It was the end of a whirlwind five-day trip to the Persian Gulf, and Hillary Clinton was anxious to get back to Washington. She wanted to keep three appointments with President Obama the next day. Instead, she was cooling her heels in the VIP lounge at the King Abdulaziz International Airport outside Jeddah, her aging Air Force Boeing 757 grounded by a faulty fuel valve. While she paced the room in a flowing red pashmina—checking her BlackBerry and making stilted small talk with reporters—her aides worked the phones, trying desperately to find her another ride home.
Salvation came in the form of General David Petraeus, the commander of the Pentagon’s Central Command, who also happened to be in Saudi Arabia that day, lunching with King Abdullah at his desert encampment outside Riyadh. Petraeus got a call through military channels that Clinton was stranded and agreed to divert his smaller Boeing 737 to Jeddah to pick her up, along with a few close aides, and take her back to Washington. “I said, ‘Look, she’s the secretary of state,’ ” he told me. “ ‘We’re going to have to disembark a fair number of people, but let’s do this.’ ” The general even gave up his private compartment at the back of the plane to Clinton, an act that was equal parts chivalry and protocol: Because she was the ranking government official on board, it was now technically her aircraft, with the secretary of state’s seal transferred from her stalled plane. Throwing down a couple of blankets, Petraeus stretched out and tried to get some sleep.
“The only place where I could get flat was the space between seats that face each other,” the general recalled, having made a characteristically thorough study of the cabin layout.
Clinton and Petraeus both enjoy telling the story, and why not? It is a grace note in a methodically managed, mutually advantageous relationship—one that began warily in the toxic atmosphere of the Iraq War but was cemented in the war councils of the Obama White House. As a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Clinton impressed Petraeus on multiple visits to Iraq, connecting with his troops and peppering him with incisive questions about his counterinsurgency strategy. But in September 2007, she alienated him by publicly questioning his assessment of the progress made by George W. Bush’s troop surge. Accepting his assertions, she scoffed, would require a “willing suspension of disbelief.” Petraeus viewed it as a crass, if predictable, political move by a candidate facing a primary challenge from the antiwar Obama. It didn’t help that Hillary had chatted amiably with the general in a Senate cloakroom before putting a shiv in him during the televised hearing. A chilly period followed until Clinton, soon after taking office as secretary of state, invited Petraeus for a conciliatory glass of wine in her Georgian house in Washington. From then on, there would be no daylight between her and this son of a Dutch-born sea captain.
Clinton’s cultivation of men with medals didn’t end with Petraeus. She became even closer to General Jack Keane, a retired army vice chief of staff who was the intellectual architect of the Iraq surge and a mentor to Petraeus. A burly, independent-minded New Yorker who grew up in Manhattan housing projects and goes to the opera at the Met, Keane spent dozens of hours with Clinton over the last decade—over lunch, drinks, and dinner—tutoring her on Iraq, Afghanistan, and the threat posed by the Islamic State. In all those conversations, Keane said, the only major issue where they split was the surge, which she opposed. In 2008, after Iraq had been stabilized, she told him, “Well, Jack, you were right all along.” (The country’s stability didn’t last.) Clinton also forged links with Stanley McChrystal, the ascetic warrior who led the counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan until he was fired by Obama after his aides made derogatory remarks about almost every member of his war cabinet to Rolling Stone magazine. She was the exception. “Hillary had Stan’s back,” one of the aides told the reporter, Michael Hastings.
Most important, she built an enduring alliance with Robert Gates, the defense secretary and Bush holdover, with whom she shared a Midwestern upbringing, a taste for a stiff drink after a long day of work, and a deep-seated skepticism about the intentions of America’s foes. In the administration’s first high-level meeting on Russia in February 2009, when Gates was still sniffing out his new colleagues, aides to Obama proposed that the United States make some symbolic concessions to Russia as a gesture of its goodwill in resetting the relationship. Clinton, the last to speak, brusquely rejected the idea, saying, “I’m not giving up anything for nothing.” Her hardheadedness made an impression on Gates, a former CIA officer who had been faulted for his agency’s failure to anticipate the collapse of the Soviet Union and was deeply wary of a changed Russia. He decided, there and then, she was someone he could do business with.
“I thought, ‘This is a tough lady,’ ” he told me.
Clinton’s cultivation of the military reflected her instinctive comfort with the brass as well as a shrewd political calculation: lining up with the Pentagon would prevent the State Department from being marginalized at a time when the internal foreign policy debates that really mattered were about how to end two wars. Her most recent predecessors, Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell, had lost out in knife fights with the defense secretary or the vice president. Drawing close to Gates would make the State Department and Pentagon allies, not adversaries, in dealing with a clannish White House staff. Gates, too, complained about the controlling nature of the West Wing, but as a Republican and a Bush veteran who had been asked to stay on, he was given more deference by the White House. “A lot of the things that Secretary Clinton had foisted upon her and agreed to, he couldn’t imagine having to deal with and never would have tolerated,” said Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary at the time.
For Clinton, it was a variation on a familiar theme: Just as the ambitious senator from post-9/11 New York tried to make herself bulletproof on national security, the new secretary of state was trying to establish her bona fides in a wartime administration. But her affinity for the armed services is also rooted in a traditional worldview in which the military plays the central role in projecting American power. It stands in sharp contrast to Obama, who kept his generals at arm’s length, complained he was bullied by his commanders over how many additional troops to send to Afghanistan, and favored covert special operations over conventional military campaigns.
“Hillary is very much a member of the traditional American foreign policy establishment,” said Vali Nasr, a foreign policy strategist who advised her on Pakistan and Afghanistan at the State Department. “She believes, like presidents going back to the Reagan or Kennedy years, in the importance of the military—in solving terrorism, in asserting American influence. The shift with Obama is that he went from reliance on the military to the intelligence agencies. Their position was, ‘All you need to deal with terrorism is NSA and CIA, drones and special ops.’ So the CIA gave Obama an angle, if you will, to be simultaneously hawkish and shun using the military.”
Clinton’s old-school hawkishness collided with Obama’s new approach in unpredictable ways. She backed General McChrystal’s recommendation to send 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan, before endorsing Gates’s fallback proposal of 30,000. (Obama went along with that, though he stipulated that the soldiers would begin to pull out again in July 2011, which she viewed as a mistake.) She supported the Pentagon’s plan to leave behind a residual force of 10,000 to 20,000 American troops in Iraq. (Obama rejected this, largely because of his inability to win legal protections from the Iraqis, a failure that was to haunt him when the Islamic State overran much of the country.) And she argued for the United States to intervene in Libya to avert a slaughter of civilians in Benghazi by Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi. It was the only place where she and Gates parted company; he warned that nothing good would come of the United States starting another war against a Muslim country.
Clinton swung Obama in favor of military action, perhaps the clearest case in which she carried the day. But Gates’s warnings were well-founded. The United States and its allies developed no plan for dealing with the violence that erupted after Qaddafi’s ouster, and Obama watched in horror as Libya descended into anarchy. In the case of Afghanistan, Clinton’s vote created a winning bloc in Obama’s cabinet for a major troop surge. But she contributed to what critics, even inside the Pentagon, viewed as the “over-militarization” of the conflict. The keys to solving Afghanistan were diplomatic as well as military: rooting out the rampant corruption of the Afghan regime and reducing the constant meddling of its neighbor, Pakistan. By falling in behind the Pentagon, Clinton’s State Department did not play as central a role as it should have in helping extricate America from its wars.
“I think one of the surprises for Gates and the military was, here they come in expecting a very left-of-center administration and they discover that they have a secretary of state who’s a little bit right of them on these issues—a little more eager than they are, to a certain extent,” said Bruce Riedel, the former intelligence analyst who conducted President Obama’s initial review on the Afghanistan War. “Particularly on Afghanistan, where I think Gates knew more had to be done, knew more troops needed to be sent in, but had a lot of doubts about whether it would work.”
For those who closely followed Clinton’s career, her embrace of the military was no surprise.
In 1975, the year Hillary Rodham married Bill Clinton, she said she stopped in at a marine recruiting office in Arkansas to inquire about joining the active forces or reserves. She was a lawyer, she explained; maybe there was some way she could serve. The recruiter, she recalled two decades later, was a young man of about twenty-one, in prime physical condition. Clinton was then twenty-eight, freshly transplanted from Washington, teaching law at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, and wearing Coke-bottle eyeglasses. “You’re too old, you can’t see, and you’re a woman,” he told her. “Maybe the dogs will take you,” he added, “dogs” being a pejorative reference to the army.
“It was not a very encouraging conversation,” Hillary said at a lunch for military women on Capitol Hill in 1994. “I decided maybe I’ll look for another way to serve my country.”
Though Clinton repeated the story in the fall of 2015 over breakfast with voters in New Hampshire, there have long been suspicions it is apocryphal. She did not mention it in her memoirs, Bill gave a different account of it in 2008, substituting the army for the marines, and there is no documentary evidence it ever happened. Why would a professionally minded Yale Law graduate, on the cusp of marriage, suddenly want to put on a uniform? Ann Henry, an old friend who taught at the university after Clinton moved to Little Rock, recalled that during those days, female faculty members, as an exercise, would test the boundaries of careers that appeared closed to women. “I don’t think it’s made up,” she told me. “It was consistent with something she would have done.” Others speculated it was some kind of subversive antiwar stunt. Hillary had, after all, spoken out against Vietnam at Wellesley.
Many painted her with the same brush as Bill, whose dodging of the draft and attendance at antiwar protests saddled him with an antimilitary reputation that took him years to overcome. His push to end antigay discrimination in the military, which resulted in the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” law, only deepened the suspicion. Even his salute was found wanting. But Hillary’s history was always more complicated. People who know her well said the impulse to enlist was in keeping with her conservative Midwestern upbringing—the navy petty officer’s daughter with a traditional streak. How else to explain a young woman who, at the height of the antiwar protests in 1968, when she was already well into her metamorphosis from Goldwater Girl to liberal activist, still managed to attend the Republican convention?
Clinton’s next exposure to the military did not come until she was First Lady eighteen years later. Living in the White House is, in many ways, like living in a military compound. A marine stands guard in front of the West Wing when the president is in the Oval Office. The Military Office operates the medical center and the telecommunications system. The navy runs the mess, the marines transport the president by helicopter, the air force by plane. Camp David is a naval facility; when the first family goes there for the weekend, they are guarded by the marines. The daily contact with men and women in uniform, Clinton’s friends said, deepened her feelings for them.
In March 1996, Clinton visited American troops stationed in Bosnia. The trip became notorious years later when she claimed, during the 2008 campaign, to have dodged sniper fire after her C-17 military plane landed at an American base in Tuzla. (Chris Hill, a diplomat who was on board that day and later served as ambassador to Iraq under Clinton, recalled children handing her bouquets of spring flowers; not snipers.) But she didn’t fake the good vibes during her tour of the mess and rec halls. With her teenage daughter at her side, she bantered and joked with the young servicemen and -women—an experience, she wrote, that “left lasting impressions on Chelsea and me.”
When Clinton was elected to the Senate, she had strong political reasons to care about the military. The Pentagon was in the midst of a decades-long, politically charged process of closing military bases; New York State had already been a victim. Plattsburgh Air Force Base was closed in 1995, a loss of 350 civilian jobs for that hard-luck North Country town. New Yorkers were determined to protect their remaining bases, especially Fort Drum, home of the army’s Tenth Mountain Division, which sprawls over one hundred thousand acres in rural Jefferson County. In October 2001, a month after 9/11, Clinton traveled to Fort Drum at the invitation of General Franklin “Buster” Hagenbeck, who had just been named the division’s commander and would be deployed to Afghanistan a month later. Like many, he had preconceptions of Clinton from her years as First Lady; the woman who showed up at his office around happy hour that afternoon did not fulfill them.
“She sat down,” he recalled, “took her shoes off, put her feet up on the coffee table and said, ‘General, do you know where a gal can get a cold beer around here?’ ”
It was the start of a dialogue that stretched over two wars. In the spring of 2002, Hagenbeck led Operation Anaconda, a two-week assault on Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters in the Shah-i-Kot Valley that was the largest combat engagement of the war to date. (It later came under fire for shoddy communications between air and ground forces.) When the general came back to Washington to brief the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Clinton took him out to dinner on Capitol Hill for her own briefing. They also spoke about the Bush administration’s preparations for war in Iraq, something Hagenbeck was following with anxiety. The general, it turned out, was more of a dove than the senator. He warned her about the risks of an invasion, which was then being war-gamed inside the Pentagon. It would be like “kicking over a bee’s nest,” he said.
Hagenbeck forgave Clinton for her vote to authorize military action. “She made a considered call,” he said. And “she was chagrined, much after the fact.” He viewed her subsequent vote against the Iraq surge as at least defensible, given that “people are going to argue for years over the role of the surge.” For him, what mattered more than Clinton’s voting record was her unstinting public support of the military, whether in protecting Fort Drum or backing him during a difficult first year in Afghanistan.
Clinton’s education in military affairs began in earnest in 2002, after the Democratic Party’s crushing defeat in midterm elections moved her up several rungs in Senate seniority. The party’s congressional leaders offered her a seat on either the Senate Foreign Relations Committee or the Senate Armed Services Committee. She chose Armed Services, spurning a tradition of New York senators, from Jacob Javits to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who coveted the prestige of Foreign Relations. Armed Services dealt with more earth-bound issues such as benefits for veterans and the Selective Service System, and it was the preserve of Republican hawks such as John McCain. But after 9/11, Clinton viewed Armed Services as better preparation for her future. For a politician looking to hone hard-power credentials, it was the perfect training ground. She dug into it like a grunt at boot camp.
Andrew Shapiro, her foreign policy adviser, lined up ten experts—including Bill Perry, who had been defense secretary for her husband, and Ashton Carter, who would become Obama’s fourth defense secretary—to tutor her on everything from grand strategy to defense procurement. She met quietly with Andrew Marshall, the octogenarian strategist at the Pentagon who labored for decades in the blandly named Office of Net Assessment, earning the nickname Yoda for his Delphic insights. She went to every committee meeting, no matter how mundane. Aides recall her on C-SPAN3, sitting alone in the chamber, patiently questioning a lieutenant colonel.
Thirty years after she said she was rejected by a marine recruiter in Arkansas, Hillary Clinton had become a military wonk.
Jack Keane is a bear of a man with a jowly, careworn face, Brylcreem-slick hair, and the supreme self-confidence of a retired four-star general. He speaks well, with a trace of a New York accent that gives his arguments a rat-a-tat-tat urgency. He is a well-compensated member of the military-industrial complex, sitting on the board of General Dynamics and serving as a strategic adviser to Academi, the controversial private-security contractor once known as Blackwater. He is the chairman of an aptly named think tank, the Institute for the Study of War. Though he is one of a parade of cable-TV generals, Keane is the resident hawk on Fox News, where he appears regularly to call for the United States to use greater military force in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan. He doesn’t shrink from putting boots on the ground, and has little use for civilian leaders, such as Barack Obama, who do.
He is also perhaps the greatest single influence on the way Hillary Clinton thinks about military issues.
Keane first got to know her in the fall of 2001, when she was a freshman senator and he was the army’s second-in-command, with a distinguished combat record in Vietnam, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo. His bond with David Petraeus had been forged in 1991, when he saved the younger man’s life after he was accidentally shot in the chest during a military exercise. Fifteen years later, Keane would enter the annals of military history as the leader of a vocal insurgency inside the Bush administration that argued that the remedy for a floundering campaign in Iraq was to double down on it, a strategy that would become known as the surge. But with Clinton, his agenda was more modest: He wanted to make her a home-state booster for Fort Drum and another New York institution, West Point. Keane had expected her to be intelligent, hardworking, and politically astute, but he was not prepared for the respect she showed for the army as an institution, or her sympathy for the sacrifices made by soldiers and their families. Keane was confident he could smell a phony politician a mile away; she did not strike him as that.
“I read people; that’s one of my strengths,” he told me. “It’s not that I can’t be fooled, but I’m not fooled often.”
Clinton took an instant liking to Keane. “She loves that Irish gruff thing,” said one of her Senate aides, Kris Balderston, who was in the room that day. When Keane got up after forty-five minutes to leave for a meeting back at the Pentagon with a Polish general, she protested that she wasn’t finished yet and asked for another appointment. “I said, ‘OK, but it took me three months to get this one,’ ” Keane told her drily.
Clinton exploded into a raucous laugh. “I’ll take care of that problem,” she promised.
She was true to her word: The two were to meet dozens of times over the next decade, discussing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Iranian nuclear threat, and other flashpoints in the Middle East. Sometimes he dropped by her Senate office; other times they met for drinks at Bistro Bis, a popular restaurant on Capitol Hill. He escorted her on her first visit to Fort Drum and set up her first trip to Iraq. Once, Clinton’s aides scheduled lunch in the Senate dining room. She ordered them to move it to a nearby restaurant and showed up full of apologies, saying she did not want to put the general in an awkward position, being seen with such a political figure in such a public venue. By mutual agreement, they steered clear of politics. The one time Clinton strayed into that terrain, Keane asked, “Are you sure you want to go there? I think you instinctively know you’re not going to like my response.”
Everything else, though, was on the table. At a meeting in Clinton’s Senate office in January 2007, Keane tried to sell her on the logic of the surge. The previous month, he had met with President Bush in the Oval Office to recommend that the United States deploy five to eight army and marine brigades to wage an urban counterinsurgency campaign; only that, he argued, would stabilize a country being ripped apart by sectarian strife. His presentation, delivered at the request of Bush’s national security adviser Stephen Hadley, angered some of Keane’s fellow generals, who didn’t want to change course. But it had a big impact on the commander in chief, who soon ordered more than twenty thousand additional troops to Iraq.
Clinton was another story. “I’m convinced it’s not going to work, Jack,” she told him. She predicted that the American soldiers patrolling in Iraqi cities and towns would be “blown up” by Sunni militias or al-Qaeda fighters. She did not buy his argument that they would be protected by the local population, once the locals realized that the Americans were there to halt the cycle of sectarian bloodshed. “She thought we would fail,” Keane recalled, “and it was going to cause increased casualties.”
Politics, of course, was also on her mind. Barack Obama was laying the groundwork for his candidacy in mid-January with a campaign that would emphasize his opposition to the Iraq War and her vote for it. He was setting off on a fundraising drive that would net $25 million in three months, sending tremors through Hillaryland and establishing him as a formidable rival. Clinton needed to put together her own campaign quickly to prevent him from making even greater inroads. Although she disagreed with Keane about Iraq, Clinton asked him to become a formal adviser to her on national security. “As much as I respect you,” he replied, “I can’t do that.” Keane’s wife had health problems, which had moved up his retirement from the army, and he did not, as a policy, endorse candidates. (That didn’t stop Donald Trump from invoking him as an expert source during a Republican debate.) Sometime during 2008—he doesn’t remember exactly when—Clinton made a major concession on the surge. “She said, ‘You were right, this really did work,’ ” Keane said. “On issues of national security,” he said, “I thought she was always intellectually honest with me.”
He and Clinton continued to talk, even after she became secretary of state. Several times in 2009, Clinton’s aides rearranged her schedule to make time for calls or meetings with Keane. In June 2010, Clinton emailed her secretary, “I want to see Jack Keane for a drink.” More often than not, they found themselves in sync. Keane, like Clinton, favored more robust intervention in Syria than Obama was willing to undertake. In April 2015, the week before she launched her candidacy, Clinton asked him for a briefing on military options for dealing with the fighters of the Islamic State. Bringing along three young female analysts from the Institute for the Study of War, Keane gave her a two-hour-and-twenty-minute presentation. Among other steps, he advocated imposing a no-fly zone over parts of Syria that would neutralize Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s air power, with a goal of forcing him into a political settlement with opposition groups. Six months later, Clinton publicly adopted this position, further distancing herself from Obama.
“I’m convinced this president, no matter what the circumstances, will never put any boots on the ground to do anything, even when it’s compelling,” Keane told me. He was sitting in the library at his home in McLean, Virginia, lined with books on military history and strategy. His critique of Obama was hardly new or original, but it faithfully reflected the thinking of Clinton and many of her policy advisers. “One of the problems the president has, which weakens his diplomatic efforts, is that leaders don’t believe he would use military power. That’s an issue that would separate the president from Hillary Clinton rather dramatically. She would look at military force as another realistic option, but only where there is no other option.”
Befriending Keane gave Clinton instant entrée to his informal network of active-duty and retired generals. The most interesting by far was David Petraeus, a cerebral commander who shared Clinton’s jet-fueled ambition and a life story that mixed heady success with humbling setbacks. Both would be accused of mishandling classified information—Clinton because of her use of a private server and email address to conduct sensitive government business, a decision that erupted into a political scandal and cast a shadow over her presidential campaign; Petraeus because he had given a diary containing classified information to his biographer and mistress.
On Clinton’s first trip to Iraq in November 2003, Petraeus, then a two-star general commanding the 101st Airborne Division, flew from his field headquarters in Mosul to the relative safety of Kirkuk to brief her congressional delegation. “She was full of questions,” he recalled. “It was the kind of gesture that means a lot to a battlefield commander.” On subsequent trips, as he rose in rank, Petraeus walked her through his plans to train and equip Iraqi Army troops, a forerunner of the counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan. It worked to their mutual benefit: Petraeus was building ties to a prominent Democratic voice in the Senate; Clinton was burnishing her image as a friend of the troops. “She did it the old-fashioned way,” he said. “She did it by pursuing relationships.”
“Her star power with the troops was evident,” Petraeus continued. Sometimes that caused tensions with her fellow lawmakers, who were largely ignored while she was being mobbed by the soldiers. “They would line up. Everybody wanted to be in a photo with Senator Clinton. The other members of the delegation would be back in the vehicle, and occasionally you’d hear, ‘C’mon, Hillary.’ ”
When Petraeus was sent back to Iraq as the top commander in early 2007, he gave every member of the Senate Armed Services Committee a copy of The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, which he had edited during a tour at Fort Leavenworth. Clinton read hers from cover to cover. During a hearing, she seized on a ratio in the manual to challenge him on whether the United States would ever be able to field enough forces in Iraq, as a percentage of the population, to conduct a viable counterinsurgency. “We were sailing through,” the general recalled, “and all of a sudden, lo and behold, there was Clinton.” Petraeus conceded her point: Even with the surge, there would not be enough troops on the ground to meet his recommended ratio of soldiers to locals. But he argued the gap would be narrowed by the use of contractors and, later, the introduction of trained Iraqi troops.
“It was a very penetrating line of inquiry,” he said of Clinton’s interrogation. “Welcome to the National Football League.”
The next time Petraeus went to Capitol Hill, nine months later, domestic politics had turned savagely against the war. He was there with the American ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, to report on the status of the surge. Both men believed the influx of troops had contributed to a measurable reduction in civilian deaths from roadside bombs and other insurgent attacks in the country. But they faced five senators running to be president of a nation fed up with the war. (In addition to Clinton and Obama, there were Joe Biden, Chris Dodd, and John McCain.) With the exception of McCain, all were itching for a fight; the general’s friend Clinton drew the most blood. “You have been made the de facto spokesmen for what many of us believe to be a failed policy,” she said, glaring at him and Crocker.
Although Clinton’s reservations about the surge were valid, her opposition to it, like her vote for the war, came back to haunt her. This time, it was her ally Bob Gates who resurrected the ghost. In his memoir, Gates wrote that she confessed to him and the president that her position had been politically motivated because she was then facing Obama in the Iowa caucuses. (Obama, he wrote, “vaguely” conceded that he, too, had opposed it for political reasons.) Clinton pushed back, telling Diane Sawyer of ABC News that Gates “perhaps either missed the context or the meaning, because I did oppose the surge.” Her opposition, she told Sawyer, was driven by the fact that at that time, people were not going to accept any escalation of the war. “This is not politics in electoral, political terms,” Clinton said. “This is politics in the sense of the American public has to support commitments like this.”
The next time she found herself in a debate over sending troops into harm’s way, she voiced no such reservations.
“We need maps,” Hillary Clinton told her aides.
It was early October 2009 and she had just returned from a meeting in the Situation Room, where Obama’s war cabinet was debating how many additional troops to send to Afghanistan. The Pentagon, she reported, had used impressive color-coded maps to show its plans to deploy troops around the country. The attention to detail made Gates and his commanders look crisp and well-prepared; the State Department looked wan by comparison. At the next meeting, on October 14, the team from State unfurled its own maps to show the deployment of the “civilian surge,” the army of aid workers, diplomats, legal experts, and crop specialists who were supposed to follow the soldiers into Afghanistan.
Clinton’s fixation with maps was typical of her mind-set in the first great war-and-peace debate of the Obama presidency. She wanted to be taken seriously, even if her department was less central than the Pentagon. One way to accomplish this was by promoting the civilian surge, the pet project of her friend and special envoy to the region, Richard Holbrooke. “She was determined that her briefing books would be just as thick and just as meticulous as those of the Pentagon,” a senior adviser recalled. She also didn’t hesitate to get into the Pentagon’s business, asking detailed questions about the training of Afghan troops and wading into the weeds of military planning. If she was overseas during one of the meetings, Clinton made sure to take part remotely. After an exhausting day in which she had spoken at Moscow State University and then visited the Russian republic of Tatarstan, Clinton put on headphones in her cabin and listened to the discussion in the Situation Room as she flew through the night, high above the Volga River, on her way home.
Much has been written about the troop debate, a three-month drama of dueling egos, leaked documents, and endless deliberations that crystallized the portrait of Obama as an overly methodical professor-in-chief. The story is typically framed as a test of wills between the Pentagon’s wily military commanders and an inexperienced young president, with Joe Biden playing the role of devil’s advocate for Obama. While that portrait is accurate, it neglects the role of Clinton. By siding with Gates and the generals, she gave political ballast to their proposals and provided a hawkish counterpoint to Biden’s skepticism. Her role should not be overstated: She did not turn the debate, nor did she bring to it any distinctive point of view. But her unstinting support of McChrystal’s maximalist recommendation made it harder for Obama to choose a lesser option.
“Hillary was adamant in her support for what Stan asked for,” Gates told me. “She made clear that she was ready to support his request for the full forty thousand troops. She then made clear that she was only willing to go with the thirty thousand number because I proposed it. She was, in a way, tougher on the numbers in the surge than I was.” Gates believed that if he could align Clinton; the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mike Mullen; the commander of Central Command, David Petraeus; and himself behind a common position, it would be hard for Obama to say no. “How could you ignore these Four Horsemen of national security?” Geoff Morrell said.
Just as Clinton benefited from her alliance with the military commanders, she gave them political cover. “Here’s the dirty little secret,” said Tom Nides, her former deputy secretary of state for management and resources. “They all knew they wanted her on their side. They knew that if they walked into the Situation Room and they had her, it made a huge difference in the dynamics. When she opened her mouth, she could change the momentum in the room.”
David Axelrod recalled one meeting where Clinton “kicked the thing off and pretty much articulated their opinion; I’m sure that’s one that they remember. There’s no doubt that she wanted to give them every troop that McChrystal was asking for.” Still, Clinton didn’t prevail on every argument. Obama added a crucial condition of his own: that the soldiers be deployed as quickly as possible and pulled out again, starting in the summer of 2011—a deadline that proved more fateful in the long run than a difference of ten thousand troops. Clinton opposed setting a deadline for withdrawal, arguing that it would tip America’s hand to the Taliban and encourage them to wait out the United States—which, in fact, was exactly what happened.
“The president was walking a very fine line,” Axelrod said. “At the end of the day, he yielded to the wisdom of the group to the degree that he sent more troops. But in return, he got a commitment to limit the length of the mission. What he wasn’t going to do was sign a blank check. What came out of it was a much more truncated approach to how these troops were going to be deployed and then scaled down.”
Clinton’s role in the debate was not without costs to her relationship with the White House. Her insistence on playing ditto-head to Gates rankled Obama’s political aides, who felt she helped box in the president on a troop deployment he did not want, and that could pose real political dangers to him. As Bob Woodward of The Washington Post reported, Clinton at one meeting declared, “Mr. President, the dilemma you face…” Her use of “you,” not “we,” suggested that somehow, Afghanistan was Obama’s problem, not hers, rekindling suspicions that she was not really on his team. Axelrod and Emanuel were drawn to Biden’s more minimalist option. Rather than send a massive force to Afghanistan to rebuild the country—a hugely expensive project—Biden proposed a smaller counterterrorism force that would target the Taliban and al-Qaeda and improve the training of Afghan troops.
In the final days of the debate, Clinton also found herself at odds with her own ambassador in Kabul. He, too, held different views than she did on the wisdom of a surge, which he had put into writing. On November 6, 2009, in a long cable addressed to Clinton, Ambassador Karl Eikenberry made a trenchant, convincing case for why the McChrystal proposal, which she had endorsed two weeks earlier in a meeting with Obama, would saddle the United States with “vastly increased costs and an indefinite, large-scale military role in Afghanistan.” The Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, was “not an adequate strategic partner,” Eikenberry wrote. Pouring in more American soldiers and money, he said, would only increase the country’s dependence and “deepen the military involvement in a mission that most agree cannot be won solely by military means.” It would make more sense to intensify diplomacy with Afghanistan’s neighbor Pakistan, which offered a better chance to be a “game changer” in the struggle to vanquish the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
A few days later, the cable was leaked to my Times colleague Eric Schmitt, and the latest rift in the administration spilled into the open. Such leaks are not unusual in Washington: McChrystal’s original assessment of the state of the war, and his call for more troops, had been leaked to Woodward two months earlier. This amounted to a counterpunch by the doves. Much of Eikenberry’s analysis proved prescient, particularly his warnings about the threadbare partnership with Karzai. It carried an extra sting because he was a retired army three-star general who had been the commander in Afghanistan from 2005 to 2007. Clinton had not asked for the cable; Eikenberry had been encouraged to lay out his views by Doug Lute, who coordinated Afghanistan policy in the White House and shared the suspicion that Obama was being bulldozed into a larger-than-necessary surge. Clinton was furious, fearing it could upset a debate in which she and the Pentagon were about to prevail.
The episode laid bare a vexed relationship between Clinton and Eikenberry, one of the few generals with whom she didn’t hit it off. A soldier-scholar with graduate degrees from Harvard and Stanford, Eikenberry was brilliant but had a reputation among his colleagues for being imperious. He clashed with two of her most trusted aides, Holbrooke and Jack Lew, the deputy secretary of state directly responsible for the civilian surge. Clinton had a similarly chilly relationship with Lute, another retired army lieutenant general with a graduate degree from Harvard, who also fought with Holbrooke. “She likes the nail eaters—McChrystal, Petraeus, Keane,” a former aide said. “Real military guys, not these retired three-stars who go into civilian jobs.”
Eikenberry wanted to function as a sort of proconsul in Afghanistan—the civilian equivalent of McChrystal—coordinating the work of the United Nations, the World Bank, and other nonmilitary agencies. But he represented only the United States while McChrystal commanded a multinational force. And the cable poisoned his relations with Karzai. Clinton viewed him as insubordinate on other grounds: In October 2010, he turned up at a NATO meeting in Brussels after having been told not to come. She and Gates both wanted the White House to remove him—a bitter, ultimately futile effort that goes unmentioned in Clinton’s book but is covered by Gates in juicy detail. The ambassador, Gates concluded, was “under an umbrella of protection at the White House.”
Neither Gates nor Clinton ever informed Eikenberry that they had tried to get rid of him, Eikenberry told me. While he declined to discuss the cable, his doubts about the investment of American blood and treasure were unchanged years later. “It is possible that the Afghan state will not collapse and the country again serve as a major base for international terrorism,” he said. “But even if we achieve this much, it will have come at great human and fiscal cost, and over a thirteen-year period when we should have been more focused on the geopolitical challenges posed by China and Russia.”
What the cable made clear was the degree to which the Afghanistan debate was dominated by military considerations. While Clinton did raise the need to deal with Pakistan, her reflexive support of Gates, Petraeus, and McChrystal on troops meant she was not as powerful a voice for diplomatic alternatives as she could have been. (Ironically, Eikenberry, the retired general, gave more weight to political considerations.) “She contributed to the over-militarizing of the analysis of the problem,” said Sarah Chayes, who was an adviser to McChrystal in Afghanistan and later to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen. Clinton also naïvely accepted Hamid Karzai’s pledge in 2009 that the Afghans would stand up a security force capable of securing major cities within three years, and the entire country within five years—a timetable that proved illusory. In October 2015, six years after that promise, the persistent violence in Afghanistan and the legacy of Karzai’s misrule forced Obama to reverse his plan to withdraw the last American soldiers by the end of his presidency. A few thousand troops will stay there indefinitely.
Clinton talked a lot about the civilian surge but never quite translated it into reality. The whole project always had a whiff of the utopian nation-building that Obama had disparaged in his mother’s fieldwork in Indonesia: lawyers helping Afghans set up clean courts, agricultural experts helping them plant sustainable crops, civil servants helping them build efficient public agencies. In the end, the State Department proved inadequate to the task of deploying civilians in anywhere near the numbers needed to make a difference on the ground. The problem was institutional and cultural: The State Department Clinton inherited had been depleted during the Bush years, while the wartime Pentagon had been put on steroids. State still relied on the army to train its recruits, which it did in typically grand style, converting a complex of dilapidated buildings in rural Indiana that had once been a farm colony for “feeble-minded” boys into the simulacrum of a war-torn Afghan city. Though the State Department eventually sent about 1,250 people to Afghanistan, 700 of them never ventured beyond the fortified walls of the embassy in Kabul. Unlike the military, it could not order its diplomats into life-threatening assignments. At the Pentagon, which was managing a vast, deadly campaign with 100,000 troops, there was little sympathy for these limitations.
“The culture inside the State Department is, ‘They’re big-footing us,’ but then they don’t want to do it,” Chayes said. “The military is dying for the State Department to play a bigger role, but it doesn’t, either because it doesn’t have the resources or it doesn’t have the derring-do.”
Midwestern roots and flat vowels aside, Hillary Clinton and Bob Gates were not natural buddies. They didn’t agree on politics and had very different career paths: Clinton, an actor on the political stage; Gates, an operator in the shadowy world of intelligence. In July 2007, they crossed swords over Iraq: Clinton, then a senator, lashed out in a conference call with reporters after one of his deputies brushed aside her request for a briefing from the Pentagon on when it planned to begin pulling troops out of Iraq. Gates rushed to smooth her feathers, sending her a contrite letter by messenger. In his memoir, he painted a strangely shaded portrait of her. He lavished praise on Clinton as “smart, idealistic but pragmatic, tough-minded, indefatigable, a very valuable colleague, and a superb representative of the United States all over the world.” But he also noted that the White House kept her on a short leash. From forcing an unwanted deputy on her to shielding an ambassador she regarded as insubordinate, the White House, in Gates’s telling, all but put her in a gilded cage.
Still, Gates and Clinton both knew how to ride the political winds. And they had reasons to make common cause that went beyond Afghanistan. In the spring of 2009, she backed him when he asked Obama to block the release of Abu Ghraib–like photographs that documented the abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan by American military personnel. Clinton had just returned from Baghdad, where the commander, army general Ray Odierno, warned her that the images would expose the troops to reprisal. (Obama agreed; the photos remain concealed.) Gates returned the favor by lobbying Congress to raise the State Department’s budget. Diplomats, he said, needed to pick up some of the work of nation-building that had been done by soldiers.
Gates was acutely aware of the deficiencies of the civilian surge, but he never called out the State Department or allowed his subordinates to do so. Clinton had backed him on troops, and he was going to protect his relationship with her. A veteran of six administrations, Gates had witnessed corrosive battles between the Pentagon and the State Department—Caspar Weinberger vs. George Shultz under Ronald Reagan; Donald Rumsfeld vs. Colin Powell under George W. Bush—and he was determined not to repeat the cycle with Clinton. They shared a bigger common adversary: the West Wing. It would not be “career enhancing,” Gates warned his staff, to get caught sniping at the secretary of state. There was symbolic power in a public alliance between diplomat and warrior, and they choreographed their relationship like tango dancers. After appearing together on a panel at George Washington University in October 2009, in which they finished each other’s sentences, the two decamped to Blue Duck Tavern, a rustic-chic West End restaurant, for a cozy dinner. Their aides leaked it to the press before the check arrived.
The symbolism, however, was always in service of a policy goal, large or small. In July 2010, Clinton and Gates met in South Korea on the sixtieth anniversary of the start of the Korean War. They traveled up to the demilitarized zone, where they studiously avoided eye contact with a North Korean soldier who glared at them through the window of the guard post that straddles the border. Back in Seoul that evening, they got together for a drink in the bar of the Grand Hyatt hotel, discussing East Asian security over the racket of a Korean cover band. Seoul was on a razor’s edge during that period. Four months earlier, North Korea had torpedoed a South Korean Navy corvette, the Cheonan, killing forty-six sailors. For weeks, the State Department and Pentagon had been debating how to respond to North Korea’s belligerence and reassure their loyal Korean ally. The tentative plan—developed by Clinton’s deputy at State Jim Steinberg—was to dispatch the aircraft carrier George Washington into coastal waters to the east of North Korea as a show of force.
But Admiral Robert Willard, then the Pacific commander, wanted to send the carrier on a more aggressive course—into the Yellow Sea, between North Korea and China. The Chinese foreign ministry had warned the United States not to do that, which for Willard was all the more reason to do it. He pushed Mullen, who in turn pushed Gates, to reroute the George Washington. Gates agreed, but he needed the commander in chief to sign off on a decision that could have political as well as military consequences.
In a weekend conference call with the president and a handful of his top aides, Gates laid out the case for diverting the George Washington to the Yellow Sea—that the United States should not look like it was yielding to China. Clinton strongly seconded it. “We’ve got to run it up the gut!” she had said to her aides a few days earlier, invoking an old football play in which the player carrying the ball barrels through the middle of the defensive line. The Vince Lombardi imitation drew giggles from her staff who, even eighteen months into her tenure, still marveled at her old-school hawkishness. Obama, though, was not persuaded. The George Washington was already under way; changing her course was not a decision to make on the fly.
“I don’t call audibles with aircraft carriers,” he said, one-upping Clinton on her football metaphor.