On September 13, the president chaired the first of nine—by my count—very long (two-to-three-hour) meetings on McChrystal’s assessment and Afghan strategy. Two days later the Senate Armed Services Committee held a confirmation hearing for Mike Mullen’s second term as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at which time he forcefully argued for more troops in Afghanistan. He was implicitly critical of the vice president’s views, saying we could not defeat al Qaeda and prevent Afghanistan from becoming a safe haven again “from offshore.… You have to be there, where the people are when they need you there, and until they can provide for their own security.” The president—and everyone else in the White House—was livid, seeing the testimony as another effort by Mullen and the military to force the commander in chief’s hand. Rahm told me that the president “used my language” when he heard what Mullen had said. In an effort to calm things down, at a press conference soon thereafter I said the president deserved the right to absorb McChrystal’s assessment and have his questions answered, that some of the most important decisions of his presidency were involved and he should not be rushed. I suggested that “everybody should just take a deep breath.”
Then the biggest shoe of all dropped. On Monday, September 21, The Washington Post published a detailed story by Bob Woodward on McChrystal’s assessment, clearly based on a leaked copy. The four-column-wide headline read “McChrystal: More Forces or ‘Mission Failure.’ ” The Post had given us advance warning it was going to run the story, and over the weekend Cartwright, Flournoy, and Geoff Morrell negotiated with Woodward and others from the Post to remove sensitive numbers, references to intelligence gaps, Special Forces unit designations, and the like. They had some success, but they could not redact the political bombshell the story represented. The story ended with a quote from the assessment: “Failure to provide adequate resources also risks a longer conflict, greater casualties, higher overall costs, and ultimately, a critical loss of political support. Any of these risks, in turn, are likely to result in mission failure.” After I left office, I was chagrined to hear from an insider I trust that McChrystal’s staff had leaked the assessment out of impatience with both the Pentagon and the White House. If so, I’d be very surprised if Stan knew about it.
Anger and suspicion were further fueled six days later when the CBS-TV program 60 Minutes aired an interview with McChrystal in which he spelled out in detail how bad he had found the situation in Afghanistan and what needed to be done. The interview had been taped in late summer, long before the debate got under way in the administration, but the timing of its airing was awful.
McChrystal had been invited weeks earlier to give a speech on October 1 in London and asked Mullen whether he should do so, given the furor surrounding the leaked assessment. Mike encouraged him. I did not object. I should have. Stan’s speech was innocuous enough, but in response to a question afterward, he dismissed out of hand the option Biden was supporting.
An infuriated president, Mullen, and I repeatedly discussed what he regarded as military pressure on him. On September 16, Obama asked us why all this was being discussed in public. “Is it a lack of respect for me? Are they [he meant Petraeus, McChrystal, and Mullen] trying to box me in? I’ve tried to create an environment where all points of view can be expressed and have a robust debate. I’m prepared to devote any amount of time to it—however many hours or days. What is wrong? Is it the process? Are they suspicious of my politics? Do they resent that I never served in the military? Do they think because I’m young that I don’t see what they’re doing?” Mike assured him there was no lack of respect. I said we just needed to shut everyone down until the process was complete.
The president and I then talked alone. I told him Mullen had called both Petraeus and McChrystal after the incidents and thought he had the situation under control. I said Mike’s testimony had been a surprise to me, especially since we had reviewed potentially hot topics before his hearing.
Again and again I tried to persuade Obama that there was no plan, no coordinated effort by the three military men to jam him. I said that if there had been a strategy to do that, they sure as hell wouldn’t have been so obvious. I reminded him that McChrystal had never had a job before with the kind of public exposure he now had, that he was inexperienced and a bit naïve about dealing with the press and politics. I said Mullen and Petraeus were both on his team and wanted to serve him well; but particularly when testifying, or even when talking to reporters, both felt ethically compelled to say exactly what they thought, however politically awkward. I told the president that Mike’s independence had annoyed Bush as well. My assurances fell pretty much on deaf ears, which I found enormously frustrating and discouraging.
The press was reporting a campaign being mounted by the military to force acceptance of McChrystal’s recommendations, and Emanuel told me that, according to reporters, there were four different sources saying that McChrystal would quit if he didn’t get his way. A wall was going up between the military and the White House. That was bad for the country, even dangerous. I had to fix it. In a conference call with McChrystal and Petraeus on September 23, I told them that the decision the president was facing was conceivably the most significant of his presidency. The experts and politicians in Washington were divided on what to do in Afghanistan. The president was very deliberative and very analytical, and he was going to take whatever time was necessary to work through this decision. If he agreed to provide significant additional troops, he would do everything he could to make it work, though it would be a very heavy political lift at home. I directed McChrystal to provide his memorandum on force options only to me, the chairman, Petraeus, Stavridis at NATO, and the NATO secretary general. I said no copies should be made, and it should not be shared with staff or anyone else, that a leak would possibly be fatal to Stan’s case. I reassured them that the president was not questioning Stan’s assessment or recommendations for further resources, but rather whether changed circumstances on the ground required revisiting the strategy he had settled on in March. I ended the call by emphasizing that we had to actively oppose the perception in the press and embraced by some in Congress that the president and the military were pitted against each other.
Four days after McChrystal’s London gaffe, I gave a speech to the Association of the U.S. Army in which I mentioned the leaks. I said it was important to take our time to get the Afghan decision right, “and in this process it is imperative that all of us taking part in these deliberations—civilian and military alike—provide our best advice to the president candidly but privately.” Most commentators thought it was a shot at McChrystal, but my target was far broader. We heard regularly from members of the press that Biden, Jones, Donilon, McDonough, Lute, Emanuel, and Axelrod were “spilling their guts” regularly—and disparagingly—to reporters about senior military leaders, Afghanistan, and the decision-making process. I was told that The New York Times was besieged by unsolicited White House sources offering their views. I acknowledged that the Pentagon leaked. But whenever I would complain about White House leaks, there were bullshit protestations over there of innocence. Only the president would acknowledge to me he had a problem with leaks in his own shop.
As impatient and frustrated as I would get at different points, not to mention just being sick of sitting in the Situation Room hour after hour, day after day, I believe the process on Afghanistan was an important and useful one. In my entire career, I cannot think of any single issue or problem that absorbed so much of the president’s and the principals’ time and effort in such a compressed period. There was no angle or substantive point that was not thoroughly examined. If I were to fault the process, I would say that vastly more attention was focused on every aspect of the military effort than—despite Donilon’s and Holbrooke’s best efforts—on the broad challenge of getting the political and civilian part of the equation right. Too little attention was paid to the shortage of civilian advisers and experts: to determining how many people with the right sk
ills were needed, to finding such people, and to addressing the imbalance between the number of U.S. civilians in Kabul and elsewhere in the country. Nor did we focus on the tension between our ambassadors and commanders in Afghanistan, Eikenberry and McChrystal in particular. During my tenure as secretary, there were three U.S. ambassadors to Kabul; none did well, in my opinion. None could compare to Afghan-born Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador in Kabul from 2003 to 2005, in coaching, counseling, and working with Karzai—or to a couple of CIA station chiefs in Afghanistan. Even Secretary Clinton would speak of Eikenberry’s insubordination, that he would not do what she directed. Though both Clinton and I wanted Eikenberry replaced—because his relationship with Karzai was beyond repair and his relationships with both Defense and State were so poor—and repeatedly told Jones so, the ambassador was protected by the White House.
From September through November, over and over again we would rehash the issues and get further into the weeds—details beyond what was needed or appropriate. Broadly, there were three substantive areas on which our many meetings focused. The first was the nature of the threat. What were the relationships between the Taliban, al Qaeda, and other extremist groups in the Afghan-Pakistani border area? Was defeat of the Taliban essential to the defeat of al Qaeda? If the Taliban regained power, would al Qaeda return to Afghanistan? Would a more stable Afghanistan change Pakistan’s strategic calculus? The second issue was which strategy for dealing with the threat would be most effective and efficient, COIN or CT-Plus. The key question with COIN was whether there was an Afghan model of governance that would be “good enough” to meet our objectives. Did the government have enough legitimacy in the eyes of its own people to permit our strategy to succeed? In the case of CT-Plus, could it work if the United States lacked the resources on the ground to protect the population and without adequate intelligence to be effective in its counterterrorism strikes? Third, if we stayed with the president’s March strategy, how would we know if and when it was time to change course?
Pakistan continued to be a critically important factor in our discussions. If Pakistan was so critical to the success of our strategy, Biden asked, why were we spending thirty dollars in Afghanistan to every one dollar in Pakistan? There was a lot of talk about more military and civilian aid to the Pakistanis. Their military was deeply suspicious of U.S. intentions in Pakistan, believing any effort to increase the number of our uniformed personnel there was part of a nefarious scheme to seize their nuclear weapons. They welcomed our cash and our equipment but not our people. And they were not particularly interested in letting us teach them how to go after targets in their own country. As for civilian assistance, their paranoia and our political ham-handedness reinforced each other. After much political effort, and the leadership of Senators John Kerry and Dick Lugar and Representative Howard Berman, Congress passed a five-year, $7.5 billion aid package for Pakistan. It was a great achievement and just what was needed, especially the multiyear aspect to demonstrate our long-term commitment. Then some idiot in the House of Representatives attached language to the bill that stipulated that the assistance was conditional on the Pakistani military not interfering with the civilian government. Not surprisingly, there was outrage in Pakistan, especially among the military. In a flash, all the actual and potential goodwill generated by the legislation was negated. I knew that nothing would change Pakistan’s hedging strategy; to think otherwise was delusional. But we needed some level of cooperation from them.
The president kept returning also to the matter of cost. He observed that the cost of the additional troops McChrystal was requesting would be about $30 billion; yet if he froze all domestic discretionary spending, he would save only $5 billion, and if he cut the same by 5 percent, that would save only $10 billion. He said that if the war continued “another eight to ten years, it would cost $800 billion,” and the nation could not afford that given needs at home. His argument was hard to disagree with. The costs of the war were staggering.
By the fifth NSC meeting, on Friday, October 9, some clarity was emerging on the key issues. Panetta set the stage with a simple observation: “We can’t leave, and we can’t accept the status quo.” The president said he thought we had reached “rough” agreement on that but also on what was achievable in terms of taking on the Taliban; that defining counterinsurgency in terms of population security as opposed to Taliban body count was sound; and that the basic “inkblot” strategy was sound—we couldn’t resource COIN throughout the country, so we had to deny the Taliban a foothold in key areas.
He then posed the next set of questions. Were the interests of the Afghan government aligned with our own? How could we ramp up training of the Afghan forces to allow us to leave in a reasonable time? How would we transition from clearing out the Taliban in an area to transferring security responsibility there to the Afghans? Did we have a strategy for reintegration of Taliban fighters? What were the timetables, and how did we sustain the effort? If we were not sending enough troops for countrywide counterinsurgency, how did we choose what to protect? How would we deal with Pakistani opposition to our adding troops? I thought these questions in themselves reflected progress in our discussions. Apparently assuming the president was leaning toward approving significantly more troops, Biden jumped in: “What if a year from now this isn’t working? What do you do then? Are you increasing the consequences of failing?”
About eight that same Friday night, as I was eating my Kentucky Fried Chicken dinner at home, the president called. “I’m really looking to you for your views on the way forward in Afghanistan. I’m counting on you,” he said. Earlier that week Biden had leaned over in the Situation Room and whispered to me, “Be very careful what you recommend to the president because he will do what you say.” I spent the weekend deciding what to say.
When I met privately with the president in the Oval Office on October 13, I told him I had thought about his call a lot and had prepared a memo for him offering my thoughts on what he should do. He grinned broadly, stuck out his hand to shake over the bowl of apples on his coffee table, and said, “You have the solution?” I wasn’t sure about that, but in the event, one of the most significant decisions of his presidency largely tracked the recommendations in my paper.
I wrote that the Afghan Taliban and al Qaeda had become symbiotic, “each benefiting from the success and mythology of the other, both inside and outside Afghanistan.” Al Qaeda clearly believed that a Taliban victory over the United States in Afghanistan would have great strategic benefit for the group.
Because while al Qaeda is under great pressure now and highly dependent on other extremist groups for sustainment, the success of those other groups—above all, the Taliban—would vastly strengthen the message to the Muslim world and beyond that these groups (including al Qaeda) are on the side of God and the winning side of history. What makes Afghanistan and the border area with Pakistan different from Somalia, Yemen, or other possible safe havens is that the former is the epicenter of extremist jihadism—the place where native and foreign Muslims defeated a superpower and, in their view, caused its collapse at home.… Taliban success in taking and holding parts of Afghanistan against the combined forces of multiple modern Western armies (above all, the United States)—the current direction of events—would dramatically strengthen the extremist Muslim mythology and popular perceptions of who is winning and who is losing.
I wrote that all three of the mission options we had been discussing were “doomed to fail, or already have.” Counterterrorism focused solely on al Qaeda could not work without a significant U.S. ground presence in Afghanistan and the opportunity to collect intelligence that this would afford us. “We tried remote-control counterterrorism in the 1990s, and it brought us 9/11.” “Counterterrorism plus,” or “counterinsurgency minus,” was what we had been doing since 2004, and “everyone seems to acknowledge that too is not working.” Fully resourced counterinsurgency “sounds a lot like nation-building at its most ambitious” and would requi
re troop levels, time, and money that few in the United States or in the West were prepared to provide.
I wrote that the core goals and priorities Obama had decided the previous March remained valid and should be reaffirmed. However, we had to narrow the mission and better communicate what we were trying to do. We could not realistically expect to eliminate the Taliban; they were now a part of the political fabric of Afghanistan. But we could realistically work to reverse their military momentum, deny them the ability to hold or control major population centers, and pressure them along the Pakistani border. We ought to be able to reduce their level of activity and violence to that which existed in 2004 or thereabouts. I recommended focusing our military forces in the south and east and charging our allies with holding the north and west. Our military efforts should be intended to stabilize the situation in Afghanistan and buy time to expand and train the Afghan security forces, who, despite their many deficiencies, were courageous fighters; many of them were prepared to die—and had died—fighting the Taliban. We should “quietly shelve trying to develop a strong, effective central government in Afghanistan.” What we needed, I wrote, was some central government capacity in a few key ministries—defense, interior, finance, education, rural development. We should help broker some kind of “national unity” government or other means to give the Karzai government at least a modicum of legitimacy in the eyes of the Afghan people. We also had to get a handle on corruption. “Our kids must not die so that corrupt Afghan officials can line their pockets.”
Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War Page 48