Obama’s Wars

by Bob Woodward

  By not holding him accountable after the election, “what we’ve done is make Karzai even stronger in the process. He’s a very strong president in a weak system, and we’ve assumed for too long that he’s a weak leader in a weak system and we don’t have any other choice. That is wrong. He’s a strong leader, tactical in orientation, with poor management skills.

  “The outcome of the elections is we made him stronger and contributed to his tendencies that we don’t want to contribute to. … He’s already getting everything he wants.”

  On the ground, he said, McChrystal’s forces had not finished clearing key areas. “The enemy is just beginning to adapt,” Harvey said. Assassinations by the Taliban had gone up, as had IED attacks. The Taliban continued to intimidate other Afghans trying to work with the U.S., by dropping short notes on the front seat of a car: “Stop taking the money. Don’t go to these meetings.” Or when an Afghan’s son shows up four hours late from school, the note read: “Next time it’ll be his head.” One incident like that gets magnified a hundredfold as people talk about it, repeating the story in coffee shops and the market, Harvey said.

  He had some 89 intelligence analysts in Afghanistan doing the same kind of detailed, methodical work he had personally done for Petraeus in Iraq. One harsh reality was that the Taliban senior leadership thought they were okay, even with the surge of 30,000 more U.S. troops.

  As a concrete measure, Harvey had a 12-step plan for dealing with Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president’s half-brother, who controlled parts of Kandahar. The plan was designed to get control over his roadside extortions and kidnappings, and go after his private security firms. Harvey’s bottom line: Someone would have to get really tough, but that wasn’t happening.

  On April 16, the president met with the NSC for the monthly Afghanistan-Pakistan update. McChrystal had committed his forces to clearing and holding operations because the ANSF weren’t ready to hold the territory themselves. It was bogging down the model of clear, hold, build and transfer.

  The president asked about the recent Marja operation in Helmand, where coalition troops were holding after the offensive had been launched in February. “Are we on timeline?”

  Yes, sir, the military said.

  Hey, Obama asked, by the way, what about the areas we cleared in the summer of 2009? Now, those were in Helmand too?

  Yes, sir.

  Where would you put us on the clear, hold, build, and transfer model in the places south of Marja? These were the districts of Nawa and Garmsir.

  We’re holding, the military said, our forces are fixed there.

  How about the 25,000 U.S. troops in the east? the president asked. They had been there for years. Where are they on the clear, hold, build and transfer model?

  They are still holding, sir.

  Any of them close to transferring?

  Not a single one, sir.

  The model had become clear, hold, hold, hold, hold and hold. Hold for years. There was no build, no transfer.

  Petraeus said they were misconstruing the approach for beginning a transfer. First, July 2011 was more than a year off. “It’s not hand off, it’s thin out,” he said. The “advise and assist” mission ordered by the president last year meant partnering with the Afghan forces, working together, joined at the hip. That involved a gradual transition, eventually shifting from U.S. to Afghan forces in the lead. “Then we recede and then we thin out our numbers.”

  They were still in the early stages, said Petraeus, who felt the situation was sobering but, as always, not disheartening.

  No one in the meeting pushed it further and asked, When would the transfer begin? When would the U.S. forces be able to get out completely? What made anyone think that the United States could go down to the Taliban heartland in the south and achieve an outcome different from the one in the east?

  Before the president’s Thursday, May 6, secure video with McChrystal for the 90-minute monthly review, Donilon and Lute had been conspiring to raise the prominence of Kandahar, because they felt the counterinsurgency mission there would fail. The operation to gain full control of the city was beginning that month.

  It was impossible to escape the conclusion that Kandahar would be a litmus test for the war. The city was the iconic center of the Taliban. Mullah Omar had ruled from there. If “Pashtunistan” were a country, Kandahar would be its capital.

  Donilon and Lute had prepared questions for the president to focus the meeting on Kandahar. Since it was going to be the test case for 2010, the questions included: How are we doing? How is Kandahar going to change the complexion of the war in the next six months?

  McChrystal presented a map of Kandahar and its suburbs that attempted to lay out the tribal dynamics. It was a crazy quilt of overlapping colors that resembled a piece of modern art. The legend for the 20 tribes was as big as the map itself. It would almost require a Ph.D. in Afghan culture for an American to comprehend. The Taliban lived this, putting the United States at a strategic disadvantage.

  The slide also had mug shots of some three dozen political power brokers in Kandahar, attempting to outline the current balance of power. Some were known to aides in the room—the provincial governor, Tooryalai Wesa, and Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president’s half-brother. But most were not. A spaghetti soup of dotted lines, dashed-dotted lines and double-dotted lines reflected what were believed to be the relationships and tribal loyalties. Some are Barakzais, others such as Karzai are Popalzais, and on and on. Some of the narcotics kingpins were listed.

  President Obama’s body language was like a flashing neon sign. He crossed his arms, crossed his legs and literally pushed away from the table, distancing himself from what was up on the wall. He leafed through his briefing papers, full of loaded questions from Donilon, Lute and the NSC staff. One item was, “I got the diagnosis of the problem, and I see what you’re prescribing for a cure, but the two don’t connect. The dots don’t connect.” Why?

  Perhaps it was too stark and confrontational. He didn’t ask it.

  The president reflected on the Kandahar map and the power broker chart.

  “This reminds me of Chicago politics,” Obama said. “You’re asking me to understand the interrelationships and interconnections between ward bosses and district chiefs and the tribes of Chicago like the tribes of Kandahar. And I’ve got to tell you, I’ve lived in Chicago for a long time, and I don’t understand that.”

  McChrystal quipped, “If we’re going to do Chicago, we’re going to need a lot more troops.”

  Much laughter. When everyone settled down, he added, “We’re not going to make Kandahar a shining city on the hill.”

  McChrystal had presented snapshots of the main players in Kandahar. There were no full answers to the questions such as, who’s beholden to whom? Who owes a debt to whom? Who has blood feuds? Where are the real alliances? Where are the intermarriages? What could be changed? And when?

  Petraeus had just returned from southern Afghanistan. “We did things in Marja that you could not have done two or three months ago,” he said. “We walked through the market with the district governor, stopped and ate bread, surrounded by Afghans.” He said they did the same thing in Nad Ali and in Kandahar.

  Though he had lots of security, Petraeus walked around Marja without body armor, no Kevlar, no personal weapon and a soft cap. He said he felt safer there than walking the markets in Baghdad several years earlier. His bottom line—“progress without question but innumerable challenges.”

  There were some key tribes not inside the tent with the U.S. and Afghan government, largely because of threats and intimidation by the Taliban, Petraeus said.

  The president asked how they would measure success. He said he wanted sustainable progress and was still thinking about the transfer. “Be careful we don’t start something for which we don’t have resources to enable completion.

  “Keep thinking about how we’ll know if we’re succeeding,” the president said, “and when we’ll know.”

  Aft
erward, the president indicated to several close aides that the briefing had a clarifying effect on him. “What makes us think,” he asked, “that given that description of the problem, that we’re going to design a solution to this?”

  Donilon and Lute had told the president: If you’re not fully satisfied with General McChrystal’s description here, he will be in Washington next week. You should invite him to come see you and continue this discussion in a smaller, more intimate setting.

  In other words, if the meeting had amounted to a “strike one” for the commanding general, the president ought to give McChrystal another swing.

  He agreed.

  Toward the end of one of the NSC principals meetings without the president, the conversation turned to the challenge of dealing with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. CIA Director Panetta believed Karzai was the kind of individual who would shut down if he felt isolated. Should that happen, the U.S. would never know where the hell he was going to go or what he was going to do.

  “It is very important that we be able to have someone who can talk to Karzai, he can talk to, who he trusts,” said Panetta, who had an ideal candidate in mind. The new CIA Kabul station chief was the same operative who had saved Karzai’s life back in 2001 by serving as a human shield when a bomb dropped near them. But Ambassador Eikenberry refused to let the station chief meet with Karzai alone.

  “Our chief of station out there is somebody who saved his life, has a relationship with him, talks to him,” Panetta said. “Karzai wants to talk to him. It’s really important to give him that access.”

  Secretary Clinton agreed. She had instructed Eikenberry to let the meetings occur, but he had refused to budge even though he believed everything rode on Karzai being prodded in the right direction.

  “We will do that,” said Jones. “That has to be done.”

  Eikenberry was ordered to relent. The CIA could now have private meetings with Karzai when no one else was present.

  On May 10, during President Karzai’s visit to Washington, McChrystal and Holbrooke had a 45-minute talk.

  “Stan, are you really okay with July 2011?” Holbrooke asked.

  “I think we can do the job,” responded the commanding general, who by necessity was now a professional optimist. “It depends on what we have to withdraw.”

  But, Holbrooke said, it was not just a matter of withdrawing U.S. and NATO forces but also of transferring the security responsibility to the Afghans.

  McChrystal agreed, though he had his own question for the special representative. “Why is there so much skepticism about Kandahar?” As the next big operation, it could be a turning point. But he had found lots of doubters in Washington.

  Holbrooke had just spoken with Biden, who was pessimistic and more convinced than ever that Afghanistan was a version of Vietnam. Holbrooke, in a bleak mood himself, asked if there was an Afghan example of “clear, hold, build and transfer” actually happening.

  Not yet, McChrystal said.

  Was there a way to actually have a transfer? Holbrooke inquired. For example, in the three-month-old Marja operation involving 15,000 U.S., British and Afghan troops, was there a way to take out, say, one U.S. company made up of just several hundred soldiers and transfer their responsibilities to the Afghans? “It would prove the concept,” Holbrooke said. “It would prove we are not trapped.”

  “That’s a good idea,” McChrystal replied. He paused, and thought hard for a long time. “No, we’re not ready yet.”

  Holbrooke’s heart sank. “Transfer” had been a core concept in the president’s strategy review going back six months. It was the ticket out. And they couldn’t even transfer one company? Marja was a partnering operation, which meant each U.S. unit was supposed to be working with an Afghan counterpart. A senior U.S. commander was working side by side with an Afghan general in a command center.

  Marja was a 155-square-mile farming town of 80,000, and after all that work and firepower McChrystal was saying they weren’t ready to transfer sole responsibility to a single Afghan company.

  • • •

  That evening, Secretary Clinton hosted a dinner at Blair House across from the White House for President Karzai and several of his top cabinet ministers. Gates, Jones, McChrystal, Lute and Holbrooke attended. In all, only about a dozen sat around the table.

  There were the usual tensions, good moments and bad.

  How strong is your commitment? Karzai asked at one point.

  Gates, as usual, had held back during most of the dinner. But he reminded everyone that he still felt guilty for his role in the administration of Bush senior in 1989 when the United States had pulled out after the Soviet withdrawal.

  “We’re not leaving Afghanistan prematurely,” Gates finally said. “In fact, we’re not ever leaving at all.”

  At least one stunned participant put down his fork. Another wrote it down, verbatim, in his notes.

  Though Gates meant a long-term security commitment, not a lasting combat presence, his comment was precisely the kind of soothing reassurance that would only encourage Karzai to leave the security issues to the United States.

  On May 11, the president took Donilon and Lute up on their proposal that McChrystal be invited to continue the discussion. Obama assembled a small group in the Oval Office to hear the Afghanistan commander. It included Biden, Gates, Mullen, Jones, Donilon and Colonel John Tien, the NSC Afghanistan director who essentially had a foot in each of the camps. Tien was a COINista at heart because of his experience in Ramadi, Iraq, but he also saw reason for skepticism.

  After the session, Lute, who had missed the White House meeting because he had been at the State Department with Clinton and Karzai, caught up with Colonel Tien.

  “John,” Lute asked, “how did Stan do?”

  “Strike two,” Tien said.

  • • •

  At Clinton’s meeting with the Afghan president, a kind of informal, tea-and-cookies session, Karzai voiced the conviction that the Pakistani ISI played a dominant role in managing the Taliban. The Pakistanis often complained that they never got actionable intelligence about the location of Mullah Omar. Some CIA experts half joked that the Pakistanis only had to ask the ISI case officers who managed the Taliban. “They don’t need that from us,” one intelligence expert had said. “They could get better information from their case officers.”

  “Do you really think the ISI could pick up Mullah Omar if they wanted?” Clinton asked.

  Karzai reached over and plucked a chocolate chip cookie from its plate. “They could deliver Mullah Omar like I can pick up this cookie,” he said.

  During that week, Biden invited Ambassador Eikenberry and General Lute over to the vice president’s office, where Tony Blinken joined them.

  Biden, Blinken, Lute with Donilon, McDonough and Brennan had tried to hold the line against the big troop increase during the strategy review. The six got their traction during the review from Biden. Obama had given the vice president extraordinary freedom and airtime to try to develop the counterterrorism option. They never got a full military analysis of that option, but in the six months since the review, they noted that the Biden pillar—the counterterrorism portion of the decision—was the one that was really producing.

  McChrystal had tripled the number of JSOC teams, and the CIA’s Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams, the 3,000-strong Afghan paramilitary organization, were having superb results—multiple raids every night around Kandahar, despite the lack of the troop density Petraeus had insisted would be necessary for successful counterterrorism.

  I have been focusing on Iraq and other matters, the vice president said. Since it was six months after the president’s Afghanistan decisions, he asked, “Where do we stand?”

  Eikenberry could have simply said, go back and read my cables about the risks. Instead, he reminded the vice president what an unreliable partner Karzai was.

  “He’s on his meds, he’s off his meds,” Eikenberry said, trying to account once again for Karzai’s errati
c behavior. “They’re not producing governance in Marja. And we haven’t tackled the hard problem, Kandahar. And now we’re saying, essentially, that Karzai’s going to produce a political solution for Kandahar. That’s completely irresponsible to suggest that,” adding, “so basically, we’re screwed.”

  Was there a political solution that would bail them out? They needed a big break, a strategic break. Could Pakistan be the wild card? Could it change its DNA?

  Lute thought it was a measure of their desperation that they would even consider looking to Pakistan for luck.

  Could Karzai become a new guy? Could the Taliban have an epiphany and change?

  The intelligence showed that the Taliban leadership was feeling the pressure of the eight-year war, of living in virtual exile in Pakistan, of living under the not-so-light touch of the ISI. That was wearing thin. Things were closing in on them, like the capture of Quetta Shura Taliban military commander Abdul Ghani Baradar and shadow governors being arrested. The families of the Taliban were also living under the ISI’s thumb. It was evident that this safe haven sojourn wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. The intelligence showed that the Taliban and their families were effectively asking, Do we have to live under this ISI regime forever? That’s not our vision of what this was supposed to be all about. Meanwhile, there was no way Taliban leaders, at least not the meaningful guys, were crossing the border into Afghanistan—or even stepping one foot inside—where the wild-eyed JSOC teams were on the prowl. JSOC was putting the wood to Taliban regulars in Afghanistan. So was there an alternative for the Taliban?

  Maybe the landing zone was not through the COINistas’ clear, hold, build and transfer? someone asked. Maybe there was an end run, getting some Taliban to reconcile, to break with al Qaeda and provide a bridge back into Afghanistan. Such an effort could not be led by the United States. They needed to find a philosopher-king. But who? Did such a person exist?

  They ruled out Holbrooke. He seemed to need center stage too much and had lost Obama’s confidence.