Promised Land (9781524763183)

by Obama Barack

  Still, some hard truths prevented me from rejecting McChrystal’s plan out of hand. The status quo was untenable. We couldn’t afford to let the Taliban return to power, and we needed more time to train more capable Afghan security forces and to root out al-Qaeda and its leadership. As confident as I felt in my own judgment, I couldn’t ignore the unanimous recommendation of experienced generals who’d managed to salvage some measure of stability in Iraq and were already in the thick of the fight in Afghanistan. I therefore asked Jim Jones and Tom Donilon to organize a series of NSC meetings where—away from congressional politics and media grousing—we could methodically work through the details of McChrystal’s proposal, see how they matched up with our previously articulated objectives, and settle on the best way forward.

  As it turned out, the generals had other ideas. Just two days after I received the report, The Washington Post published an interview with David Petraeus in which he declared that any hope for success in Afghanistan would require substantially more troops and a “fully resourced, comprehensive” COIN strategy. About ten days later, fresh off our first discussion of McChrystal’s proposal in the Situation Room, Mike Mullen appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee for a previously scheduled hearing and made the same argument, dismissing any narrower strategy as insufficient to the goal of defeating al-Qaeda and keeping Afghanistan from becoming a future base for attacks against the homeland. A few days after that, on September 21, the Post published a synopsis of McChrystal’s report that had leaked to Bob Woodward, under the headline MCCHRYSTAL: MORE FORCES OR “MISSION FAILURE.” This was followed in short order by McChrystal giving an interview to 60 Minutes and delivering a speech in London, in both instances promoting the merits of his COIN strategy over other alternatives.

  The reaction was predictable. Republican hawks like John McCain and Lindsey Graham seized on the generals’ media blitz, offering the familiar refrain that I should “listen to my commanders on the ground” and fulfill McChrystal’s request. News stories appeared daily, hyping the ever-growing rift between the White House and the Pentagon. Columnists accused me of “dithering” and questioned whether I had the intestinal fortitude to lead a nation during wartime. Rahm remarked that in all his years in Washington, he’d never seen such an orchestrated, public campaign by the Pentagon to box in a president. Biden was more succinct:

  “It’s fucking outrageous.”

  I agreed. It was hardly the first time that disagreements inside my team had spilled into the press. But it was the first instance during my presidency when I felt as if an entire agency under my charge was working its own agenda. I decided it was also going to be the last. Shortly after Mullen’s congressional testimony, I asked him and Gates to see me in the Oval Office.

  “So,” I said after we’d taken our seats and I’d offered them coffee. “Did I not make myself clear about how I wanted time to evaluate McChrystal’s assessment? Or does your building just have a basic lack of respect for me?”

  The two men shifted uncomfortably on the couch. As is usually the case when I’m angry, I didn’t raise my voice.

  “From the day I was sworn in,” I continued, “I’ve gone out of my way to create an environment where everyone’s views are heard. And I think I’ve shown myself willing to make unpopular decisions when I thought it was necessary for our national security. Would you agree with that, Bob?”

  “I would, Mr. President,” Gates said.

  “So, when I set up a process that’s going to decide whether I send tens of thousands more troops into a deadly war zone at the cost of hundreds of billions of dollars, and I see my top military leaders short-circuiting that process to argue their position in public, I have to wonder. Is it because they figure they know better and don’t want to be bothered answering my questions? Is it because I’m young and didn’t serve in the military? Is it because they don’t like my politics…?”

  I paused, letting the question linger. Mullen cleared his throat.

  “I think I speak for all your flag officers, Mr. President,” he said, “when I say we have the highest respect for you and the office.”

  I nodded. “Well, Mike, I’ll take your word on that. And I give you my word that I’ll make my decision about Stan’s proposal based on the Pentagon’s advice and what I believe best serves the interests of this country. But until I do,” I said, leaning in for emphasis, “I’d sure like to stop having my military advisors telling me what I have to do on the front page of the morning paper. Is that fair?”

  He agreed that it was. We moved on to other matters.

  * * *

  —

  LOOKING BACK, I’m inclined to believe Gates when he said there was no coordinated plan by Mullen, Petraeus, or McChrystal to force my hand (although he’d later admit to hearing from a reliable source that someone on McChrystal’s staff had leaked the general’s report to Woodward). I know that all three men were motivated by a sincere conviction in the rightness of their position, and that they considered it to be part of their code as military officers to provide their honest assessment in public testimony or press statements without regard to political consequences. Gates was quick to remind me that Mullen’s outspokenness had aggravated President Bush as well, and he was right to point out that senior officials in the White House were often just as guilty of trying to work the press behind the scenes.

  But I also think that the episode illustrated just how accustomed the military had become to getting whatever it wanted during the Bush years, and the degree to which basic policy decisions—about war and peace, but also about America’s budget priorities, diplomatic goals, and the possible trade-offs between security and other values—had been steadily farmed out to the Pentagon and the CIA. It was easy to see the factors behind this: the impulse after 9/11 to do whatever it took to stop the terrorists and the reluctance of the White House to ask any tough questions that might get in the way; a military forced to clean up the mess that resulted from the decision to invade Iraq; a public that rightly saw the military as more competent and trustworthy than the civilians who were supposed to make policy; a Congress that was chiefly interested in avoiding responsibility for hard foreign policy problems; and a press corps that could be overly deferential to anyone with stars on their shoulders.

  Men like Mullen, Petraeus, McChrystal, and Gates—all of them proven leaders with a singular focus on the hugely difficult tasks before them—had simply filled a vacuum. America had been lucky to have those men in the positions they were in, and when it came to the later phases of the Iraq War, they’d mostly made the right calls. But as I’d told Petraeus that first time we met in Iraq, right before I was elected, it was the job of the president to think broadly, not narrowly, and to weigh the costs and benefits of military action against everything else that went into making the country strong.

  As much as any specific differences over strategy or tactics, such fundamental issues—the civilian control of policy making, the respective roles of the president and his military advisors in our constitutional system, and the considerations each brought to bear in deciding about war—became the subtext of the Afghan debate. And it was on these issues that the differences between me and Gates became more obvious. As one of Washington’s savviest operators, Gates understood as well as anybody congressional pressure, public opinion, and budgetary constraints. But for him, these were obstacles to navigate around, not legitimate factors that should inform our decisions. Throughout the Afghan debate, he was quick to ascribe any objections Rahm or Biden might raise—about the difficulty in rounding up the votes in Congress for the $30 to $40 billion a year in additional spending that McChrystal’s plan might require, or the weariness that the nation might feel after close to a decade of war—as mere “politics.”

  To other people, though never directly to me, Gates would sometimes question my commitment to the war and the strategy I’d adopted back in March, no do
ubt attributing it to “politics” as well. It was hard for him to see that what he dismissed as politics was democracy as it was supposed to work—that our mission had to be defined not only by the need to defeat an enemy but by the need to make sure the country wasn’t bled dry in the process; that questions about spending hundreds of billions on missiles and forward operating bases rather than schools or healthcare for kids weren’t tangential to national security but central to it; that the sense of duty he felt so keenly toward the troops already deployed, his genuine, admirable desire that they be given every chance to succeed, might be matched by the passion and patriotism of those interested in limiting the number of young Americans placed in harm’s way.

  * * *

  —

  MAYBE IT WASN’T Gates’s job to think about those things, but it was mine. And so, from mid-September till mid-November, I presided over a series of nine two-to-three-hour meetings in the Sit Room to evaluate McChrystal’s plan. The sheer length of the deliberations became a story in Washington, and though my talk with Gates and Mullen had put a stop to on-the-record editorializing from the top generals, leaks, anonymous quotes, and speculation continued to appear regularly in the press. I did my best to block out the noise, aided by the knowledge that many of my loudest critics were the same commentators and so-called experts who had actively promoted or been swept up in the rush to invade Iraq.

  Indeed, one of the chief arguments for adopting McChrystal’s plan was its similarities to the COIN strategy Petraeus had used during the U.S. surge in Iraq. As a general matter, Petraeus’s emphasis on training local forces, improving local governance, and protecting local populations—rather than seizing territory and piling up insurgent body counts—made sense. But Afghanistan in 2009 wasn’t Iraq in 2006. The two countries represented different circumstances demanding different solutions. With each Sit Room session, it became clearer that the expansive view of COIN that McChrystal imagined for Afghanistan not only went beyond what was needed to destroy al-Qaeda—it went beyond what was likely achievable within my term of office, if it was achievable at all.

  John Brennan reemphasized that unlike al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Taliban was too deeply woven into the fabric of Afghan society to be eradicated—and that despite their sympathies toward al-Qaeda, they showed no signs of plotting attacks outside Afghanistan against the United States or its allies. Our ambassador in Kabul, former general Karl Eikenberry, doubted that the Karzai government could be reformed and feared that a large troop infusion and further “Americanization” of the war would take all pressure off Karzai to get his act together. McChrystal’s lengthy timetable for both installing troops and pulling them out looked less like an Iraq-style surge than a long-term occupation, leading Biden to ask why—with al-Qaeda in Pakistan and almost entirely targeted with drone strikes—we should commit one hundred thousand troops to rebuilding the country next door.

  In front of me, at least, McChrystal and the other generals dutifully responded to each of these concerns—in some cases persuasively, in others not so much. Despite their patience and good manners, they had trouble hiding their frustration at having their professional judgments challenged, especially by those who’d never put on a uniform. (McChrystal’s eyes narrowed when, on more than one occasion, Biden started explaining to him what was necessary to carry out successful counterterrorism operations.) Tensions between White House staffers and the Pentagon got worse, with NSC staff feeling stonewalled when it came to getting information in a timely fashion and Gates quietly fuming over what he considered to be the NSC’s constant micromanagement. The bad blood even spilled over into relationships within departments. Joint Chiefs vice chairman James “Hoss” Cartwright and Lieutenant General Douglas Lute—an NSC deputy and “war czar” during the final two years of the Bush administration whom I’d asked to stay on—would both see their stock drop inside the Pentagon the minute they agreed to help Biden flesh out a less troop-intensive, more CT-oriented alternative to McChrystal’s plan. Hillary, meanwhile, considered Eikenberry’s end runs around official State Department channels as verging on insubordination and wanted him replaced.

  It’s fair to say, then, that by the third or fourth go-round of PowerPoint slides, battlefield maps, and balky video feeds, along with the ever-present fluorescent lighting, bad coffee, and stale air, everyone was sick of Afghanistan, sick of meetings, and sick of one another. As for me—well, I felt the weight of the office more than at any other time since I’d been sworn in. I tried not to let it show, keeping my expressions neutral as I asked questions, took notes, and occasionally doodled on the margins of the pad the staff had set out before me (abstract patterns, mostly, sometimes people’s faces or beach scenes—a seagull flying over a palm tree and ocean waves). But every so often my frustrations would flare, especially whenever I heard anyone respond to a tough question by falling back on the argument that we needed to send more troops in order to show “resolve.”

  What does that mean exactly? I’d ask, sometimes too sharply. That we keep doubling down on bad decisions we’ve already made? Does anyone think that spinning our wheels in Afghanistan for another ten years will impress our allies and strike fear in our enemies? It reminded me, I’d later tell Denis, of the nursery rhyme about an old lady who swallowed a spider to catch a fly.

  “She ends up swallowing a horse,” I said.

  “And she’s dead, of course,” Denis said.

  Sometimes, after one of these marathon sessions, I’d wander back to the small pool house near the Oval to have a cigarette and soak in the silence, feeling the knots in my back, shoulders, neck—signs of sitting too much, but also of my state of mind. If only the decision on Afghanistan was a matter of resolve, I thought—just will and steel and fire. That had been true for Lincoln as he tried to save the Union, and for FDR after Pearl Harbor, with America and the world facing a mortal threat from expansionist powers. In such circumstances, you harnessed all you had to mount a total war. But in the here and now, the threats we faced—deadly but stateless terrorist networks; otherwise feeble rogue nations out to get weapons of mass destruction—were real but not existential, and so resolve without foresight was worse than useless. It led us to fight the wrong wars and careen down rabbit holes. It made us administrators of inhospitable terrain and bred more enemies than we killed. Because of our unmatched power, America had choices about what and when and how to fight. To claim otherwise, to insist that our safety and our standing in the world required us to do all that we could for as long as we could in every single instance, was an abdication of moral responsibility, the certainty it offered a comforting lie.

  * * *

  —

  AROUND SIX in the morning on October 9, 2009, the White House operator jolted me from sleep to say that Robert Gibbs was on the line. Calls that early from my staff were rare, and my heart froze. Was it a terrorist attack? A natural disaster?

  “You were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize,” Gibbs said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “They just announced it a few minutes ago.”

  “For what?”

  Gibbs tactfully ignored the question. Favs would be waiting outside the Oval to work with me on whatever statement I wanted to make, he said. After I hung up, Michelle asked what the call was about.

  “I’m getting the Nobel Peace Prize.”

  “That’s wonderful, honey,” she said, then rolled over to get a little more shut-eye.

  An hour and a half later, Malia and Sasha stopped by the dining room as I was having breakfast. “Great news, Daddy,” Malia said, hitching her backpack over her shoulders. “You won the Nobel Prize…and it’s Bo’s birthday!”

  “Plus, it’s gonna be a three-day weekend!” Sasha added, doing a little fist pump. They both kissed me on the cheek before heading out the door for school.

  In the Rose Garden, I told the assembled press corps that less than a year into my presidency, I
didn’t feel that I deserved to be in the company of those transformative figures who’d been honored in the past. Instead, I saw the prize as a call to action, a means for the Nobel committee to give momentum to causes for which American leadership was vital: reducing the threats of nuclear weapons and climate change; shrinking economic inequality; upholding human rights; and bridging the racial, ethnic, and religious divides that so often fed conflict. I said I thought the award should be shared with others around the world who labored, often without recognition, for justice, peace, and human dignity.

  Walking back into the Oval, I asked Katie to hold the congratulatory calls that were starting to come in and took a few minutes to consider the widening gap between the expectations and the realities of my presidency. Six days earlier, three hundred Afghan militants had overrun a small U.S. military outpost in the Hindu Kush, killing eight of our soldiers and wounding twenty-seven more. October would become the deadliest month for U.S. troops in Afghanistan since the start of the war eight years earlier. And rather than ushering in a new era of peace, I was facing the prospect of committing more soldiers to war.

  * * *

  —

  LATE THAT MONTH, Attorney General Eric Holder and I took a midnight flight to Dover Air Force Base, in Delaware, to witness the return to U.S. soil of the remains of fifteen U.S. soldiers and three drug enforcement agents who’d been killed in back-to-back incidents in Afghanistan—a deadly helicopter crash and two roadside bombings in Kandahar Province. A president’s attendance at these “dignified transfers,” as they were called, was rare, but I thought it important, now more than ever, to be present. Since the Gulf War, the Defense Department had barred media coverage of the homecomings of service members’ caskets, but with the help of Bob Gates, I’d reversed this policy earlier in the year—leaving the decision to individual families. Having at least some of these transfers publicly documented, I felt, gave our country a clearer means to reckon with the costs of war, the pain of each loss. And on this night, at the end of a devastating month in Afghanistan, with the future of the war under debate, one of the families had elected to have the moment recorded.