by Obama Barack
In February, Gates and our newly installed commander in Iraq, General Ray Odierno, presented me with a plan that withdrew U.S. combat forces from the country in nineteen months—three months later than I had proposed during the campaign but four months sooner than what military commanders were asking for. The plan also called for maintaining a residual force of fifty to fifty-five thousand noncombat U.S. personnel, which would remain in the country till the end of 2011, to train and assist the Iraqi military. Some in the White House questioned the necessity of the extra three months and the large residual force, reminding me that both congressional Democrats and the American people strongly favored an accelerated exit, not a delay.
I approved Odierno’s plan anyway, traveling to Camp Lejeune, in North Carolina, to announce the decision before several thousand cheering Marines. As firmly as I had opposed the original decision to invade, I believed America now had both a strategic and a humanitarian interest in Iraq’s stability. With combat troops scheduled to leave Iraq’s population centers in just five months per the SOFA, our service members’ exposure to heavy fighting, snipers, and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) would be greatly diminished as we progressed with the rest of the drawdown. And given the fragility of Iraq’s new government, the ragged state of its security forces, the still-active presence of al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), and the sky-high levels of sectarian hostility sizzling inside the country, it made sense to use the presence of residual forces as a kind of insurance policy against a return to chaos. “Once we’re out,” I told Rahm, explaining my decision, “the last thing I want is for us to have to go back in.”
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IF ARRIVING AT a plan for Iraq was relatively straightforward, finding our way out of Afghanistan was anything but.
Unlike the war in Iraq, the Afghan campaign had always seemed to me a war of necessity. Though the Taliban’s ambitions were confined to Afghanistan, their leadership remained loosely allied to al-Qaeda, and their return to power could result in the country once again serving as a launching pad for terrorist attacks against the United States and its allies. Moreover, Pakistan had shown neither the capacity nor the will to dislodge al-Qaeda’s leadership from its current sanctuary in a remote, mountainous, and barely governed region straddling the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. This meant that our ability to pin down and ultimately destroy the terrorist network depended on the Afghan government’s willingness to let U.S. military and intelligence teams operate in its territory.
Unfortunately the six-year diversion of U.S. attention and resources to Iraq had left the situation in Afghanistan more perilous. Despite the fact that we had more than thirty thousand U.S. troops on the ground and an almost equal number of international coalition troops there, the Taliban controlled large swaths of the country, particularly in the regions along the border with Pakistan. In places where U.S. or coalition forces weren’t present, Taliban fighters overwhelmed a far larger but badly trained Afghan army. Meanwhile, mismanagement and rampant corruption inside the police force, district governorships, and key ministries had eroded the legitimacy of Hamid Karzai’s government and siphoned off foreign aid dollars desperately needed to improve living conditions for one of the world’s poorest populations.
The lack of a coherent U.S. strategy didn’t help matters. Depending on who you talked to, our mission in Afghanistan was either narrow (wiping out al-Qaeda) or broad (transforming the country into a modern, democratic state that would be aligned with the West). Our Marines and soldiers repeatedly cleared the Taliban from an area only to see their efforts squandered for lack of even halfway-capable local governance. Whether because of overambition, corruption, or lack of Afghan buy-in, U.S.-sponsored development programs often failed to deliver as promised, while the issuance of massive U.S. contracts to some of Kabul’s shadiest business operators undermined the very anti-corruption efforts designed to win over the Afghan people.
In light of all this, I told Gates that my first priority was to make sure our agencies, both civilian and military, were aligned around a clearly defined mission and a coordinated strategy. He didn’t disagree. As a CIA deputy director in the 1980s, Gates had helped oversee the arming of the Afghan mujahideen in their fight against the Soviet occupation of their country. The experience of watching that loosely organized insurgency bleed the mighty Red Army into retreat—only to have elements of that same insurgency later evolve into al-Qaeda—had made Gates mindful of the unintended consequences that could result from rash actions. Unless we established limited and realistic objectives, he told me, “we’ll set ourselves up for failure.”
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, also saw the need for a revamped Afghan strategy. But there was a catch: He and our military commanders first wanted me to authorize the immediate deployment of an additional thirty thousand U.S. troops.
In fairness to Mullen, the request, which had come from the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) commander in Afghanistan, General Dave McKiernan, had been pending for several months. During the transition, President Bush had put out feelers to see if we wanted him to order the deployment before I took office, but we’d indicated that our preference was to hold off until the incoming team had fully assessed the situation. According to Mullen, McKiernan’s request could no longer wait.
At our first full NSC meeting, held in the White House Situation Room (often referred to as “the Sit Room”) just two days after my inauguration, Mullen had explained that the Taliban were likely to mount a summer offensive and we’d want additional brigades on the ground in time to try to blunt it. He reported that McKiernan was also worried about providing adequate security for the presidential election, which was originally scheduled for May but would be postponed until August. If we wanted to get troops there in time to achieve those missions, Mullen told me, we needed to put things in motion immediately.
Thanks to the movies, I’d always imagined the Sit Room as a cavernous, futuristic space, ringed by ceiling-high screens full of high-resolution satellite and radar images and teeming with smartly dressed personnel manning banks of state-of-the-art gizmos and gadgets. The reality was less dazzling: just a small, nondescript conference room, part of a warren of other small rooms wedged into a corner of the West Wing’s first floor. Its windows were sealed off with plain wooden shutters; its walls were bare except for digital clocks showing the time in various world capitals and a few flat-screens not much bigger than those found in a neighborhood sports bar. Quarters were close. The principal council members sat around a long conference table, with various deputies and staff crammed into chairs lining the sides of the room.
“Just so I understand,” I said to Mullen, trying not to sound too skeptical, “after almost five years where we managed with twenty thousand or fewer U.S. troops, and after adding another ten thousand over the past twenty months or so, it’s the Pentagon’s assessment that we can’t wait another two months before deciding to double our troop commitment?” I pointed out that I wasn’t averse to sending more troops—during the campaign, I had pledged an additional two brigades for Afghanistan once the Iraq withdrawal was under way. But given that everyone in the room had just agreed that we should bring in a well-regarded former CIA analyst and Middle East expert named Bruce Riedel to lead a sixty-day review meant to shape our Afghan strategy going forward, sending another thirty thousand U.S. troops to Afghanistan before the review was complete felt like a case of putting the cart before the horse. I asked Mullen whether a smaller deployment could serve as a sufficient bridge.
He told me that ultimately it was my decision, adding pointedly that any reduction in the number or further delay would substantially increase risk.
I let others chime in. David Petraeus, who was coming off his success in Iraq and had been elevated to the head of Central Command (which oversaw all military missions in the Middle East and Central Asia, including Iraq and Afghanistan)
, urged me to approve McKiernan’s request. So did Hillary and Panetta, which didn’t surprise me: As effective as the two of them would turn out to be in managing their agencies, their hawkish instincts and political backgrounds left them perpetually wary of opposing any recommendation that came from the Pentagon. In private, Gates had expressed to me that he felt some ambivalence about such a significant increase to our Afghan footprint. But given his institutional role, I didn’t expect him to directly countermand a recommendation from the chiefs.
Among the principals, only Joe Biden voiced his misgivings. He had traveled to Kabul on my behalf during the transition, and what he saw and heard on the trip—particularly during a contentious meeting with Karzai—had convinced him that we needed to rethink our entire approach to Afghanistan. I knew Joe also still felt burned by having supported the Iraq invasion years earlier. Whatever the mix of reasons, he saw Afghanistan as a dangerous quagmire and urged me to delay a deployment, suggesting it would be easier to put troops in once we had a clear strategy as opposed to trying to pull troops out after we’d made a mess with a bad one.
Rather than deciding on the spot, I assigned Tom Donilon to convene the NSC deputies over the course of the following week to determine more precisely how additional troops would be used and whether deploying them by summer was even possible logistically. We’d revisit the issue, I said, once we had the answer. With the meeting adjourned, I headed out the door and was on my way up the stairs to the Oval when Joe caught up to me and gripped my arm.
“Listen to me, boss,” he said. “Maybe I’ve been around this town for too long, but one thing I know is when these generals are trying to box in a new president.” He brought his face a few inches from mine and stage-whispered, “Don’t let them jam you.”
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IN LATER ACCOUNTS of our Afghanistan deliberations, Gates and others would peg Biden as one of the ringleaders who poisoned relations between the White House and the Pentagon. The truth was that I considered Joe to be doing me a service by asking tough questions about the military’s plans. Having at least one contrarian in the room made us all think harder about the issues—and I noticed that everyone was a bit freer with their opinions when that contrarian wasn’t me.
I never questioned Mullen’s motives, or those of the other chiefs and combatant commanders who made up the military’s leadership. I found Mullen—a Los Angeles native whose parents had worked in the entertainment business—to be consistently affable, prepared, responsive, and professional. His vice chairman, Marine four-star general James “Hoss” Cartwright, had the sort of self-effacing, pensive manner you wouldn’t associate with a former fighter pilot, but when he did speak up, he was full of detailed insights and creative solutions across a whole set of national security problems. Despite differences in temperament, both Mullen and Cartwright shared attributes I found common among the top brass: white men (the military had just one woman and one Black four-star general when I took office) in their late fifties or early sixties who had spent decades working their way up the ranks, amassing stellar service records and, in many cases, advanced academic degrees. Their views of the world were informed and sophisticated, and contrary to the stereotypes, they understood all too well the limits of military action, because of and not despite the fact that they had commanded troops under fire. In fact, during my eight years as president, it was often the generals, rather than civilians, who counseled restraint when it came to the use of force.
Still, men like Mullen were creatures of the system to which they’d devoted their entire adult lives—a U.S. military that prided itself on accomplishing a mission once started, without regard to cost, duration, or whether the mission was the right one to begin with. In Iraq, that had meant an escalating need for more of everything: more troops, more bases, more private contractors, more aircraft, and more intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR). More had not produced victory, but it had at least avoided humiliating defeat and had salvaged the country from total collapse. Now, with Afghanistan looking like it, too, was sliding into a sinkhole, it was perhaps natural that the military leadership wanted more there as well. And because until recently they’d been working with a president who had rarely questioned their plans or denied their requests, it was probably inevitable that the debate over “how much more” would become a recurring source of strife between the Pentagon and my White House.
In mid-February, Donilon reported that the deputies had scrubbed General McKiernan’s request and concluded that no more than seventeen thousand troops, along with four thousand military trainers, could be deployed in time to have a meaningful impact on the summer fighting season or Afghan election security. Although we were still a month away from completing our formal review, all the principals except Biden recommended that we deploy that number of troops immediately. I gave the order on February 17, the same day I signed the Recovery Act, having determined that even the most conservative strategy we might come up with would need the additional manpower, and knowing that we still had ten thousand troops in reserve if circumstances required their deployment as well.
A month later, Riedel and his team completed their report. Their assessment offered no surprises, but it did help articulate our principal goal: “to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan and to prevent their return to either country in the future.”
The report’s added emphasis on Pakistan was key: Not only did the Pakistan military (and in particular its intelligence arm, ISI) tolerate the presence of Taliban headquarters and leadership in Quetta, near the Pakistani border, but it was also quietly assisting the Taliban as a means of keeping the Afghan government weak and hedging against Kabul’s potential alignment with Pakistan’s archrival, India. That the U.S. government had long tolerated such behavior from a purported ally—supporting it with billions of dollars in military and economic aid despite its complicity with violent extremists and its record as a significant and irresponsible proliferator of nuclear weapons technology in the world—said something about the pretzel-like logic of U.S. foreign policy. In the short term, at least, a complete cutoff of military aid to Pakistan wasn’t an option, since not only did we rely on overland routes through Pakistan to supply our Afghan operations but the Pakistani government also tacitly facilitated our counterterrorism efforts against al-Qaeda camps within its territory. The Riedel report, though, made one thing clear: Unless Pakistan stopped sheltering the Taliban, our efforts at long-term stability in Afghanistan were bound to fail.
The rest of the report’s recommendations centered on building capacity. We needed to drastically improve the Karzai government’s ability to govern and provide basic services. We needed to train up the Afghan army and police force so that they would be competent and large enough to maintain security within the country’s borders without help from U.S. forces. Exactly how we were going to do all that remained vague. What was clear, though, was that the U.S. commitment the Riedel report was calling for went well beyond a bare-bones counterterrorism strategy and toward a form of nation-building that probably would have made sense—had we started seven years earlier, the moment we drove the Taliban out of Kabul.
Of course, that’s not what we had done. Instead, we had invaded Iraq, broken that country, helped spawn an even more virulent branch of al-Qaeda, and been forced to improvise a costly counterinsurgency campaign there. As far as Afghanistan was concerned, those years were lost. Due to the continuing, often valiant efforts of our troops, diplomats, and aid workers on the ground, it was an exaggeration to say that we’d have to start from scratch in Afghanistan. But it nonetheless dawned on me that even in the best-case scenario—even if Karzai cooperated, Pakistan behaved, and our goals were limited to what Gates liked to call “Afghan good enough”—we were still looking at three to five years of intense effort, costing hundreds of billions more dollars and more American lives.
I didn’t like t
he deal. But in what was becoming a pattern, the alternatives were worse. The stakes involved—the risks of a possible collapse of the Afghan government or the Taliban gaining footholds in major cities—were simply too high for us not to act. On March 27, just four weeks after announcing the Iraqi withdrawal plan, I appeared on television with my national security team behind me and laid out our “Af-Pak” strategy based largely on the Riedel recommendations. I knew how the announcement would land. A number of commentators would quickly seize on the irony that having run for the presidency as an antiwar candidate, I had so far sent more troops into combat than I had brought home.
Along with the troop increase, there was one other change in our Afghan posture that Gates asked me to make, one that frankly took me by surprise: In April, during one of our Oval Office meetings, he recommended that we replace our existing commander in Afghanistan, General McKiernan, with Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal, the former commander of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and current director of the Joint Chiefs.
“Dave’s a fine soldier,” Gates said, acknowledging that McKiernan had done nothing wrong and that changing a commanding general in the middle of a war was a highly unusual step. “But he’s a manager. In an environment this challenging, we need someone with different skills. I couldn’t sleep at night, Mr. President, if I didn’t make sure our troops had the best possible commander leading them. And I’m convinced Stan McChrystal’s that person.”
It was easy to see why Gates thought so highly of McChrystal. Within the U.S. military, members of Special Ops were considered a breed apart, an elite warrior class that carried out the most difficult missions under the most dangerous circumstances—the guys in the movies rappelling from helicopters into enemy territory or making amphibious landings under cover of darkness. And within that exalted circle, no one was more admired or elicited more loyalty than McChrystal. A West Point graduate, he’d consistently excelled over the course of a thirty-three-year career. As JSOC commander, he’d help transform Special Ops into a central element in America’s defense strategy, personally overseeing dozens of counterterrorism operations that had dismantled much of AQI and killed its founder, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Rumor had it that at fifty-four, he still trained with Rangers half his age, and from the looks of him when he stopped by the Oval with Gates for a courtesy visit, I believed it—the man was all muscle, sinew, and bone, with a long, angular face and a piercing, avian gaze. In fact, McChrystal’s whole manner was that of someone who’s burned away frivolity and distractions from his life. With me, at least, that included small talk: During our conversation, it was mostly “Yes, sir” and “No, sir” and “I’m confident we can get the job done.”