Running for president in 2008, the forty-seven-year-old Obama, then a senator, knew the dark history of the Vietnam War. How could he not, running against “Hanoi Hilton” POW John McCain? McCain continually challenged Obama’s determination on the wars, contrasting what he cast as his opponent’s lack of commitment with his own pledge to stay the course and back U.S. troops. “We are going to win in Iraq and win in Afghanistan, and our troops will come home with victory and honor,” McCain said in a November 3, 2008, election eve speech in Miami, Florida.
Facing the prospect of inheriting not one but two insurgency wars, Obama asserted during the 2008 presidential campaign that he would not make the mistakes previous wartime presidents ( Johnson, Nixon, and George W. Bush) had made. Obama pledged that, as president, he’d shut down Bush’s war in Iraq within sixteen months. Instead, Obama said, he would turn the nation’s focus with renewed vigor back on the United States’ primary foes—Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and any nation or people that harbored terrorists. He’d put a full-court press on Afghanistan, kill bin Laden, and bring American soldiers back home as soon as he possibly could. That would be peace with honor.
“We will bring this war [in Iraq] to an end. We will focus our attention on Afghanistan,” Obama repeated at one campaign stop after another.
But like Richard Nixon in 1969, the newly elected president now had to deliver on his rhetoric. The Bush administration had never come up with a clear strategy for Afghanistan. The rapid overthrow of the Taliban just months after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the influx of Afghan expatriates returning home gave rise to optimism. A handpicked, westernized Pashtun politician named Hamid Karzai was chosen as Afghanistan’s interim president by a loya jirga, or assembly of delegates, in 2002. But soon complacency over a seeming victory led to the bungling of the war effort’s critical last phase—stabilizing a new legitimate power and getting out. In the months and years to come, as the White House shifted its attention and resources to Iraq, stability operations in Afghanistan would be badly neglected.
In March 2003, Bush ordered the U.S. military invasion of Iraq and the toppling of dictator Saddam Hussein. Despite Bush’s May Day 2003 “mission accomplished” speech, the administration again demonstrated the lack of a realistic plan for stabilizing the country. Instead, borrowing from the post–World War II model, the administration put in place an autocratic chief executive to oversee the occupation of Iraq until popular elections could be held. Bush chose a former assistant to Henry Kissinger at the State Department during the Nixon and Ford administrations, Paul “Jerry” Bremer, as head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA)—essentially making him the governor of Iraq.
Bremer’s disastrous edicts—to disband Iraq’s military and forbid any former member of Hussein’s Ba’ath Party to hold a public sector job—helped ignite another insurgency. Pentagon minds grappled with ideas for stanching the post-Saddam bloodshed to little avail. At last, after the carnage of four years of insurgency and sectarian strife, they turned to Petraeus, putting in charge a creative general with a bold strategy to turn things around.
As all major U.S. military resources flowed to Iraq, Afghanistan’s Taliban had steadily resurged and Osama bin Laden remained at large. In a sobering report delivered to the White House in August 2009, the senior commander in Afghanistan, Gen. McChrystal, warned Obama that the military coalition had fought to a stalemate. The Taliban was seizing new territory. After exhaustive analysis and debate about the controversial report—inside and outside the government—Obama in November prepared for the Oval Office meeting with his top advisors.
Like Nixon in 1969, Obama faced a decision whether or not to escalate the war. He could dispatch tens of thousands more troops in a full-blown counterinsurgency campaign to try to defeat the Taliban, or he could wage a far more narrow counterterrorism strategy targeting Al Qaeda that relied heavily on aerial drone strikes with only small numbers of American boots on the ground. The first option risked entanglement in a protracted, labor-intensive, costly war that the American public was unlikely to stomach. The second raised the chances that Afghanistan would revert to civil war and suffer a Taliban comeback. Obama’s advisors were deeply divided between the two camps of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism.
Military commanders were pressing for a troop buildup in Afghanistan. Without significantly more troops, the campaign would “likely result in failure,” said McChrystal’s sixty-six-page report, which was leaked to the Washington Post in late September.
McChrystal and other top military advisors—chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Michael Mullen, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and Central Command chief Petraeus—lobbied for sending forty thousand fresh U.S. troops to the country for a robust counterinsurgency campaign. More troops were vital to bring enduring security and governance to the Afghan people and flush out the Taliban, they argued. The greatest challenge would be shoring up the government given serious doubts about the leadership of President Karzai. Karzai’s administration had been accused of fraud in the 2009 presidential elections, and his family had been implicated in major corruption scandals as well as in Afghanistan’s vast opium trade.
Another camp of Obama advisors, led by Vice President Joseph Biden, argued strenuously against a big troop influx. Instead, Biden called for focusing on targeted counterterrorism operations to degrade leaders of the Taliban and Al Qaeda along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and elsewhere. Meanwhile, the strategy would boost training of Afghan security forces and reconciliation efforts to persuade Taliban fighters to give up their arms. Biden argued that the U.S. public lacked the political will for a drawn-out escalation of the Afghanistan war; instead, in a process similar to “Vietnamization,” the Afghans would take over.
Both strategies had serious drawbacks. Obama knew that the public’s patience with the war was wearing thin. Recent polls showed that most Americans had concluded that the war was not even worth fighting. And the public was solidly against sending any more troops to the landlocked country where U.S. forces had been fighting for more than eight years. Such sentiments were overwhelming within the president’s Democratic Party, with seven in ten Democrats saying the war was not worth the cost, and fewer than one in five supporting a troop increase.
The cost of the war was another huge factor on the president’s mind. With the country still emerging from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the price tag of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was $1 trillion and counting. One report projected that another ten years in Afghanistan would double that cost. Obama wanted to engage in nation building in the United States, not in an impoverished Central Asian country whose economy was dominated by the opium poppy.
Instead of focusing on what the options lacked, Obama worked the problem pragmatically. If he did not commit to a troop surge, a promise he had made during his campaign and one he was reluctant to abandon, military hawks would accuse him of not giving them the opportunity to win the war. Petraeus had had great success with his COIN program in Iraq. To refuse to give the military the chance to apply the same principles in Afghanistan would deny the United States the chance to exit the war with honor. But Obama decided it would be a mistake to give the generals the expectation that he would be open to additional future troop commitments, concerned they would ask for more forces year after year, and Afghanistan would turn into as much of a quagmire as Vietnam. What Obama wanted was to give the military enough support to deal a fatal blow to the Taliban and get Afghanistan back on track, but no more.
It was a mild Washington Sunday, late in the afternoon, when Obama called the small circle of defense advisors into the Oval Office to tell them what he had decided. Present were Biden, National Security Advisor Jim Jones, Gates, Mullen, Petraeus, and a handful of others. The time for debate, he had made it clear, was over. He was essentially issuing an order.
The core goal of the strategy, Obama told them, was still to defeat Al Qaeda and deny the ter
rorist organization a safe haven in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But, he explained, the means to accomplish that goal in Afghanistan would be neither a full-fledged COIN strategy nor a light-footprint CT approach. It would be a combination of both, a surge of thirty thousand troops coupled with intensified, targeted raids. The intention was to weaken the Taliban and reduce its territory to the point where Afghan security forces could take over.
Then came the catch that surprised them all: they had eighteen months.
Obama told his advisors that the surge troops would flow in as rapidly as possible but would begin coming home in July 2011. This would not be an open-ended war, Obama stressed. There would be no blank check. Obama turned to Gates, Mullen, and Petraeus and asked them if they agreed with his plan. All voiced their support.
But the July 2011 deadline was troubling, particularly for Petraeus and many U.S. military commanders on the ground. The timeline was unreasonably short to anyone familiar with the history of counterinsurgencies, which historically had lasted on average more than a decade. Once Obama’s clock became public knowledge, it would be hugely discouraging to Afghans who had sided with the U.S. military—and emboldening to the enemy.
During the meeting with the president, Petraeus mentally calculated how difficult it would be to make adequate headway by the time eighteen months rolled around. “I was concerned,” he said later. “It was not about making progress faster; rather it was about making progress, period. The Taliban was very much on the march in 2008, 2009, and 2010, and we needed to halt their momentum.” Key to doing that, Petraeus knew, would be to recruit a local Afghan security force. He thought of the plan outlined in Jim’s paper “One Tribe at a Time.” Small teams of Special Forces soldiers would eat, sleep, and live with tribesmen while training them and empowering them to defend their homes. In that way, the teams together with the tribes could cover large parts of rural Afghanistan and rapidly accelerate the traditional COIN timeline. It was all about relationships. If highly trained American soldiers could forge bonds of trust with the tribes, they could help the tribes regain control over their territory and push out the Taliban.
“It was hugely important . . . at a time when I was looking for ideas on Afghanistan,” Petraeus recalled later. Others within the military had discussed the concept of grassroots security in Afghanistan, but Jim “was the first to write it down, in a very coherent fashion, very readable, very encouraging frankly . . . and there is enormous power in that,” he said. Petraeus, McChrystal, and others made the paper a strategic catalyst for a bottom-up approach to security, according to several officers involved, using it to lay the groundwork as they began to formulate a plan for raising local forces nationwide.
Village by village and tribe by tribe, success could buy more time. Petraeus had pushed a grassroots security plan in Iraq that helped turn the tide of that war—and he intended to do the same thing in Afghanistan. The president wouldn’t pull the plug on a winner—especially when the footprint and cost were so small and the payoff so large.
CHAPTER 4
“BREAK LEFT,” PETRAEUS ORDERED through a headset to the Black Hawk helicopter pilot.
“Hold on, Ann!” the wiry four-star general said, turning to me. I braced my feet against the floor and tugged on the shoulder belts strapping me into the seat beside him.
The chopper banked steeply, then leveled out and skimmed low over the rectangular tan rooftops and palm trees of downtown Baghdad. It was near dusk, and the war-torn city of seven million people, the second largest in the Arab world, sprawled out flat and bronze beneath us as far as the eye could see in the desert haze.
It was April 2007, just three months into the Bush administration’s surge of more than 20,000 U.S. troops to bolster the 140,000 already in Iraq. Suicide bomb explosions and gunfire rocked Baghdad daily. I had been reporting on the war since the first day, embedded with the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division as it spearheaded the invasion to topple Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, and this was the worst I’d seen it.
I’d flown into the Iraqi capital a few days earlier on a sleek C-17 Globemaster with Defense Secretary Robert Gates, covering his latest swing through the Middle East in my role as Pentagon correspondent for the Washington Post. In Baghdad, Gates was pressing Iraq’s leaders to push through political compromises between rival Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish factions. I was relieved to escape the security bubble that isolated Gates and his official entourage, which whisked reporters from five-star hotels to high-level meetings with just enough time in between to spoon-feed us a few quotes at the airport VIP lounge. Occasionally we were invited to have drinks with Gates at a hotel bar—off the record. He would roll up his shirtsleeves and regale us with stories of Cold War intrigue, giving a personal glimpse of the man behind the Pentagon briefing room podium. But the former CIA chief always played his cards close to his vest. The traveling press cocktail circuit was never my idea of reporting. Now I was headed back into the streets of Baghdad with ground troops, where I felt most comfortable. First, though, I would get Petraeus’s view from three hundred feet.
I watched Petraeus gaze out the window onto the city, a maelstrom of violence and sectarian killing that he, as the new top U.S. commander in Iraq, had the mission of quelling. His angular face was taut. Five full U.S. combat brigades were flowing into Iraq, most of them bound for Baghdad. Thousands of troops were fanning out into dozens of tiny outposts in neighborhoods across the city in an effort to increase security for the Iraqi population—a key tenet of Petraeus’s counterinsurgency plan.
Petraeus was largely responsible for the Army’s new COIN doctrine, Field Manual 3-24, published in December 2006. He was involved at every stage from conceptualizing the strategy, to deciding on key content, to personally editing several chapters dozens of times. A core part of the doctrine was what Petraeus referred to as “counterinsurgency math”—namely, that victory against an insurgency required approximately one security force member for every forty to fifty people in the country. His Iraq strategy aimed to put enough U.S. troops into position in neighborhoods to protect Iraqi civilians and also strengthen the capabilities of Iraqi security forces and local governments. That, in turn, was intended to enable ordinary Iraqis to feel safe enough to provide intelligence on insurgents, or stand up to the enemy themselves.
That evening, Petraeus wanted to convince me that his plan was beginning to work—just in time for me to write a front-page story for the Sunday edition of the Washington Post.
It was part of Petraeus’s pragmatic public agenda: speeding up the Baghdad clock by intensifying military operations on the ground, while slowing down the political clock in Washington by demonstrating enough progress to buy more time to try to win the war. It was essentially the same tactic he would later use in Afghanistan.
Petraeus was a master with the media, unlike many others who seemed intimidated by reporters. No other general officer I knew moved so fluidly from on the record to deep background to off the record—sometimes in a single sentence. One of his tactics—I learned the hard way—was to wax pedantic, eating up all of the reporter’s time. Late that afternoon, in a conference room on the grounds of one of Hussein’s old palaces, I had interviewed Petraeus for more than an hour on the fine points of his strategy. He answered my first question with a monologue that ran on for ten minutes. Finally I cut in and blurted out another question.
“Sir, I’ve got to interrupt you here—why have the Iraqi forces been so sluggish moving into Baghdad?”
One of Petraeus’s military aides, sitting at the table beside him, burst out laughing.
“We’re very glad you interrupted,” he said.
“Yeah,” Petraeus admitted with a grin. “I’m trying to run down the Washington Post clock!”
Still, I had to admire Petraeus’s encyclopedic grasp of detail about Iraq. Brilliant and ambitious, Petraeus was already gaining a reputation in military circles as one of the most talented American generals of his generation. What was unusual about Pe
traeus’s rise was that he was a true scholar—the kind normally shunned by the Army brass. A West Point graduate with a doctorate in international relations from Princeton, he had survived the Army’s anti-intellectual culture with the support of powerful mentors. Now Petraeus faced the toughest challenge of his career—putting his cerebral war strategy into action, with countless American and Iraqi lives at risk.
As the interview wrapped up, Petraeus unexpectedly turned to me.
“How would you like to go for a ride?” he said.
“Sure,” I answered, surprised.
“Let’s go,” he said. I followed him to the flight line, where his helicopter was waiting, the warm blast from its rotor blades whipping our clothes and hair.
We ducked and climbed through the open side door. Petraeus took a seat by the window, motioned to me to sit next to him, and handed me a headset with a pair of light green earphones and a microphone.
“You got me?” he asked through the mouthpiece, making sure I could hear him.
“Yep,” I said, and gave him a thumbs-up.
We lifted off, and Petraeus began a running commentary as he studied the neighborhoods below, looking for signs of normalcy.
After one turn, he caught sight of a patch of relative calm. “He’s actually watering the grass!” Petraeus said excitedly, peering down at a man tending a soccer field, with children playing nearby.
And so it went, all around the city. Telling the pilot to “break left” and “roll out,” he scrutinized the landscape for even tiny improvements—a pile of picked-up garbage, an Iraqi police car out on patrol, a short line at one gas station—as if gathering mental ammunition that would help him deal with the next wave of carnage in Baghdad. An amusement park, its rides lit up, merited a full circle.
American Spartan Page 3