Worthy Fights: A Memoir of Leadership in War and Peace

by Leon Panetta

  Using some of the authority that Congress had granted the National Security Agency to monitor terrorist e-mails, the U.S. government was able not only to track those communications but also to see the bomb recipe, which was shared with the FBI so that agents here would know what materials Zazi was likely to purchase. When Zazi left his home in Aurora, Colorado, in August 2009 on his way to New York to carry out his mission, he was followed the entire time by the FBI. Apparently spooked by reports from relatives and others that agents had been asking about him, he called off his plans and flew back to Colorado. Roger’s team kept me apprised. On September 22, 2009, Najibullah Zazi was arrested; he remains in custody today.6

  Time and again, we were successful at stopping terrorist attacks. But even success in this area was a cause for alarm, as each of these operations reminded us of the spread and lethality of Al Qaeda. We were fighting around the world, against a determined, creative, and merciless enemy. There was no rest.

  It was against this background that I paid a visit to MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida, headquarters of U.S. Central Command and U.S. Special Operations Command. My host was General David Petraeus, the affable, disciplined, and confident commander who had helped turn the tide of the Iraq war with his famous “surge.” He first welcomed me into his office, which was nothing short of a shrine . . . to him. To be fair, we all collect so much bric-a-brac in these jobs—coins, awards, and photos of ourselves—that our walls become covered with the stuff. I did it too. But David set a new bar. Every inch of flat space in his office was covered with a military challenge coin he had received. Every bit of wall was covered with a picture of him flying in a helicopter, wearing shades, surveying his battlefield—Iraq, or wherever—below. He also had a huge coterie of advisers, people who were loyal to him and whose careers he had carefully looked after. I had Jeremy with me, along with General Welsh and one of our liaisons to Petraeus’s command. David had two or three flag officers, several field-grade officers, and even enlisted women and men there to help him with the briefing.

  He had recently returned from Pakistan, where he had met with General Kayani, and he had immersed himself in the nuances of the region. He deftly walked me through the Pakistani military’s advances in western Pakistan, jabbing a 3-D map of the North-West Frontier Province with what looked like a pool cue. David knew the name of every battle, every township lost and gained in the fight against the militants, and every stronghold of the leading terrorists.

  The next day—and the real purpose of my visit—I cochaired with David a meeting of all of the senior officials in the U.S. government responsible for counterterrorism. Once, the concern about the American government approach to terrorist threats had been that it was conducted by agencies in silos, barely communicating with one another. No more. The State Department’s ambassador at large for counterterrorism, Dan Benjamin, was there, as were Stuart Levey and David Cohen from the Treasury Department. All of the major military commands were represented. Mike Leiter led off with a briefing on the U.S. government’s overall strategy against terrorism—a complex web of responsibilities that stretched from diplomatic initiatives and monitoring the money behind the groups to military and covert action.

  I was particularly impressed with a briefing from a three-star navy admiral, Bill McRaven, who led the Joint Special Operations Command. Bill made a big impression with his booming baritone, wide smile, and huge biceps. He methodically went through all of the terrorist hot zones around the world, detailing U.S. military activities in each of these places. Bill’s forces were responsible for, in military parlance, “finding, fixing, and finishing” terrorist targets. They had proved decisive in the efforts against Al Qaeda in Iraq.

  CIA’s briefing was much different, at least in appearance. It was led by Norm, one of Roger’s deputies and a rumpled, soft-spoken career analyst in his fifties, sporting thinning hair, thick glasses, a bit of a paunch, and a loosened tie. But, like McRaven, Norm also brought his A game, quickly breaking down the agency’s efforts against Al Qaeda senior leaders. In essence, he said, our strategy was to put enough pressure on the leaders of Al Qaeda to force them to burrow further underground, take more risks with their communications, or make a mistake. We needed to keep the pressure on. On that point, everyone agreed.

  At the end of the daylong session, the CIA team packed our bags and headed for our charter plane. Jeremy offered to give Mike Leiter a ride, since we had one extra seat in the sixteen-passenger jet. I sat in my usual spot, facing forward on the right side of the aircraft. I asked Mark Welsh to sit across from me so we could review the day. A thunderstorm was booming over Tampa, but Mark assured me it was nothing to worry about. He was an F-16 pilot and one of the air force’s best, so I allowed myself to relax. A few minutes after takeoff, as we were in a steep ascent, the plane bumped violently, a loud “ding” rang out, and the oxygen masks dropped from the ceiling. I looked at Mark.

  “Okay, that’s not good,” he said, not the words one hopes to hear from an F-16 pilot during a bumpy flight. “We should put these on,” he added, gesturing to the masks. For a moment, it occurred to me that this could be how it ends. Thoughts of Sylvia and the boys bounced in my head as I breathed through the mask. The air force steward came racing down the aisle with a heavy binder in his hand, urgently flipping pages in a manual. It didn’t make me feel much better to think that in the middle of an emergency the pilot apparently wanted to look something up.

  And yet I guess he found it, because the plane slowly leveled off. After a minute or two, the captain assured us that all was okay. The oxygen masks dangled there during the entire two hours back to D.C.

  When we got off the plane, Mike Leiter looked at me, white as a sheet, and deadpanned, “That’s the last time I ever ask you for a ride.”

  • • •

  Through the summer and fall of 2009, President Obama and his national security team aggressively searched for a new approach to the war in Afghanistan. The options were infinite in theory, limited in practice. Obama had campaigned as a critic of the Bush administration’s overreliance on military solutions, particularly its conflation of Islam and terrorism. The war in Iraq had been easier to dismiss—“a war of choice” as he called it, distinguishing it from the war in Afghanistan as a “war of necessity.” Now, as president, he sought a new way to prosecute the necessary war. He was prepared to add resources, including troops, but he wanted a plan to end the conflict, leave behind a stable nation, deny refuge to Al Qaeda, and eventually to bring home American forces from the longest war in this nation’s history.

  In one sense, I was peripheral to that debate. It largely centered around troop strength, obviously a matter for the military and the president to decide. And yet the CIA was integral to our efforts in Afghanistan. As a result, I participated in most of the major meetings, particularly at the outset of the review.

  Those conversations touched on many nuances and complications, but they largely boiled down to two questions: How many troops were needed to stabilize Afghanistan, and how long would they have to stay? In turn, both of those questions demanded identification of an objective: Were we in Afghanistan until it was a fully functioning democracy, with respect for human rights and sectarian differences? Or would we be satisfied with a country that could sustain itself and hold its own against the blandishments of current or future terrorist organizations that sought protection there? Finally, what was our posture toward the Taliban? Was it inextricable from Al Qaeda, or could we live with a restored Taliban if that group—whose subjugation of women and imposition of distinctly anti-Western Islamic codes were offensive to most Western values—nevertheless governed without threat to its neighbors or others?

  As those debates occupied the administration in the fall of 2009, I had some distinct advantages over many in the room. While there was disagreement about how to approach the Taliban, there was universal consensus that we needed to spare no effort against the leade
rship of Al Qaeda; I didn’t need to argue much for our work. I prepared a list of items that I believed could help the CIA replicate and extend such operations. I proposed a buildup of CIA operations in the region, continued work on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the expansion of our capabilities that would allow us to find more Al Qaeda fighters in the region.

  I presented our suggestions at a meeting with the president and his national security advisers on October 7, 2009. The general nature of those meetings was that proposals were made and taken under advisement, and that was expected. The president, after all, needs to consider any significant policy determination in the full light of his responsibilities. Commitment to spending in Afghanistan has to be weighed against domestic priorities and competing demands from across the government. In this case, as was often his practice, he jotted notes as I spoke. When I finished with my list of requests, however, the president’s reaction was uncharacteristically and bracingly decisive. “The CIA,” he said, “gets what it wants.” That settled it. I had permission to proceed with my full program.

  Two days later, General Stanley McChrystal’s vision for Afghanistan got its first full airing before the National Security Council. McChrystal, who had submitted his classified review of the war at the end of August, argued for a surge of forty thousand troops. He’d been making that case in sessions with the president and others for weeks, but in response to demands from the White House that he not present the president with just a single proposal, he had—somewhat artificially, in my view—broadened his recommendations to include three: an increase of either ten thousand, forty thousand, or eighty-five thousand soldiers. The last, he said, would allow for a more aggressive and sustained counterinsurgency campaign, while the lowest number would be only enough to provide training for Afghan troops to take the job forward.7 Moreover, Obama had already agreed to an increase of twenty-one thousand troops early in his term, so whatever surge he authorized now would be the second major increase in forces in less than a year—from a president committed to winding the war down, not ratcheting it up.

  Although McChrystal’s options had the appearance of offering the president a choice, there was less of a choice than it seemed. If Obama opted for the increase of ten thousand, the military warned that it could not guarantee Afghanistan’s continued stability, nor train its forces fast enough to let the government there defend itself. That was a trap that Obama could not afford to fall into. At the other extreme, sending eighty-five thousand more soldiers to Afghanistan was beyond the political pale. Authorizing it on top of Obama’s earlier deployment would have meant that the president would have, in a single year, sent more than one hundred thousand soldiers to that war. The cost would be astronomical, the president would break faith with his supporters, and Congress would almost surely reject it.

  The overall picture was that the ten-thousand-troop option wasn’t enough to do the job, and the eighty-five-thousand-troop surge wasn’t economically or politically feasible. In effect, then, the military was giving Obama one choice and making it look like three.

  Making matters worse, McChrystal and other generals had been publicly campaigning for a buildup even as they professed to be giving neutral advice to the president. McChrystal was particularly visible. He had given an interview to 60 Minutes in which he seemed to imply that President Obama was detached from the particulars of the Afghanistan war, and then on October 1 he had delivered a speech in London about the state of the conflict. Afterward, he was asked whether a limited campaign could be successful. “The short answer is no,” he responded. “A strategy that does not leave Afghanistan in a stable position is probably a shortsighted strategy.”8

  Setting aside that McChrystal may well have been right about that, it nevertheless was an ill-advised remark at a time when the president was still considering his options. The military, or at least some of the military’s leading generals, were effectively boxing in their boss. The White House saw this as a coordinated effort to limit the president’s decision space, while Gates saw it as evidence that the Pentagon brass was unable to stay on message. For my part, it seemed that the leading generals saw the problem the same way and weren’t good about keeping quiet, but not that they were organizing a campaign against their president.

  At the meeting on October 9, I tried to draw a distinction between our approach to the Taliban and to Al Qaeda. Yes, they were intertwined, I argued, but our real enemy was Al Qaeda. The Taliban’s affront to the United States was not so much its backward domestic policies—denying girls the right to go to school, for instance. The reason we were at war was because the Taliban had offered Al Qaeda safe haven. If we could grind down Al Qaeda, we’d have much less to fear from the Taliban. That focus, I argued, made some of the other concerns less troubling. Afghan president Hamid Karzai was unpredictable and widely regarded as corrupt, but our mission didn’t need to wait for a perfect president or a flawless government. We needed stability, influence, and a functioning state in order to prevent the lawlessness that would provide fertile earth for dangerous seeds. That was more important than the precise number of troops on the ground or the schedule for the surge and eventual drawdown.

  Others staked out a variety of positions in that and subsequent meetings. The generals consistently maintained that anything less than a surge of forty thousand troops would doom the mission. Vice President Joe Biden challenged that presumption again and again. More than anyone else in those conversations, Biden raised the specter of Vietnam, of incremental increases in commitment without a clear plan or exit strategy. Hillary Clinton, by contrast, was an enthusiastic champion of the military’s proposed increase. She conceded that stepping up America’s military commitment to Afghanistan was no guarantee of victory, but she also forcefully argued that failing to do so virtually guaranteed failure. Gates argued for the surge but, late in the debates, proposed that it could be carried out with between thirty thousand and forty thousand troops, a modest scaling back that helped calm the conversation.

  To me, the debate over troop levels took too long and was too public, especially given that I believed it was destined to end pretty much where the military wanted it to end. Obama was a new president, a Democrat without military experience. For him to defy his military advisers on a matter so central to the success of his foreign policy and so early in his presidency would have represented an almost impossible risk. Bob Gates might have resigned. Worse, the war might have soured, and Obama surely would have been blamed for losing the gains Bush had fought so hard to achieve.

  In the end, Obama accepted Gates’s recommendation, settling on thirty thousand new troops with an emergency reserve of three thousand more, and, more important, moving away from the notion that our mission was to destroy or eliminate the Taliban. Rather, he adopted the formula that our mission was to “disrupt, dismantle, and defeat” Al Qaeda. That struck me as a more focused and achievable aim, and it better reflected America’s interest in the region. We were not there to dictate the specifics of Afghan government; instead, our objective was to prevent the country from lapsing back into the environment that had allowed Al Qaeda to operate there. When Obama lit upon “disrupt, dismantle, and defeat” as our approach to Al Qaeda, I adopted that same language to frame the CIA’s role.

  As for the matter of troop strength, I wasn’t at the table for the final deliberations. That’s mainly because the administration excluded Denny Blair, the director of national intelligence, from the military conversations, and because Blair was responsible for coordinating the intelligence services, protocol prevented me from attending meetings if he was not included. That had the strange effect of forcing the administration to consider the appropriate strategy and staffing for Afghanistan without direct input from the CIA, an unwise example of personnel questions trumping the need for thorough discussion.

  Despite that, I thought the resolution was thoughtful and balanced, even if it was largely preordained. Presenting
it to the public for the first time, on December 1, President Obama eloquently explained his rationale—his reluctance to commit more men and women to a long fight, but also his determination not to walk away too soon, before America’s objectives had been met.

  Obama delivered his address at West Point’s Eisenhower Hall Theatre, and with the cadets before him, he acknowledged that his decision would have profound implications for many of their lives. “I know that this decision asks even more of you—a military that, along with your families, has already borne the heaviest of all burdens,” he said. He described writing letters to the families of fallen soldiers, visiting the wounded at Walter Reed, greeting the caskets at Dover. “If I did not think that the security of the United States and the safety of the American people were at stake in Afghanistan, I would gladly order every single one of our troops home tomorrow.”

  But that security was paramount, he explained, and was threatened by instability in Afghanistan and Pakistan. “This is the epicenter of violent extremism practiced by Al Qaeda. It is from here that we were attacked on 9/11, and it is from here that new attacks are being plotted as I speak. This is no idle danger, no hypothetical threat.”9

  Nine days after announcing his intention to send thirty thousand more soldiers to Afghanistan—and after eleven months of a presidency that had waged a strenuous campaign to thin the ranks of Al Qaeda—Barack Obama received the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. The announcement of that prize had been greeted with a bit of disbelief in Washington, but to his credit, President Obama’s speech accepting it powerfully expressed the truth that peace, sadly, is too often secured only by force.

  • • •

  That same month, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize presided over a concerted campaign to bring down Al Qaeda’s leadership. Two high-ranking Al Qaeda leaders were taken off the battlefield in quick succession. We were recapturing momentum, and I wanted our foot on the gas.