by Steve Coll
Amid rising mistrust among his key war advisers, Obama ordered, through Jim Jones, yet another interagency review of strategy in September to digest McChrystal’s report from the field and to decide the question of more troops. Lute directed the process from his cramped office in the West Wing, fifty feet from the entrance to the Situation Room, between a men’s restroom and the White House mess. He drew support from the N.S.C.’s Afghanistan-Pakistan directorate next door in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
To prepare, Hillary Clinton convened a lengthy meeting at Foggy Bottom with her senior advisers to hash out the State Department’s positions. Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg, Deputy Secretary Jack Lew, Policy Planning director Jake Sullivan, Holbrooke, and several of his aides joined a half-day summit. Eikenberry connected by secure video from Kabul, Anne Patterson from Islamabad. Almost all of them agreed that military pressure was necessary to roll back the Taliban, but they also agreed that McChrystal’s plan alone was insufficient. Clinton would propose a complementary plan of regional diplomacy, including efforts to talk to and pacify the Taliban. She would push as well for a much stronger focus on the alliance with Pakistan—a “new partnership,” as Clinton would put it, with more civilian aid, more military aid and training. Her draft plan was essentially a less militarized expansion of the Plan Colombia–inspired strategy for Pakistan conceived by the Bush administration in its final years.19
On September 30, Obama presided over the first formal war strategy review session in the Situation Room. The president declared at the outset that the United States would not abandon Afghanistan. Peter Lavoy, now running analysis in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, presented an intelligence briefing derived in part from the C.I.A.’s updated District Assessments maps. The Taliban controlled or contested between one fourth and one third of Afghan territory and controlled or influenced about a third of the Afghan population, Lavoy said. The intelligence community’s best judgment was that there was no chance the Taliban could take over all of Afghanistan anytime soon, but the guerrillas could gain enough influence in Kandahar, the Taliban’s birthplace, to establish a refuge and create strong new momentum for their insurgency.
Lavoy tried to lead the principals and their key deputies—Obama, Biden, Clinton, Gates, James Jones, Panetta, Mullen, U.N. ambassador Susan Rice, Holbrooke, Lute, and others, along with Petraeus and McChrystal from Central Command—through a kind of seminar. At its heart lay the problem of war aims. The purpose of the war in Afghanistan was to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat Al Qaeda and its affiliates. But what did this stated resolve about “affiliates” imply, exactly, about the war against the Taliban? The Pentagon presented a PowerPoint slide displaying numerous American statements and policy declarations over the years showing that, whether they wanted to admit it or not, United States policy had long been to defeat the Taliban. That gave the group in the Situation Room pause because they knew the goal was implausible. Gates, who had served at the C.I.A. and the White House as the Soviet war in Afghanistan faltered, worried that it was too ambitious to try to defeat the Taliban. The movement was “part of Afghanistan,” he said at one point. He led the cabinet toward an agreement that while they should continue to try to defeat Al Qaeda, with the Taliban, the objective should be to “degrade” the movement and “reverse its momentum.”
Several times over the next few weeks, Lavoy spread out the C.I.A. maps and walked the group through the history and fundamentals of Islamist political violence in South Asia. He reviewed the demographics of “Pashtunistan,” the overlapping areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan where tribally organized Pashtuns lived. Two thirds of Pashtuns were in Pakistan, not in Afghanistan, he reminded the group.
Millions of Afghan refugees from the Soviet war had married and settled in Pakistan, some sending their sons to work in the Persian Gulf. After their rise in the 1990s, the Taliban built networks and found sympathy or support within this diaspora, from Dubai to Karachi to Quetta to Kandahar. The Taliban’s “sanctuary” involved more than just training camps and safe houses in Baluchistan or Waziristan. They had depth. They were also not the same as Al Qaeda, Lavoy reminded them. They might have provided sanctuary to Al Qaeda but they had not joined in the September 11 attack and they did not promote war outside Afghanistan.
The maps and Lavoy’s demographic and historical briefings made plain to almost everyone—although Petraeus and McChrystal seemed to be exceptions—that there was no way to defeat the Taliban militarily, to eradicate them or force their surrender, unless the United States was prepared to invade Pakistan, an unstable nuclear weapons state. Obama ruled that out. That implied that the goals of the Afghan war had to be reduced to something less than the Taliban’s full military defeat. Either that or Pakistan’s army had to finally take on the Taliban, to wipe them out.20
Obama scrutinized the puzzle diligently. He hauled away fat briefing books to the White House residence and came back with notes indicating that he had read them carefully. He detected some of the contradictions. The briefing books reported, for example, that General Ashfaq Kayani and the Pakistan Army would take the United States seriously only if Obama showed staying power. Yet the same books reported that Kayani and his high command did not want the United States to send yet more combat troops into Afghanistan. How was this to be squared? Obama tried to focus several sessions of the review on Pakistan and India. He was frustrated that he kept getting back analysis that as long as Pakistan’s strategic focus was on India, the army would never end support for the Taliban or allied groups. No one predicted that the relationship with India and Pakistan was going to improve quickly, yet no one had new ideas about how to manage that problem in Afghanistan.
They all agreed that Pakistan required another huge infusion of American aid to help the country defeat its own Taliban insurgents. Anne Patterson, the ambassador in Islamabad, warned against putting too much faith in Pakistan’s civilian government. “Let’s not fool ourselves that we have a democracy” to work with in Islamabad. The United States had to work with the Pakistan Army. More money would not purchase the generals’ love, however. “We can’t buy our way out on the core goal,” she said.21
Here were more contradictions to consider, dating back to the early 1980s and the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan. The United States judged Pakistan’s army to be its essential partner, to be resourced above all other Pakistani institutions, yet the United States also wished for a more effective civilian government in Islamabad. As in earlier eras, Obama’s advisers had convinced themselves that Kayani and Pasha were with them, at least to an adequate extent, or else, if they weren’t, that the United States had no choice but to forge ahead and achieve what might be possible. Jim Jones had grown steadily convinced that I.S.I. was not an American ally, but he reported to the principals that autumn that he also saw “real progress with I.S.I.” Biden said that when he spoke with Pasha, the I.S.I. chief had told him, “Let’s kill Mullah Omar and move on Haqqani too.”
On September 28, Kayani told Mullen over a secure telephone line that he might be willing to go after the Haqqanis. This was progress, Mullen felt. The Pakistan Army was still reeling from its war against domestic insurgents. At last, Pakistan “fears Mullah Omar,” Biden thought.22
If the National Security Council had taken a ride up Connecticut Avenue to the embassy of Pakistan, and had gone for a leisurely walk with the Pakistani ambassador, away from the listening devices he feared were implanted in his office by I.S.I., they would have heard a different analysis. Husain Haqqani, the ambassador, was a former journalist and a persistent critic of the Pakistan Army who had landed in Washington after Asif Zardari’s election.
One day in October, as the White House review went on, Haqqani received a visitor in his office. He handed over an old newspaper clipping about the “shadow games” within Pakistan’s deep state—for instance, the bugging of rivals’ offices in Islamabad.
Haqqani
pointed to the ceiling, to indicate the presence of listening devices.
“Pakistan’s army is determined to fight the Pakistani Taliban,” he said loudly, as if speaking to the microphones. Then he mouthed Kayani’s name silently and patted his shoulders, like a charades player trying to mime “epaulets.” Haqqani silently mouthed words to make clear that Kayani would not fight the Afghan Taliban. The Obama administration had to understand that “shadow games” persisted.23
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On October 8, General McChrystal formally presented to the National Security Council three options for more American troops in Afghanistan. In the most aggressive plan, he would require about eighty thousand additional soldiers. In the middle case, he would use forty thousand to secure the eighty key districts he had identified in the east and south. At the low end, in a plan put forward by Joint Chiefs vice chairman James Cartwright, he could try to deploy about ten thousand to resource fewer key districts, although the chances of success would be lower. From then on, the strategy review often devolved into discussions about troop deployments, “critical districts,” and numbers.
Holbrooke raged privately at McChrystal’s Goldilocks-inspired proposal, telling aides it was “one of the shabbiest intellectual presentations of all time.” Clinton, however, leaned toward recommending forty thousand more soldiers, the middle course. She seemed reluctant to break with the Pentagon as she also advocated for complementary diplomacy and a “civilian surge.” Following on the Bush administration’s late interest in accelerating Afghan reconstruction, the Obama administration pushed through $4 billion in fresh funds for the fiscal year beginning that October. Clinton seemed careful about the record she was creating at such a critical juncture of war-or-peace decision making.
Petraeus yielded little. “We can’t wait one day,” he insisted at one session, urging more troops. Without them the war would fall into “a death spiral.”
They all agreed that something had to be done about corruption in the Karzai government. Yet the cabinet did not examine in any depth how billions of dollars in international aid or C.I.A. covert counterterrorism armies or the massive numbers of security and Western transport contractors flying back and forth each day between Kabul and Dubai might be incentivizing and creating corruption. “So much nonsense,” Holbrooke fumed.24
The war review meetings in the Situation Room dragged on—there were eventually ten of them, totaling about thirty hours. By October’s end, Clinton had grown frustrated by the review’s drift away from diplomacy and the challenge of Pakistan. She directed Holbrooke’s office to produce a bound volume of every paper she had submitted to the White House that fall, as well as supplementary memos and slide decks. She said she wanted to ensure there was a record that at least her department had attempted to discuss issues other than troop numbers. An aide hand-delivered the volume to the West Wing office of Jim Jones. The White House never responded.25
In November, Jones flew to Pakistan bearing a letter from Obama to President Asif Zardari. Protocol required an exchange between counterparts, but the real audience for Obama’s correspondence was Kayani. The letter’s essence, as Holbrooke summarized it, was “We want to listen to your strategic terms” for a peaceful settlement in Afghanistan. “Tell us what they are.”
Holbrooke flew to Pakistan next. He dined for four hours with Kayani and Pasha. They delivered the first draft of an answer: “It was all India all the time,” Holbrooke recounted. “The Pakistanis see everything through the prism of India.” The specifics included Kashmir, their access to water from Indian glaciers, and whether Afghanistan would be governed by the likes of Amrullah Saleh and other perceived Indian allies. Kayani’s goal, Holbrooke thought, was to “get us to lean on the Indians. Fool us a little. Play us against ourselves. The usual game.” Holbrooke’s solution was to “concentrate on one issue,” the fact that “the Pakistanis believe that if we leave [Afghanistan], the Indians are going to move in.”26
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Kayani told McChrystal privately in the midst of the autumn review that the most important issue in the Afghan war was whether there was a “perception that the U.S. was winning.” Without that perception the Taliban would never give up violence or consider a political compromise. He might as well have been speaking about the I.S.I. as well. Yet at the end of his review, Obama reached a decision that made clear that the United States did not intend to “win” the war in a conventional military sense.27
The final written documents and orders to come out of the review redefined America’s objectives so as to eschew victory over the Taliban. The goal instead would be to “reverse the Taliban’s momentum” and deny the guerrillas access to major cities and highways. Outside the key terrain districts, the goal would be merely to “disrupt” the Taliban and prevent Al Qaeda from recreating a sanctuary on Afghan soil. It was explicitly not the objective of the United States to “defeat” the Taliban. That would be left to the Afghan National Army after the bulk of American troops began to withdraw, starting in 2011. Therefore, another key objective of American troops surging into Afghanistan would be to train and prepare the Afghans to carry on the long war to a successful conclusion, largely on their own.
The Obama war cabinet had concluded more or less by consensus that there was no purely military solution to the problem of the Taliban. The ambivalence of the president and his most senior White House advisers exacerbated the gap between them and the uniformed commanders they relied on. Obama felt fully committed to the destruction of Al Qaeda and he supported efforts to give the Afghan government and security forces a chance to take charge. Yet Obama was simply not invested in a military mission designed to defeat the Taliban. His aides saw the Pentagon’s uniformed commanders—Petraeus above all—as hubristic about what they had accomplished in Iraq and unrealistic about Afghanistan. Every time the generals would brief him in detail about how counterinsurgency would work, step by step, in Afghanistan, Obama would become more skeptical, particularly about the amount of resources that would be required to make sustainable progress. Petraeus’s view was: I’m the only one in this room who has been to war. What do you want to do? Quit? We have a mission. What are your ideas to achieve it? The more the back-and-forth went on, the more Petraeus and his command came to see Obama and his aides as indecisive naysayers, carpers from the sidelines with no constructive alternatives to the war they were charged to fight.
In late November, Obama made an additional decision: He would announce in advance that American troops would start to withdraw in 2011. It was odd on its face for a president to order American soldiers into harm’s way for an urgent national security cause while simultaneously naming a date when those interests would be achieved sufficiently for the troops to start to go home. Obama’s rationale was twofold. He wanted to force the Afghans into recognition that they had to prepare quickly to take responsibility for the war against the Taliban and for successful governance. He also wanted to ensure that the generals could not maneuver the White House into extensions of time or further increases in troop numbers. The United States remained in the grip of its worst economic crisis since the 1930s. Democrats in Congress were increasingly restive about the Afghan war. Obama derived the 2011 date from the Pentagon’s own internal documents, which stated that adequate progress should unfold by then if a troop surge was approved. Gates, too, had advised that if the surge of troops was not making progress by mid-2011, two years after the first Marines went in, then that would be a good indicator that the plan was not working. Obama decided to bind the military to its own predictions.28
The problem with announcing a withdrawal date was the effect it would have on Kayani and his corps commanders. They already believed that the American project in Afghanistan was destined for failure, and that its collapse might saddle Pakistan with yet another wave of turmoil. By making clear that the United States was going home, Obama would affirm the I.S.I.’s convictions and redouble the service’s incentive to aid
the Taliban as a means of Pakistani influence in post-American Afghanistan.
Obama chose to keep his own counsel on his decision to announce a date for the start of withdrawal. At the final review session in the Situation Room, on November 23, the subject never arose. The main question remained how many more troops to dispatch. The range of proposals on the table had by now narrowed to between twenty thousand and forty thousand.
On Sunday, November 29, Obama held a secure videoconference with Eikenberry and McChrystal. They sat in Kabul, in the U.S. embassy’s classified conference room, as Obama’s face appeared alone on a flat-screen monitor. The “feeling was strangely intimate,” as McChrystal put it. Obama explained that he had decided to send thirty thousand more American troops to the war. His administration would also try to round up as many as ten thousand more from N.A.T.O. allies, to come closer to McChrystal’s forty-thousand-troop option. Obama now also disclosed his intention to announce publicly that American troops would start heading home in July 2011.
McChrystal told him that such an announcement “would give the Taliban the sense that if they survived until that date, they could prevail” and it “might decrease confidence” among Afghan allies.
Obama asked McChrystal point-blank if he could live with the decision as outlined. McChrystal said yes. He wrote later that if he had felt that an announcement of a withdrawal date “would have been fatal to the success of our mission, I’d have said so.”29
At around 5:00 p.m. that same afternoon in Washington, Obama summoned Gates, Mullen, Petraeus, Biden, Lute, and a few others to the Oval Office. He handed out draft orders. He said his strategy did not constitute fully resourced counterinsurgency or open-ended nation building. He asked each of them directly if they could carry out the strategy as described, including his intention to announce July 2011 as the start of a withdrawal. Petraeus was stunned by the figure of just thirty thousand more troops; it seemed to him to have been plucked from thin air. They all said yes. Petraeus thought it was not a choice. It was either take the thirty thousand or nothing at all.30
