Obama’s Wars

by Bob Woodward

  “If you’re talking about a completely uncorrupt government that delivers services to all of its people, that end state won’t be achieved in my lifetime,” Brennan said. “That’s why using terminology like ‘success,’ like ‘victory’ and ‘win,’ complicates our task.”

  He said they needed to identify milestones that would measure progress in Afghanistan and align the resources with those milestones. There are very few al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The intelligence analysis indicated the Taliban might not even want al Qaeda back if it reestablished control of the government. Hosting al Qaeda had cost the Taliban Afghanistan in 2001. Why would al Qaeda want to go back to Afghanistan, where the U.S. and NATO already had 100,000 ground troops?

  No, Brennan said, they needed to think about places like Yemen and Somalia, which are full of al Qaeda. And al Qaeda is taking advantage of these ungoverned spaces where there is little or no U.S. troop presence. There were larger issues in this decision that had to be considered in a global context.

  “We’re developing geostrategic principles here, and we’re not going to have the resources to do what we’re doing in Afghanistan in Somalia and Yemen,” Brennan said.

  Afghanistan was a small piece of real estate, the counterterrorism chief said. His worry was the rest of the world.

  The clock read 5:05 P.M. They had been meeting for two and a half hours.

  “I think these meetings have resulted in a useful definition of the problem,” the president said, “and that redefined efforts against the Taliban are helpful and that a good definition is emerging.” But they were not there yet, he said, adding that he appreciated the late hour for those in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where it was past midnight.

  “We won’t resolve this today,” Obama said. “We’ve recognized that we’re not going to completely defeat the Taliban, which we all agree on. Bob’s summary, I think, was clear-eyed and achievable.” The trouble, he said, with the ill-defined notion of defeating the Taliban, which would be hard to achieve, was “We need something that can be in our sights.”

  “Second,” the president said, “I’m not of the view that we can simply leave. To the extent that we define counterinsurgency as population security as opposed to a high Taliban body count, that I can embrace and I think it’s sound. We need to determine how broad or narrow the scope of that objective is, though.” They would debate that further.

  Obama said he thought the basic inkblot strategy was sound. But they needed more work on defining what those key areas were.

  “If I ordered in 40,000 troops, that would not be sufficient for a counterinsurgency strategy for the entire country. So we need to find some key strategic areas to deny the Taliban a foothold and give ourselves a platform to achieve our goals.”

  Grappling for consensus, he noted the general agreement on the difficulty of defeating the Taliban and the importance of protecting Afghans.

  “The fact that we agree on these pillars of a strategy belies the notion of huge divisions among the team here and it provides a basis for moving forward,” Obama said, overlooking substantial disagreements. Biden and Brennan, for example, were not on board.

  But several issues remained for the president that had to be addressed in the next sessions.

  “Are the Afghan government’s interests aligned with ours?” On some topics they may not be aligned, he said. There are significant questions about corruption, about dependency.

  “On training Afghan troops, are they invested in the strategy we described?” Obama said. “We need to ramp up in a way that we can envision an exit strategy in a meaningful time frame. It’s not enough to have trainers if the Afghans don’t know why they’re fighting. They need to be invested in success.” The Afghans were not fighting with the same commitment in their own country as “our kids,” he said. “They need to be fighting for something.”

  As he did at these sessions, the president had a notepad. In very neat, small writing, he would list five or six phrases from the discussion. It was a way for him to exercise control, set the agenda at the end of these meetings by asking questions from his notes.

  “Can we get them to a point that will enable us to extract two, three, four years from now?” Obama asked.

  Also on his question list was, “Why should Karzai change?” Without giving Karzai the right incentives to reform, the U.S. would be stuck tending to the country for him.

  “So the question is: We can clear, hold and build, but how can we transfer?” he asked. Is the strategy sustainable over time? “We’ve put a lot of lives and money in Afghanistan.” Just to put the timeline question in human terms, he added, “I don’t want to be going to Walter Reed and Bethesda eight years from now.” These were the military hospitals filled with those wounded in the wars.

  “It will be tough for our allies,” Obama said, as well as the American public.

  The key piece for any eventual drawdown, as the president saw it, was reintegration. Not all members of the Taliban were glad to have hosted al Qaeda. Some Taliban warlords were obsessed with tribal matters. They had neither the wherewithal nor the desire to crash airliners into American skyscrapers. Ending the war would involve getting the less zealous Taliban to support the Afghan national government and move to neutral.

  “How can we peel off the folks who are fighting against us?” Obama said. That was what Petraeus had done in Iraq.

  “Given how much we spend on civilian aid and assistance, we need to make sure we have the right strategy for spending,” he continued. That went to the matter raised by Holbrooke that foreign aid money could be a corrupting influence in Afghanistan.

  He returned to the question of timetables, another big debate from Iraq.

  “I’m always wrestling with this issue,” Obama said as he weighed the pros and cons out loud. A timetable could send a message that all the enemy needed to do was run out the clock.

  “We don’t want our enemy to wait us out, but we also need to show some”—and he lapsed into a worn phrase from Vietnam—“light at the end of the tunnel.

  “We can’t sustain a commitment indefinitely in the United States,” he said. “We can’t sustain support at home and with allies without having some explanation that involves timelines.”

  The word “timeline” was a red flag for the military. They already planned to protect Afghans, train the Afghan security forces, and help straighten out the Afghan government. The president was now saying all that had to be accomplished on a deadline. For the military brass, it is an axiom that war does not take place on anyone’s schedule.

  “How could we ramp up as recommended and have an exit strategy within a reasonable time?” Obama asked. “How do we get to transfer starting eight years after the fact?”

  During this period, Obama said that they had all talked about Afghanistan “from here forward,” as though the war was starting anew and the past could be sidestepped.

  “We should understand as we talk about this that the American people don’t see this as beginning now. Right?”

  No one disputed that.

  “Their memories of this extend eight years back,” he continued. Then there was the Iraq invasion. “The endeavor in Afghanistan, in their mind, did not begin in the last six to eight months.”

  Underscoring the earlier questions about where McChrystal placed bubbles on the map, Obama repeated, “We’re not sending enough troops for a countrywide insurgency. We have to ask hard questions about where we’re doing population security. Is it in the south? Are there some bubbles in the north?

  “Finally, Pakistan is publicly saying they’re opposed to more troops,” Obama said. “If the neighbor says that, what does that say about their buy-in?” If he added troops, he said they had to carefully explain to the Pakistanis what it meant.

  Biden seconded the president. “We paid a price for pressing the pause button,” he said. “Everyone agrees that were we to be seen as losing Afghanistan, that would be a victory for al Qaeda and help jihadist recruiting.�
� But, returning to the dividing line in the room, he worried about making an additional commitment without having the ability to assure any progress in governance.

  “We’re not leaving,” Holbrooke said, bolting in as the meeting approached the three-hour mark with the president having given his summary and intent on winding down. He said the civilian programs in place are beginning to produce results. “I’m concerned about setting timelines. This is a long war. It will be longer than Vietnam.

  “If it is important, and it is, then we must make a commitment. But we must ensure it’s sustainable.”

  The president took over. “We won’t get any more bites at this apple,” he said, adding as if speaking to himself, “it’s been useful to discuss but we have to make a decision.”

  But the serious sticking points of Afghan governance and Karzai had yet to be settled.

  “You do have one bite at the apple,” Petraeus said, almost pleading. “Make it one that can make a difference. Try to avoid leaving a position that requires us to come back. But I do recognize we have to be able to say by the end of 2010 whether it’s working.”

  Rahm Emanuel made a rare comment about how to convey the severity of the U.S. conviction that Karzai must put good people as governors of the 34 provinces.

  Nurtured as a political operative in the Chicago political machine, Emanuel was comfortable with sending Karzai the equivalent of a dead fish with an imperial wrapping.

  “Tell him we’re going to put our own governors in if we have to,” he said.

  The president ignored that impractical, if not impossible, suggestion.

  “I’m not an advocate of the timetable,” Obama said, “but it will come from the Hill.” A Democratic Congress would insist on a timetable, he said, even though Congress had shown itself unable to set a timetable for Iraq, the much more unpopular war. The Iraq timetables had finally been set by the Bush and Obama administrations.

  “We have to show a plan that will actually enable us to show progress,” the president continued. “These conversations are helpful, and I see conversions” since the first meeting in September. They were coming together, he insisted. “We all looked around and admired the problem. Now it’s time to make some decisions.”

  Obama looked around the room as he made one last comment.

  “I appreciate not reading about the meetings in The Washington Post,” he said.

  Jones wrote in his black book that the Afghan National Police have “always been weak and remains a critical failure.” Not just a problem, but a “failure.”

  The president was not completely satisfied with the meetings thus far. One day during this period, Obama was walking toward the Oval Office with Gibbs. The inertia of the debate and boilerplate statements bothered him. He was tired of hearing about how everyone recognized the challenges—Afghanistan had been under-resourced, needed more troops, required a better government. Most of the principals were reiterating what they said in their reports.

  “People have to stop telling me what I already know,” he said. “And we have to get to the point where we hear some information about what people want to do.”

  Holbrooke went back to his office at the State Department, where his small staff had been complaining that they were up all night drafting analysis papers that went unread.

  “There’s one person in the room who reads them,” Holbrooke told them, “and that’s the man they are intended for.” The sleepless nights were worth it and they should prepare another package of reports for the president.

  20

  General Lute was trying to get the Pentagon to evaluate counter-terrorism plus (CT plus) as an option. It was Biden’s idea and it meant adding CT forces to hunt the Taliban and other forces to train the Afghan army and police. Exactly how many troops were needed for that? Could CT work?

  CT involved precise lethal attacks, generally on a person, a small group or a single building. It usually required fewer troops than protect-the-population counterinsurgency, which was one of the reasons why it appealed to the vice president.

  An NSC memo was sent to Gates, who passed it along to McChrystal. The Afghanistan commander responded with a cursory two-page paper saying that CT wouldn’t work. Successful CT depended on the density of conventional forces used in a counterinsurgency. Those conventional forces gathered intelligence from the bottom up through Afghan villagers and by interrogating low-level insurgents. That intelligence let CT forces know whom to target, attack and kill. Without the strong human intelligence available only through counterinsurgency, CT would be ineffective.

  Biden was not convinced. There were already 68,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan who could do counterinsurgency and develop the intelligence for CT.

  “Why don’t we just apply more CT forces?” Biden asked at a meeting with Tom Donilon, General Cartwright and his national security adviser, Tony Blinken. They could disrupt the Taliban, keeping the insurgents off balance to make sure they couldn’t take over the country, Biden said.

  “I’m not a military guy,” Biden said. “Here’s how I would approach this strategically, but we need a military plan.” He needed detailed analysis and numbers.

  “We’ll provide that,” said Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

  Those three words marked the beginning of one of the worst times in his 38 years of military service. A small fireplug of a man, Cartwright, 60, a Marine fighter pilot, was known in the White House as Obama’s favorite general. The president frequently dealt with him on sensitive code word JSOC operations and other Special Access Programs because Chairman Mullen was traveling. Obama wanted to approve and stay informed about these operations, so the two had spent a fair amount of time together.

  Before becoming vice chairman, the second highest ranking military officer and a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he oversaw airspace and missile defense as head of the U.S. Strategic Command. Cartwright doubted that an increase of 40,000 troops would pay off in the ways advertised. In his view, counterinsurgency could not work if the borders were not controlled. The Afghanistan-Pakistan border was notoriously wide open. Taliban fighters could cross into Pakistan to “rest, relax, and rearm” before returning to Afghanistan to kill Americans.

  Cartwright also believed that the president was by law entitled to a full range of options.

  The vice chairman phoned Blinken.

  “I tried to flesh out what you guys have put on the table,” Cart-wright said. He had run the numbers, done the analysis. Would Blinken like to go over it?

  They met in Blinken’s second-floor office at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. Cartwright sketched out his plan. The problem with counterinsurgency was that the military had to concentrate its troops and resources in one area until the Afghan forces could take over, whenever that might be. With U.S. troops confined to an inkblot—a bubble—the enemy had the freedom to maneuver outside that bubble. Taliban insurgents had the advantage of being able to take whacks constantly at stationary American forces, which gave them the initiative. The bubble strategy also let the Taliban have potential safe havens in parts of Afghanistan where coalition forces were not located.

  Instead of the options McChrystal proposed, the U.S. could send in two Special Forces brigades, totaling 10,000 troops. Those CT forces could outmaneuver the Taliban. Rather than sitting there protecting people, these troops would engage and kill the enemy.

  “We can sort of use their tactics against them,” Cartwright said.

  The U.S. could send another 10,000 trainers to prepare the Afghan forces to take over the areas already secured by the U.S. and its allies. That would free coalition troops to either expand the inkblots or start new ones. It was a combination of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism. Or put simply, a hybrid option, requiring only 20,000—half CT, half trainers.

  From that sketch, Blinken wrote a memo for the vice president. Blinken and Cartwright also outlined the hybrid option for John Brennan, the president’s counterterro
rism adviser.

  Biden shared the memo with the president and explained his thinking. A hybrid approach would let the military demonstrate whether counterinsurgency worked in parts of Afghanistan before the U.S. committed to it for the entire country.

  “Shouldn’t our focus be on proving our concept before we double down on it?” Biden said.

  But there was a glitch. Admiral Mullen despised the hybrid option. He did not want it discussed and debated at the White House. So he barred it from leaving the Pentagon.

  “We’re not providing that,” Mullen told Cartwright.

  “I’m just not in the business of withholding options,” Cartwright responded. “I have an oath, and when asked for advice I’m going to provide it.” Under the law as a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he was empowered to give independent military advice to the president, even if it differed from the chairman’s. And the law said that the chairman was obligated to submit any alternative advice “at the same time he presents his own advice to the president, the National Security Council, or the secretary of defense.”

  The relationship between Mullen and Cartwright had been tense. It just got much worse. Some senior civilians in the Pentagon thought they were barely on speaking terms.

  Jones thought the option should possibly be considered, but Cart-wright had basically circumvented the chairman and the military hierarchy. The national security adviser spoke with him for more than an hour to see if there was some way to smooth over the disagreement. Mullen was still the boss. Going around him even at the vice president’s request was risky. It put Cartwright in an awkward position. This wasn’t how the system was supposed to work. There had to be a process. Jones too was appalled by Mullen’s inflexibility, but there had to be a way other than going against the chairman to get the option heard.

  “At the end of the day,” Cartwright told Jones, “it’s my job. It’s what I signed up to do. I’m going to give them options if they ask. I’m one of the Joint Chiefs, that’s the oath.”