by Bob Woodward
One possible candidate was Lakhdar Brahimi, the elderly United Nations diplomat who had helped engineer Karzai’s rise to power after the U.S. invasion in 2001. Could he deliver this? Brahimi was 76, perhaps too old for the monumental diplomatic mission.
The more they looked at it, the more complex it was. The more they stared at the problem and unpacked its elements, the clearer it was that Pakistan held an unhealthy amount of leverage on the whole outcome. Pakistan owned the Taliban. So the Taliban couldn’t necessarily deliver themselves.
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On Friday afternoon, May 14, Brigadier General Lawrence Nicholson, who had commanded the 10,000 Marines in Helmand province for a year, visited Jones and Lute at the White House. He was going to be the military assistant to the deputy secretary of defense, Bill Lynn.
Jones said that the last time he had seen Nicholson he had been in Helmand delivering the Whiskey Tango Foxtrot warning about more troops. And now, he noted with some irony, the WTF vaccination had not only failed, but had the opposite impact—the patient got the disease and, Jones noted with some irony, an additional 30,000 were headed to Afghanistan.
Lute reminded Nicholson of the “clear, hold, build and transfer model” and its importance to the president’s orders under the new strategy.
Nicholson indicated he understood this.
“Larry,” Lute said, “forget Marja, this year’s adventure. Let’s go to last year’s adventure. So we’re now at the 12-month mark. So tell me.” The operation into the town of Nawa, which was the brightest light and seemed to have the best prospects for being secured, had been launched in July 2009. “Where are we in Nawa in this four-step model that leads to ‘T’ transfer?”
“Well,” Nicholson said, “we’re in the hold/build phase.”
Hmmm, said Lute. “So at the 12-month mark, Larry, you’re at hold/build. Let me ask you to look into a crystal ball and tell me when are you going to get to ‘T’?”
They agreed that it depended on the Afghans, who had to produce the army, police and a government that could take over.
So, Lute asked, when would those Marines be available to do something else? “Like maybe Kandahar? Or go home? Be part of the July 2011 gang?”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Nicholson said. “At least another 12 months.” And that was for the best district.
“Larry,” Lute said, “we try to calibrate Washington’s expectations. From clear to transfer is at least 24 months? The 12 months you’ve just had, and another 12 months? That’s not the promise here. We haven’t even gone into the suburbs of Kandahar yet, which, by the way, is much more important than where you guys were.” Kandahar was much more dangerous. It was where the Taliban was going to make a stand. “They don’t care about Nawa. Okay? They care about their iconic center, which is Kandahar.”
In Nawa, Lute continued, “this is what right looks like. Well, if right looks like 24 months, if that’s as good as it gets, then we can’t connect the dots here.”
Nicholson said that he also placed extreme caveats on 24 months. “Maybe you can get there in 24 months,” he said, “if you can get at the surrounding poppy problem, which fuels the insurgency.”
“How the hell are we going to do that?” Lute asked. Even though a blight had recently destroyed 33 percent of the poppy crop, the prospects of really undercutting the insurgency’s financing were remote. Despite the Afghan conspiracy theories, the CIA had not, in fact, developed a poppy-eating bug.
Nicholson said the other caution was that they would have to stop the Taliban insurgents from coming in from Pakistan. “If you can control the border,” he said.
The Afghan-Pakistan border was like Arizona. There was no control for 100 miles in either direction of a legal crossing point, and no U.S. or coalition troops were committed to the border. For practical purposes, the Taliban could cross anywhere.
“If Nawa is on—the best case—a 24-month timeline,” Lute said, “we’re screwed. We’re not going to demonstrate progress this year.”
Lute probed Nicholson on the force ratios. “So when you went into Garmsir and Nawa, what was the U.S.-to-Afghan force ratio?”
Nicholson said it was about 10 U.S. to one Afghan, making it virtually an all-U.S. operation.
Now, Lute said, for this year’s version in Marja, McChrystal was advertising an improvement—just two U.S. battalions to one Afghan battalion, for example. But Lute said when you dug into the numbers, the reality was very different. The Afghan units were composed of dramatically fewer soldiers than U.S. units. And McChrystal was counting the Afghan police, which improved the ratios. But there was a lot of smoke and mirrors. They were recycling the Afghan National Civil Order Police (ANCOP), which was a cut above the normal police, a kind of gendarme force. The ANCOP moved from dangerous trouble spot to dangerous trouble spot. But these ANCOP essentially now say, I signed up to be a policeman and I’m basically the first guy through the door in operation after operation. The gendarme force voted with its feet, and the attrition rate was 75 percent annually. The model was supposed to be just a 15 percent attrition rate.
The other problem was that the ANCOP were in Marja and they were now supposed to go to Kandahar. Who would police Marja?
Astonishingly at the end of their hour-long meeting, Jones said, “That sounds like good progress.”
God damn, Lute thought. Had he and Jones been in the same meeting?
Jones later said all the news from Afghanistan was not good, and the war was not like a light switch that could be turned off. “But McChrystal’s upbeat,” he said.
After the meeting with Nicholson, Lute went back to Colonel Tien and the rest of his team. “Let’s start building the scheduled strategic review,” he said. “There’s no reason building it in November,” just a month before it would be due. They could make the slides for the December review now. “I can pretty much predict that Kandahar’s going to look a lot like it looks today. There’s no reason to work the weekends in November. We might as well just do it during the workday in May and June.” He emphasized, “We might as well do this leisurely and get going on it because I can tell you what the outcome’s going to look like.” The president had directed that the military not go anywhere unless they could transfer in 18 to 24 months, he reminded them. He told them about the Nicholson meeting. “Well, the best case, with big caveats, the guy on the ground is saying 24 months.
“This is a house of cards,” he added.
A few days later, Petraeus was flying back from a trip, another in his endless travels, and he came to the rear of the plane to visit with his executive officer and Colonel Gunhus, his spokesman. It was unusual. Normally Petraeus was all work—and some sleep—at the front of the plane. This evening he also had had “some grape,” as Gunhus called it, a single glass of wine.
Several days earlier Petraeus had told the Associated Press that Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad had been a “lone wolf.” Shahzad had attempted to set off a makeshift bomb in his SUV, which he had parked by the crowded Midtown Manhattan tourist area on the evening of May 1. The bomb smoked but failed to explode. By calling Shahzad a “lone wolf,” Petraeus had meant that he had not operated in the United States with any assistance. But the story read as though Petraeus was contradicting claims by others in the Obama administration that Shahzad had been trained by the Pakistani Taliban (TTP).
Petraeus and Gunhus had prepared a short press release to correct the miscommunication. But first the general had asked Gunhus to contact Denis McDonough in the White House to get his advice. McDonough had said to do nothing, let it blow over, it was not a big deal. This was just short of an order, so the release was not issued. But once again it looked like Petraeus was at odds with the White House. As the plane roared to its next destination Gunhus noted that the White House still had a tendency to leave Petraeus twisting in the wind.
They knock you down every chance they get, Gunhus said.
“They’re fucking with the wrong guy,” Petraeus said.
/> To address worries of a nuclear terrorist attack in the United States, Brennan ran a top-to-bottom classified exercise on Tuesday, May 18, testing how the intelligence agencies and federal government would respond. Called COOPEX 2010 (Continuity of Operations Exercise), it was essentially a scripted war game in which terrorists detonated a small, crude nuclear weapon in Indianapolis, taking down several city blocks and killing thousands.
In the hypothetical scenario, the terrorists had access to about 17 kilograms of fissile material. After the Indianapolis blast, enough was left over for a second bomb, which the terrorists planned to set off in Los Angeles.
Obama himself participated, appearing on the secure video with a series of questions. How did this happen? Who most likely did it? Was it state-sponsored? How can we retaliate?
As part of the game, the nuclear material had come from a country much like Pakistan, but the attack was not state-sponsored because that country—just as Pakistan was in some cases—had been fighting the terrorist group responsible for it. No immediate retaliation against the country was deemed necessary.
Each federal department and agency had to weigh in with evaluations and recommendations. The Agriculture Department noted that the price of food was shooting through the roof. Some discussion focused on the demand for services and treatment at Indianapolis hospitals, but no one addressed the question of clean water, one of the major needs after a nuclear fallout. Such an attack would create mass panic and almost unimaginable dislocations in the economy and transportation, making 9/11 look small. But COOPEX 2010 included no discussion of what Congress, the media or 300 million Americans were doing. The attack was presented in a vacuum, as if all those people stayed on the sidelines.
Michael Morell, named deputy director of the CIA a month earlier, raised a different problem. According to his calculations, there was likely enough fissile material for yet another bomb. “We haven’t found the third bomb,” Morell said.
“Brennan went ripshit,” recalled one senior participant. This was designed as a two-bomb scenario, not three. “And he’s trying to wrap it up neatly and tidily, but Morell kept wondering if there was a third bomb. What about a third bomb? And they couldn’t wrap it up.” This participant said the whole exercise was “dumbfounding” and “surrealistic,” demonstrating that the administration seemed woefully unprepared to deal with such an attack.
During my Oval Office interview with the president, Obama volunteered some extended thoughts about terrorism: “I said very early on, as a senator, and continued to believe as a presidential candidate and now as president, that we can absorb a terrorist attack.”
I was surprised.
“We’ll do everything we can to prevent it, but even a 9/11, even the biggest attack ever, that ever took place on our soil, we absorbed it and we are stronger. This is a strong, powerful country that we live in, and our people are incredibly resilient.”
Then he addressed his big concern, “A potential game changer would be a nuclear weapon in the hands of terrorists, blowing up a major American city. Or a weapon of mass destruction in a major American city. And so when I go down the list of things I have to worry about all the time, that is at the top, because that’s one area where you can’t afford any mistakes. And so right away, coming in, we said, how are we going to start ramping up and putting that at the center of a lot of our national security discussion? Making sure that that occurrence, even if remote, never happens.”
Obama sent Jones, Panetta and Lute to Pakistan, yet again, for May 19 meetings with the country’s leaders. Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad, a 30-year-old U.S. citizen born in Pakistan, had been trained by the Tehrik-e-Taliban (TTP), the Taliban branch fighting against the Pakistani government.
Jones and Panetta were looking for a breakthrough, hoping this time would be different. It now seemed more likely than ever that a terrorist trained in Pakistan would carry out a deadly attack on U.S. soil. On past trips, they had prodded Pakistan to do more about the safe havens used by al Qaeda, the Quetta Shura Taliban, the Haqqani network and LeT. The Pakistanis had for the past year argued that their main priority was TTP. Now Jones and Panetta would have to try to persuade them to do more about that group.
“We’re living on borrowed time,” Jones said at the meeting with Zardari and other top Pakistani officials. “We consider the Times Square attempted bombing a successful plot because neither the American nor the Pakistani intelligence agencies could intercept it and stop it.” Only luck prevented a catastrophe.
Jones said that President Obama wanted four things: full intelligence sharing, more cooperation on counterterrorism, faster approval of visas for U.S. personnel, and, despite past refusals, the sharing of airline passenger data.
If, God forbid, Shahzad’s SUV had blown up in Times Square, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, Jones warned. The president would be forced to do things that Pakistan would not like.
“The president wants everyone in Pakistan to understand if such an attack connected to a Pakistani group is successful there are some things even he would not be able to stop. Just as there are political realities in Pakistan, there are political realities in the United States.
“No one will be able to stop the response and consequences. This is not a threat, just a statement of political fact.”
Wait a second, Zardari replied, if we have a strategic partnership, why in the face of a crisis like you’re describing would we not draw closer together rather than have this divide us?
President Obama’s only choice would be to respond, Jones said. There would be no alternative. The U.S. can no longer tolerate Pakistan’s à la carte approach to going after some terrorist groups and supporting, if not owning, others. You are playing Russian roulette. The chamber has turned out empty the past several times, but there will be a round in that chamber someday.
Jones did not reveal that an American response could entail a retribution campaign of bombing up to 150 known terrorist safe havens inside Pakistan.
“You can do something that costs you no money,” Jones said. “It may be politically difficult, but it’s the right thing to do if you really have the future of your country in mind. And that is to reject all forms of terrorism as a viable instrument of national policy inside your borders.”
“We rejected it,” Zardari said.
Jones begged to differ. He cited evidence of Pakistani support or toleration of Mullah Omar’s Quetta Shura and the Haqqani network, the two leading Taliban groups killing U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.
As a result of FBI interviews done in the United States and other intelligence, Panetta said they had a good outline of the TTP network, showing ties to the Times Square bomber Faisal Shazad. He took out a so-called link chart showing the connections. “Look, this is it,” the CIA director explained. “This is the network. Leads back here.” He traced it out with his finger for the Pakistani leaders. “And we’re continuing to pick up intelligence streams that indicate TTP is going to conduct other attacks in the United States.”
This was a matter of solid intelligence, he said, not speculation.
“Just to be clear,” the CIA director added, “the Times Square bomber, thank God, did not get enough training.” His training in bomb making had been compressed. “But if that had gone off, perhaps hundreds, if not thousands, of American would’ve been killed.” Underscoring Jones’s point, he said, “If that happens all bets are off.”
“If something like that happens,” Zardari said defensively, “it doesn’t mean that somehow we’re suddenly bad people or something. We’re still partners.”
No, both Jones and Panetta said. There might be no way to save the strategic partnership.
Jones and Panetta were very specific about the alarming intelligence they had gathered.
The LeT commander of the 2008 Mumbai attack, Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi, who is being held by Pakistani authorities, is not being adequately interrogated and “he continues to direct LeT operations from his detention
center,” Jones said.
LeT is operating in Afghanistan and the group carried out a recent attack at a guesthouse there. Intelligence also shows that LeT is threatening attacks in the United States and the possibility “is rising each day,” Jones said.
The recent attack on Bagram Airbase, Afghanistan, was coordinated with the Haqqani network in Miram Shah, the capital of North Waziristan. “We have intercepts to prove that.”
Zardari didn’t seem to get it.
“Mr. President,” his foreign minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, said, “This is what they are saying. They’re saying that TTP was involved in this attack in Times Square. They’re saying that if, in fact, there is a successful attack in the Untied States, they will take steps to deal with that here, and that we have a responsibility to now cooperate with the United States.”
Afterward, the Americans met privately with General Kayani. Although Kayani had graduated from the U.S. Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, he was a product of the Pakistani military system—nearly 40 years of staring east to the threat posed by India. His training, exercises, maps, intelligence focus and the bulk of Pakistani troops were directed toward India. This was part of a Pakistani officer’s DNA. It was hard, perhaps impossible, for a Pakistani general to put his binoculars down, turn his head over his shoulder, and look west to Afghanistan.
Jones told Kayani the clock was starting now on all four of the requests. Obama wanted a progress report in 30 days.
But Kayani would not budge very much. He had other concerns. “I’ll be the first to admit, I’m India-centric,” he said.
In the meeting with Kayani, Panetta laid out a series of additional requests for CIA operations. He had come to believe that the Predator and other unmanned aerial vehicles were the most precise weapons in the history of warfare. He wanted to use them more.
Pakistan allowed Predator drone flights in specified geographic areas called “boxes.” Since the Pakistanis had massive numbers of ground troops in the south, they would not allow a “box” in that area.
