Margah itself was now under fierce attack. One hundred and twenty insurgents from Arab countries and Chechnya and fighters from the brutal Haqqani network of Afghan and Pakistani insurgents opened fire on the sixty Americans and their Afghan National Army partners at the outpost with machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades and mortars. “We had multiple indicators an attack like this was going to happen in that area in an attempt to gain victory before the end of the fighting season, and our combined Afghan and coalition forces were ready for them,” Campbell later related. Around Margah, there were four separate “direct-fire and attack-helicopter-engagement areas” established in locations where the insurgents had surrounded the outpost’s perimeter, hoping to breach the wire. Campbell later reported that more than ninety insurgents lay dead on the battlefield when the fighting was over, along with two wounded attackers, who were evacuated for medical care. “To put it bluntly . . . the insurgents failed miserably,” Campbell assessed, crediting artillery support, attack aviation, Air Force aircraft and “the dogged determination of soldiers in a fight.”
Campbell went to Combat Outpost Margah on Veterans Day with Petraeus, who pinned the Silver Star medal on Sergeant Starks, the fire-team leader for C Company, 2nd Battalion, 4th Brigade Combat Team. “Starks was like just about all our true heroes, characteristically humble and full of praise for his buddies, while noting that he was just doing what they’d have done—and did do, in some cases—for him,” Petraeus said later. “A wonderful American. What a night they had!”
CHAPTER 5
ANACONDA
With U.S. forces turning the tide on the dangerous terrain in Kandahar Province’s Arghandab, Zhari and Panjwai districts, in late September Petraeus suddenly faced a new assault from Washington. Bob Woodward’s latest book, Obama’s Wars, had sent shock waves to Kabul. An officer in Petraeus’s internal think tank, the Commander’s Initiatives Group, fired off an e-mail to its members, alerting the team to a story in the Washington Post that summarized the book’s details. “There are,” the officer wrote, “a few quotations in this article, previewing Woodward’s book, that are somewhat ‘rollingstone-esque’—touching on several officials, and the Boss is mentioned here a few times,” he relayed, making a clear reference to the Rolling Stone article that had toppled McChrystal. He mentioned one that jumped out: “During a flight in May, after a glass of wine, Petraeus told his own staffers that the administration was ‘fucking with the wrong guy.’”
The heart of Woodward’s book was a detailed look at the Obama administration’s lengthy strategic review of Afghanistan and Pakistan policy that took place throughout the fall of 2009, with McChrystal commanding the war in Afghanistan and Petraeus, his boss, heading the military’s powerful Central Command, based in Tampa. Obama wanted alternatives to endless, costly war and nation building in Afghanistan. Vice President Biden advocated a strategy he called “counterterrorism plus” that would have focused mainly on hunting down al-Qaeda’s leaders in Pakistan and Afghanistan, as opposed to far more extensive counterinsurgency operations.
Woodward chronicles the administration’s frustration over what he described as seeming resistance by top military leaders—McChrystal, Petraeus and Admiral Michael G. Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, all supported by Defense secretary Gates—to present anything other than plans calling for 40,000 to 80,000 more troops to implement a robust counterinsurgency strategy. Moreover, at every turn that fall, according to Woodward, the military had sought to limit Obama’s options. In turn, Petraeus, McChrystal and Mullen felt they were simply urging enough troops to defeat al-Qaeda and the Taliban. “Does the president want to win or lose?” they reportedly asked each other, believing they were forthrightly laying out what was required to achieve the objectives established by the president—and ultimately convincing the president they were right.
Obama had, after all, campaigned on ending the Iraq War and concentrating on Afghanistan, which he described as the neglected conflict that should have been the nation’s priority all along. Upon taking office in early 2009, Obama gave Bruce Riedel, a respected former CIA analyst who had worked on his campaign, sixty days to produce a strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. Obama embraced Riedel’s recommendations and ordered the deployment of the 17,000 additional troops that had been requested by the commander in Afghanistan, General David McKiernan. “These soldiers and Marines will take the fight to the Taliban in the south and the east and give us a greater capacity to partner with Afghan security forces and to go after insurgents along the border,” the president announced in March 2009. An additional 4,000 troops, Obama said, would also go to Afghanistan to train Afghan security forces. “There is an uncompromising core of the Taliban,” the president said. “They must be met with force, and they must be defeated.” There were, at the time, only 38,350 U.S. troops in Afghanistan. This was far below the troop-to-civilian ratio that the Counterinsurgency Field Manual stated was necessary for a successful counterinsurgency campaign—which would have required some 450,000 coalition and Afghan troops for the thirty million Afghans, though Petraeus would routinely note that not all areas needed anywhere near such densities. The insurgency was most serious in about half of Afghanistan, with pockets in the rest. There would never, it was clear, be that many troops, but commanders were mindful of the doctrine when they developed recommendations for force levels.
Less than two months after the new strategy and deployments were announced, Gates fired McKiernan, on the job not quite a year, and replaced him with McChrystal, the vaunted former commander of the Joint Special Operations Command who was then serving as Mullen’s trusted deputy, as director of the Joint Staff at the Pentagon. Gates and Mullen felt strongly that McKiernan needed to be replaced with a new leader. Petraeus concurred, and they all had the utmost confidence in McChrystal, who had led JSOC forces in executing devastating counterterrorist operations in Iraq and Afghanistan for more than five years.
At his confirmation hearing on June 2, 2009, before the Senate Armed Services Committee, McChrystal observed that the key resource was people, and he noted that the 21,000 additional troops would all be on the ground by October. “You might properly ask if that is enough,” McChrystal observed. “I don’t know. It may be some time before I do.” Jim Jones, a former Marine general serving as Obama’s national security adviser, was miffed that McChrystal already seemed to be asking for more troops. But Jones and Obama agreed to Gates’s recommendation that the Pentagon give McChrystal sixty days to conduct his own assessment of conditions on the ground.
Meanwhile, in mid-July, Jones sent the Pentagon a long-awaited Strategic Implementation Plan that defined the terms of the Riedel strategy and mapped out a series of metrics for measuring success in Afghanistan. The document preceded the review and guided McChrystal’s implementation of the new strategy based on the Riedel review; it also provided guidance that would aid in his assessment. Jones had accepted a suggestion from Gates that the document should state that the goal was to “defeat” the Taliban, although the original White House draft had merely said “disrupt.” The distinction was enormous to Mullen, Petraeus and McChrystal. As McChrystal later noted in an interview, he had not planned on asking for more troops when he began his assessment. But he quickly found that conditions in Afghanistan were far worse than he had anticipated, and as he dug into Jones’s Strategic Implementation Plan document, he began to wrestle with what it would take to defeat the Taliban. It was clear to him early on that he didn’t have nearly the forces needed to accomplish that task.
Over the course of the summer and into the fall, McChrystal assessed the situation on the ground and then worked on calculating how many brigades he would need to clear pieces of key terrain and how fast new Afghan troops could reasonably be made ready. He came to the conclusion that at least another 40,000 U.S. troops—in addition to the 21,000 already committed by Obama—would be needed, and that was still with a significant
level of risk. In fact, more forces would be desirable if the president wanted to reduce the level of risk to mission accomplishment. “We were trying just to be as clear as we could on what we absolutely believed was the best military advice, which we owed the POTUS,” McChrystal later recalled. But in hindsight, he acknowledged that his recommendation quickly “became more political than I expected. So we were kind of playing catch-up in appreciating that.”
Meanwhile, Petraeus, Mullen and McChrystal and their staffs continued to carefully review the Strategic Implementation Plan. “There was the real work to determine what the new policy statement meant in operational terms,” Petraeus later noted. “We got it, started tearing it apart and studying it, and it looked pretty good.” What they didn’t realize at the time was that some key aides in the White House apparently weren’t aware that Jones had issued the Strategic Implementation Plan that called for “defeating” the Taliban. As a planner who supported Petraeus later observed, “All we were repeating during the subsequent policy review was what was in the promulgating order, and yet we didn’t initially realize they were going to completely re-look the whole thing.” In fact, at the time they received the order, planners at Central Command and in Afghanistan were not initially anticipating a full-fledged White House review of Afghan policy that would consume the entire fall.
During the subsequent policy review process, Petraeus quickly realized how politically charged McChrystal’s request for 40,000 additional troops was becoming, and how divided the White House and Obama’s national security team were over the appropriate course of action in Afghanistan. Before the process had begun, Petraeus had made his view clear in an interview with columnist Michael Gerson, whose piece appeared in early September in the Washington Post. Repeating what Mullen had stated in an open hearing on Capitol Hill the day prior to his interview, Petraeus told Gerson that accomplishing the objectives that had been established would require a “fully resourced, comprehensive counterinsurgency campaign.” Continuing, he noted, with characteristic nuance, “I don’t think anyone can guarantee that it will work out even if we apply a lot more resources. But it won’t work if we don’t. . . . [T]he Taliban have sanctuaries in Afghanistan. You can’t take out sanctuaries with Predator strikes. We have to regain the initiative. We have to get ahead of this, to arrest the downward spiral, to [regain the] momentum.”
The column reportedly angered White House aides who felt Petraeus was “prejudging a presidential decision,” even though he was merely restating what Mullen had told the Senate Armed Services Committee the day before his interview, when the chairman stated that he supported “a properly resourced, classically pursued counterinsurgency effort”—and noted that that “probably means more forces.” The rift between Petraeus, McChrystal, Mullen and Gates and a White House contingent led by Vice President Biden, who favored a narrower counterterrorist strategy, would only grow as the fall progressed.
Less than a week later, Woodward broke the story of McChrystal’s classified assessment of the conditions in Afghanistan on the front page of the Washington Post, noting that the general had concluded that the United States’ military effort in Afghanistan would fail without a significant troop buildup—though he had yet to finalize the numbers of additional forces needed. The leak ratcheted up the pressure on the White House to act. The final straw came when McChrystal, having been cautioned ahead of time, gave a speech in London on October 1 in which he insisted that only his counterinsurgency program could bring about success in Afghanistan. The White House wasn’t pleased. But McChrystal, Petraeus and Mullen ultimately stood by the request for 40,000 more troops as the only way to make progress in Afghanistan. They saw this as providing forthright military advice, but all recognized that public statements early on, before they understood the implications of the policy review, had created tension between those in the White House and those in uniform. Petraeus and Mullen took key lessons from the experience and would apply them in the review of the situation in Afghanistan in December 2010 and then in June 2011, during the preparation for discussions over the pace of the drawdown of the surge forces.
Throughout the fall policy review, the military leaders had the support of Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Clinton’s views drew, in part, from her long-standing professional friendship with retired general Jack Keane that began when she was a senator from New York and Keane was vice chief of state of the Army. Keane, who had also been an important advocate for the surge in Iraq, believed strongly that a robust and comprehensive counterinsurgency approach in Afghanistan was the only way to assure success, and Clinton was persuaded by McChrystal and Petraeus’s logic.
But even with Gates and Clinton behind McChrystal, Petraeus and Mullen, Biden and some other key members of the White House staff resented what they felt was an unrelenting push for more troops. The group reportedly included Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s chief of staff; David Axelrod, a senior adviser and key campaign strategist; Denis McDonough, a campaign adviser who became chief of the National Security Council staff; Tom Donilon, deputy national security adviser, who was close to Biden and had also worked on the campaign; and Doug Lute, a retired Army lieutenant general who served as senior adviser and the NSC’s coordinator for Afghanistan-Pakistan policy. Lute, Petraeus and McChrystal had all attended West Point at the same time. Petraeus graduated in 1974, Lute in 1975 and McChrystal in 1976. Lute had overseen combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan as director of operations for Central Command from 2004 to 2006, and he later joined the Bush White House as the so-called war czar during the surge in Iraq. He was reportedly not enthusiastic about the troop demands being jointly pressed by the military and Gates, who remained resolute about the need for more forces. Meanwhile, the Joint Chiefs’ vice chairman, General James “Hoss” Cartwright, resisted the call by McChrystal and Petraeus for 40,000 more troops. Cartwright wanted to develop a “hybrid option” that required only 20,000 additional troops. His plan, similar to that favored by Biden, was a more limited mission of hunting down the Taliban insurgents and training the Afghan police and army to take over. Mullen was furious when Cartwright presented the option during a meeting that Mullen missed due to travel, noting that no other serious military figure believed such an option was the least bit feasible for achieving the objectives in the current strategy document. In fact, a Mullen-hosted war game had shown that approach to be inadequate.
Like McChrystal and Mullen, Petraeus argued that he was merely recommending a force level needed to protect the nation’s strategic interests—and achieve the president’s stated objectives. “We truly didn’t try to box them in,” he told a friend a year later in his office at ISAF headquarters in Kabul. “I was disappointed when folks thought that. Yeah, we were all in league; we supported what we thought was the militarily sensible approach. It was an interesting period. Folks say we didn’t give them options. We gave them options. We gave an eighty-thousand option, a sixty-thousand option, and a forty-thousand option, and we provided associated levels of risk to accomplish the mission for each option. And we said that below forty thousand you can’t accomplish the mission. You couldn’t do it with twenty thousand, so there was no way we could recommend something like that.”
Obama ultimately agreed to 30,000 additional troops, with an additional 10 percent authorization for Gates, should that be needed for critical unanticipated requirements, and with a pledge to ensure generation of the rest of the needed 40,000 from other troop-contributing nations. But he also then insisted that Mullen, Petraeus, McChrystal and Gates agree to a secret six-page “terms sheet” that stated: “This approach is not fully resourced counterinsurgency or nation building, but a narrower approach tied more tightly to the core goal of disrupting, dismantling and eventually defeating al Qaeda and preventing al Qaeda’s return to safe havens in Afghanistan or Pakistan.” Gates and the military had not only seen the terms before they were asked to agree to them; they had provided input to those from the Pe
ntagon who were helping the White House craft them. What Obama personally added at the last minute, Pentagon officials later shared, was the provision that a drawdown of forces would begin in July 2011. “As we learned in the Oval Office on Sunday evening the night before the policy was to be announced, it was take it or leave it,” one participant later told an assistant. Gates, Mullen, Petraeus, McChrystal and the others “took it.”
Obama announced the outcome of the review in a speech at West Point on December 1, 2009. In a huge auditorium filled with cadets in simple gray uniforms, Petraeus looked up from the front row alongside Mullen, Gates, Clinton and retired Army general Eric Shinseki, the secretary of Veterans Affairs. The president explained his decision: “As commander in chief, I have determined that it is in our vital national interest to send an additional thirty thousand U.S. troops to Afghanistan. After eighteen months, our troops will begin to come home. These are the resources that we need to seize the initiative, while building the Afghan capacity that can allow for a responsible transition of our forces out of Afghanistan.”
Petraeus had flown to West Point with the president on Air Force One. It was the most time the two had spent together in such an informal environment. The president had requested that Petraeus travel with him, so Petraeus flew back to Washington from Tampa on short notice for the second time in two days. The show of solidarity was important, and it meant a great deal to Petraeus. Still, key members of the White House staff remained wary of Petraeus’s stature and motives. In the fall of 2009, in fact, he and others involved in the review process reportedly had been warned by the White House not to speak to the press about the review, guidance he followed so diligently that journalist Thomas Ricks described one of Petraeus’s presentations that fall as “Dave Does Dull.” (Petraeus noted to his public affairs officer that it had taken great skill to be dull in such a charged atmosphere.)
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