Obama’s Wars

by Bob Woodward

  “Give it some lift that we’ve carried a special burden since the time of FDR. We have not always been lauded as a consequence. We’ve made some mistakes, but we’ve underwritten the architecture of national security with the service and sacrifice of our young men and women and our taxpayers.

  “Extremism will be a long struggle,” he said. “In many ways, it’s more complicated than simply dealing with nation-states, because you’re dealing with disorderly regions.

  “Our motivations are the same as they were over the last 60 years, which is that we don’t seek world domination or occupation.” He said he thought that the lives of our children and grandchildren would be better if other people’s children and grandchildren had better lives.

  Expressing some frustration, he noted, “Our entire national policy can’t just be focused on terrorism.” There were 6 billion people in the world with a vast range and diversity of concerns, and we also had to be focused on our own economy because it’s the foundation of our strength in the world. “We can’t lose sight of that, and we have too much in recent years.”

  Finally, the president added, “The American people are idealists, but they also want their leaders to be realistic. The speech has to convey that.”

  Obama had met that week with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who was later quoted in The Washington Post as saying there was “serious unrest” among Democrats over the possibility of voting to spend billions more for the Afghanistan War. It was the most difficult vote she could ask her fellow Democrats to cast. On a conference call with bloggers, Pelosi said, “We need to know what the mission is, how this is further protecting the American people and is this the best way to do that, especially at a time when there’s such serious economic issues here at home.”

  Later on Wednesday, Obama held his regular weekly meeting with Gates in the Oval Office. The room is so well lit, bright with no shadows, that it has a stark feeling. It is assuredly a setting for business.

  Everything was winding down for the Thanksgiving holiday. They had completed nine often grueling sessions on the strategy review, and it was clear to everyone, including Obama, that Gates needed some final decisions soon. Since Mullen was traveling to Geneva for an unannounced meeting on strategic arms reductions, Cartwright, the vice chairman, was attending in his place. Jones also joined.

  The president said that he had arrived at the number. Under the redefined mission, he said, the best I can do is 30,000.

  Cartwright was not surprised. It had a perfect symmetry—right between the McChrystal 40,000 and the hybrid 20,000. But it was also between the 35,000 that Gates had most recently been seeking, and the 25,000 that Cartwright had thought was about right.

  Here is why it will be 30,000, the president added. The financially hard times were real, as they all knew. Obama said he wasn’t going to support an open-ended commitment. In addition, he was not going to do nation building or pursue a full counterinsurgency strategy. Already, he and Bush had committed 33,000 troops more in one year.

  Jones was still amazed that the military had not provided a real assessment of how the hell those 33,000 were doing, and they still wanted another 40,000. A cynical person would think you can’t be serious. A cynical person, Jones thought, would say, “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.”

  The country would not support business as usual in Afghanistan, Obama said. “This is what I’m willing to take on, politically.” The very best was 30,000, he repeated.

  Gates had worked for seven other presidents. Each had his own decision-making style. Assertions and conclusions were often floated, sometimes emphatically, sometimes tentatively. It wasn’t evident what this meant.

  “I’ve got a request for 4,500 enablers sitting on my desk,” Gates said. The requests for force had been stacking up since September when they began the review. “And I’d like to have another 10 percent that I can send in, enablers or forces, if I need them. If I need mineclearing units or more medical personnel, support people.”

  “Bob,” the president said, “30,000 plus 4,500 plus 10 percent of 30,000 is”—he had already done the math—“37,500.” Sounding like an auctioneer, he added, “I’m at 30,000.”

  It was an extraordinary moment. He had never been quite so definitive or abrupt with Gates. When Obama spoke at the meetings, it had often been questions or summaries. “I’m at 30,000.

  “I will give you some latitude within your 10 percentage points, things that you might need in the future,” but under exceptional circumstances only. “But I’m not getting to 37,500,” Obama said emphatically. “I might as well go to 40,000.”

  “Can you support this?” Obama asked. “Because if the answer is no, I understand it and I’ll be happy to just authorize another 10,000 troops and we can continue to go as we are and train the Afghan national force and just hope for the best.”

  “Hope for the best,” the condescending words hung in the air.

  Gates said that he would support 30,000. Yes, he could go along.

  Cartwright signed up as well. He realized that the president had given a shot across the bow—take it or leave it. Clearly, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs concluded, the president had picked 30,000 in order to keep the family together.

  The auctioneer had closed the bidding. The president had decided.

  As a Thanksgiving tradition, Biden and his family rented a house in Nantucket.

  There was no good option that would guarantee success, the president told him by secure phone. “We were dealt a very bad hand,” Obama lamented again.

  Biden said it would not be that bad if the Karzai government fell.

  No, Obama said, the downside was too great, and he was going with 30,000.

  Biden wrote a long-hand memo to the president. “It’s not the number, it’s the strategy,” he said, and sent it on secure fax to Obama. In the course of the holiday he faxed half a dozen handwritten memos to Obama, underscoring that theme and urging that the president incorporate five points into his final decision:

  1. No full counterinsurgency;

  2. No nation building;

  3. Focus on al Qaeda;

  4. The military can occupy only what they can transfer to the Afghans; and

  5. The goal is to “degrade” the Taliban with eventual reconciliation in mind.

  He also pressed Obama not to buy in to the extravagant goal of building a 400,000 Afghan security force.

  26

  On the morning of November 27, Obama again invited Colin Powell to the Oval Office for another private talk. The president said he was struggling with the different points of view. The military was unified supporting McChrystal’s request for 40,000 more troops. His political advisers were very skeptical. He was asking for new approaches, but he just kept getting the same old options.

  “You don’t have to put up with this,” said Powell, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs. “You’re the commander in chief. These guys work for you. Because they’re unanimous in their advice doesn’t make it right. There are other generals. There’s only one commander in chief.”

  When I asked the president about this advice, he said, “General Powell and I talk. And I consider him a friend. And since he’s now out of that building [the Pentagon], every once in a while I’ll check in with him. I’ll leave it at that.”

  “Why are we having another meeting about this?” the president asked that day after Thanksgiving as his White House national security team filed into the Oval Office—Jones, Donilon, Emanuel, McDonough, Lute and Colonel John Tien, an Iraq combat veteran and former Rhodes Scholar on the NSC staff. “I thought this was finished Wednesday.”

  Donilon and Lute said there were open questions from the Pentagon. Were the enablers already authorized?

  No.

  What does the 10 percent apply to?

  The 30,000, an exasperated president said, and that’s it. “Why do we keep having these meetings after we have all agreed?”

  Well, we’re still working with the military on thes
e questions.

  The president said he had reached agreement with the secretary of defense—why was there still a debate? That should have ended it. But the Pentagon was not used to or comfortable with being held to such precise standards.

  The Pentagon seemed to be reopening every question. Donilon started ticking them off. Most came by phone from Mullen or the JCS staff, though Donilon and Lute were also talking with General Cart-wright and Michèle Flournoy, the undersecretary for policy.

  Like what?

  Well, the estimate that they could get all the 30,000 troops into Afghanistan by summer.

  “We didn’t come up with that,” the president said. “Petraeus told us that.”

  Now the Pentagon was saying they were unsure.

  “It wasn’t us that concocted …” the president said.

  The Pentagon was also questioning the withdrawal date of July 2011. At one point earlier, Gates had said he preferred six months later—the end of 2011.

  “I’m pissed,” Obama said, but he didn’t raise his voice much. That was their date as well, he said. It was actually on the chart they briefed to us—the one with the longer trajectory. They identified it as the point when Afghans would be able to take the lead and responsibility in certain areas. Was this a negotiating tactic or what?

  It seemed every issue was back up for discussion, negotiation or clarification. Obama said he was ready to go back and just give them 10,000 trainers. That would be it.

  This was a contest that pitted the president against the military establishment. Donilon was stunned by the political power the military was exerting. But, he reasoned, the White House had to be the longdistance runner in the contest. From studying Vietnam and George W. Bush’s Iraq War, he knew one common theme was miscue after miscue. Presidents being surprised, presidents not getting into the details enough, presidents not being clear about what they wanted, presidents not understanding the implications of seemingly simple decisions.

  Jones left the meeting and spoke with Mullen, who was indeed saying that getting the 30,000 there might take longer than the end of the summer. McChrystal had been told he could decide which units composed the 30,000. Not surprisingly, he wanted units from the legendary 101st Airborne Division, the “Screaming Eagles” that Petraeus had commanded during the 2003 Iraq invasion. These units would not be ready until September.

  No, Jones told him, it would really not be a good idea to go back to the president now and say it couldn’t be done. Assertions had been made. The president wanted everyone to keep his word. In essence, this was military advice Obama didn’t want.

  “Got it,” Mullen said, disappointed that Jones, a retired four-star, didn’t seem to comprehend.

  In the Oval Office, Obama continued with Donilon, Lute and the others. The meeting went on for hours, almost the entire day, as they tried to nail down the president’s orders. They had all read Lessons in Disaster. One of its conclusions was that Johnson failed to translate his Vietnam decisions into specific orders for the military.

  Obama began to dictate precisely what he wanted, composing what Donilon called a “terms sheet,” making it similar to a legal document used in a business deal. He took Gates’s memo and agreed that the strategic concept would be to “degrade” the Taliban—not dismantle, not defeat, not destroy. He pasted Gates’s six military missions from the memo into his own orders. The six military missions involved reversing the Taliban momentum and then denying, disrupting and degrading them.

  As the contest went on through the afternoon, the Pentagon civilians and the Joint Staff had an ever expansive view of the strategy, seeking to broaden it.

  “You can’t do that to a president,” Donilon kept saying. That was not what Obama wanted. He wanted a narrower mission.

  But the push continued.

  Put in restrictions, Obama ordered.

  Donilon tried, but back it would come from the Pentagon with more, not less. One addition had to do with messaging to al Qaeda.

  “We’re not going to do it,” the president said when he received word.

  Donilon felt like he was rewriting the orders ten times, and he finally told the military interlocutors that the president only wanted matters directly related to the goal. “If you guys have a bunch of other bullshit you want to do,” he said, the president would not accept it.

  Say it directly, Obama dictated. In final form, his orders said that the military mission “will be limited in scope and scale to only what is necessary to attain the U.S. goal.” Period. It couldn’t be clearer. When all the words were filtered and reworked, he had two goals—defeat al Qaeda and degrade the Taliban.

  But expansive, protect-the-population counterinsurgency ideas and side missions kept coming from the Pentagon.

  No, Obama said. Again, he would say it directly, dictating the line, “This approach is not fully resourced counterinsurgency or nation building.” It couldn’t be clearer, and he couldn’t be more emphatic.

  Still, some were clinging to the original McChrystal request for 40,000. It was as if no one had ever told them no.

  No, Obama said. On the troop number, he was picking the low end of Option 2A, the proposal for 35,000 to 30,000. It was 30,000. Let’s be clear, he said. He had picked Option 2A with “the narrower mission and the express tighter timeline.” He was sticking to July 2011. It was not just to begin withdrawing U.S. forces, but on that date “we will expect to begin transferring lead security responsibility from these forces to the ANSF,” he dictated.

  In case anyone did not understand the big change, he said for the terms sheet, “In July 2011, we will assess progress nationwide and the president will consider the timing of changing the military mission.” The mission would not grow. It would only contract.

  Around dinnertime—after nearly eight hours of wrangling and clarifying with the Pentagon—Obama went over a final draft, dictating and crafting the language.

  “Maybe I’m getting too far down in the weeds on this, but I feel like I have to,” he said. The president polished the document until 9:15 P.M.

  When he was done, the orders were typed out, six single-spaced pages. That’s what he would issue, he said. His decision wasn’t just going to be a speech or a general sense on the numbers game of 30,000. It would be this directive. And everyone was going to read it and sign up. That was the price he would exact, the way he would end the contest—for the moment, at least. Because, as they all knew now, the contest, like the war, would probably not end, and the struggle would continue.

  Among the most top secret elements were not only stepped-up CIA drone and other attacks against al Qaeda in Pakistan, but the president’s directive that McChrystal increase the tempo of counter-terrorism attacks against the Taliban inside Afghanistan.

  In some respects, McChrystal was the perfect wolf in sheep’s clothing. After years as Special Forces commander (JSOC) in Iraq, no one in the U.S. military knew more about these operations than he. Now McChrystal was the Afghanistan commander who had embraced the kinder, gentler protect-the-people counterinsurgency, putting limits on combat operations in order to reduce Afghan civilian casualties and even instructing his forces on the road to treat Afghans with respect.

  But under the radar, McChrystal had his own wolf, Vice Admiral William H. McRaven, a Navy SEAL, who had taken command from him of the Joint Special Operations Command in June 2008. The scale and lethal intensity of McRaven’s attacks in Afghanistan was at a level almost unimaginable to anyone without TOP SECRET CODEWORD clearances. The “jackpot rate”—when the strikes got the intended target—had jumped from 35 percent to 80 percent. Slapping a table for emphasis on each word, one senior civilian official with those clearances said, “Every single night they are banging on these guys with a pace and fury that is pretty impressive.” And the 18 months to July 2011 would give the special operators time and space to disrupt, degrade and perhaps in a significant way decimate the Taliban insurgency. It might give new meaning to the word “degrade.”

>   Obama’s strategy was built on the idea that the time, space, intensity and success would allow the politics to come together. At least that was his hope.

  Word circulated in the highest reaches of the Pentagon that the decision was about to implode. The Pentagon was saying that the secretary of defense thought he had received permission for the 4,500 plus the 10 percent.

  Obama thought he had been clear, so he made it clearer and talked to Gates about 7 P.M. “I thought we’d straightened this out on Wednesday,” he said, obviously bewildered. He hated wasting time, and this was to him a complete rehash. But Donilon and Lute wanted absolute clarification.

  How many times did he have to say it?

  The number was 30,000, the president said, and the overall deal was that the 10 percent of that 30,000 was only for exceptional circumstances. But the 4,500 enablers would have to be part of the 30,000. It would have to be built into or come out of that 30,000 somehow, but it was not on the table. Period. His number was 30,000. It was a hard cap.

  Later that night, Obama gave a final read of his six pages of orders. The relitigation and debate were over. “I’m comfortable with this decision,” he said. “I’m comfortable with the way that it’s been set forth here. I’ll call Bob tomorrow, I’ll call Hillary, and we’ll have them in tomorrow or Sunday and I’ll go through it with them face-to-face.”

  Donilon felt that the document was an assertion of presidential and civilian control of the military. The uniformed military had had too much of a say in the later years of the Bush presidency. The embodiment of that was Dave Petraeus, who, with his team, had made important and sound decisions in Iraq beginning in about 2007. But a lot of poor decisions had been made before that by Bush and others in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Petraeus had been engaged in damage limitation. To Donilon, President Obama was trying to ensure that his administration was not engaged in damage limitation five years from now. No nationwide counterinsurgency in Afghanistan was necessary to protect the United States.