should be placed on the provincial and district-level governments instead of Karzai and the capital in Kabul. Success for McChrystal depended on at least a minimum level of governmental competence.

  The top three priorities—in terms of civilian effort—were agriculture, education and reduction of poppies, Holbrooke said. Pursuing all three would undermine support for the Taliban.

  Jones wrote in his notebook, “But the big question is, what can you do in a year?” That was the problem with how Holbrooke approached his job. He talked about long-term initiatives when things in Afghanistan had to be turned around immediately. Restoring Afghan agriculture might take a decade of harvests.

  The NSC meeting with the president on Wednesday, October 14, was scheduled for 9:45 A.M.

  Donilon asked, “What are the prospects we can get a credible Afghan government in place in five years?”

  No one answered.

  Obama emphasized that transfer was the key. What was the prospect of getting to “Bangladesh-level” corruption? The term meant the U.S. might have to tolerate the inevitable “bakshish,” the small cost-of-doing-business bribes that were part of Afghan culture. Clinton, Holbrooke and the intelligence chiefs, Blair and Panetta, all agreed that out-of-control corruption was the main problem.

  The president turned to reconciliation and reintegration.

  “Are we able to make arrangements with local leaderships that are legitimate and can help repel the Taliban? Do we have a plan to interact with local tribal leaders who are credible, so that as long as the central government isn’t repressive we can repel the Taliban?” I haven’t seen a plan that achieves that, he said.

  “How do we transfer?” he continued. “Are there existing structures that we can work with? My working premise is that we can’t be the sheriff in every town, so are there local partners that can do that? Are we in a position to strengthen something legitimate that already exists that doesn’t require a constant ISAF presence? Is there an elite that allows Afghans to take control of their government without us having to administer it?”

  Eikenberry tried to field the barrage of questions.

  “Based on past policies, Karzai has a compact with foreign governments and not his own people,” the ambassador said. The challenge was not just Karzai’s relationship with the United States, but with the rest of Afghanistan that could partner against the Taliban.

  Petraeus reminded everyone that a “transfer” was not the same as a withdrawal. There would still be an American presence in Afghanistan. With transfer, you don’t “hand off,” he said, you thin out.

  Gates attempted to answer the president’s questions.

  “Our chance of success is about narrowing our focus and narrowing our mission,” he said. “No government in Central Asia is a democracy and delivers services well. We can’t aim too high. How can we reem-power local Afghan leaders? The key is to blend with local Afghan culture and not to impose Western democracy.”

  The conversation moved to how adding troops would contribute to growing the Afghan forces, and whether there would be enough trainers to speed the transfer. Ambassador Rice asked for the ratio of U.S. trainers to Afghans.

  There may not be enough trainable forces, Biden pointed out.

  Obama had specific questions. How much are Afghan troops paid? the president asked. Would we be better off having fewer, better-trained soldiers that were paid more? What about the possibility of creating Afghan Special Forces units that were highly trained and better paid?

  As the negotiator famous for the treaty ending the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Holbrooke had been pondering ways to bring a peaceful settlement to this war. He saw reconciliation and reintegration as distinct. Reconciliation was esoteric, an iffy high-level treaty with Taliban leaders. Reintegration occurred down at the local level in villages and towns, possibly financed by the U.S. military’s discretionary Commander’s Emergency Response Program.

  As an ongoing reconciliation effort, the State Department had a secret compartmentalized operation to negotiate through Saudi Arabia with elements in the Quetta Shura, the central Afghan Taliban organization that is based out of Pakistan. Its leader, Mullah Omar, had threatened to kill anyone who talked to the Saudis or Karzai’s people.

  Several years earlier, Karzai had written to the Saudi king and asked him to set up back-channel talks. The people the Taliban sent were repudiated by Mullah Omar. At least three rounds of talks took place, but the bona fides of the Taliban representatives remained in question. No American official had ever talked directly to a Quetta Shura Taliban representative.

  Near the end of the meeting, Obama called on Petraeus. The president had previously asked the general for a briefing about what his experiences in Iraq might say about the prospects of reconciliation in Afghanistan.

  Actually, I’ve written this out in a document, Petraeus said. He had passed out copies of a memo around the table that was entitled “Lessons on Reconciliation.”

  This surprised Chairman Mullen.

  What memorandum, Dave? he asked.

  The memorandum that the secretary of defense cleared, Petraeus said.

  Gates sat there, not moving a muscle.

  There was an awkward moment of silence.

  “Okay, well,” Mullen finally said, “let me … I didn’t know about this memo.” He added that the service chiefs hadn’t seen this memo either.

  When Mullen needed reinforcements, he often invoked the chiefs, as though they acted as a unitary body. But the chiefs were more like the Supreme Court, full of dissenting opinions.

  By law Petraeus, as a combatant commander, reported directly to Gates.
Their arrangement was that Mullen, who only had a communications, oversight and advisory role, would be kept up to speed.

  Mullen passed a private note to Petraeus, who read it, folded it and put it aside as he gathered his thoughts.

  “I’d like to withdraw this memo,” he announced. “Could everyone give it back to me?”

  The memos were collected.

  That was odd, Jones thought. You don’t see that every day. Right in front of the commander in chief, two four-star officers had openly exhibited their internal tension.

  For veterans of internal White House and national security power politics, it was a bizarre vignette to savor. But it was also disturbing. The president had asked Petraeus about reconciliation and Mullen had effectively put his foot down in defiance of a presidential request. To many, it made the chairman of the Joint Chiefs look small and petty. It also revealed another dysfunctional relationship. Holbrooke, who dealt extensively with both men, believed that this was more than a rivalry, that the two “hated” each other.

  “I’ll just describe this to you,” Petraeus said, once most of the memos were back in hand. He then began his briefing.

  At least one copy never made it back to Petraeus. The secret document contained three major sections, each broken into bullet points. The first section was, “Factors that enabled reconciliation in Iraq.”

  This section noted the importance of the U.S. showing resolve:

  • “A sense by the [insurgent] Sunnis that coalition determination was firm and that the insurgent groups were not going to prevail over coalition and Iraqi forces.”

  At the time, Sunni Muslims in Iraq were also beginning to reject the foreign insurgents and had a political alternative to the violence:

  • “Sunni weariness of insurgent activity.

  • “Disenchantment with foreign leadership of [al Qaeda in Iraq].

  • “Rejection by Sunnis of the extremist ideology, oppressive practices and indiscriminate violence of AQI and the Sunni insurgent groups.

  • “The presence of an Iraqi political process that had a degree of legitimacy.”

  The second section was called, “Factors that enable reconciliation not present in Afghanistan.” It revealed how arduous it would be to bring parts of the Taliban into the fold of the existing Afghan government. In sharp declarative sentences, it detailed how almost none of the positives from Iraq existed in Afghanistan:

  • “The Taliban and other insurgent groups believe they are winning, not losing.

  • “There are questions about coalition resolve.

  • “The political process lacks the relative legitimacy of that in Iraq.

  • “Insurgent leaders and members are largely indigenous, not foreign.

  • “The Taliban provides better governance, security and dispute resolution than does the government of Afghanistan in some areas.”

  The third section, “Actions that could facilitate reconciliation/ reintegration in Afghanistan,” indicated there was one way to overcome these problems. The overarching solution reflected the counterinsurgency doctrine of its author, Petraeus:

  • “Commit to providing the resources needed to accomplish our objectives in Afghanistan, including securing the main population centers.

  • “Develop the nuanced understanding of local situations necessary to identify reconcilables and irreconcilables.

  • “Craft individual approaches for individual areas.”

  “Now we have a pretty good idea of what the reality is,” the president said. He did not have to add that it was grim. “At the next meeting, we need to move towards options and decisions.” The review had been going on for more than a month.

  • • •

  The meeting ended around 12:45 P.M. Petraeus and Mullen went to the Pentagon. Starting at two, Mullen was leading a four-hour war game that was supposed to test the impact of different troop levels, especially McChrystal’s request for 40,000 and the Cartwright-designed hybrid option of 20,000.

  DNI Blair had suggested it in September. The retired admiral was enthusiastic about the benefits of such exercises, having served as the director of the Joint Staff war-gaming agency in the early 1990s. In that post, Blair had read through the old Vietnam studies known as the Sigma Series. He found them heartbreaking. The games had correctly forecast the flaws in the Vietnam strategies but the military had ignored them. Blair thought a war game analysis might appeal to Obama intellectually.

  Lute had been invited to the game, but he proposed an NSC boycott.

  “We should not participate in this,” he said. “First of all, we don’t need the war game. I can tell you what the answer’s going to be. So I’m not spending a day over there in the Pentagon drinking lousy coffee to get to the self-evident conclusion.”

  The game would be a sham to bolster the case for the 40,000, Lute said, expressing the increasing skepticism that the military leaders had closed their minds. “If State and DNI and NSC participate in this war game, we’re going to give it the legitimacy that it does not deserve.”

  But State and DNI were participating.

  The code name for the game was “Poignant Vision.” Instead of the classic opposition forces model—in which red and blue teams respond to each other move after move—it was more a seminar in which Mullen posed a series of questions. What would be the impact if the Taliban got surface-to-air missiles? What if the Pakistanis squeezed major supply routes into Afghanistan?

  Petraeus noted that a normal war game model was designed for conventional force-on-force conflict. He knew of no way to war-game counterinsurgency, which included so many other social variables. And in the discussion during Poignant Vision, he made it clear he didn’t believe that adding 20,000 troops for an expanded counterterrorism strategy would work. Mullen agreed.

  But Cartwright recognized that some kind of counterterrorism component would be needed. A counterinsurgency fixed troops in one location where the enemy could keep thwacking away at them. Their flanks would be vulnerable.

  No one disputed that.

  Having more CT forces roaming the countryside would enable the U.S. to go after the Taliban more aggressively, Cartwright said. He thought the war game showed the hybrid option was still viable.

  Blair, who was more steeped in these issues than any of them, thought Poignant Vision didn’t go beyond a normal staff analysis. This kind of game did not come close to producing a definitive conclusion.

  “Well,” Blair said at the end of the day, “this is a good warm-up. When is the next game?”

  But he realized that Mullen and Petraeus had no intention of taking the issue further.

  21

  On Tuesday evening, October 20, Axelrod and Gibbs were out enjoying a steak dinner when Axelrod’s BlackBerry went off.

  The Washington Post and ABC News were running a poll about the president the next day. Axelrod read the e-mail out loud.

  “Drop for Obama in Afghanistan, Few See a Clear Plan for the War,” was the headline. “Barack Obama’s ratings for handling the war in Afghanistan have dropped sharply, with Americans by two to one saying he lacks a clear plan there. The public itself is divided on how to proceed, torn between the difficulties of the war and the threat of Taliban or al Qaeda–backed terrorism.”

  Axelrod took a breath. The public didn’t distinguish between the Taliban and al Qaeda. That might be part of the problem. There were nuances in this decision. The first part of the review had been about distinguishing between the groups. Axelrod knew that voters didn’t tolerate nuance—Obama’s specialty—from politicians.

  “Forty-five percent now approve of the president’s handling of the situation,” he continued, “down 10 points in a month, 15 points since August and 18 points from its peak.” The drop was mostly attributable to the loss of Republican support.

  Axelrod said he was neither jolted nor surprised. They had a monumental communications task in front of them for the president.

  “At the end of this process,”
he said, “it’s going to be incumbent on him and on us to explain our decision in very clear terms so that people understand what we’re doing and why. … The politics of taking our time to make a decision are absolutely fine. But the problem is we have to make a decision. … And any decision we make is going to be difficult.”

  CIA Director Panetta, who had served 16 years as a congressman and then as President Clinton’s budget director and chief of staff, saw that Obama was facing a huge political reality. He told other principals, “No Democratic president can go against military advice, especially if he asked for it.” His own recommendation would be, “So just do it. Do what they say.” He repeated to other key White House officials his belief that the matter should have been decided in a week. But Obama never asked him about it, and he never volunteered his opinion to the president.

  The long hours in the strategy review were taking their toll on a number of participants. Several times, Emanuel just stood up and started walking around the Situation Room and gesturing with his arms, nervous energy practically shooting out of him. Some found it entertaining. Others found it distracting. But no one else had the leeway or self-confidence to behave this way at a presidential meeting. Donilon called it “adult-onset Attention Deficit Disorder.”

  Former Vice President Dick Cheney tore into the Obama strategy review at a Wednesday, October 21, ceremony where he accepted the “Keeper of the Flame” award from the Center for Security Policy.

  “The White House must stop dithering while America’s armed forces are in danger,” Cheney said.

  At the White House press briefing the next day, Gibbs shot back at the vice president as the one who dithered. “I think it’s a curious comment, given—I think it’s pretty safe to say that the Vice President was for seven years not focused on Afghanistan,” he said. “Even more curious, given the fact that an increase in troops sat on desks in this White House, including the Vice President’s, for more than eight months, a resource request filled by President Obama in March.”