Obama’s Wars

by Bob Woodward

  Obama held the chart and waved it as if it were a piece of damning evidence in a courtroom. “Where we are now,” he said, pointing to the current 68,000, “is above where we were when we came in.” That had been just 35,000. “Five years from now we’re only where we are now,” he said. The chart showed the force level at about 68,000 then. Under this plan he would have more troops in Afghanistan when he left office—whether after one or two terms—than when he took office. And the United States would only get down to 20,000, as he put it, “after my presidency.”

  Rhodes passed McDonough a note saying: More troops in Afghanistan in 2016 than when he took office!

  Obama was almost fretting. “A six-to-eight-year war at $50 billion a year is not in the national interest of the United States.” That was what was before him. The entire timeline from deployment to drawdown was too much. “Actually,” he continued, “in 18 to 24 months, we need to think about how we can begin thinning out our presence and reducing our troops. This cannot be an open-ended commitment.”

  Petraeus then boldly declared that he thought they could get all the troops in by the first half of next year.

  The president took another look at Mullen’s four options.

  “So let me get this straight, okay?” Obama asked. “You guys just presented me four options, two of which are not realistic”—the 85,000 dream and the 20,000 hybrid. Of the remaining two—the 40,000 and Gates’s 30,000 to 35,000—he noted their numbers were about the same. “That’s not good enough.” And the way the chart presented it, the 30,000 to 35,000 option was really another way to get to the full 40,000 because there would be a decision point for the fourth brigade in a year, December 2010. So 2A is just 2 without the final brigade? he asked.

  “Yes,” said McChrystal.

  Two and 2A are really the same, Obama said. “So what’s my option? You have essentially given me one option.” He added sternly, “You’re not really giving me any options. We were going to meet here today to talk about three options. I asked for three options at the Joint Chiefs meeting.” That was some 10 days earlier. “You agreed to go back and work those up.”

  At one point Mullen said, “No, I think what we’ve tried to do here is present a range of options, but we believe that Stan’s option is the best.”

  But, Obama pressed, you haven’t really made them that different.

  It was silent in the room, and there was a long pause.

  “Well, yes, sir,” Mullen finally replied. He later said, “I didn’t see any other path.”

  It was as if the ghosts of the Vietnam and Iraq wars were hovering, trying to replay the history in which the military had virtually dictated the force levels. This was the second lesson from Gordon Goldstein’s book about McGeorge Bundy and Vietnam: “Never Trust the Bureaucracy to Get It Right.”

  The president repeated that he wanted the graph moved to the left. Get the forces in faster and out faster. “You tell me that the biggest problem we have now is that the momentum is with the Taliban, and the reason for this resource request is that the momentum is with the Taliban. But you’re not getting these troops into Afghanistan” for more than a year. “I’m not going to make a commitment that leaves my successor with more troops than I inherited in Afghanistan.

  “We have a government with a serious dependency issue,” Obama said of Afghanistan. “If I’m Karzai, this looks great to me, because then I don’t have to do anything.

  “It’s unacceptable,” he said. He wanted another option.

  “Well,” Gates finally said, “Mr. President, I think we owe you that option.”

  It never came. I later pressed the president twice about what happened and why. He finally acknowledged that he personally had to help design a new option. “What is fair is that I was involved,” Obama said. “I was more involved in that process than it was probably typical.”

  Afterward, Petraeus immediately got on the secure video with his logistics team, which moves troops and supplies in and out of war zones.

  “Okay,” he said, addressing them fondly as “Logistics Nation,” his term for the team headed by Major General Ken Dowd, who was the combatant commander’s supply officer. “I’ve just written a check and I need you to help me cash it.”

  “Hooah, sir!” Dowd said, using the universal military expression that means anything and everything except no.

  Petraeus said that he had told the president they could get all the troops and equipment on the ground in Afghanistan by the first half of 2010. “We really need to drill this absolutely in every respect. Where can we shorten timelines?” It was a matter of squeezing everything.

  So it was back to the drawing board for the military as Obama went off on a 10-day trip to Asia. On the way over, he phoned Gates from a secure line on Air Force One.

  “Bob, I just want to go through what we talked about,” he said, and repeated the elements of the new option he was looking for.

  “That’s what we’re working on,” Gates promised.

  Later, Obama expressed his frustration to his top advisers. The military was “really cooking the thing in the direction that they wanted.” Once they got around to dealing with enablers and the flexibility that the military would want, the choice would be between 40,000 and 36,000, he said.

  It was laughable. “They are not going to give me a choice.”

  What also really set off the president was that the military wanted to leave more than 100,000 troops there for years. “I’m not going to leave this to my successor,” and the military plan “compromises our ability to do anything else. We have things we want to do domestically. We have things we want to do internationally.”

  The open-ended, perpetual commitment of force in Afghanistan is wrong for our broader interests, Obama said. First, it would increase the dependency of the Karzai government, which would be happy to have us there forever to do the hard things. Second, it doesn’t address corruption and it reinforces the Taliban’s talking point that we will permanently occupy the country. So, he said, the task of balancing the military imperative with all of this was going to be his.

  “If they tell me these are the resources that they really need to break the Taliban’s momentum then we need to do that” in some form. “But I have to figure out a way to make this option aligned with what I feel are the strategic interests that we have in Afghanistan.” And they are limited. He was going to have to begin to map some way out.

  Obama indicated that he had wanted the strategic review to be as prolonged as it had been in order to get away from the events of the early fall when the McChrystal assessment had been published and McChrystal had given the London speech. These events had created the appearance that the military was boxing him in. Obama said he wanted his final decision to be based upon his consultation with the military and not something that was forced upon him. He had to get himself and the country out of that box. War could not suck the oxygen out of everything else. Some of it had to do with the nature of wars that had the U.S. fighting local insurgencies. There were going to be no victory dances in the end zone. One of his problems with Bush had been the constant talk of a victory that was not attainable.

  Obama had campaigned against Bush’s ideas and approaches. But, Donilon, for one, thought that Obama had perhaps underestimated the extent to which he had inherited George W. Bush’s presidency—the apparatus, personnel and mind-set of war making.

  After the November 11 meeting, Mullen and Lute talked privately.

  “Mr. Chairman,” Lute said, “the president really wants another option. This is not a wild hair by the VP. This is, he’s serious about this. There’s no question. Look, he really expects a paper here. We’ve got to have this analysis.” Gently he added, “You’re on the hook. The president’s going to call on you.”

  Mullen wasn’t acting as if he felt any pressure. Lute was astonished.

  Three days later, Mullen and the Joint Chiefs of Staff produced the latest version of the secret graph entitled “Alternative
Mission in Afghanistan.”

  It was a source of the president’s mounting frustration. Under this revised plan, an imaginary dotted line showed a drawdown beginning—possibly—in 2012, the year he would be running for reelection. The current level of 68,000 would not be reached until the spring of 2013, according to the chart. Then the shift to an “advise/ assist” mission would begin to take place. But according to the chart, it would only happen if four “key assumptions” were realized, none of which the strategy review had suggested were likely. The assumptions were that the Taliban would be degraded to “manageable” by the Afghans, the Afghan security forces would be able to secure the gains from the U.S. surge, the sanctuaries in Pakistan would be “eliminated or severely degraded,” and the Afghan government could stabilize the country.

  The chart projected some 30,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan into 2015. In my interview with the president, I said that based on the chart someone had suggested “No Exit” as the title of this book.

  Obama disagreed. “You don’t know the ending,” he said. “Because there is going to come a point in time in which the United States’ combat function in Afghanistan will have ceased.”

  The president did not say when that might be.

  * At the end of 2006 when Petraeus had been the commander-designate for Iraq he insisted that President Bush make an up-front commitment to send five brigades, saying, “Don’t bother to send me to Iraq if you’re only going to commit to two brigades.”

  24

  Despite the CIA’s love affair with unmanned aerial vehicles such as Predators, Obama understood with increasing clarity that the United States would not get a lasting, durable effect with drone attacks. “I don’t think anybody believes that we’ll have much more than a disruption effect on al Qaeda,” said Lute, “and its associates by doing it from the air or by doing sort of the high value target hit list.”

  Still, Emanuel showed an intense interest in the drone strikes and called CIA Director Leon Panetta regularly with one question: “Who did we get today?”

  The president wanted to move the Pakistanis to bring some semblance of law and order to the ungoverned tribal areas and go after al Qaeda and the Taliban more aggressively on the ground.

  “We’ve got to get to that Pakistani risk factor,” Obama said. “Why don’t we send a delegation, high-level delegation over there?” He reached out directly to Pakistani President Zardari, drafting a letter and dispatching Jones and John Brennan to hand-deliver it.

  In the two-page letter, dated November 11, Obama proposed a more formal “long-term strategic” partnership over the coming months and years. Referring to “recent arrests in the United States of individuals with ties to militants in Pakistan,” meaning Najibullah Zazi and David Coleman Headley, Obama wrote, “we must find new and better ways to work together to disrupt their ability to plan attacks.” In an unmistakable reference to the ISI-supported terrorist group LeT, he said that using such “proxy groups” would no longer be tolerable.

  Obama made an unusual appeal to the widower of the assassinated Benazir Bhutto in the private letter, which was not intended to become public. “I know that I am speaking to you on a personal level when I say that my commitment to ending the ability of these groups to strike at our families is as much about my family’s security as it is about yours.”

  He proposed an escalation. “If your government will match my gesture, I will commit my government to deepening and broadening our work together, particularly in the area of counterterrorism cooperation, with the goal of defeating al Qaeda, TTP, LeT, the Haqqani network, the Afghan Taliban” and others.

  Jones and Brennan flew to Pakistan, presenting the letter to Zardari on November 13. “Pakistan is the epicenter of the strategic review,” Jones said. The president was elevating the importance of Pakistan. Jones said the region would now be called PakAf instead of AfPak.

  This distressed the Pakistanis, who responded that the inversion might suggest that Pakistan was the main problem. That would not be positive, nor would it be in the spirit of the proposed partnership, they said.

  Jones said he understood, and the name change was not made.

  Brennan, Obama’s trusted counterterrorism adviser, said that during the past several months, U.S. law enforcement agencies had discovered at least two individuals who had been trained in terrorist camps in Pakistan, and he cited the cases of Zazi and Headley. They had been very close to developing attacks in New York and Europe, Brennan said. They had been uncovered by the U.S. and foreign intelligence services.

  “It is difficult,” Jones said solemnly, “to imagine the consequences to our relationship had they been successful.”

  This was both a plea and a warning. If a destructive attack originated from Pakistan, there would be a response from the U.S.

  Jones’s message also was that Pakistan could get virtually anything from its wish list of weapons, trade deals and money if it agreed to go along with the partnership. He believed that no country could refuse such an offer from the United States.

  And it was not as though the U.S. was seeking the kind of presence in that country as it had in Afghanistan, or for that matter Germany and Japan. “We are not asking for bases in Pakistan,” he said at one point.

  On November 17, Tony Blinken met with Pakistani Ambassador Haqqani. Blinken said that despite the impressive Pakistani efforts in Swat and Waziristan there was still concern about the ISI and some terrorist groups. “There is appeasement one day, confrontation another day and direction a third day,” he said.

  And that same week, Panetta visited Islamabad for meetings with Zardari and other top officials.

  “The United States,” the CIA director said, “expects Pakistan’s full support as al Qaeda and its affiliates are common enemies.” This cooperation, he added, was a matter of Pakistan’s own “survival.”

  Panetta noted that the command and control for the Taliban was in the Pakistani city of Quetta. Intelligence showed that bombs were being made there. “They are taken across the border and blowing up Americans,” Panetta said. “We have to go after this.”

  The CIA had a secret base in Quetta, but the Pakistanis tried to keep the CIA people on the base. They did not allow them much access around the city, arguing that they would be spotted too easily because many had white skin. The CIA people felt almost as if they were under house arrest. The CIA argued it could assert a lot more pressure on the Taliban senior leadership if they could be seen as running agents in Quetta. It would demonstrate that the Taliban had been penetrated, a message the CIA wanted to send.

  The CIA team did have kill-capture authority on Mullah Omar. But because of the large population in Quetta, drones would not be very effective. Thus—and this was the bottom line—there was a need for “joint ISI-CIA operations on the ground,” Panetta said. This would be a big step that would involve more CIA covert teams inside Pakistan.

  The Pakistanis balked at the joint operations, but were soon granting visas for more CIA people to enter Pakistan. For example, a January 18, 2010, request for 36 CIA people was soon approved, and CIA deputy director Steve Kappes personally asked for 10 more visas on April 19, 2010.

  Later in November, Zardari answered Obama with a wandering letter that the White House concluded must have been composed by a committee dominated by the Pakistani military and ISI. It wallowed in the impact of three decades of conflict in Afghanistan: “We continue to suffer. Pakistan continues to bleed.” The letter did not directly refer to India, but its subtext lurked behind many paragraphs. “Our security is fragile,” it said, “due to a fast evolving imbalance in the conventional field.” The Swat operation “cost Pakistan nothing less than US $2.5 billion.

  “Here I must draw your attention to a proxy war against Pakistan, now in full swing,” Zardari wrote, “in which neighboring intelligence agencies”—read India—“are using Afghan soil to perpetrate violence in Pakistan.” The letter insisted the Pakistan contributions to the war on terror “a
gainst al Qaeda and Taliban are second to none.” Instead of accepting or rejecting the offer for a strategic partnership, Zardari—or the committee—said it was being given “my highest consideration.”

  There was a lot of head-scratching at the White House over this. It was decided to take it as a yes, and soon the Pakistanis learned that U.S. military Special Operations Forces were rehearsing attacks into the tribal areas of Pakistan. At a dinner with Ambassador Haqqani, DNI Blair said the two countries had to get over their mutual distrust as he pressed for the strategic partnership. Or, Blair said, “we will have to do what we must to protect U.S. interests.” In other words, go it alone.

  There was another side to the tough talk. As a result of nearly endless policy discussions in the White House, Jones, Donilon, Lute and others had repeatedly asked: How are we going to get these guys in Pakistan to change? For the moment, they knew this was the wrong question. Pakistan was not going to change. The Pakistanis were hardwired against India. Let’s quit banging our heads against that wall and accept it.

  Pakistan would be at such a disadvantage in a conventional war with India, which had a two-to-one advantage in troops, that it had relied on two asymmetric tools—proxy terrorism through LeT and the threat of nuclear weapons. As a result, Pakistan did not want to be pressed to halt their production of fissile material for more nuclear weapons.

  Jones tried to convey to them: We’ve come to the conclusion that after years of trying, we’re not going to change your strategic calculus. It’s yours. We accept it and want to understand it better. You get to be the Pakistanis in this relationship, while we get to be the Americans. We’re not going to try to be both.