From Brussels, Gates returned to Washington as Petraeus made an eighteen-hour stopover in Rome, where he enjoyed the ride into town in an armored Maserati with a Carabinieri escort. At a dinner later that night, Petraeus was awarded the Croce d’Oro—the Carabinieri Golden Cross—by Italian defense minister Ignazio La Russa. He was out of his hotel near the Via Veneto at six the next morning on a clear and cool day for a six-mile run that he thought was one of his most scenic ever, down the Via Veneto, through and around the Colosseum, past the Trevi Fountain and up the Spanish Steps before a fast finish back down the Via Veneto.
EVEN AS PETRAEUS’S FOCUS necessarily shifted a bit to his next job, running the CIA, the war in Afghanistan demanded his full attention. Petraeus thought there had been an interesting dynamic during his briefing among newer members of Congress who may not have fully appreciated all that was going on inside Afghanistan. He also read a four-page weekly update from Lieutenant General Caldwell on recruiting and training the Afghan military. Over the next six months, the American government would provide those forces with 14,000 vehicles, 33,000 weapons and 40,000 radios. Petraeus wished he could be there when the shipments arrived. He was pleased to learn that the U.S. military would soon begin providing food and other relief supplies to 28,000 Afghans in northern Sar-i-Pul Province who were in danger of starving to death in drought conditions, another initiative he’d been tracking.
Preparing for his final embed with Afghan forces in Helmand Province before returning to Washington himself, Lujan sent Petraeus a note to let him know that the Army staff had approved his request for a fellowship at the Center for a New American Security, in Washington, which—with its former leaders now at State (Assistant Secretary Kurt Campbell) and the Pentagon (Undersecretary Flournoy)—was run by retired Army lieutenant colonel John Nagl, an ardent Petraeus mentee who had helped write the new counterinsurgency manual. “Definitely could not have done it without your assistance,” said Lujan. Petraeus replied, “You get what you earn in life, Fernando, and you more than earned the fellowship. It was a privilege to help.”
CHAPTER 11
DRAWDOWN
Petraeus landed early on June 11, 2011, at Andrews Air Force Base. He was planning to stay in Washington for nearly two weeks. The first would be dominated by a series of White House meetings on the drawdown of forces from Afghanistan. The second would revolve around his confirmation hearing as CIA director before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
As Petraeus began work on his opening statement for his CIA confirmation than the UN mission in Afghanistan released a statement that said May had been the deadliest month for Afghan civilians since records were first kept in 2007. The tally was chilling: 368 dead, 593 wounded. The Taliban and other insurgent forces were responsible for 82 percent of the deaths, international forces were responsible for 12 percent, and 6 percent died in cross-fire between the two sides. A fresh wave of attacks made headlines in Afghanistan. A roadside bomb killed fifteen civilians, including eight children, in the Arghandab River Valley, and a suicide bomber attacked a police headquarters in Khost, killing its Afghan commander. Furthermore, the Washington Post ran a piece about Democratic leaders in Congress, led by Senator John F. Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, urging Obama to draw down troops faster than the Pentagon wanted. Times were tough.
The workweek began with a media report on “Obama’s Secret Afghan Exit Formula”—which was to pull out thirty thousand troops but do so slowly, over twelve to eighteen months, under military guidance. Petraeus, however, had no idea how valid the piece was or where the White House was headed—he had yet to present his recommendations. He had worked with only a handful of select individuals in Kabul, all sworn to secrecy. Outside Kabul, his discussion circle had gone no further than Mattis, Mullen and Gates, who had excluded their personal staffs. He was adamant about avoiding the perception that the military was trying to box in the president by leaking its recommendations to the press.
Petraeus began his day on Tuesday with an early-morning five-mile run through the neighborhoods around Fort Myer before meeting on Capitol Hill with three members of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Then it was on to the White House’s West Wing for a meeting with John Brennan, the administration’s counterterrorism chief, followed by meetings back across the river with Gates at the Pentagon. From there, he met with the director of national intelligence, Jim Clapper. He finished his day over dinner at the Matisse, in Georgetown, with Walter Pincus, a veteran intelligence correspondent at the Washington Post.
On Wednesday Petraeus presented his recommendations for drawing down troops in Afghanistan to President Obama and other senior national security officials in the White House Situation Room. According to accounts from aides close to other participants, Petraeus described a range of options for the president, options that the Obama team had been seeking. The one Petraeus reportedly preferred: Remove 3,000 to 5,000 troops by the end of 2011 and leave the rest of the 33,000 surge troops in Afghanistan through the 2012 fighting season, which would end around November. Petraeus tried to remain sanguine about the White House’s likelihood of supporting his recommendation. He would be happy if most of the surge forces could stay through a second fighting season in 2012, even as he personally wanted to stay and oversee the fight through the 2011 fighting season. At the end of the meeting, Obama asked him to come up with an alternative assessment for a second meeting. “Tell me,” the president said, “what I can and cannot do if you have to recover 15,000 by end of this year, and another 15,000 by July 2012. And how would that change the strategy?”
After the White House meeting, Petraeus contacted Major General Mick Nicholson, his ISAF deputy chief of staff for operations, and asked him to assess the risks associated with the alternative the president had requested. In Kabul, Nicholson’s portfolio covered everything from Pakistan to transition to the drawdown planning. The drawdown decision would have implications for every line of effort. Nicholson was asleep in Kabul when his aide woke him at 2:00 A.M. It had to be urgent, Nicholson realized. Petraeus relayed the president’s tasking. By the next morning, Nicholson and a subordinate had put together the briefing that Petraeus needed to answer Obama’s questions and sent it to him over the classified Internet network.
Petraeus wasted not a moment as he made the Washington rounds, maintaining simultaneous e-mail conversations from his laptops in the backseat of his black GMC Yukon. He maintained his poker face, even on e-mail with trusted confidants. Not only did he not want to share any information on the ongoing deliberations on the drawdown, he also didn’t want to deal with his own transition just yet. Thursday began with more rounds of meetings with senators on the Senate Intelligence Committee on Capitol Hill. The relationship with Pakistan dominated the conversation. Petraeus hadn’t seen General Kayani, the head of the Pakistani army, since his last visit a week prior to the bin Laden raid, but he looked forward to seeing him again shortly after Petraeus’s return to Kabul, when he would host the next trilateral meeting with senior officials from Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Friday morning included the second meeting on Afghanistan in the White House Situation Room. According to staffs of some of the principals, Petraeus presented an edited version of Major General Nicholson’s matrix and the associated risks to accomplishment of various missions that would be involved with the president’s alternative course of action. Petraeus and Mullen cautioned about the risks to the military effort of drawing down more rapidly than recommended, as was to be anticipated, while some other participants explained why they felt additional risks could be taken, in accordance with the alternative the president had proposed.
Gates reportedly had several meetings with the president in anticipation of the third meeting, when it was believed that the president would announce his decision. Gates knew where Petraeus stood on his recommendations, and he supported him. But he also understood the president’s challen
ges, and he sought to craft some kind of compromise.
That afternoon, Friday, Petraeus and his wife flew from Andrews Air Force Base to Maine for a casual meeting and dinner at the Bush compound in Kennebunkport with former president George H. W. Bush and his wife, Barbara. The feast of lobsters, swordfish and vintage red wine was an opportunity for Petraeus to speak with another former CIA director, the one for whom the CIA campus was named. The former president turned it into a reunion of sorts when he called Bill Clinton and his son, George W. Bush, so they could also pass on their regards to Petraeus and offer brief insights on the president’s use of the CIA. Petraeus came away from the evening humbled and amazed at how far life had taken the first-generation son of a crusty Dutch sea captain from a modest home in Cornwall-on-Hudson.
As the White House and Pentagon teams deliberated, Karzai stated publicly that American officials were secretly negotiating with the Taliban. These talks had been reported but never confirmed by the U.S. government. Karzai’s own government had also been negotiating with the Taliban, but he used the speech to question the tactics and motivation of U.S. and other foreign troops fighting in Afghanistan. “The nations of the world which are here in our country are here for their own national interests,” he said. “They are using our country.”
An official from the U.S. Embassy communications team immediately contacted the palace spokesperson, Wahid Omar, who calmly advised the official to “ignore” Karzai’s statements concerning the talks with the Taliban, because these were “not planned.” Karzai’s speech was full of other negative statements, which seemed to have become his hallmark of late. “Ignore those, too,” Omar said. Officials in Washington struggled to see them as anything less than betrayal by an ally. In Afghanistan, Ambassador Eikenberry reacted strongly, denouncing Karzai’s remarks as “hurtful and inappropriate.”
Eikenberry’s relationship with Karzai was tense, to put it mildly. In a secret cable to Secretary of State Clinton in 2009, subsequently leaked in Washington and then made public by WikiLeaks, Eikenberry had bluntly stated his objections both to Karzai as a strategic partner and to McChrystal and Petraeus’s recommended addition of 40,000 troops to support expanded counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan. “President Karzai is not an adequate strategic partner,” he wrote. “The proposed counterinsurgency strategy assumes an Afghan political leadership that is both able to take responsibility and to exert sovereignty in the furtherance of our goal—secure, peaceful, minimally self-sufficient Afghanistan hardened against transnational terrorist groups. Yet Karzai continues to shun responsibility for any sovereign burden, whether defense, governance or development. He and much of his circle do not want the U.S. to leave and are only too happy to see us invest further. They assume we covet their territory for a never-ending ‘war on terror’ and for military bases to use against surrounding powers.” In the cable, Eikenberry also said that “we underestimate how long it will take to restore or establish civilian government” in Afghanistan and predicted that “more troops won’t end the insurgency as long as Pakistan sanctuaries remain.”
Eikenberry had offered a far more charitable view of Karzai during an interview in Kabul just ten days before this latest controversy. He explained that while Karzai viewed Pakistan as Afghanistan’s existential threat, he thought his countrymen were paying a far higher price for Pakistan’s bad behavior than Pakistan itself. “You’re going to someday get a son or daughter of Sigmund Freud to do a great story of Karzai,” Eikenberry said. “He is an extraordinarily complicated man. He’s under unimaginable amounts of pressure every day. I don’t know how anyone could do that job well. You just get worn down and then it becomes a matter of surviving day to day. He’s an emotional man, truly he’s an emotional man, with a heart that causes that emotion to come out. So he looks at a picture of Afghan children dead, maimed horribly, unfortunately with the staff around him, the few that try to spin him up at just the wrong moment, right before a press conference, and he reacts to that.” Karzai faced mounting problems, Eikenberry said, that were related to corruption, his own leadership failings and his faltering relationship with the parliament, not to mention the never-ending Kabul Bank scandal, in which the nation’s largest private bank had made hundreds of millions in questionable loans to its own shareholders, including a number who were Karzai’s relatives or backers.
E-mailing from D.C. Petraeus asked his staff for a more complete analysis of Karzai’s remarks. Petraeus agreed with a NATO official’s assessment that the ongoing Kabul Bank scandal was the pressure point looming over Karzai’s intemperate remarks, and he sought to reassure officials in Washington, while avoiding comment to the press himself.
“IT’S ‘OPEN THE ENVELOPE time,’” Petraeus told his security team as his SUV approached the White House for the final meeting with Obama on the drawdown of forces. On the way, retired Army general Jack Keane, one of his mentors, e-mailed him with rumors of what he was hearing: The White House was going to recommend 10,000 depart by the end of 2011, with the rest out by the summer of 2012. Petraeus acknowledged Keane’s e-mail but was noncommittal.
Keane was protective of his prodigy. “Given we are already 10K short from initial request by you and Stan and that this decision not only protracts the war but risks the mission, should you consider resigning?” he e-mailed to Petraeus. “I don’t think quitting would serve our country,” Petraeus responded. “More likely to create a crisis. And, I told POTUS I’d support his ultimate decision. Besides, the troops can’t quit. . . .”
Petraeus refused to discuss his interactions with the president, but accounts from officials briefed on the White House meeting indicate that Obama, Petraeus, Mullen, Biden, Gates, Clinton and other senior national security officials engaged in a lengthy discussion, tense but respectful, over the pace of the drawdown. Obama expressed his gratitude that there had been no leaks and said the frank exchanges during their two prior meetings had been a great help to him. The president believed that Petraeus and ISAF forces had made gains that justified his commitment of extra forces but that now it was important to signal to the American, Afghan and international communities that the coming year would be one of transition. There was general agreement with Obama’s desire to draw down 10,000 troops by the end of 2011, though that was a larger figure than Petraeus and the military had recommended. But there was sharp disagreement over when the remaining 23,000 surge troops should leave Afghanistan.
Obama began the discussion by explaining that he wanted the 23,000 forces out of Afghanistan by July 2012—five months sooner than the after-the-end-of-the-fighting-season drawdown Petraeus had recommended. Mullen thought a drawdown by July would sacrifice virtually the entire fighting season. Both Gates and Clinton also expressed reservations. When Obama looked to Gates in an attempt to achieve consensus, Gates said there was a big difference between July and an “end of summer” drawdown. After further discussion, Obama voiced a willingness to consider splitting the difference and leaving the troops in Afghanistan through the end of the summer, but he was against waiting until the end of 2012. Gates, Clinton and Mullen all then said they could support an “end of summer” timetable. When Obama turned to Petraeus, the general was reportedly respectful, but he was not budging. He expressed concern that removing the troops before the end of the fighting season would increase risk considerably and could invalidate the campaign plan. Biden expressed the counterpoint, favoring the original July deadline—or one even sooner. Susan Rice, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, suggested being flexible about the exact drawdown timetable for the 23,000 by saying they would leave in “mid- to late summer” of 2012. As momentum seemed to shift toward a late-summer drawdown, Petraeus again made it clear that he remained in favor of keeping the troops in Afghanistan until the end of the year in order to achieve the six objectives the president had laid out at West Point. The mission in Afghanistan, he said, was not transition; it was achieving conditions that allowed for successful
transition. Obama asked whether those three extra months would make that much difference; Petraeus said he thought they would.
Petraeus again assured the president that he would faithfully support and execute his decision, but he noted that he would have to say, if asked at his confirmation hearing in two days, that the timeline was more aggressive than he had recommended. The president understood the obligation of military witnesses at congressional hearings to provide their personal views on issues when asked. Nonetheless, it was a tense moment. Finally, the president made his decision: 10,000 forces would leave Afghanistan by the end of the year, and the remaining 23,000 surge troops would be out by the end of summer 2012.
When Petraeus left the White House, he reportedly felt he had been heard. His recommendation had not been adopted, but he believed in and supported the process, and he recognized that only the president could truly weigh all the factors—many of which went beyond the military’s purview. He’d acknowledged as much at the first meeting. He accepted the president’s decision—and was ready to execute. He wanted to get in touch with his headquarters in Afghanistan to reassure them that all was well; he knew many would feel disappointed. It was time, as he liked to say, “to look forward and take the rearview mirrors off the bus.” He wrote a statement and asked Lieutenant General James Bucknall, his deputy at ISAF headquarters, to read it at the morning’s stand-up. He added one important instruction: Do not forward it to anyone via e-mail. The president had not yet made his public announcement, but Petraeus wanted his team to be prepared to deal with, if not shape, the troops’ and coalition members’ reaction. His statement read:
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