by Bob Woodward
Petraeus said they did not have to defy all those risk factors. Progress could take many forms. There was another risk—the battlefield. In Iraq it had been the most visible differential. Provide security and the other risks would be reduced. Violence would drop and the country would appear more stable. “All we have to do is begin to show progress,” Petraeus said, “and that’ll be sufficient to add time to the clock and we’ll get what we need.”
“That’s a dramatic misreading of this president,” Lute said. Obama hadn’t even uttered the word “counterinsurgency” in his speeches and opposed the idea of a long-term commitment. “I don’t think he’s into that.”
Lute wondered how the president had packaged this for himself. He surmised the following: The president had fast-forwarded and figured it would most likely be ugly following July 2011. Obama had to do this 18-month surge just to demonstrate, in effect, that it couldn’t be done. The surge would be expensive, but not so much that the country could not absorb it. Obama would have given the monolithic military its day in court and the United States would not be seen as having been driven off the battlefield. The only way Lute could explain the final decision was that the president had treated the military as another political constituency that had to be accommodated. “Because I don’t think the review adds up to the decision,” he said.
Lute thought the president could have reasonably said to Gates, we just committed 33,000 troops this year. When you can show me it is working, then I will double down. As I read it, there’s nothing about the situation that is so imminently deteriorating, so dramatically deteriorating, that we don’t have time to prove that we know what we are doing. That would have been a more prudent approach, Lute believed. And wasn’t it incumbent on them to be as sure as possible that they knew what they were doing?
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Mullen heard though his sources at the White House—JCS chairmen have their sources too—that Lute believed the strategy would not work. Given their frequent contact, Mullen thought Lute might have told him his views.
It upset Mullen, who shared his disappointment in their Friday afternoon Tandberg video session after the West Point speech.
Lute’s relationship with the chairman had been tense. He had agreed to take the job as war czar in 2007, after Gates promised that he would be taken care of later with an important assignment from the JCS chairman. When Pete Pace left and Mullen became chairman, the job of taking care of Lute fell to him. Mullen had offered Lute several jobs that were hardly plums, so Lute had declined them. He planned to retire out of the White House assignment.
Lute believed Mullen resented the fact that Jones, a retired four-star, and Lute, an active duty three-star, were giving Obama regular military advice. Mullen was supposed to be the principal military adviser to the president.
Lute was also convinced that Mullen had consumed the COINistas’ Kool-Aid without understanding it. As a naval officer, Mullen’s head was on the bridge of a capital ship drinking coffee, shouting out rudder orders and “More coffee!” He had not done an independent, sober, clear-eyed analysis of what was being sold. He thought his job was to endorse the work of his subordinates. Mullen didn’t do much homework and hadn’t dug into the details of what they were doing. “That’s a recipe for quagmire,” Lute said. “That’s a recipe for disaster in this business.”
On the Tandberg that afternoon, Mullen and Lute agreed that now that they had a policy decision, they would have to implement their butts off to give it the best chance.
Mullen decided to be frank. “The secretary and I believe you weren’t always helpful in the course of the review,” he told Lute.
“I hope the president doesn’t have the same view,” Lute responded.
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Gates planned to go see the president to say he wanted to leave soon. In a December meeting, the president, however, said, “I’d like for you to stay on through the full term, but I know that’s asking too much.”
Caught off guard, Gates felt preempted. It got under his skin. The full term meant another three years. They began negotiations, and Gates thought the president sounded like a rug merchant.
“I can commit to you for another year,” he finally said. That meant he would stay until January of 2011, just a month after the first serious reevaluation of the new strategy, but six months before the beginning of some kind of withdrawal in July 2011. Gates said he would be willing to revisit the issue the next year to see if he would stay longer.
On Christmas Day 2009, a 23-year-old Nigerian named Umar Abdulmutallab attempted to detonate a bomb sewn into his underwear on a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit. The bomb fizzled, igniting but not exploding. The plane landed safely with 300 on board. On vacation in Hawaii, Obama blasted what he called “systemic” intelligence failures.
The president directed Brennan to examine what went wrong and write a report. As a deputy national security adviser, Brennan reported directly to the president on terrorism. He was known as “The Answer Man” because he worked so hard, read raw intercepts, and talked directly to foreign intelligence services and chiefs. Because the failed bomber had come from Yemen, Brennan had spoken with its president, Ali Abdullah Saleh. But Brennan’s closeness with Obama also caused DNI Blair and others in the intelligence bureaucracy to see him as the competition.
Two weeks after the failed Christmas bombing, around 11 A.M. on Thursday, January 7, 2010, Brennan handed Blair a copy of the report hours before the president planned to make a statement and release it.
“This is the first time I have seen it,” Blair said with some dismay, “and you’ve got the president going on in three hours?” He read the report quickly.
“This is wrong,” he said. The draft report placed far too much blame on lower-level analysts, simplifying a problem that was vastly more complicated. “I can’t support this.”
He was quickly hustled into the Oval Office to see the president.
“What’s the problem?” Obama asked.
“This is incorrect,” Blair said, holding a copy of the report. “If I’m asked whether I agree with this report, I will say no.” In military parlance, Blair was throwing his admiral’s stars on the table. It was an act of protest that implied a threat to resign. If a Senate committee asked whether he agreed with the report, he said, “I’ll tell them no.”
Blaming lower-level analysts was a dodge, Blair said. Everyone had screwed up—DNI, CIA, NSA, FBI, the State Department, the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), which was supposed to connect the dots scattered among the agencies, and even the White House. There had been clear, multiple warnings in their reports, intelligence systems and computer networks.
“Well,” Obama said, “I thought I’ve been a pretty stand-up guy on this thing. I didn’t fire you.”
Blair was tempted to say, “Go ahead.” Instead, he said, “There’s leadership responsibility for this, and I’m willing to take it.
“It’s not just the analysts’ fault,” he said. The Christmas Day bomber previously had been in Yemen, where he had contact with the branch of bin Laden’s group called al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Earlier intelligence had focused solely on that branch conducting terrorist acts inside Yemen. “We did not pay sufficient attention to them being able to send an attacker against us.”
Yet a few months ago, Blair said, one significant intelligence report stated that an AQAP leader—an American-born cleric named Anwar al-Awlaki—was trying to find, recruit and train converts for attacks against Western targets outside Yemen. Jihadist groups that had concentrated on their own countries were now actively plotting against the U.S. homeland.
“Nobody paid any attention to it,” Blair said. “So shame on leadership, including me.” In addition to these shortcomings, Brennan’s report contained too much sensitive intelligence.
Brennan had acknowledged that he let the president down, but he was steaming with anger. He was following the al Qaeda threats out of Yemen. Being second-gue
ssed about his report made him bristle.
Obama summoned Gibbs, the press secretary.
“This is not right,” the president said. “Can we put off the press conference?”
“No, we can’t,” Gibbs said. They had told the news media that the report would come out at 2 P.M.
“Put it off an hour,” the president directed, “and Blair, you go down with Brennan, and work with him. See if you can change the report to something you can accept.”
Blair was annoyed that the priority was sticking to the messaging schedule. Nonetheless, he descended to the Situation Room with Brennan to edit the report.
The final six-page report was vague, repetitive, disorganized and obviously hurried.
After it was released and the president spoke, Gibbs apologized to the press for the delay. “As you know,” he said, “declassifying a highly complex document takes some time, and we wanted to get that right.”
On January 12, a devastating earthquake struck Haiti. Leading the U.S. relief was Air Force General Douglas Fraser, head of the Southern Command. Early in the effort, Donilon raced into Jones’s office. It was an example of how Donilon made impulsive statements and snap judgments.
“We’ve got to relieve General Fraser for cause,” Donilon said. “He’s incompetent. You won’t believe how slow they are getting relief down there.”
“Calm down,” Jones said. “You’ve got to realize that SouthCom—do you even know where it is? SouthCom is always at the bottom of the resource list. They get the last helpings from the military pie. They’re always shortchanged. I know Fraser. He’s a good guy. He’ll straighten this out. It’s going to take longer than we would like.”
Fraser, whose command is based in Miami, was not relieved. More than 20,000 U.S. troops were in Haiti by the end of January.
The Pentagon also had concerns about Donilon. When criticism of Jones had reached a high-water mark the previous year, Gates had decided to publicly embrace him. “I think of Jim as the glue that holds this team together,” Gates told The Washington Post’s David Ignatius, whose “Jim Jones’s Team” ran prominently on the op-ed page.
Gates did this in part, he told an aide, because he did not think Donilon would work out as Jones’s successor. Gates felt that Donilon did not understand the military or treat its senior leadership with sufficient respect. The secretary later told Jones that Donilon would be a “disaster” as Obama’s national security adviser.
In February, when he had some time to reflect on the strategy review, Donilon thought it was one of the rare examples in recent American history where a president had fully understood the contours of a national security decision.
Obama doesn’t “contemplate losing,” he told others. “His life experience teaches him that if he applies himself, and you’re patient and you’re relentless—and you’re correct—that you’ll succeed.”
But Donilon’s professional frustration with Jones was growing. With Jones booking substantially fewer hours than his deputy, NSC staffers observed that Donilon was doing one and three quarters of a job, working long days and weekends, rarely seeing his family and not taking physical care of himself.
If Obama wanted something followed up after meetings, he turned to Donilon, not Jones. Donilon was the go-to guy, answering the calls that came from the Oval Office. He moved at 100 miles per hour, while Jones ran at 35 and got lapped a couple of times. Donilon was both the victim and beneficiary of Jones’s limited definition of his job. He showed both pride and resentment in his expanded role, telling friends he’d never been happier but at times erupting from the stress.
While looking at a Holbrooke memo one day, he lashed out, “This is fifth-grade work. My fifth-grade son wouldn’t do work this bad.”
Donilon had studied his history, poring over and absorbing what he felt were the mistakes in Vietnam and Iraq. In neither of those wars had the president been precise in his instructions. Obama had fixed that with the terms sheet, which Donilon considered to be a historic document and model for presidential decision making.
The troop surge was part of a reallocation of the nation’s resources, which after the 24-month “punch” into Afghanistan could be directed away from the war. At the same time, Donilon felt the U.S. was battering al Qaeda far more than the Bush administration ever had in terms of tempo, tools and global scope.
Donilon hashed out most matters at the deputies level, while the principals working with Jones met rarely and often only to rehearse the monthly reviews before an actual NSC meeting with Obama. When Jones was abroad for the president, however, Donilon would not host a principals meeting in his absence. He might be the de facto national security adviser, but Jones had the accounts with the key principals—Clinton and Gates.
In 40 years in the Marine Corps, Jones had always found a way to connect with the boss. That was not the case with Obama, whom he found cerebral and distant. Jones had never really been invited into the inner circle of Emanuel, Axelrod and Gibbs—and now Donilon. With those aides holding so much control, Jones felt as though he couldn’t be in charge. He planned to leave office around the start of 2011.
Jones had several get-togethers and meals with Pakistani ambassador Haqqani, hoping to work out a deal.
“We are a nation of rug merchants,” Haqqani said, trying to explain his country without disparaging it. “That’s our origin historically. So have you ever tried buying a carpet in Iran or Pakistan?”
Over the years, Jones had bought many rugs during his trips abroad.
“The guy starts at 10,000 and you settle for 1,200,” Haqqani went on. “You guys have no idea of the proportionality, you know? So be reasonable, but never let the guy walk out of the shop without a sale. Do a sale. So our side now, we’ve asked for the moon, but we’ll get something. We’re getting our stuff. We’ll get our helicopters, which the army needs to go into North Waziristan.”
At another meeting with Donilon and Lute present, Jones asked, “What would it take to get you guys to focus on our concerns without you guys totally giving up whatever your obsessions and concerns are?”
Economic aid and more military capability, the ambassador said. “Give us a little bit of respect. Don’t humiliate us publicly.”
Jones made it clear that the United States wanted real support on counterterrorism—more CIA, more Special Operations inside Pakistan. How could the U.S. really get that?
“A man who is trying to woo a woman,” Haqqani said, was the best analogy. “We all know what he wants from her. Right?” The man wants one thing; he wants to make love. “But she has other ideas. She wants to be taken to the theater. She wants that nice new bottle of perfume. If you get down on one knee and give the ring, that’s the big prize. And boy, you know, it works.”
Turning to Donilon and Lute, Jones said, “We have to figure out a way of giving these guys the ring.”
“The ring is, by the way,” Haqqani said, “recognition of Pakistan’s nuclear program as legitimate. That is going to be the ring.”
But Pakistan already had nuclear weapons and acknowledgment by the U.S. was not going to get them to change their behavior.
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Petraeus met for two hours on Saturday, April 3, with Derek Harvey, his trusted intelligence adviser and the director of CentCom’s Afghanistan-Pakistan Center of Excellence, the organization that Petraeus had founded to gather and analyze intelligence in Afghanistan with a homicide detective’s rigor.
Harvey drew one of the most pessimistic pictures possible of the war. “Our political and diplomatic strategies are not connected to our military strategy,” he warned. “It is not going to work. We’re not going to achieve the objectives that we’ve set out for ourselves. We can get to a point of some transient stability and the appearance of success that will not be enduring, that might provide a window for us to withdraw, and to keep things steady for the next three or four years. But inevitably, it will result back to the Great Game,” the 19th- and early-20th-century struggle for domi
nance in Central Asia.
Pulling no punches, Harvey listed the likely long-term outcome: “malign actors, disrupted, ineffective, collapsing government in Kabul; a reemergence of violent extremist groups and safe havens.” In other words, a complete return to a pre-9/11 environment.
Was Harvey sure? Petraeus asked.
Harvey said that McChrystal did not have a plan to moderate, adjust and change President Karzai’s behavior. The Afghan government had to improve if the campaigns in Marja and Kandahar were to succeed. Once the coalition forces cleared the Taliban from each of those places, a competent government needed to be in place to prevent the Taliban from returning. The default move by McChrystal and his command was deferring to Karzai and equating the president to the entire Afghan government. That was wrong.
What are the options? Petraeus asked.
The strategy of supporting the Karzai government was counterproductive, Harvey said. Looking at cease-fire options or reconciliation with the Taliban, “When you peel it back, there’s nothing there. And we’re being played in a rope-a-dope manner by various elements at different tiers of the Taliban.” For insurgents who want to put down their arms and help the government, there was no place to go, no organization in place. The guidance to the U.S. forces said to turn these people over to the government. “This is exactly who these people are in opposition against, even if they’re not fighting actively.” The Karzai government was despised.
Harvey said there were missed opportunities coming from the Karzai reelection fraud that previous August. Karzai had largely gone unchallenged by the U.S. afterward, and his victory was sealed when his opponent dropped out of the runoff election. “We are so dependent upon Karzai,” Harvey said. “His weakness becomes a strength. And sometimes you have to break china to make real progress. There was a real opportunity to shift the dynamic there on the ground. It would’ve been costly and painful in the near-term.”