The president made a surprise visit to Afghanistan just over a week later on December 3. Weather prevented him from helicoptering from Bagram Air Base into Kabul to have a working dinner with Karzai, but the two talked on the telephone. The president spent several hours chatting with U.S. troops, visiting wounded at the medical facility on the base, and meeting with Petraeus and Eikenberry. There was grumbling among the Afghans about the president not making the dinner with Karzai, and some as well among our military about him not getting off the air base and visiting a forward operating base, where the fighting troops were. I thought both criticisms unwarranted, particularly in the latter case. Had I been asked, I would have recommended against him going to a FOB because of the risk; secretaries of defense are expendable, but presidents are not.
I arrived in Afghanistan four days later, partly to get a last personal update before the review concluded, and partly to visit the troops before the holidays. Major General J. F. Campbell, commander of the 101st Airborne and Karzai’s and my host the previous May at Fort Campbell, provided a realistic picture of the tough fight in the east. There were some areas, like the Pesh River Valley, he said, where a long-term U.S. troop presence was actually destabilizing. The locals hated both us and the Taliban, and we were better off leaving them alone. He told me he needed more intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance and more firepower to go after fighters coming across the border from Pakistan. He said he saw progress every day, “but it’s gonna take time.”
I spent two full days with the troops on this trip, the first in Regional Command–East and the second in the south. At Forward Operating Base Joyce, near the Pakistani border, I presented six silver stars, testimony not only to the bravery of the recipients but to the intensity of the fight in eastern Afghanistan.
We helicoptered next to Forward Operating Base Connolly, southwest of Jalalabad, still in the east. This was probably the most emotional troop visit I made as secretary. The week before, six soldiers in one platoon at this FOB had been killed by a rogue Afghan policeman, and I met alone with eighteen soldiers of that platoon. We sat on folding chairs in a tent, and I quietly told them we would do everything humanly possible for the families of those who had been killed, that I had some idea how hard this was for them, and that they had to keep focused on the mission. We talked for about fifteen minutes. I thanked them for their service and signed memory books they had for each of the six. After some briefings, I then spoke to 275 soldiers. I was barely holding it together. I told them I was the guy who signed the orders that sent them here, “and so I feel a personal responsibility for each and every one of you.” I said that to all the troops I talked to, but after my meeting with the platoon, I felt the need to go further. “I feel the sacrifice and hardship and losses more than you’ll ever imagine. You doing what you do is what keeps me doing what I do.” Choking up, I then said something I had never said before and, embarrassed, never said again: “I just want to thank you and tell you how much I love you.”
I returned to Washington to yet another fight over Afghan policy. As I’ve said, the president had made it clear both publicly and privately that the December review was intended simply to examine progress and to identify where adjustments were needed. His intent was then for a small group, early in 2011, to examine the way forward more fundamentally. Unfortunately, the Lute-directed NSS paper prepared for the December review basically questioned whether any progress had been made at all, as he attempted to relitigate the president’s decisions of a year earlier. Clinton and I were furious. Lute had told our representatives that the NSS “had the pen” for the report and resisted attempts by State and Defense to include dissenting views. I told Donilon the NSS might have the pen, but it couldn’t have its own foreign policy. The analytical papers prepared by the interagency group were pretty balanced and included a number of positive developments in Afghanistan. But it was the NSS overview paper, which everyone outside the NSS thought was too negative, that would dominate the process. Some of the “adjustments” it proposed appeared to question the strategy itself rather than identify how to make it work better.
I regretted that the Defense leadership and Lute had come to have such an adversarial relationship. As I wrote earlier, Pete Pace and I had twisted Lute’s arm to get him to take on the newly created job of NSC war czar at the White House in 2007, charged with coordinating the military and civilian components of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama had asked him to remain in the same role. The relationship between him and the senior military leadership began to deteriorate, though, early in the new administration, as he was increasingly viewed as an advocate for views contrary to those of the Joint Chiefs, the field commanders, and me. His disparaging comments to Bob Woodward, for Obama’s Wars, about senior military leaders and me didn’t exactly win him friends in the Pentagon either. The longer he stayed at the White House, and the more senior officers and Defense civilians saw him as an adversary, the more difficult it became for him to return to a promising future in uniform. I got along personally with Doug, always believed he served both Bush and Obama loyally, and felt badly that his bridge back to the Pentagon burned.
The day after I returned from Afghanistan, Saturday, December 11, the principals met for two hours on the draft review. I accused the NSS of trying to “hijack” the policy with its overview paper, which, I said, was not balanced. In fact, it wasn’t even consistent with the topic-specific papers prepared by the NSS itself, based on contributions from other departments and agencies. I argued that the NSS could not just override the views of Defense, State, and CIA. Rather, where there was disagreement on progress, I contended, it should be made explicit—“we shouldn’t have to fight for a week to get our views included.” I took issue with the NSS assertion that “the pace of the strategy is generally insufficient” and said that the paper fundamentally mischaracterized certain elements of Petraeus’s strategy. Panetta disagreed with the NSS assessment of the al Qaeda effort, as did Hillary on the civilian component of the strategy.
The review did have one positive outcome. State had been requested to prepare a paper on corruption in Afghanistan, and I was told that Hillary had personally redrafted major elements. The analysis was the best I had ever seen on the topic. The paper said there were three levels of corruption that needed to be addressed: (1) corruption that was predatory on the people—for example, shakedowns by the national police and bribes for settlement of land disputes; (2) high-level, senior leadership corruption; and (3) “functional” corruption—common bribes and deal making. I said the paper set forth exactly the right way to look at the problem and that, given an overall and deeply ingrained culture of corruption that was highly unlikely to end anytime soon, we needed to focus on those aspects that mattered most to our success—low-level corruption that alienated the Afghan people and high-level corruption that undermined confidence in the entire government. Hillary and I both again raised the contradiction between (not to mention the hypocrisy of) U.S. payments to Afghan officials and our public stance on corruption. We ran into a stone wall named Panetta. The CIA had its own reasons not to change our approach.
On December 16, the president appeared in the White House press briefing room flanked by Biden, Clinton, Cartwright, and me. He began by paying tribute to Richard Holbrooke, who had tragically died three days before from a torn aorta. The president then went on to summarize the review, saying that the United States was “on track to achieve our goals” in Afghanistan and adding that “the momentum achieved by the Taliban in recent years has been arrested in much of the country, and reversed in some key areas, although these gains remain fragile and reversible.” He reaffirmed that U.S. forces would begin withdrawing on schedule the next July. He added that al Qaeda was “hunkered down” and having a hard time recruiting, training, and plotting attacks, but that “it will take time to ultimately defeat al Qaeda, and it remains a ruthless and resilient enemy bent on attacking our country.” The president and vice president decamped
as soon as Obama finished reading his statement, leaving the other three of us to take questions. In response to a question as to whether the review “sugarcoated” the picture in Afghanistan, Clinton replied, “I don’t think you will find any rosy scenario people in the leadership of this administration, starting with the president. This has been a very, very hard-nosed review.” I was asked about the pace of the July drawdowns, and I said we didn’t know at that point: “The hope is that as we progress, those drawdowns will be able to accelerate.”
Yet again the contending forces within the administration, like medieval jousters, had armored up and clashed on Afghanistan. Yet again the president had mostly come down on Hillary’s and my side. And yet again the process had been ugly and contentious, reaffirming that the split in Obama’s team over Afghanistan, after two years in office, was still very real and very deep. The one saving grace, as strange as it might seem, was that this fundamental disagreement on Afghanistan never became personal at the most senior level; nor did it ever spill over into other issues, where the national security leadership continued to work together quite harmoniously. But a new source of contention was about to emerge early in 2011, and this time the internal battle lines would be drawn very differently. I would even find myself in agreement with the vice president, a rare occurrence in both the Bush and Obama administrations.
THE ARAB REVOLUTION
The history of revolutions is not a happy one. Most often repressive authoritarian governments are swept out, and power ends up in the hands not of moderate reformers but of better-organized and far more ruthless extremists—as in France in 1793 (the Reign of Terror), Russia in 1917 (the Bolsheviks), China in 1949 (Mao), Cuba in 1959 (Castro), and Iran in 1979 (Ayatollah Khomeini). In fact, it is hard to think of a major exception to this fate apart from the American Revolution, for which we can largely thank George Washington, who rejected a proffered crown, refused to march the army against Congress (however tempting on occasion that must have been for him), and voluntarily gave up command of the army and then the presidency. Revolutions and their outcomes are usually a surprise (especially to those overthrown) and damnably hard to predict. Experts can write about economic hardship, demographic problems such as a “youth bulge,” pent-up rage, and “prerevolutionary” conditions, but repressive governments often manage such conditions for decades. Thus was the Obama administration—and everyone else in the world (including every Arab government)—surprised by the “Arab Spring,” a revolution that shifted the political tectonic plate of the Middle East.
Sometimes revolutions are triggered by singular and seemingly isolated events. This was the case in the Middle East, where, on December 17, 2010, in the small Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid (overrun by German panzers in 1943 on their way to defeating American forces at the Kasserine Pass), a poor twenty-six-year-old street vendor named Mohammed Bouazizi set himself on fire after being harassed and humiliated by a police officer. He died three weeks later. His mother, according to a Washington Post reporter, said, “It was not poverty that made her son sacrifice himself.… It was his quest for dignity.” In an earlier time, before cell phones, Facebook, and Twitter, what happened in the village usually stayed in the village. But not now. A cell phone video of a subsequent protest demonstration in Sidi Bouzid was posted online and went viral across Tunisia, sparking more and larger demonstrations against the regime of President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, a dictator in power for more than twenty years. The video was spread throughout the Middle East not only by the Internet but also by the Qatari-owned television network Al-Jazeera, which was equally detested by authoritarian governments in the region and by the administration of Bush 43. Less than a month later, on January 14, Ben Ali was ousted and fled to Saudi Arabia. According to news reports, more than sixty political parties were created within two months, but the best organized and largest by far was the Islamist Ennahda Party (which would win 41 percent of the vote in elections held ten months later to select a Constituent Assembly charged with drafting a constitution).
President Obama’s first official statement on developments in Tunisia was on the day of Ben Ali’s ouster, January 14, when he condemned the use of violence against peaceful demonstrators, urged all parties to avoid violence, and called upon the government to respect human rights and hold free and fair elections in the near future. He devoted one sentence to Tunisia in his State of the Union address on January 25, saying that the United States “stands with the people of Tunisia and supports the democratic aspirations of all people.”
Young, Internet-savvy Egyptians read Facebook pages and blogs about developments in Tunisia and in the latter half of January began to organize their own demonstrations at Tahrir Square, a huge traffic circle in downtown Cairo, to protest the authoritarian regime of Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s president for nearly thirty years. The first large demonstration was on the same day as the State of the Union address, and the peaceful protests would grow daily as more and more Egyptians of all ages and backgrounds joined. The administration was divided on how to respond, with the NSS staff—perhaps sensitive to the criticism of some conservatives and human rights activists that Obama had been too slow and cautious in reacting to developments in Tunisia—urging strong support for the demonstrators in Tahrir Square.
On January 28, Mike Mullen called me at home to tell me the president had joined a principals’ meeting that afternoon on the Middle East peace process and turned immediately to events in Egypt. Mike walked next door to my house and briefed me on the meeting. He said that the deputies, led by NSS members Denis McDonough, John Brennan, and Ben Rhodes, had proposed “very forward leaning” support of the protesters in Egypt and a change of leadership there. According to Mullen, Biden, Clinton, and Donilon had urged caution in light of the potential impact on the region and the consequences of abandoning Mubarak, an ally of thirty years. The president, Mike went on, was clearly leaning toward an aggressive posture and public statements.
Alarmed, I called Donilon and asked to see him first thing the next day, a Saturday. He said the president might call me that night. The president didn’t call, and I met with Donilon at eight-thirty a.m. on the twenty-ninth. I reminded him that I had been sitting in the office he now occupied with Zbigniew Brzezinski when the shah of Iran was overthrown in 1979, and I spoke about the role the United States had played in that revolution. I expressed my great concern that we were entering uncharted waters and that the president couldn’t erase the Egyptians’ memory of our decades-long alliance with Mubarak with a few public statements. Our course, I said, should be to call for an orderly transition. We had to prevent any void in power because it likely would be filled by radical groups. I said we should be realistically modest “about what we know and about what we can do.” Donilon reassured me that Biden, Hillary, he, and I were on the same page. All of us were very concerned that the president and the White House and NSS staffs were leaning hard on the need for regime change in Egypt. White House staffers worried about Obama being “on the wrong side of history.” But how can anyone know which is the “right” or “wrong” side of history when nearly all revolutions, begun with hope and idealism, culminate in repression and bloodshed? After Mubarak, what?
The internal debate continued through the weekend. I missed a principals’ meeting on Saturday afternoon because of a commitment in Texas, but former ambassador to Egypt and retired career diplomat Frank Wisner was dispatched to Egypt by the president on Sunday to meet with his old friend Mubarak and deliver a message from the president: start the transition of power “now.”
That same morning I made the first of multiple calls to my counterpart in Egypt, the minister of defense, Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi. I urged him to ensure that the army would exercise restraint in dealing with the protesters and to support political reforms that would protect the dignity of the Egyptian people. He was quite gracious and reassuring, saying that the Egyptian military’s primary mission was to defend Egypt and secure critical facilities, �
�not to harm its people or shed blood in the streets.” I told him we were concerned about the government’s lack of decisive action to develop a political solution to the crisis and that, without moving toward a political transition—including “meaningful discussion” with key members of the opposition—Tantawi would likely be hard-pressed to maintain stability in Egypt. “Nothing bad will happen to Egypt, I assure you,” he said.
The afternoon of February 1, the principals met again with the president, and there was a heated debate about whether he should call Mubarak and, if so, what he should say publicly about the call. We interrupted the meeting to watch Mubarak’s televised speech to the Egyptian people. He said he would change the constitution, not run for president again (his term would expire in the fall), begin a dialogue with the opposition, and appoint a vice president—in short, he promised to do exactly what the administration had asked him to do through Wisner. Timing is everything, though, and I would often wonder whether, if Mubarak had made that speech two weeks earlier, the outcome for him might have been very different. What he promised was now too little, too late.
NSS staffers McDonough, Brennan, and Rhodes, and the vice president’s national security adviser, Tony Blinken, all argued the president should call Mubarak and tell him he should leave office in the next few days. We needed, they said yet again, “to be on the right side of history.” Biden, Clinton, Mullen, Donilon, and I were in strong agreement, urging caution. We had to consider the impact of such a statement throughout the region. What would come next?
Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War Page 65