MY LAST FIGHTS: ENDING TWO WARS
I had lost the argument on Libya. I had lost on the budget. I had had a tough but—I thought—successful run for four years. The last six months were turning out very differently.
As 2011 began, we were wrestling with continuing internal Iraqi disagreement on formation of a government, an increase in attacks on our embassy and other targets by powerful Iranian-provided improvised rocket-assisted munitions (IRAMs), and planning for the post-2011 U.S. presence in Iraq.
The IRAMs were not going to threaten the security gains that had been made, but they had the potential to cause a lot of American casualties, and they reflected increased targeting by Iranian-supported extremists of our troops and diplomats. The Iraqis were making little effort to stop the attacks. In January, I asked General Austin, our commander in Iraq since the preceding September, in a videoconference if he had the authority to go out and kill those firing the IRAMs. He said he was trying to get the Iraqis to do it but would use our troops if he had to. I responded, “If you get the opportunity to kill them, do it.” I asked for a menu of possible actions we could take against the Iranians and their minions in Iraq. I was cautious about going to war with Iran over its nuclear program, but I wouldn’t stand for Iranians killing our troops in Iraq.
The principal question surrounding Iraq that spring, however, was the size of the U.S. military and diplomatic presence after December 31, when—according to the agreement Bush 43 had concluded with Maliki—all our troops had to be out of the country. Any continuing U.S. military presence would require a new agreement with the Iraqis. I met with Mike Mullen, Austin, our ambassador to Iraq, Jim Jeffrey, and others on January 31. Jeffrey and Austin said that Maliki wanted a U.S. troop presence after December but was doubtful he could get the Council of Representatives to approve a status of forces agreement (legal protections for our troops when stationed in foreign countries). In fact, all the key Iraqi leaders wanted a continuing U.S. military presence, Austin said, but as in 2008, no one wanted to take the political risk of saying so publicly or leading the political fight. Jeffrey said he was looking at a post-December State Department presence of about 20,000, many of them for security.
On February 2, in the middle of the Egypt crisis, the principals were to meet in the Situation Room to discuss all this. I believed that 40,000 Americans—20,000 civilians, 20,000 troops—would be a very hard sell, both in Washington and in Baghdad. Mullen said that Austin was trying to get the numbers down, but we were still looking at a three-to-five-year transition in Iraq. We agreed that if we stayed, we needed to keep our capabilities for intelligence, air defense, logistics, and counterterrorism.
At the principals’ meeting later that day, I said “Whoa” when we quickly dived into the details. Basic questions had to be answered first, including whether we all agreed we wanted a U.S. military presence in Iraq after December 31? (I did.) To what extent did State’s plans after December 31 depend upon a U.S. military presence? What if Congress wouldn’t approve the money for State? As so often, I said, the NSS was already in the weeds micromanaging before basic questions had been addressed.
To a certain extent, as in the Afghan debate in the fall of 2009, I found myself in a different place from both the White House advisers and the military commanders. Recognizing the huge political roadblocks, I believed a substantial U.S. military presence was needed post-2011 to help keep Iraq stabilized, to continue training and supporting their security forces, and to signal our friends in the region—and Iran—that we weren’t abandoning the field. Accordingly, I asked Austin to prepare force options below 20,000. He came back in mid-March with options for 15,000 troops (which would forgo any U.S. presence in southern Iraq) and 10,000 (which would severely limit the support we could provide for the embassy). The lower option would result in virtually no U.S. troops on the political fault line around Kirkuk between the central government and the Kurds, an area of continuing potential confrontations. Sustaining helicopter support both for our forces and especially for the embassy was vital since it was still too dangerous for civilians to move around Iraq in vehicles.
I made my fourteenth and last visit to Iraq in early April. I couldn’t help but reflect on how far we had come in four and a half years—and on the cost of that progress. I flew into Baghdad from Saudi Arabia and helicoptered to the distinguished visitors’ quarters. As we flew over the city, I marveled at how much had changed since December 2006. The security forces and police were all Iraqi now. There were traffic jams. The parks were filled with families. The markets were bustling. Life had returned to the city.
With each successive visit, my basketball-court-size bedroom had one or another new amenity, like hangers in the closet. The primitive plumbing, however, was the same. After showering the next morning, I looked in the mirror, and to my horror, my white hair had turned yellow. There had been something strange in the shower water, and now, with a full day of meetings and an interview with Katie Couric of 60 Minutes ahead of me, I looked like someone had peed on my head. Iraq continued to surprise me in new and different ways until the very end.
Apart from wanting to thank the troops, the primary purpose of my trip was to tell the Iraqi leaders they had to make some decisions quickly about whether they wanted us to stay after the end of the year. I reviewed with Prime Minister Maliki the areas in which his forces were deficient: counterterrorism, intelligence, air defense, logistics, training, and capabilities for external defense. Noting that most Iraqi leaders had privately expressed their support for a post-2011 American presence, I asked if he would describe for me his strategy for building support in the Council of Representatives. At the end of our meeting, I warned him that if U.S. soldiers kept getting killed by extremist groups and he did not approve operations to capture or kill those responsible, I had directed General Austin to exercise our right to self-defense under the security agreement and to go after them unilaterally. I had the same messages for Sunni deputy prime minister Saleh al-Mutlaq and for President Talabani. “The clock is ticking,” I said. “Time is short. You need to figure out whether you want some U.S. troops to remain after December. You can’t wait until October or even this summer to figure it out.” I also told Talabani that Iraq’s leaders needed to reach private agreement to support one another on this issue in public.
In my meetings with junior enlisted troops, they asked me about numerous news reports on the latest budget crisis in Washington and rumors that the troops might not get paid. I told them, “Let me just say you will get paid. All smart governments throughout history always pay the guys with guns first.”
By mid-April, the president asked Austin to explore the feasibility and risks of having 8,000 to 10,000 troops remain in Iraq. There was some grumbling in Defense over the low number; I thought we could make that work. But the thumb twiddling continued in both Baghdad and Washington, and in June, as I prepared to leave, the number of troops that might stay on as well as the size of our embassy post-December were totally up in the air.
I don’t know how hard the Obama administration—or the president personally—pushed the Iraqis for an agreement that would have allowed a residual U.S. troop presence. In the end, the Iraqi leadership did not try to get an agreement through their parliament that would have made possible a continued U.S. military presence after December 31. Maliki was just too fearful of the political consequences. Most Iraqis wanted us gone. It was a regrettable turn of events for our future influence in Iraq and our strategic position in the region. And a win for Iran.
As you will recall, the president had put all of us on notice in the late fall of 2010 that, while he wanted a low-key and swift review of the Afghan strategy in December, he intended to return to the subject in the spring. He didn’t wait that long. He gathered Biden, Clinton, Mullen, Donilon, Lute, and me (and other White House and NSS staff) in the Oval Office on January 20 to begin the strategy review. The key subjects were the troop drawdowns in July and determining what our presence shoul
d be in Afghanistan after 2014. Did we want bases? Would we continue to conduct counterterrorism operations? What is “Afghan good enough”? How big should the Afghan national security forces be? How much would they cost, and who would pay for them? Petraeus and the Defense Department were proposing an Afghan force level between 352,000 and 378,000. The president expressed his displeasure that those numbers had leaked, again making it look like the military was trying to “jam” him. He wondered how our strategy for pursuing “reconciliation” with the Taliban might play out and fit with Karzai’s and Pakistani general Kayani’s view. Obama said we needed a political strategy to accommodate or work around Karzai and Kayani.
It was as if we had never stopped arguing since 2009. The vice president jumped in aggressively, saying the strategy in Afghanistan could never succeed, there was no government, corruption was rampant, and Pakistan was still providing sanctuaries. He proclaimed that neither Karzai nor Kayani wanted a big Afghan army. I countered.
The internal fight heated up again on March 1, when Biden convened a meeting at his residence to push for a dramatic troop drawdown. The residence is a big Victorian-era house on the grounds of the Naval Observatory, first occupied by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller in the mid-1970s. As always, Biden was warm in welcoming us, a cordial host. When we got down to business, he asked whether the strategy had succeeded enough so we could “think bigger about transition sooner.” Could we meet our strategic goals with less “input” over the next two years? He argued again that no one wanted an Afghan army of 300,000 or more and that our commitment in Afghanistan was limiting our ability to deal with both Iran and North Korea. He contended that both public opinion and Congress were becoming more negative about the war. (In my view, virtually no effort had been made by the White House to change that attitude during the fifteen months since the president’s decisions on the Afghan surge.)
The temperature of the Afghan debate rose further a few days later, provoked in no small part by a cable from the U.S. ambassador to NATO, Ivo Daalder, reporting that Petraeus had told a NATO meeting that the transition to Afghan security leadership would “commence” everywhere by the end of 2014, a statement that seemed to contradict the president’s intention that the security transition be completed by then. When the president saw that cable, it looked to him like another case of military insubordination. As a result, the president opened an NSC meeting on March 3 with a blast: “I am troubled by people popping off in the press that 2011 doesn’t mean anything.… My intention is to begin the security transition in July 2011 and complete it by the end of 2014. We will think through the glidepath [of troop drawdowns], but I will push back very hard if anyone proposes moving the drawdowns to the right [delaying them]. I prefer to move to the left [accelerating them]. I don’t want any recommendations trying to finesse the orders I laid out.” He concluded, “If I believe I am being gamed …” and left the sentence hanging there with the clear implication the consequences would be dire.
I was pretty upset myself. I thought implicitly accusing Petraeus (and perhaps Mullen and me) of gaming him in front of thirty people in the Situation Room was inappropriate, not to mention highly disrespectful of Petraeus. As I sat there, I thought: The president doesn’t trust his commander, can’t stand Karzai, doesn’t believe in his own strategy, and doesn’t consider the war to be his. For him, it’s all about getting out. Biden continued to egg him on, and his staff missed no oppertunity to pass him inflammatory news clips and other information raising questions about Petraeus and the senior military leaders.
I called Donilon two days later to express my concern that the vice president was poisoning the well with the president with regard to Petraeus and Afghanistan. I said I thought Biden was subjecting Obama to Chinese water torture, every day saying, “the military can’t be trusted,” “the strategy can’t work,” “it’s all failing,” “the military is trying to game you, to screw you.” I said we couldn’t operate that way. I asked how the Daalder cable could be sent in to the president without someone checking its accuracy. I said, if he or the president had been concerned about the cable, why didn’t they call me instead of posturing in front of thirty people “who will inevitably leak how the president imposed his will on the military” and about mistrust of the military in the White House?
My fuse was really getting short. It seemed like I was blowing up—in my own, quiet way—nearly every day, and no longer just in the privacy of my office with my staff. As we’ve seen, I had blown up at Donilon and the vice president at a meeting on Libya on March 2 and at House Defense Appropriations chair Bill Young on the third, had come close to openly arguing with the president in the NSC meeting that same day, and had gone off on Donilon again on the fifth. Partly, I think, I was just exhausted from the daily fights.
As the debate in Washington over the pace of troop drawdowns cranked up, I wanted to get a firsthand report on how the campaign was going. I also needed to talk with Karzai about the overall relationship and our post-2014 relationship. In addition, I wanted to reassure Afghans that the drawdowns beginning in July would be gradual, that there would still be many American troops fighting in the fall.
Tensions between the United States and Karzai were running particularly high when I arrived on March 7, following the deaths the preceding week of nine young Afghan boys in an American air strike. I had a long private meeting with him late that first afternoon. I apologized profusely for the deaths of the boys and, as I had so often before, described for him the extraordinary measures we were taking to avoid civilian casualties. With regard to the security transition, I told him I shared his concerns about foreign governments and organizations operating independently of the Afghan government, creating parallel structures. I also recognized the intrusiveness of ISAF troops and operations on the daily lives of Afghans. The solution, I said, was for the Afghans gradually to assume leadership for security. While NATO would provide recommendations on which places were ready to transition, I said, Karzai should have the final approval authority.
I said the Afghan security forces were critical for transition. The United States had budgeted $12.8 billion to train, equip, and sustain those forces for the coming year, but how, I asked him, could that be sustained long term? Maybe over time Afghanistan could maintain a small regular army plus a large national-guard-type organization. I told Karzai I believed a long-term U.S. presence in Afghanistan would be important for his country but also in the interest of regional stability. We did not want permanent bases, I made clear, but perhaps we could share some facilities with the Afghan security forces. He had spoken of a binding agreement between us, but I told him it had taken Congress five years just to ratify defense-technology-sharing agreements with the British and Australians. What we needed was a mutual commitment to an enduring U.S. presence.
Partnerships must be of mutual value to last, I said, raising the level of my intensity. He and I had been working together for more than four years, I said, and I had been his advocate and defender throughout. “I have listened to you” on civilian casualties, on more respect for Afghans, on respect for Afghan sovereignty, on private security contractors, and most recently, on the provincial reconstruction teams. “But my efforts are not helped when you blame us for all of Afghanistan’s problems. We are your ally and partner. We protect your government, and we saved your life. Your criticisms are making a long-term relationship more difficult to sustain in the United States and elsewhere.” Looking ahead, I said, we needed to work together on transition and the Kabul Bank. In February, Dexter Filkins had published a devastating exposé of the looting of the bank in The New York Times. I told Karzai he could not ignore it or blame earlier audits or the United States or the international community. I told him that if he did not address the bank problem or continued to blame us, it would undermine efforts to agree on any strategic partnership. I said the bank issue provided “an opportunity for you to stand up for your people.” Not for the first time, I warned him that he had people a
round him who exploited his worries and concerns, who tried to get him angry and upset at us, and who propounded all kinds of ridiculous conspiracy theories.
Karzai’s responses in the meeting and then at dinner led me to wonder if he listened to anyone but the conspiracy-minded. He said he had heard that the United States wanted to weaken Afghanistan, to create many small states in its place. U.S. efforts to build the Afghan Local Police (ALP) and to work with local leaders could “be very destabilizing,” he added. In the war on terror, he claimed, it was never clear whether the United States wanted Pakistan strong or weak. The Chinese view, he said, was that the United States wanted to strengthen Afghanistan against Pakistan and to use India against China. What is the “real” American agenda? he asked. He carried on at some length about the “radicalization” of the Pashtuns, wondering who was behind it. The Indians, he said, thought it might be the United States or the United Kingdom. To all this and more, knowing the futility—and risks—of challenging him in front of a roomful of people, I responded only that he “needed to get his relationship with the United States straight in the very near future.”
Before and after the Karzai meeting, I met at length with Petraeus, Rodriguez, the operational commander, and others to pose questions I felt would be at the heart of the White House discussions in the coming weeks. I asked about their expectations for the spring and summer campaigns, whether the Pakistanis were actually making a difference, and how we might discourage our allies from pulling out of Afghanistan prematurely.
The day after the Karzai encounter was an emotional one. I flew to Camp Leatherneck in southern Afghanistan and visited the medevac unit there. Pilots, medics, and doctors described what they had been able to do with the additional assets we had provided them, the lives they had been able to save. Every day those crews put their lives on the line to save our troops; to say they are heroic doesn’t do them justice. Talking with them fueled my gratitude for what had been accomplished but reignited my fury at those in the Pentagon who had fought the medevac initiative with such vigor.
Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War Page 72