Obama’s Wars

by Bob Woodward

Gibbs’s comments angered Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell. The White House seemed to forget that the same troop request had also sat on Gates’s desk. In their effort to fire back at Cheney, they were firing at the same defense secretary they oftentimes propped up as validation for their decisions.

  At yet another NSC principals meeting, Hillary Clinton turned to the secure video screen showing Admiral Mullen, who was on a five-day goodwill trip to Japan and South Korea.

  “I just talked to our civilian chief in RC South, Frank Ruggiero,” she said. In June, Ruggiero had become the head of U.S. Provincial Reconstruction Teams in southern Afghanistan. He was stationed at the Kandahar airbase, yet he could seldom wander far from it.

  “He’s only been in the city twice, and he had to go in an MRAP every time,” Clinton said. “And yet, we have 8,000 troops in the Kandahar area and we had only 800 a few years ago.” She had identified a big problem: with 10 times more troops, security didn’t seem to improve.

  It was no secret that the fate of the war might rest on Kandahar, the wellspring of the Taliban movement. When Kandahar had fallen on December 7, 2001, the first phase of the war ended—the Taliban regime had been overthrown. But despite the presence of extra troops in Kandahar province, the top U.S. civilian had to be chauffeured in a heavily armored vehicle.

  “How come the whole city is out of our control?” Clinton asked.

  That’s why McChrystal needs more troops, Mullen answered.

  The intelligence about Kandahar showed that the Taliban already controlled Loya Wiala, a sprawling refugee neighborhood north of the city center that the Americans called “District 9.” Other parts of the city were in the hands of Karzai’s corrupt brother, Ahmed Wali, who feuded with rival tribes for power.

  A survey of the Kandahar population commissioned by the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade contained the depressing observation that some locals felt safest by bribing the Taliban: “Many city residents believe that currently the most effective protection against the Taliban insurgents is not the number of police or international forces, but the payment of protection money, a practice that is already widespread. This demonstrates that the operational radius of the Taliban insurgents already reaches into the very heart of the city.” The survey was later heralded in a report co-written by Army Major General Michael Flynn, McChrystal’s intelligence officer, as a model for U.S. intelligence in Afghanistan.

  According to some intelligence analysis, Kandahar was susceptible to a mass uprising that might resemble the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam, a public relations disaster and psychological crossroads in that war. Watch Kandahar, the intelligence warned. It could be more important than Kabul, the capital.

  On Friday, October 23, Jones reviewed the unfulfilled troop requests for Afghanistan that had stacked up before Obama became president. It showed that not only President Bush but Gates had punted for years. The inflexibility of the Pentagon brass—especially Mullen and McChrystal—during the review sessions offended Jones.

  Once, he half jokingly said to Mullen, “Listen, my impression is we could tell you your mission is to guard two Quonset huts in Afghanistan, and you’d say 40,000.”

  Mullen laughed. “Yeah, we heard you,” the chairman said. “But it’s 40,000.”

  Obama wanted to meet next Monday and hear the bottom-line recommendations from his top advisers.

  Writing in longhand, Jones said that McChrystal should be “provided with four brigade combat teams, per his request. Two brigades should be provided by the United States. A third should be provided by the Afghanistan National Army and a fourth brigade to be provided through the NATO coalition.”

  He figured this was where the president was heading—about 20,000 U.S.—but by dressing it up with a brigade each from the Afghans and NATO it would look like McChrystal was getting what he requested. Jones thought it might be a good compromise. He was seeking what he called the “sweet spot.”

  Jones typed his recommendation into his computer that Saturday. But he never formatted it for the meeting, or printed it out. It stayed on the hard drive, never to be sent to the president.

  Months after the review ended, Jones admitted, “I should’ve sent it, in retrospect. But it was moving that way, I thought.”

  Clinton’s deputy at State, Jim Steinberg, had privately told her he was worried they were on the path to another Vietnam. There was an “open-endedness” to the mission, and he worried that McChrystal would again be back asking for more troops. Seek more clarity about where this is going, he urged.

  Holbrooke also gave his advice to Clinton in confidence.

  I will support you in any position you take, because you’re my boss, he told her. But you need to know my actual views. I’m against the full 40,000. The military has not made the case. Instead, let’s send 20,000 and put the other half on standby status so they can be deployed later if necessary.

  She listened to Steinberg and Holbrooke, but that was all.

  The Situation Room had lots of empty chairs around the table at 11:30 A.M. on Monday, October 26. Mullen’s chair was vacant. Petraeus was in the Central Asian country of Tajikistan. No uniformed military had been invited. The back bench seats were also vacant. None of the White House regulars were there—not Axelrod, not Gibbs, not Rhodes, not McDonough, not Lute. They had not been invited.

  After nearly six weeks of meetings, the president had called this meeting to ask Gates and Clinton to present their recommendations.

  I would like to make a decision before I leave on my Asia trip in two weeks, Obama said. The announcement of the decision could come later, but he wanted to get the decision locked down.

  His assessment of the choices was not reassuring. “We don’t have two options yet,” he said directly. “We have 40,000 and nothing.”

  No one could dispute that. Obama said that he wanted a new option that week. He had in his hand a two-page memo sent the day before by his budget director, Peter Orszag, projecting costs for the Afghanistan War. Under McChrystal’s recommended strategy, the memo said the cost for the next 10 years would be $889 billion, nearly $1 trillion.

  “This is not what I’m looking for,” the president said. “I’m not doing 10 years. I’m not doing a long-term nation-building effort. I’m not spending a trillion dollars. I’ve been pressing you guys on this.”

  Gesturing to the McChrystal assessment, the troop request, and the Orszag memo, he added, “That’s not in the national interest.” The president had talked about opportunity costs before. Spending $1 trillion on Afghanistan would come at the expense of other priorities—domestic programs or lowering the deficit.

  The first “flaw in Stan’s proposal,” he continued, was that there was no international element to it. McChrystal’s request was for a brigade of about 10,000 every three months over the course of a year. The fourth U.S. brigade would replace the departing troops from the Netherlands and Canada.

  Gates said that it could be a challenge for NATO to fill that fourth brigade. The administration could go back to these countries with a full-court press to get them to maintain, if not increase, their troop presence. But since that was a year off, they didn’t have to decide on a fourth brigade right now. It could be held in abeyance.

  “Yes,” Obama said, “this needs to be internationalized. That’s one of the big flaws in the plan that’s been presented to me.” Overall, he said, they needed evaluation points, the ability to test if any addition of force was working.

  If more troops were added, Gates said, they could do an evaluation after 12 to 18 months. “At that point,” he said, “it’s either working or it’s not working. You should be able to transfer after that period.”

  Obama seemed to like the word “transfer.” He said there needed to be a focus on counterterrorism training and accountability, ultimately turning over the security elements to the Afghans.

  “The presentation that’s been given to me is very different than the surge,” Obama said, referrin
g to Bush’s decision to send 30,000 more troops to Iraq in 2007. Did they not need to consider a surge-type option in Afghanistan to break the insurgency momentum?

  Obama then raised McChrystal’s request that they train the Afghan National Security Forces up to 400,000. This was based entirely on the so-called counterinsurgency math that one soldier or policeman was required for every 40 to 50 people in the general population (400,000 plus 148,000 U.S. and NATO troops fulfilled the ratio for an Afghan population of 28.4 million). That was literally the extent of the analysis, the president complained, and there seemed to be a degree of automatic piloting to it.

  Gates didn’t object. “The goal of 400,000 Afghan National Security Forces is neither necessary nor desirable,” he said.

  On the troop request, Gates said he basically supported the full McChrystal request, but the fourth brigade should be held back for now.

  The president summarized what Gates had said. They would measure whether it was working in 12 to 18 months. “We don’t need the fourth brigade. We might not need the full 400,000, and we can look at a more measured growth of the ANSF. And we could surge to break the momentum but not stay in a long-term COIN strategy.”

  It was Clinton’s turn. They should give McChrystal what he wanted, she said, but she agreed they could wait on the fourth brigade. Her recommendation seemed closer to the original McChrystal request than Gates’s.

  “On the civilian side,” she added, “we need some realism.”

  They all agreed there was lots of work to do with Karzai.

  Jones said that he did not think the military had proven its case for the troops, and suggested they should send all the trainers—the 11,000 that McChrystal requested—and the enablers.

  In terms of brigades, Jones thought the one for Kandahar should be sent right away. Kandahar was the most critical city in the war. Three of the four major population centers were firmly in the hands of the Afghan government. All but Kandahar. Lose it and the country would be split, the war could be over, he said. But given the long lead time for the other brigades—one brigade a quarter as McChrystal had requested—the final decision on the other brigades could wait. Jones also said that McChrystal was overly focused on the U.S. role, the troops for southern and eastern Afghanistan, and was overlooking the role of NATO forces in the rest of the country. He thought it possible to get 5,000 more troops from the NATO countries.

  Obama indicated he was not ready to make a decision. “We don’t have an end state,” he said. “I don’t see it clearly. There are no guarantees of progress in any short period of time. The plan is too open-ended. There is neither victory nor defeat in 10 years.”

  He was envisioning an option that would be a surge of forces that lasted less than a year. Everyone, he said, should go back and think some more. He wanted to schedule a meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff to hear their ideas.

  Gates said he had two disagreements with the uniformed military. One, was over the application of the word “defeat” to the Taliban. That was not possible, so they should use “degrade.” His second disagreement was over the term “fully resourced counterinsurgency.” That couldn’t be done either.

  I want a realistic ramp-down of troops, Obama said, to an equilibrium that is manageable and a better-described closure.

  Jones wrote in his black book, “McChrystal’s plan does not address comprehensive turnover in a rational way.”

  Obama asked Gates, Do you really need 40,000 to reverse the momentum of the Taliban?

  Before Gates could answer, Obama said, “What about 15,000 to 20,000? Why wouldn’t that do it?” He repeated that he wasn’t buying into a $1 trillion, 10-year counterinsurgency strategy.

  “I want an exit strategy,” the president said.

  • • •

  Nearly everyone could see that by supporting McChrystal, Clinton was joining forces with the uniformed military and the secretary of defense, diminishing the president’s running room. She had reduced his cover for any decision with significantly fewer troops or a softer policy. It was a definitive moment in her relationship to the White House. Could she be trusted? Could she ever truly be on the Obama team? Had she ever been? Even though her electoral future seemed circumscribed, politicians know that anything can happen. They generally play for themselves. Gates believed she was speaking from conviction.

  The next day, October 27, Jones sent a formal tasking memo to Gates requesting him to present a plan with the attributes that had been discussed with the president, one that brought the troops in faster.

  Jones and Donilon were sure the president wanted clarity, and the lessons from Iraq and Gordon Goldstein’s book about Vietnam, Lessons in Disaster, showed that a president had to have precision on military matters of this consequence. Absent clear recommendations and decisions, the military would tend to do what they wanted to do. Clarity would have to be forced on them.

  Having watched the sessions for more than a month, NSC chief of staff Denis McDonough thought the process was turning into a disaster, veering out of control in a way that would make it difficult ever to get consensus.

  It did not take long for a number of the like-minded to get together. Biden and Blinken were also worried, as were Tom Donilon, General Lute and John Brennan.

  These six—Biden, Blinken, Donilon, Lute, Brennan and McDonough—had a series of off-line meetings. It was a powerful group, close to Obama in different ways, a balance to the united front put up by Gates, Mullen, Petraeus, McChrystal and now Clinton. Lute liked to call their sit-downs “breakout sessions”—small, informal gettogethers after the large NSC meetings. There was about half a dozen of them, in Lute’s office, Brennan’s, Donilon’s—even one at the vice president’s residence.

  “Where are we headed?” Biden asked at one. “What’s going on here, guys?” The vice president said that he still didn’t think the president had to do the 40,000. The cost was too high and the prospects for success too low. How could they get his counterterrorism plus option on the table to give it the proper airing it deserved?

  Just before midnight on Wednesday, October 28, Obama boarded the presidential helicopter on the White House lawn for a 45-minute flight to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to observe the arrival of the bodies of 18 Americans killed in Afghanistan. He told aides he wanted to see for himself the solemn ceremony in which the cases carrying the bodies were transferred out of the plane to a van. He wanted to meet with the families of the fallen. I want to see how hard this is for them, he told one aide.

  At 12:30 A.M. Thursday the helicopter landed at Dover next to the giant C-17 cargo plane. The large cargo hold in the back was open, but Obama could not see the 18 flag-draped coffins inside. A car brought him to the chapel where 60 family members waited. Their loved ones had died that week, and their shock and sorrow were fresh.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said as he approached each group. He put his hands on shoulders, gently patted backs, hugged and embraced the young ones. “How grateful … The nation is grateful. … You’re in the prayers of every person in this country and in the prayers of Michelle and me.”

  The motorcade returned him to the hulking, gray C-17. He walked up the back ramp to the line of cases. At each one, he stopped, said a small prayer and placed a presidential coin.

  For nearly two hours he stood in his long overcoat in the cool darkness and watched as a six-person Army unit wearing fatigues, black berets and white gloves transferred the individual cases from the plane to the van. It was all done with precision. The units had regular practice because Dover was the main point of entry for the nation’s war dead. By 4 A.M. the ceremonies were complete. The president thanked everyone, slipped back in the helicopter, switched off the overhead light. No one said a word during the 45-minute flight to the White House.

  22

  Around 1:30 P.M. on Friday, October 30, Obama called the Joint Chiefs to the White House. This was not just a matter of checking another box on the way to making a big decision. The presid
ent was in a desperate search for another option.

  For the past two months, the uniformed military—Mullen, Petraeus and McChrystal—had been locked into counterinsurgency and 40,000 troops. But the individual service chiefs had yet to be consulted for the review.

  As the heads of the Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force, the chiefs recruited, trained, equipped and supplied the forces to combatant commanders like Petraeus and their subordinate ground commanders such as McChrystal. Neither Petraeus nor McChrystal attended the Friday meeting, because both were in Afghanistan and were junior in rank to the chiefs. But in the tangle of all things military, the chiefs were not in the chain of command. They had been largely sidelined since the strong JCS chairmanship of Colin Powell 20 years earlier. George W. Bush had used the chiefs to provide perfunctory opinions after he had made his decisions.

  Nonetheless, the chiefs had an almost mythic lore in military history. George Marshall had been the powerful Army chief of staff during World War II. On the other hand, the reputation of the chiefs had suffered dramatically after their spineless performance during the Vietnam War, when they failed to give honest guidance to President Johnson as documented by Army Brigadier General H. R. McMaster’s 1997 book, Dereliction of Duty.

  “I have one option that was framed as three options,” Obama told the chiefs. “I want three real options to choose from.” It was an unusual appeal for help from the chiefs.

  “I’m committed to making this a unified effort” a success, he continued. “This is America’s war, but I don’t want to make an open-ended commitment.” They had all read McChrystal’s assessment and his troop request. The objective of this meeting was to get unbiased views on alternatives, the president said, and the costs associated with any other options.

  Biden added, “If it isn’t working, you should be prepared to say so.”

  Just to be clear, the president said, “The goal is to defeat and dismantle al Qaeda,” the central threat. But the goal in Afghanistan is to “disrupt the Taliban, weaken them so that the Afghans can handle it.”