by Obama Barack
There was a constant hush throughout the four or five hours I was on the base. In the small, plain chapel, where Holder and I joined the families who had gathered. Inside the cargo bay of the C-17 aircraft that held the eighteen flag-draped transfer cases, where an army chaplain’s solemn prayer echoed against the metallic walls. On the tarmac, where we stood at attention and watched six pallbearers dressed in army fatigues, white gloves, and black berets carry the heavy cases one by one to the rows of waiting vehicles, the world silent except for the howl of wind and the cadence of steps.
On the flight back, with sunrise still a few hours away, the only words I could remember from the entire visit were those of one soldier’s mother: “Don’t leave those boys who are still over there hanging.” She looked exhausted, her face hollowed by grief. I promised I wouldn’t, not knowing whether that meant sending more soldiers to finish the mission for which her son had made the ultimate sacrifice, or winding down a muddled and lengthy conflict that would cut short the lives of other people’s children. It was left for me to decide.
A week later, another disaster struck our military, this time closer to home. On November 5, a U.S. Army major and psychiatrist named Nidal Hasan walked into a building at the Fort Hood army base in Killeen, Texas, pulled out a semiautomatic pistol he’d purchased at a local gun store, and opened fire, killing thirteen people and wounding scores of others before being shot and apprehended by base police officers. Once again, I flew to comfort grieving families, then spoke at an outdoor memorial service. As a trumpet played taps, its plaintive melody punctuated by muffled sobs in the audience, my eyes traveled the memorials to the fallen soldiers: a framed photograph, a pair of empty combat boots, a helmet set atop a rifle.
I thought about what John Brennan and FBI director Robert Mueller had told me in briefings on the shooting: Hasan, a U.S.-born Muslim with a troubling record of erratic behavior, appeared to have been radicalized over the internet. In particular, he’d been inspired by—and repeatedly sent emails to—a charismatic Yemeni American cleric named Anwar al-Awlaki, who had a broad international following and was believed to be the leading figure in al-Qaeda’s increasingly active branch in Yemen. According to Mueller and Brennan, there were early indications that the Defense Department, the FBI, and the Joint Terrorism Task Force had all been alerted in one way or another to Hasan’s possible drift toward radicalism, but that interagency information-sharing systems had failed to connect the dots in a way that might have headed off the tragedy.
The eulogies ended. Taps began again. Across Fort Hood, I imagined soldiers busily preparing for deployments to Afghanistan and the fight against the Taliban. And I couldn’t help but wonder whether the greater threat might now actually lie elsewhere—not just in Yemen or Somalia but also in the specter of homegrown terrorism; in the febrile minds of men like Hasan and a borderless cyberworld, the power and reach of which we didn’t yet fully comprehend.
* * *
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IN LATE NOVEMBER 2009, we held our ninth and final Afghan review session. For all the drama, the substantive differences between members of my team had by this point shrunk considerably. The generals conceded that eradicating the Taliban from Afghanistan was unrealistic. Joe and my NSC staff acknowledged that CT operations against al-Qaeda couldn’t work if the Taliban overran the country or inhibited our intelligence collection. We landed on a set of achievable objectives: reducing the level of Taliban activity so they didn’t threaten major population centers; pushing Karzai to reform a handful of key departments, like the Ministries of Defense and Finance, rather than trying to get him to revamp the entire government; accelerating the training of local forces that would eventually allow the Afghan people to secure their own country.
The team also agreed that meeting even these more modest objectives was going to require additional U.S. troops.
The only remaining dispute was how many and for how long. The generals continued to hold out for McChrystal’s original request of forty thousand, without providing a good explanation for why the more limited set of objectives we’d agreed to didn’t reduce by a single soldier the number of troops needed. The “CT Plus” option that Biden had worked up with Hoss Cartwright and Douglas Lute called for another twenty thousand troops to be devoted solely to CT operations and training—but it wasn’t clear why either of those functions needed anything close to that many extra U.S. personnel. In both cases, I worried that the numbers were still being driven by ideological and institutional concerns rather than by the objectives we’d set.
Ultimately it was Gates who came up with a workable resolution. In a private memo to me, he explained that McChrystal’s request anticipated the United States replacing the ten thousand Dutch and Canadian troops their governments had pledged to bring home. If I authorized three brigades, for a total of thirty thousand U.S. troops, it might be possible to use that commitment to leverage the other ten thousand from our allies. Gates also agreed that we treat any infusion of new troops more as a surge than an open-ended commitment, both by accelerating the pace of their arrival and by setting a timetable of eighteen months for them to start coming home.
For me, Gates’s acceptance of a timetable was particularly significant. In the past, he’d joined the Joint Chiefs and Petraeus in resisting the idea, claiming that timetables signaled to the enemy that they could wait us out. He was now persuaded that Karzai might never make hard decisions about his own government’s responsibilities absent the knowledge that we’d be bringing troops home sooner rather than later.
After talking it over with Joe, Rahm, and the NSC staff, I decided to adopt Gates’s proposal. There was a logic to it that went beyond simply splitting the difference between McChrystal’s plan and the option Biden had worked up. In the short term, it gave McChrystal the firepower he needed to reverse the Taliban’s momentum, protect population centers, and train up Afghan forces. But it set clear limits to COIN and put us firmly on the path of a narrower CT approach two years out. Haggling remained over how firm to make the thirty-thousand-troop cap (the Pentagon had a habit of deploying the approved number and then coming back with requests for thousands of “enablers”—medics, intelligence officers, and the like—which, it insisted, shouldn’t count toward the total), and it took some time for Gates to sell the approach in his building. But a few days after Thanksgiving, I called an evening meeting in the Oval with Gates, Mullen, and Petraeus, as well as Rahm, Jim Jones, and Joe, where, in essence, I had everyone sign on the dotted line. NSC staffers had prepared a detailed memo outlining my order, and along with Rahm and Joe they’d persuaded me that having the Pentagon brass look me in the eye and commit to an agreement laid out on paper was the only way to avoid their publicly second-guessing my decision if the war went south.
It was an unusual and somewhat heavy-handed gesture, one that no doubt grated on Gates and the generals and that I regretted almost immediately. A fitting end, I thought, to a messy, difficult stretch for my administration. I could take some satisfaction, though, in the fact that the review had served its purpose. Gates acknowledged that without producing a perfect plan, the hours of debate had made for a better plan. It forced us to refine America’s strategic objectives in Afghanistan in a way that prevented mission creep. It established the utility of timetables for troop deployments in certain circumstances, something that had been long contested by the Washington national security establishment. Beyond putting an end to Pentagon freelancing for the duration of my presidency, it helped reaffirm the larger principle of civilian control over America’s national security policy making.
Still, the bottom line was that I’d be sending more young people to war.
We announced the planned troop deployment on December 1 at West Point, the oldest and most storied of America’s service academies. A Continental Army post during the Revolutionary War, a little over an hour north of New York City, it’s a beautiful place—a series of black-an
d-gray granite structures arranged like a small city high among green rolling hills, with a view over the broad and winding Hudson River. Before my speech, I visited with the West Point superintendent and glimpsed some of the buildings and grounds that had produced a who’s who of America’s most decorated military leaders: Grant and Lee, Patton and Eisenhower, MacArthur and Bradley, Westmoreland and Schwarzkopf.
It was impossible not to be humbled and moved by the tradition those men represented, the service and sacrifice that had helped forge a nation, defeat fascism, and halt the march of totalitarianism. Just as it was necessary to recall that Lee had led a Confederate Army intent on preserving slavery and Grant had overseen the slaughter of Indian tribes; that MacArthur had defied Truman’s orders in Korea to disastrous effect and Westmoreland had helped orchestrate an escalation in Vietnam that would scar a generation. Glory and tragedy, courage and stupidity—one set of truths didn’t negate the other. For war was contradiction, as was the history of America.
The large auditorium near the center of West Point’s campus was full by the time I arrived, and aside from VIPs like Gates, Hillary, and the Joint Chiefs, the audience was made up almost entirely of cadets. They were in uniform: gray tunics with black trim over white collars. The sizable number of Blacks, Latinos, Asian Americans, and women in their ranks offered vivid testimony to the changes that had taken place since the school graduated its first class in 1805. As I entered the stage to a band playing the ceremonial ruffles and flourishes, the cadets stood in unison and applauded; and looking out at their faces—so earnest and full of the glow of youth, so certain of their destiny and eager to defend their country—I felt my heart swell with an almost paternal pride. I just prayed that I and the others who commanded them were worthy of their trust.
* * *
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NINE DAYS LATER, I flew to Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. The image of those young cadets weighed on me. Rather than ignore the tension between getting a peace prize and expanding a war, I decided to make it the centerpiece of my acceptance address. With the help of Ben Rhodes and Samantha Power, I wrote a first draft, drawing on the writings of thinkers like Reinhold Niebuhr and Gandhi to organize my argument: that war is both terrible and sometimes necessary; that reconciling these seemingly contradictory ideas requires the community of nations to evolve higher standards for both the justification and the conduct of war; and that avoidance of war requires a just peace, founded on a common commitment to political freedom, a respect for human rights, and concrete strategies to expand economic opportunity around the world. I finished writing the speech in the dead of night aboard Air Force One as Michelle slept in our cabin, my weary eyes drawn away from the page every so often by the sight of a spectral moon over the Atlantic.
Like everything in Norway, the Nobel ceremony—held in a brightly lit auditorium seating a few hundred people—was sensibly austere: There was a lovely performance by the young jazz artist Esperanza Spalding, an introduction by the head of the Nobel committee, and then my address, all finished in around ninety minutes. The speech itself was well received, even by some conservative commentators who remarked on my willingness to remind European audiences of the sacrifices made by U.S. troops in underwriting decades of peace. That evening, the Nobel committee hosted a black-tie dinner in my honor, where I was seated next to the king of Norway, a gracious, elderly man who told me about sailing through his country’s fjords. My sister Maya, along with friends like Marty and Anita, had flown in to join us, and everyone looked very sophisticated as they sipped champagne and chewed on grilled elk and later danced to a surprisingly good swing orchestra.
What I remember most, though, was a scene that took place before dinner, at the hotel. Michelle and I had just finished getting dressed when Marvin knocked on the door and told us to look out our fourth-story window. Pulling back the shades, we saw that several thousand people had gathered in the early dusk, filling the narrow street below. Each person held aloft a single lit candle—the city’s traditional way to express its appreciation for that year’s peace prize winner. It was a magical sight, as if a pool of stars had descended from the sky; and as Michelle and I leaned out to wave, the night air brisk on our cheeks, the crowd cheering wildly, I couldn’t help but think about the daily fighting that continued to consume Iraq and Afghanistan and all the cruelty and suffering and injustice that my administration had barely even begun to deal with. The idea that I, or any one person, could bring order to such chaos seemed laughable; on some level, the crowds below were cheering an illusion. And yet, in the flickering of those candles, I saw something else. I saw an expression of the spirit of millions of people around the world: the U.S. soldier manning a post in Kandahar, the mother in Iran teaching her daughter to read, the Russian pro-democracy activist mustering his courage for an upcoming demonstration—all those who refused to give up on the idea that life could be better, and that whatever the risks and hardships, they had a role to play.
Whatever you do won’t be enough, I heard their voices say.
Try anyway.
CHAPTER 19
RUNNING FOR THE PRESIDENCY, I’d promised Americans a different kind of foreign policy than the sort we’d been practicing since 9/11. Iraq and Afghanistan offered stark lessons in how quickly a president’s options narrowed once a war had begun. I was determined to shift a certain mindset that had gripped not just the Bush administration but much of Washington—one that saw threats around every corner, took a perverse pride in acting unilaterally, and considered military action as an almost routine means of addressing foreign policy challenges. In our interactions with other nations, we had become obdurate and shortsighted, resistant to the hard, slow work of building coalitions and consensus. We’d closed ourselves off from other points of view. I believed that America’s security depended on strengthening our alliances and international institutions. I saw military action as a tool of last, not first, resort.
We had to manage the wars we were in. But I also wanted to put this broader faith in diplomacy to the test.
It began with a change in tone. From the start of my administration, we made sure that every foreign policy statement coming out of the White House emphasized the importance of international cooperation and America’s intention to engage other nations, big and small, on the basis of mutual interest and respect. We looked for small but symbolic ways to shift policy—like boosting the international affairs budget at the State Department or bringing the United States out of arrears on its U.N. dues after several years in which the Bush administration and the Republican-controlled Congress had withheld certain payments.
Consistent with the adage that 80 percent of success is a matter of showing up, we also made a point of visiting parts of the world that had been neglected by the Bush administration, with its all-consuming focus on terrorism and the Middle East. Hillary, in particular, was a whirlwind that first year, hopping from continent to continent as doggedly as she’d once campaigned for the presidency. Seeing the excitement her visits generated in foreign capitals, I felt vindicated in my decision to appoint her as America’s top diplomat. It wasn’t just that she was treated as a peer by world leaders. Wherever she went, the public saw her presence in their country as a sign that they really mattered to us.
“If we want other countries to support our priorities,” I told my NSC team, “we can’t just bully them into it. We’ve got to show them we’re taking their perspectives into account—or at least can find them on a map.”
To be known. To be heard. To have one’s unique identity recognized and seen as worthy. It was a universal human desire, I thought, as true for nations and peoples as it was for individuals. If I understood that basic truth more than some of my predecessors, perhaps it was because I’d spent a big chunk of my childhood abroad and had family in places long considered “backward” and “underdeveloped.” Or maybe it was because as an African American, I’d experienced what it was
like not to be fully seen inside my own country.
Whatever the reason, I made a point of showing an interest in the history, culture, and people of the places we visited. Ben joked that my overseas speeches could be reduced to a simple algorithm: “[Greeting in foreign language—often badly pronounced.] It’s wonderful to be in this beautiful country that’s made lasting contributions to world civilization. [List of stuff.] There’s a long history of friendship between our two nations. [Inspiring anecdote.] And it’s in part due to the contributions of the millions of proud [hyphenated Americans] whose ancestors immigrated to our shores that the United States is the nation it is today.” It might have been corny, but the smiles and nods of foreign audiences showed the extent to which simple acts of acknowledgment mattered.
For the same reason, we tried to include some high-profile sightseeing on all my foreign trips, something to get me out of hotels and beyond the palace gates. My interest in touring Istanbul’s Blue Mosque or visiting a local eatery in Ho Chi Minh City, I knew, would make a far more lasting impression on the average Turkish or Vietnamese citizen than any bilateral meeting or press conference talking point. Just as important, these stops gave me a chance to interact at least a little with ordinary people rather than just government officials and wealthy elites, who in many countries were viewed as out of touch.
