The World as It Is

by Ben Rhodes

  “Why is this whole thing being framed around whether I have any balls?” Obama asked a small group of us in the Oval.

  He had begun to call us up there every now and then to recap what had gone on in the meetings downstairs. “I think it’s clear I care about Afghanistan, because I’m spending all this time trying to get it right.” We nodded in agreement.

  As would often be the case, he vented about things that he could not really change, the structural dynamic in Washington that sees politics as a game and foreign policy as an extension of politics. Turning serious, he reiterated that he was willing to send in more troops, he told us, but he was worried about sustainability. The chart that the military used to plot the troop requests showed our commitment to Afghanistan going up to about a hundred thousand troops over the next two years—and then staying there indefinitely. McChrystal assessed that we would need a substantial force for four years, until the Afghan Security Forces would be able to take the lead. Meanwhile, Eikenberry was arguing that the Afghan government would never get its act together if it felt as if we were going to be staying forever.

  “This is going to cost a lot of money and a lot of lives,” Obama said, kicking off one of the final Situation Room meetings. “Am I going to see kids who had their legs blown off at Walter Reed and Bethesda in eight years?” The room was quiet. He held up the chart showing the forty thousand troops sent into Afghanistan and staying there, a line that hit a plateau, a line that represented lives forever changed. “You keep giving me the same option,” he said. “I can’t sell this. It will be six years until we’re essentially back to where we are now.” Speaking as the only one who had to think about everything the U.S. government has to do around the world, he said, “A six-to-eight-year war at over fifty billion dollars a year is not in the national interest. The Petraeus surge [in Iraq] was much quicker than that. This has to be a surge like that.”

  Biden chimed in, “That’s goddamn right.” He argued that we should put in no more than the smallest force necessary to do counterterrorism—no more than ten thousand troops.

  Obama asked each of the principals for their final recommendation, and one by one they endorsed McChrystal’s troop request. Clinton said we needed to show resolve and “act like we’re going to win.” Gates supported the recommendation, while agreeing with Obama that the military would need clear timelines—a concession to Obama’s view. Mullen gave his strong endorsement, adding that by mid-2011 we’d either be “winning or losing.” Petraeus, the intellectual architect of the approach, simply said that he agreed with Gates, Clinton, and Mullen. Brennan gave the best summary of what we ended up doing. He noted that we’d have to sustain our ability to go after al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan and train Afghan Security Forces, all of which required more troops for some time. But he noted that it would take “at least a generation” to transform Afghanistan, and that we needed to stick to more modest goals. I said nothing.

  Obama said he’d think about it. He told me to get started on the outline of a speech. On Thanksgiving, I sat in my dad’s home office—which had once been my childhood bedroom—and started to work on it as my family watched football in the other room. While my parents were filled with pride at my new position, giving toasts over dinner to the health of the president of the United States, my mind was far away, on the computer screen that held a barely begun speech, and I had no idea how to explain to them what it was I’d been doing. Instead, I wanted to talk about anything else. The next day I was back at work.

  Obama called me up to the Oval Office. It was just the two of us, standing near the door, and he asked me what I thought he should do. In the short silence that followed, I felt the full weight of his question—for weeks, I’d sat along the back bench, filled with opinions about what was being said. Now, a man with the authority to send troops to fight a war was asking me what I thought. I was hesitant—I was too new at this; I had a sense of which arguments held together best, but I didn’t feel it was possible for me to predict what was going to take place in Afghanistan.

  “I agree with Brennan,” I finally said. “You need a surge to push back the Taliban. But the goal should be to target al Qaeda, train the Afghans, and then have a transition.” I was describing how we would articulate the strategy more than I was making a recommendation. I then started to make arguments back to Obama that he’d made downstairs. I wasn’t adding a lot of value.

  “Target, train, transfer,” Obama said. I could tell that he was trying out a catchphrase, one he might use to sell the escalation of this war as something less than the COIN strategy that he had rejected in his mind.

  Ultimately, Obama decided to send thirty thousand American troops to Afghanistan, with NATO getting us the rest of the way to forty thousand. We would announce it as a temporary surge—in eighteen months, the troops would start to draw down. We’d secure Afghanistan’s major population centers, then shift to training and counterterrorism—essentially endorsing the Petraeus-McChrystal approach for two years, and then shifting to the Biden-Brennan approach sooner than the military wanted. At Biden’s suggestion, Obama had all the principals memorialize their agreement with the plan in writing. It felt like a bit much, but this was the lesson from Vietnam: Limit escalation.

  The next day we met to go over his speech. The tone, he said, should be “sober and adult—not depressing.” He sat next to me on the couch and began to talk, not so much about the speech, but about the kind of president he wanted to be. “The American people are idealists,” he said, “but their leaders have to be realistic and hard-headed.” At the beginning and end of the speech, he wanted to draw upon American idealism—Roosevelt’s belief that we “carry special burdens” in the world. In between, he wanted to acknowledge that in disorderly places there is a limit to what we can achieve. When he was finished he went back behind his desk and sat down.

  I stood there an extra moment. I’d watched him get pushed into a corner that fall and stay there. I’d seen him try to slow the momentum that was leading inexorably to more troops, more war; I’d watched as that process became, essentially, a negotiation between the far-reaching recommendations of his advisors and his own sense of realism. At the same time, the economy was teetering on a ledge between depression and slow recovery, and an overhaul of American healthcare was creeping through Congress. The American public was exhausted by nearly a decade of war. In a way, we’d failed him by making him spend so much time on this review. He’d reshaped what had come to him and turned it into something that he felt was necessary, something worthy of sacrifice, something with limits. But I could still sense his unease at sending young people to die.

  “I’m proud to work for you,” I said. It felt a bit awkward—as though I was overstepping a boundary with a man who tended to keep his emotions at a distance. “I just wanted to say that.”

  I was trying to sum up something, to convey that I saw how lonely his job must be, and perhaps to say something about how this experience was changing me, how I’d try to do better. It would be the only time I ever told him that. He looked up at me. “I appreciate you,” he said. “Get to work.”

  In the coming days, he consistently took out of the speech any language that spoke of winning or victory. He would pay tribute to the troops, but not overpromise. “We should glorify their service,” he told me, “but we should not glorify war.” Years later, Gates—the most important advisor in the process—would say that Obama’s strategy was right, but he was not sufficiently committed to the mission (a convenient way for Gates to argue that he was right, and any problems in Afghanistan were Obama’s). But that was wrong. Obama was committed to taking out al Qaeda; that was just not as ambitious a mission as what the military had in mind.

  He gave the speech on December 1 at West Point. I stood backstage with him as rows and rows of uniformed soldiers awaited his words. Some of them would end up dying as a result of the decision Obama was announc
ing. Before going out, Obama fidgeted a bit backstage, waiting as a large clock ticked down to the moment when he would stride out onto the stage to deliver the address. “They’re so young,” he said.

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  A WEEK AFTER ESCALATING the war in Afghanistan, Obama flew to Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. To help him prepare the remarks he’d give at the ceremony, Obama had asked Jon Favreau and me to give him a selection of speeches and essays about war—John F. Kennedy speaking about the nature of peace and calling for a nuclear test ban treaty; Churchill, Roosevelt, and Lincoln at war; Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Reinhold Niebuhr. The two of us sat together and drafted a speech that mainly dealt with the tension of his getting the award at the beginning of his presidency. We sent it in to Obama and heard nothing back until ten on the morning we were going to board the plane for Oslo.

  He called us up to the Oval Office, along with Samantha Power. Without our knowing, she’d sent Obama a memo laying out sweeping ambitions for the speech, which she saw as a chance to address fundamental issues of war and peace. He looked tired and a little annoyed. “I had to stay up all night writing this,” he said, handing us seven pages torn from a yellow legal pad, each filled with his tiny, neat handwriting. The only other time he had written a speech from scratch was during the campaign, when he delivered his address on race.

  For the next several hours, I sat at my desk typing up his writing, polishing it in places, dividing up sections with Favreau. Obama had turned the entire speech into an effort to deal with the tension of getting the award right after he had decided to send thirty thousand troops to fight in a war. Samantha’s memo, together with the Afghan review, had stirred something inside him. I started to circulate the draft, which was dotted with quotes from Niebuhr; meditations on the meaning of war; and personal language reconciling his current position with his political heritage: “As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King’s life work, I am living testimony to the moral force of nonviolence. I know there’s nothing weak—nothing passive—nothing naïve—in the creed of the lives of Gandhi and King. But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone.”

  For the first time, I boarded Marine One with him and Michelle Obama because I needed extra time to work on the draft. The helicopter flew over downtown D.C. at dusk. There was the Washington Monument from above, the Lincoln Memorial in the distance. I tried to disappear into the couch that faced the two of them, while Michelle chided me a bit. “He was up most of the night,” she said, in what felt a little like a rebuke.

  “I know, I know,” I said.

  We flew all night and none of us slept. Obama read over revisions a page at a time in his office; I worked on the oversized computer in the back; Favreau and Power made edits in the conference room. The speech broke down into a simple structure that anticipated so many of the debates we’d have in the years to come: the first part a description of when war is just, the second a description of how we must pursue peace, including a commitment to diplomacy: “I know engagement with repressive regimes lacks the satisfying purity of indignation. But I also know that sanctions without outreach—condemnation without discussion—can carry forward only a crippling status quo.” Finally, we told him to get an hour of sleep before we landed.

  When we got to the hotel, we went to a makeshift staff office to finish the speech. Samantha had been focused on the section that laid out the case for when it is just to fight a war. Obama had defended the traditional concept of the use of force in self-defense; in other cases, he said, war had to meet certain international standards such as the enforcement of international law. These were the cases in which, Obama had written, eerily foreshadowing Syria, “More and more, we all confront difficult questions about how to prevent the slaughter of civilians by their own government, or to stop a civil war whose violence and suffering can engulf an entire region.” Samantha wanted to insert the concept of nations having a “responsibility to protect,” saying that if governments commit atrocities, nations were justified—if not obliged—to intervene. This would have represented a significant new policy for the United States, which Samantha knew. “Think of the message this will send,” she kept saying.

  I didn’t know if Obama wanted to go that far. He was in his hotel room getting ready. It was morning in Oslo—the middle of the night in D.C.—and Samantha and I sat there arguing this point while I squinted at Obama’s last edits. I felt I needed to get another opinion so I wouldn’t be the only one making this decision. I called Denis McDonough, who never seemed to sleep. He felt strongly that we couldn’t include a commitment of that significance without running it through a formal process in the government. I went to meet Obama outside his suite, where he had some final edits. I summarized the debate I’d been having with Samantha, and he looked at me with exasperation. “I’m on my way to deliver the speech,” he said. “This isn’t the time to be making policy.” Jon and I made his final edits—language that spoke of the tension between “the world as it is” and our effort to strive for “the world that ought to be.”

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  IN MARCH 2010, OBAMA made his first visit to Afghanistan as president. We had to travel in secret. On our descent, all the lights on Air Force One were shut off to avoid offering a target. We boarded helicopters at Bagram Airfield and flew into Kabul. All I saw was a scattering of lights in the rolling hills beyond, like reflections of moonlight on a rippling lake. The presidential palace was a tranquil complex of buildings with internal courtyards, full of fountains and winding pathways. While Obama met with Karzai, I smoked and made small talk with some of the guys who formed McChrystal’s inner circle.

  Like so many of the troops I met in government, they represented the ethos of a post-9/11 generation that had been asked to bear so many more responsibilities than the rest of the American people, while being given complex missions in challenging places. They were smart, tough, and mission-oriented, without the luxury of questioning the mission.

  We flew back to Bagram and Obama spoke to a cheering throng of uniformed servicemembers. All told, we were on the ground for only a few hours, VIP visitors escorted within a security bubble in Kabul, far from where the fighting was taking place, out in the sprawling darkness.

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  A FEW WEEKS LATER, Karzai came to Washington, and McChrystal’s team invited me out to his house at Fort McNair, a handsome multistory home with a backyard. We stood drinking Bud Light Limes out of a trash can filled with ice. McChrystal had an easy camaraderie with the people around him. They struck me as decent guys doing their best in a difficult spot, as confused at how to navigate Washington as I had been when I took my job. I was surprised at how openly they complained about the Pentagon, which I hadn’t yet heard from servicemembers. Each agency, I was learning, had its own layer of bureaucracy and rivalry. Later that night, Ann and I went out to dinner with one of McChrystal’s closest aides, Dave Silverman. We were at a tapas restaurant in downtown D.C., about as far away from Afghanistan as you can get. We agreed to keep in touch, and Ann and I talked on the way home about how we could see ourselves striking up a lasting friendship.

  It wasn’t to be. Not much later, a story came out in Rolling Stone that depicted McChrystal and his team as an out-of-control boys’ club, speaking crudely of just about everyone involved in Afghanistan policy. Littered with quotable put-downs of everyone from Biden (“Are you asking about Vice President Biden? Who’s that?”) to Holbrooke (“Oh, not another email from Holbrooke. I don’t even want to open it”), it ignited a firestorm. I had to reach out to Silverman that night and tell him that Obama wanted McChrystal to come home for consultations. He was surprised—they knew it was bad, but from the distance of Afghanistan, where McChrystal was the most powerful human being, it seemed to them like a passing storm.

 
That night, I met Obama on the patio outside the Oval Office. He asked me to write two speeches for the next day—one in which he’d decided to keep McChrystal for the sake of continuity, and one in which he’d decided to fire him to enforce the principle of civilian control of the military. He didn’t tell me what his decision would be, but he tipped his hand when he spent a lot more time giving guidance for a decision to get rid of McChrystal. He seemed more sad than angry. “Stan’s a good guy,” he said.

  I woke to emails from Silverman about how contrite the team was and about how McChrystal was an honorable man who had learned his lesson. I didn’t doubt him. McChrystal believed deeply in what he was doing, even if I had my doubts about the wisdom of COIN in Afghanistan. But no private could talk about a captain the way McChrystal and his team talked about their chain of command in the story, and why was a general even talking to Rolling Stone in the first place? It was a sign of how out of whack things had gotten in the post-9/11 wars, in which the glorification of Petraeus suggested that the way for a general to get ahead was to have independent lines to Congress and the media. It was also an outgrowth of how the entire Afghan review had unfolded, with Obama’s views being secondary to those of the military officers who reported to him.

  That morning, Obama called a few of us into the Oval Office. He said he was reluctant to fire McChrystal, but he would never be able to exert civilian control over the military if he didn’t. After I left the meeting, I walked down the hallway and passed the Roosevelt Room. I saw McChrystal standing there, waiting for his meeting with Obama, looking nervous and somewhat diminished—not the commanding figure who had seized control over the debate about Afghanistan policy back in the fall.