Yet what you learn when you work for the president is that while the military is scrupulously nonpartisan and will respond faithfully to the orders of the commander in chief, the Pentagon is as political a player as you’ll find in Washington. Its leaders understand how to deploy their institutional leverage to influence policy and corral presidents: the strategically placed leak, a discreet call to a friendly congressman, or less-than-supportive testimony on Capitol Hill from a general or admiral, his uniform festooned with a bedazzling array of medals and ribbons.
That concern was partly why Obama had asked Robert Gates to stay on the job as defense secretary. Gates, a fixture for four decades in the country’s national security establishment, had brought a more thoughtful sensibility to the Pentagon after the bombastic and divisive Donald Rumsfeld. Yet there was more to it. Obama was pursuing a quantum shift in policy—ending the war in Iraq and refocusing our efforts against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, banning torture as a means of interrogation, and closing the detention center at Guantánamo Bay. He was wary of military intervention as a first resort and eager for a surge of diplomacy. Obama understood that he would need more than a respectful salute from the military to accomplish his goals. He needed their support.
To the military, Gates represented continuity. He was an able and methodical manager, low-key and rational in his judgments. All this appealed to Obama, who shared many of the same qualities. “He’s really solid,” the president said of the defense secretary, early in his term, an assessment I would hear him repeat often. At least to me, Gates expressed equal admiration for the president. In the summer of 2010, after Gates agreed to re-up for an additional year, we chatted before a White House reception. “We really appreciate your sacrifice,” I told Gates, a short, gray-haired man with the reassuring mien of a trusted, small-town banker. Drawing closer, Gates smiled. “I love working with this president,” he said.
When Gates had agreed to continue as defense secretary, though, it was a commitment and not a contract. If he objected to the direction the president was taking, he could happily return to the bucolic splendor of his rural home in the other Washington across the country. Obama thought highly of Gates and valued his counsel, but he also needed Gates, as the secretary well knew. The respectful but wary tango between the commander in chief, his defense secretary, and the military leadership was a running story of my years in the White House—and much of it centered on the vexing challenge of Afghanistan.
• • •
Iraq was as central to Obama’s candidacy and election as any other single issue, but soon after he was sworn in, we would begin winding down our involvement there. The Bush administration had signed an agreement, partly at the insistence of the Iraqis, mandating the withdrawal of all American troops by the end of 2011. Obama would hold the United States to that agreement, which closely matched the plan he had proposed as a candidate. Soon after taking office, the president announced a precise schedule for that withdrawal, ending our combat mission by the summer of 2010. It was a compromise based on the advice of his commanders, extending the U.S. combat role a few months longer than he had proposed as a presidential candidate. The decision to lengthen the mission by a few months was publicly supported by John McCain and other hawks on the right, and openly criticized by our allies on the left. Still, all our troops would be home by the end of 2011, certainly a welcome relief for a war-weary country, for the servicemen and -women who had borne repeated tours of duty, and for their families. From my parochial perspective, it would also give Obama a huge promise kept for his reelection in 2012.
Afghanistan was a whole different story.
It began as a mission to rout Al Qaeda and bring Osama bin Laden to justice, but unraveled after the Bush administration shifted the military focus some fourteen hundred miles west, to another war in Iraq. Now, seven years later, bin Laden and Al Qaeda’s core leaders were still at large, the Taliban was resurgent, and the United States and its NATO allies were deeply mired in Afghanistan. Some six hundred Americans had already died there, and thousands more had been injured, in an effort to help prop up the government of Hamid Karzai, the country’s mercurial and corrupt, if democratically elected, leader. The allied mission, already costing more than three billion dollars every month, was adrift without an obvious strategy or endgame.
Obama was resolved to change that.
He knew that this would initially mean a greater commitment of U.S. troops to stabilize the country, train Afghan soldiers, and step up the assault on Al Qaeda. He had said so as a candidate. Yet he also was determined to define the mission and limit its duration. He felt the wars had already cost the nation dearly and had inflamed anti-American sentiment in Muslim countries and beyond. “This can’t be an open-ended commitment,” he said. “We can’t afford it and the American people won’t tolerate it.”
This triggered a months-long debate in the fall of 2009 about the size and scope of the mission, which played out in nine dramatic meetings in the cloistered White House Situation Room. The sessions revolved around a strategy proposed by General Stanley McChrystal, a newly appointed commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Before the president ever saw the plan, its details began leaking, setting the fault lines for the debate.
Before the formal review began, an agitated Joe Biden called me into his office. “Our objective in going there was to destroy Al Qaeda, so why are we plunging into COIN here?” the vice president said, predicting that the McChrystal plan for an expansive counterinsurgency, reported in the media, would become a sinkhole from which we could not escape. Biden believed that fewer troops, focused on Al Qaeda and counterterrorism efforts, was the smarter and more responsible strategy. “The president has asked me to play the bad cop on this and I am ready to do it.”
I shared Biden’s concern. We had campaigned against nation building and open-ended engagements. McChrystal’s plan might mean leaving troops in Afghanistan throughout Obama’s presidency. Still, very properly, when the meetings began, I was just a silent observer, there because I would have to help explain and defend whatever decision the president made.
Determined not to repeat the mistakes of the past, the president came to the first meeting in mid-September with a raft of probing questions about the length, scope, and goals of the mission—questions he would need answered before making any decisions about additional troops. What was necessary to defeat Al Qaeda? What was achievable in Afghanistan, given the weak and corrupt government there? What was the strategy for neighboring Pakistan, more than a passive player and increasingly a safe haven for both the Taliban and Al Qaeda?
Before he could get the answers, though, the president was treated to a lesson in the complex politics of dealing with the military.
Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Admiral Mike Mullen, the nation’s top military man, was asked about McChrystal’s report, which was classified and had not been released. McChrystal had yet to put a number on his request for more troops, Mullen told the committee. “But I do believe that, having heard his views and having great confidence in his leadership, a properly resourced counterinsurgency probably means more forces and, without question, more time and more commitment to the protection of the Afghan people and to the development of good governance.” Six days later, the classified McChrystal memo was leaked. The front page of the Washington Post screamed, “McChrystal: More Forces or ‘Mission Failure.’”
Whether it intended to or not, the Pentagon had jammed the commander in chief.
Even the slow-to-boil Obama was furious. He called in Gates and Mullen and, according to Rahm, was very blunt about his feelings: “McChrystal’s report is leaked and published. We meet for two and a half hours on Sunday and have a good discussion on the way to go, and then you go out and run way out in front of where you know I am? I can only conclude one of two things, Mike. Either you don’t respect me as commander in chief or you all have been very sloppy. Neither
is justifiable.”
“It got very quiet, for like five seconds, which felt like an hour,” Rahm recalled. “And then Gates said, ‘We respect you, Mr. President. The mistakes are ours.’”
What was supposed to have been a secret review was now a public debate. When the president met with congressional leaders at the White House in early October, the Republicans pushed him to embrace McChrystal’s plan, including the additional forty thousand troops he was rumored to be requesting.
“You’re the commander in chief. This is your decision, and I don’t envy you,” said Obama’s vanquished general election opponent, John McCain. “I appreciate that you need a strategy, but I do think time is not on our side.”
After a few others chimed in, echoing the same point, Obama had heard enough.
“John was right that this is my decision,” he said, with unmistakable edge. “And I assure you, John, we will not make it in a leisurely manner. But it’s important to get it right. If we’re going to debate on spending and deficits, there are consequences to the decisions we make. And the allies have to buy in to what we might be expecting them to do, and they will be looking for a plausible story for how this ends.”
In meeting after meeting with his war cabinet, the president pressed for a sharper definition of the mission. “The goals need to be realistic and narrowly tailored to serve our national interest, and they need to be achievable,” the president told them. Yet, even as he elicited agreement on scaled-down objectives, Gates and his commanders clung to the McChrystal plan and troop request. Obama was frustrated: “If we can’t describe closure, if we can’t describe the end point, it’s an open-ended commitment,” he complained. “No one can describe closure here.”
I had no doubt that Gates, Mullen, and the commanders were earnest in their recommendations and more attuned than anyone in the room to the wages of war. Even so, presidents have to weigh their decisions against a broader array of considerations. It is the tension between the civilian and military roles—a tension that occasionally boiled over.
After a meeting on October 26, from which many of us were excluded, Rahm told me that he had confronted Gates. “I said, ‘Bob, you’re boxing the president in. You know that forty thousand is just the beginning and in ten months or a year you’ll be asking for more. There’s no end to it.’ And he just stared at me. ‘Well, then you guys better think of something.’ I said, ‘Us guys, Bob?’ I’ve never seen such a campaign waged against the president of the United States.”
Three days later, the president made an unannounced midnight trip to Dover Air Force Base to greet a military plane carrying the remains of fifteen servicemen and three Drug Enforcement Agency agents killed in Afghanistan. He stood at attention and saluted as their flag-draped coffins filed by, then spent hours consoling their families. It was almost dawn when he returned to the White House. I asked Gibbs, who had accompanied him, what the president had said on the way home. “Nothing,” Robert told me. “He just looked out the window and said nothing.”
Obama knew that a surge of troops in Afghanistan would ensure that there would be many more flag-draped coffins and heartbroken families before he could bring the troops home. “It was very, very sobering,” he said. “It reminds you that there are real, grave, human consequences to these decisions. It’s not just about moving pieces around the board.”
In the midst of the deliberations, I got a call from Colin Powell, who spoke with the wisdom of a man who had been on both sides of such debates, as a military commander and civilian authority.
“Just remember that he’s the commander in chief and they ain’t,” he said. “They want more troops. They’ll always want more troops. History has shown that this is not always the right answer. My advice is that you take your time.”
On November 11, Veterans Day, the war council went through the force options, including a new Gates variation, which called for thirty thousand to thirty-five thousand additional troops, down from the forty thousand McChrystal had requested. The president, however, was focused on not just the size of the force but also the timing of its deployment. Obama had been shown a graph of the proposed troop buildup and its projected drawdown. The chart assumed a process that would last some six to eight years and cost fifty billion per year, far lengthier and costlier than he believed wise or doable. Even if it made sense and he agreed, there was no guarantee he could bring Congress along for such a plan. “I don’t know how I am going to describe this as a surge,” he said, “if in five years from now, we’re only where we are now in terms of troop levels. I want to look at an option that is not open-ended, and puts troops in for eighteen to twenty-four months and then begins thinning them out.” Holding up the chart, he said, “Why can’t we move the bell curve to the left, get the troops in and out sooner?”
The accelerated pace would project greater force in faster to stem the Taliban’s progress, train the Afghan military and police to the best of our capacity, and allow us to intensify operations against Al Qaeda. An aggressive timetable for the drawdown of our troops would also put pressure on Karzai and the Afghan army to get serious about defending their own country. “Karzai needs to know that this is a no-kidding deal,” the president said.
By the end of November, the president had made his decision. He would accept the military’s revised manpower request, identifying the defeat of Al Qaeda as the core mission and establishing more modest and achievable goals for Afghanistan. Most important, they had agreed on an accelerated timetable—not just to send the troops, but also to bring them home. “It creates an inflection point,” he told me. “It puts this war on a path to end.” Before Obama finalized it, however, he had to be absolutely certain that his commanders were on board.
“I want to make sure everyone is on the same page, and if not, they state a clear alternative,” he told his war cabinet at the ninth and final meeting of what was being called the AfPak review, which went late into the night. “We need to leave here with a unified military and civilian position. Our goal is not perfection in Afghanistan. It is to stabilize key population centers and transfer to Afghan forces. If you don’t think we have a chance to achieve the goal I’ve set out, say so now. If people think that a two-year timetable is not possible, let me know. If we’re not all in, now’s the time to say so . . . I don’t want to be in a position years down the road, where someone says, ‘We’re not there yet. We need more.’”
One by one, they embraced the plan without reservation. “I will, and the military leadership will, support your decision,” Mullen assured the president. For all the controversies that would follow, Obama has kept his promise to bring our troops home: there were nearly 180,000 Americans serving in Iraq and Afghanistan when he took office; at the end of 2014, that would be down to just over 10,000—though the emergence of the brutal Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, would compel him to reengage American forces there.
On December 1, Obama flew to West Point to announce his decision on Afghanistan before an audience of young soldiers. After the speech, the president plunged into the crowd, painfully aware that some of the cadets joyously jostling to shake his hand would lose their lives as a result of the order he had just unveiled.
Susan called me after the speech. As a mom, she was heartsick over the sacrifice that the surge of troops would mean. “I hate this war,” she said, “but tell him I thought he did the best he could.”
I passed her message on. “Tell her the commander in chief probably hates it as much as she does,” he said.
• • •
Still, Obama didn’t shrink from his responsibilities as commander in chief. For all of Bush’s bluster, Obama hit Al Qaeda with a fury his predecessor had never mounted. On his watch, drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia systemically eliminated many of Al Qaeda’s top leaders.
He didn’t need any more evidence that Al Qaeda was a threat, though there was plenty in the constant stream
of intelligence that greeted him in his national security briefing each day.
Throughout my years in the White House, Obama would have to guard against both large-scale, command-and-control-style attacks such as those on September 11, 2001, and the growing threat of “homegrown” acts of terrorism. Even on Christmas Day.
When Congress finally adjourned on Christmas Eve after the Senate passed its version of the health care bill, the president flew west to Hawaii to join his family’s vacation and I headed to my place in Michigan for some badly needed rest. That blessed peace lasted all of several hours. On Christmas Day, an e-mail arrived from Bill Burton, the deputy press secretary, who’d traveled with the president to Hawaii: “Wanted to make sure you all saw and read this report of an explosion on board a plane landing in Detroit from Amsterdam today. I’m flagging because I know these events of interest sometimes go unnoticed. . . . . but I assume that this will be a story of size once the reports are out. With a fire on board and injured passengers, according to initial reports.”
“Story of size” didn’t quite capture the full impact of it, as we would learn in phone calls throughout the course of the day.
Just before the plane landed in Detroit, a young Nigerian named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had tried to detonate plastic explosives packed in his underwear, but the device failed to trigger properly and, instead, burst into flames. Whisked away after the plane landed safely, the scalded would-be bomber admitted that he had been dispatched by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. There had been vague “chatter” in the intel stream for weeks about the potential for a Christmas Day attack. I surmised that this was, in fact, it. It would be reported that just two months earlier, Abdulmutallab’s father had volunteered concerns about his son’s “extremist” views to a CIA agent at the American embassy in Abuja, Nigeria, but that information had languished on someone’s desk. While his name had been added to a larger terrorist database, he was not included on a No-Fly List that would have tipped authorities before he was allowed to board the plane. In other words, we got lucky.
Believer: My Forty Years in Politics Page 49