Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War

by Gates, Robert M

  There were some specific issues. In trying to solve the command and control problem for coalition forces in Afghanistan, Mullen and I agreed that the best alternative was to replicate the structure we had in Iraq—a four-star commander of all forces, McKiernan, with a subordinate three-star commander to manage the war on a day-to-day basis. McKiernan, like McNeill before him, spent a significant amount of time with Karzai and other Afghan officials, coalition ambassadors, and visiting government officials, and on NATO-related issues—diplomatic and political duties. That role was critically important but made apparent the need for someone else who would be totally focused on the fight. McKiernan strongly resisted such a change. I was also concerned that we were not moving fast enough or decisively enough to deal with the problem of civilian casualties. As I said before, I don’t believe any military force ever worked harder to avoid innocent victims, but it seemed like every incident was a strategic defeat, and we needed to take dramatic action. Soon after the president’s March announcement, I told Mullen, “I’ve got kids out there dying, and if I don’t have confidence I have the very best possible commander, I couldn’t live with myself.”

  The issue came to a head in early April when Michèle Flournoy returned from Afghanistan and told me of her concern as to whether McKiernan was the best man for the job. The specific issues she raised paralleled my own list. Mullen and Petraeus both agreed a change was needed. Casey argued strenuously against firing Dave, calling it a “rotten” thing to do. He wrote a letter to the president expressing his views, a letter that he shared with me and I personally delivered.

  I had talked on several occasions privately with the president about my misgivings and in mid-April told him I thought the time had come to make a change. Mullen, Petraeus, and I would unanimously recommend Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal to succeed McKiernan. The president understood the potential for a political ruckus caused by firing the senior commander in the war, but he was willing to make the change.

  Relieving McKiernan of command was one of the hardest decisions I ever made. He had made no egregious mistake and was deeply respected throughout the Army. Mullen had been talking with him about what was in the air for a few weeks and, in the latter part of April, flew to Afghanistan to try to persuade him to step down of his own accord. Dave made clear he wanted to remain in place until the end of his tour in the spring of 2010. I couldn’t wait that long. I flew to Kabul on May 6 and went almost immediately into a private dinner with Dave, telling him why I wanted to make a change so quickly. He acceded with extraordinary dignity and class.

  I would learn only later that this was the first time a wartime commander had been relieved since Truman fired Douglas MacArthur in 1951. During World War II, Generals George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower routinely fired commanders, many of them perfectly capable officers, including several personal friends. General Matthew Ridgway did much the same in Korea before and after taking over from MacArthur. The act was common enough not to be a career-ender or blight on the reputation of the affected general or the Army itself. But by the time of the Vietnam War, it was practically unheard of in the Army. I hope that the McKiernan episode will contribute to reestablishing accountability for senior officers for wartime performance, including the precedent that personal misconduct or serious mistakes need not be required for relief.

  On May 11, I announced that McKiernan was being relieved and that I would recommend McChrystal to take his place as senior commander. My senior military assistant, Rodriguez, would become the deputy commander in charge of the day-to-day fight. A reporter asked what McKiernan had done wrong. I said absolutely nothing, that a new strategy required a new commander. When asked why McChrystal was the replacement, I said that he and Rodriguez together brought a unique skill set in both counterterrorism and counterinsurgency.

  My usual practice with senior military appointments under both Bush and Obama was to take the officer in for a brief photo op with the president just before my weekly meeting in the Oval Office. My main purpose was to have the president congratulate the appointee and offer his support and confidence. The president knew of McChrystal’s extraordinary success in running counterterrorism operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. In official settings, alas, Stan was not relaxed or casual, to say the least. When he met Obama, and the president cracked a little joke, McChrystal remained rigid and unsmiling. After Stan left, Obama smiled and said, “He’s very … focused.”

  Even before McChrystal was confirmed by the Senate, I was hearing from Mullen and others about the need for more troops—the president’s recent approval of 21,000 more notwithstanding. There was still an outstanding request from McKiernan for another 10,000, among other things. A little over a week after my meeting in Kabul with McKiernan, I attended a deployment orders meeting about staffing Rodriguez’s new operational headquarters. (Each week I would meet with the chairman and vice chairman, along with my staff and the Joint Staff, to approve “requests for forces” from commanders all over the world—which units, how many troops, and so on.) I was told that this new headquarters in Kabul would require several thousand more troops, perhaps going well above the presidentially approved number of 68,000. I was surprised by the request and told the group we could not go above the approved number without going back to the president. Once McChrystal was in Afghanistan, he would have to evaluate just how all those people were being used—for example, were there soldiers and Marines doing infrastructure construction or maintenance who could be reassigned to the new headquarters or to the fight?

  Meanwhile there weren’t enough U.S. civilian advisers and experts, described as so critical to success in the Riedel report. On May 2, Petraeus and Holbrooke cochaired a civilian-military “coordination conference” with representatives from a number of government agencies. The embassy had asked for 421 more people, but Holbrooke asked for an “unconstrained” reanalysis of the civilian requirement down to the provincial and district levels. Holbrooke obviously shared my skepticism about State’s ability to expeditiously field a significant number of civilians to Afghanistan. I told the State Department and National Security Staff that I was prepared to provide several hundred civilian experts from Defense and from the military reserve to fill vacancies.

  At a Deputies Committee meeting in late May, Tom Donilon reaffirmed the importance of the civilian component and expressed considerable impatience with the size and pace of the civilian surge. Despite the failure of State and others to deliver the needed number of civilian experts, Deputy Secretary of State Jack Lew (in charge of administration) and others did not take advantage of my offer to loan them (and pay for) Defense civilians to fill gaps. The most common response I heard was that our people weren’t an exact fit for the open positions. I felt that if a Defense civilian had half the skills or background State was looking for, that would give us 50 percent more civilian capacity than we currently had. On a related issue, I was concerned that a high percentage of the U.S. civilians in Afghanistan were stationed in Kabul, when the greatest need was in the provinces and districts where our military was attempting to clean out the Taliban. They stayed a year—with a number of weeks of vacation time—and nearly all turned over in the summer, often leaving gaps in civilian capability for months and sometimes indefinitely. The numbers and location of civilian experts would remain a source of frustration among our commanders and the rest of us at Defense. (Many of the civilians eventually sent by State did not possess the required skills either; they and too many other civilians spent their entire Afghan tour holed up in the fortified embassy compound.)

  I thought there was another potential source of civilian expertise available. I knew of the international outreach programs of most U.S. land-grant colleges and universities, particularly in fields including agriculture, livestock, veterinary medicine, and water resources. Research and practitioner faculty regularly traveled to developing countries and, working in primitive and often dangerous circumstances, made a huge contribution. Repeatedly, I urged
Holbrooke and AID officials to reach out to the national president of the land-grant university association to seek his assistance in enlisting help from some of these schools. Unlike many government employees, they would expect and want to be deployed to the countryside to help. The president of that association was Peter McPherson, former president of Michigan State and head of the Agency for International Development from 1981 to 1987 under President Reagan, and I was confident he would make every effort to enlist help from the universities. Like my offer of Defense civilians, though, nothing came of the idea. There wasn’t interest at State or AID.

  Illustrative of another problem in getting civilian experts into Afghanistan, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack volunteered to send dozens of specialists to Afghanistan but told me he had no money to cover the cost. Could Defense do so? I had to tell him we could not because of congressional restrictions on transfers of funds among government departments. We could make such transfers only to the State Department.

  On June 8, I met with McChrystal, Rodriguez, Mullen, Cartwright, and Flournoy to continue discussions on the new command structure. We needed to take this step-by-step, I cautioned, because of coalition sensitivities, so we would begin with Rodriguez solely as a deputy commander for ISAF through the fall and then see about additionally “double-hatting” him as deputy commander of U.S. forces after New Year’s. After I said we needed a better approach to dealing with civilian casualties, I told Stan I wanted him to do a sixty-day review of the situation in Afghanistan, reviewing the personnel we already had and might need. It seemed like a perfectly reasonable, indeed innocuous, request at the time. I said we needed to do the review before I approached the president about any more forces because I couldn’t nickel-and-dime him to death. Finally, I warned him that “I feel strongly that too big a footprint [too many U.S. forces] is strategically dangerous.” The president and I would rue the day I asked for that review.

  The next day was my worst so far with the Obama administration. A meeting with the president began with his approval of our plans to implement the command and control changes in Afghanistan, including Rodriguez’s headquarters. I assured him we would come up with detailed plans, get them approved in the interagency process, and then take them to the allies. I then described my request to McChrystal for a sixty-day assessment, including a review of troop levels and newly identified troop needs through the end of the year—things we had not anticipated. I would then come to the president ready to justify any further increase in troop numbers and would not ask again in 2009. The room exploded. The president said testily there would be no political support for any further troop increase—the Democrats on the Hill didn’t want one, and the Republicans would just play politics. He recounted how getting approval of the FY2009 supplemental had been harder than they imagined possible. Biden and Emanuel piled on. I was aware of Biden’s conviction—and probably that of others in the room—that this request and the McChrystal assessment were part of an orchestrated squeeze play by the military to get the president to approve a lot more troops. I described my own reservations about a big increase in troop numbers but didn’t see why two to four thousand more troops should cause so much angst and hostility.

  I left the meeting discouraged less about the skepticism regarding more troops than about the total focus on the politics. Biden was especially emphatic about the reaction of the Democratic base. (His remarks reminded me of Cheney’s focus on the Republican base when discussing detainee interrogations and Guantánamo.) Not a word was mentioned about doing whatever it took to achieve the goals the president had so recently set or to protect the troops. The president and his advisers all emphasized that before any more troops could be considered, we would have to show success and a change of momentum with the troops we had. I was stunned. The Democrats controlled both houses of Congress, and the White House was running scared. The skepticism I could understand; the politics I couldn’t.

  McChrystal was confirmed as commander—and authorized for a fourth star—by the Senate on the same day as my ugly meeting in the White House. My earlier strategy of getting him confirmed as director of the Joint Staff and taking care of any potential Senate issues at that time paid off.

  Unfortunately, by summer, the Obama foreign policy team was splintering. Biden, his staff, Emanuel, some of the National Security Staff, and probably all of the president’s White House political advisers were on a different page with respect to Afghanistan than Clinton, Mullen, Blair, and me. The same people were, to repeat, increasingly suspicious that Mullen, Petraeus, McChrystal, and other senior military officers were trying to box in—“jam”—the president and force him to approve even more troops. Donilon, Denis McDonough, and others were saying openly to people in Defense that “the White House” was not happy with Mullen’s performance as chairman “and never have been,” and they complained about his frequent interviews on television, even though they were often the ones who would ask him to go on the talk shows. McDonough bellyached to Geoff Morrell about how McChrystal’s forthcoming sixty-day assessment would be a “turd,” and he went on to say the president shouldn’t hear Mullen’s views for the first time in the papers and on TV. Rumors about Jones’s isolation in the White House and potential exit were rife. Biden, Donilon, and Lute were increasingly at odds with Holbrooke. And as mentioned earlier, the Panetta-Blair relationship had tanked. Jones told me, on his return from a trip to Afghanistan at the end of June, that he had warned Stan that any further request for troops would provoke a “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” response from the president—military parlance for “What the fuck?” The potshotting and rumormongering by late summer created a volatile atmosphere for considering McChrystal’s report.

  I had my own growing list of Whiskey Tango Foxtrot issues with the president and others in the administration by this time. After my weekly meeting (accompanied by Vice Chairman Cartwright) with the president on July 15, he asked to see me alone, an increasingly common occurrence. He then dropped a bombshell on me: he intended to meet with General Cartwright privately to ask him if he would stick around and succeed Mike Mullen as chairman of the Joint Chiefs. I was concerned that any such conversation and arrangement would leak, rendering Mike a lame duck for more than two years—unless, of course, the president’s intention was to hasten his departure. I knew nearly everyone at the White House preferred Cartwright’s briefing style, which was much crisper than Mullen’s. Cartwright could also explain highly technical matters clearly, and his analytical style meshed better with the president’s own. But Mullen’s high public profile and his independence grated as well. I pleaded with the president not to meet with Cartwright before September or October, until after he and Mullen had both been reconfirmed by the Senate in their positions for another term. When that meeting took place, I suggested the president simply ask Cartwright to remain for the full two years of his second term. (I had proposed his retirement after the first year of his second term only to stagger the chairman’s and vice chairman’s terms.) I had no problem with the idea of Cartwright succeeding Mullen as chairman at that point.

  In early August, I had a long, very direct conversation with Rahm Emanuel in his White House corner office about a list of issues. I had been in that office under many previous chiefs of staff, and the décor remained essentially unchanged, with little that personalized it beyond a few family photos on a credenza behind the desk. In his shirtsleeves, Rahm greeted me cordially as always and offered me a Diet Coke. Ignoring the more formal sofa and chairs in front of his fireplace, we sat down at his conference table. The first issue I raised was a decision by Attorney General Eric Holder that the Justice Department would not defend six Navy petty officers who had been guards at Guantánamo and were being sued by a prisoner there. The sailors had done nothing wrong, but Holder did not want to have to defend the constitutionality of holding prisoners at Guantánamo. The Justice Department had told the sailors the government would pay for their defense by private lawyers, but as I told Rahm, that
was not the same as having the full weight of the U.S. government on your side in a courtroom. Everyone in uniform knew that, and it upset them. I told Rahm the president’s approach to the military from the day he was elected had been pitch-perfect, but that this decision could strongly and negatively affect military morale and attitudes toward the commander in chief. I also complained that Holder had made this decision without any consultation with me. I told him in language I knew he’d understand that a decision by Justice not to defend innocent American service members was a travesty and a “huge fucking mistake.”

  I also told Emanuel I was ticked off that Deputy National Security Adviser John Brennan had told the president that additional Reaper drone caps in Afghanistan should be transferred from the military to CIA, without me knowing anything about it. Those were Defense Department assets, I said, and no one in the White House had any business going to the president with such a recommendation without going through the established interagency process. This was part and parcel of an increasingly operational National Security Staff in the White House and micromanagement of military matters—a combination that had proven disastrous in the past. I told Rahm, “I’m a team player, but I’m not a patsy.”