Chapter Eleven
Return of the Hostage Takers

“NOTHING IS AGREED TO UNTIL EVERYTHING IS AGREED TO,” JOE Biden said—mimicking what John Boehner had repeatedly stated during the budget talks—as he met with a small group of lawmakers to open the debt talks that President Obama had requested in his speech at George Washington University a month earlier.

On May 5, 2011, at an oval table in the dining room of Blair House, a block away from the White House, Biden had assembled the Republican-designated negotiators, Eric Cantor and Jon Kyl; the Democratic team, Chris Van Hollen, Max Baucus, Representative Jim Clyburn, and Senator Daniel Inouye; as well as Timothy Geithner, Jack Lew, Gene Sperling, Jason Furman, and Bruce Reed.

Biden began by emphasizing the crucial principle that there’s no deal until there is a deal.

With the president’s blessing, Biden was hoping to create an environment in which anything could be put on the table—a proposed spending cut, a possible tax increase—but nothing proffered or suggested was solid until a final agreement existed. If the not-until rule was in place, both sides would have more flexibility to toss out ideas and the discussions could be more candid.

The essential split at the table was no secret. The Republicans wouldn’t raise the debt ceiling without deep spending cuts and budget reforms; the Democrats wouldn’t agree to significant cuts (particularly any affecting Medicare or Social Security benefits) without an increase in revenues.

And Biden was firm on another key point: the deficit-reduction package they were trying to concoct could not be solely a cavalcade of cuts. The Democrats were indeed willing to concede on spending cuts to obtain a debt-ceiling hike, but they needed give from the Republicans. Biden was making sure that all the parties understood that there had to be revenues—either from closing tax loopholes for corporations or from gathering more taxes from those in the top income brackets. Neither Kyl nor Cantor raised an objection.

Let’s proceed in good faith, Biden urged.

DAYS LATER, BOEHNER MADE THE JOB TOUGHER. IN A SPEECH, the speaker denounced government, claiming that many of the nation’s woes were due to the “misguided belief by politicians that the American economy” can be “influenced positively by government intervention and borrowing.” This was the anti-Obama view that government had no proactive role to play in bolstering the economy. More important, Boehner declared an ultimatum: he and his fellow House Republicans would not vote to increase the debt limit unless accompanying spending cuts were greater than the increase in the borrowing authority. Tax hikes, he asserted, would have to be “off the table.”

Obama was facing what the administration viewed as another hostage situation, this time with a ransom note demanding $2.4 trillion. Boehner and the Republicans were threatening to do worse than hold up middle-class tax cuts or shut down the government; they were threatening the default of the US government—and a possible financial meltdown.

The White House calculated that there was little chance of overcoming GOP opposition in the House without submitting to this demand; there were enough Republicans willing—if not eager—to shoot the hostage. Linking the debt ceiling to spending cuts, Obama and his aides believed, was dangerous. There had never been a connection in the past; this would establish a difficult precedent for the future. But Obama and his team didn’t see much maneuvering room. The president would have to accept Boehner’s basic terms.

THE BIDEN TALKS INITIALLY FOCUSED ON CUTS, NOT REVENUES, and the participants identified several hundreds of billions of dollars in reductions in “non-health mandatories”—such programs as farm subsidies and federal and military pensions.

Cantor appeared to have come prepared to bargain in good faith. He genuinely seemed to be seeking a package that could be approved by his caucus. There was almost a touch of optimism in the West Wing.

“Our own people would come back from negotiations and say the talks are going well, and we can’t go out and bash the Republicans,” a senior administration official recalled.

But there was a split between Cantor and Kyl. Cantor and Boehner favored a solution that would lift the debt ceiling for two years. They didn’t want to deal with this again in six months, for they knew it would be a heavy lift to get the Tea Partiers and freshman members of their party to extend the government’s borrowing authority even once, let alone two or three times before the 2012 elections.

Kyl seemed just fine with a short-term extension that would have to be revisited in six months or so. Mitch McConnell, who yearned to become Senate majority leader after the next election, didn’t mind making Democratic senators facing reelection cast several uncomfortable votes for more debt.

The negotiators met five times during the month of May, eventually switching to a conference room in the Capitol. The initial sessions were productive. The group drew up a list of possible Medicare and Medicaid reductions that would squeeze hospitals, pharmaceutical manufacturers, and providers—not beneficiaries.

After the fifth meeting on May 24, Biden told reporters that he was confident they could reach at least $1 trillion in deficit reduction, as a down payment on a larger accord. There were only two problems: the Republicans had yet to indicate they could bend on revenues and $1 trillion was below Boehner’s demand.

The Biden group seemed at least to be making more progress than the Gang of Six, a group of Republican and Democratic senators who had been working to craft their own broad-based deficit-reduction accord (with cuts and revenues). In mid-May, this effort seemingly collapsed, when Senator Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican, withdrew from the gang, after Democrats wouldn’t accept the deeper cuts he was pushing for Medicare.

During the Biden talks, tempers rarely flared, but at a policy conference in Washington at the end of the month, Sperling showed a touch of frustration with the overall Republican position.

“Serious people in serious discussion do not say you cannot have a single penny in revenues,” he insisted.

Sperling noted that Representative Paul Ryan was imprisoned by a no-tax “ideological view.” Without expanding revenues, Sperling asserted, “very severe cuts” were unavoidable. He pointed out that the cut in Medicaid proposed by the House Republicans would lead to millions of poor children losing health care and elderly Americans forgoing coverage for nursing home care.

“We are not criticizing their plan,” he added. “We are just explaining their plan.”

Yet Sperling still claimed he was upbeat about the Biden talks, remarking there was “a real seriousness of purpose in that room that gives me hope.”

HOPE, THOUGH, WAS NOT BLOOMING ON CAPITOL HILL. ON June 1, a day after the Republican-controlled House voted down a bill to increase the debt ceiling (without any spending cuts), Obama had all the House Republicans to the White House for a not-so-intimate conversation.

The recent economic news had been lousy. The latest growth indicators were disappointing. But the topic was deficit reduction, entitlement reform, and the growing debt—an indicator of the narrow debate within the Beltway. The scores of GOPers sat in chairs in the East Room—almost as if they were there for a press conference—with the president at a table at the front.

Ryan was direct; he beseeched the president to stop “mis-describing” his Medicare plan and urged him to ratchet back on the “demagoguery.” His fellow Republicans, who had taken a beating for supporting an end to the Medicare guarantee, gave Ryan a standing ovation for this heartfelt plea. Obama was fast to reply.

“I’m the death-panel-supporting, socialist, may-not-have-been-born-here president,” he said, explaining that he had more interest than most politicians in eradicating extreme rhetoric.

What Ryan and the Republicans had experienced with Medicare was nothing compared to the vitriol that had been hurled at Obama by their ideological soul mates. Obama held firm to his critique of the Republicans’ Medicare plan: it was indeed a transfer of health care costs from the government to the elderly. The meeting accomplished little.

The next day, the House Democrats had their own turn at the White House. Many of them feared Obama was too willing to cave during the debt-ceiling negotiations. The president promised he would not again sign off on extending the Bush tax cuts for the top brackets, no matter what hostages the Republicans grabbed. Nancy Pelosi was adamant that Obama not trade away Medicare benefit cuts for a deficit/debt-ceiling deal.

Representative Henry Waxman, a veteran lawmaker from California, vented for the group. He urged the president to fight more fiercely and to take better advantage of the bully pulpit, implying that the president was an inadequate negotiator. This was the Democrats’ number one complaint about the president—he gave away too much without enough of a fight. Many were still yearning for a more aggressive Obama.

The president insisted that he knew how to negotiate with the Republicans. He also told his party colleagues to stop expecting him to let loose the fiery rhetoric.

“When Eric Cantor says something, Eric Cantor says something,” Obama explained. “When I say something, markets and countries and people react.”

He was obliged to be more prudent. He did not have the luxury to engage in a political food fight.

Obama and his aides were frustrated that this seemed to escape their allies on the Hill, in the progressive activist community, and within the liberal commentariat.

Still, Obama said he believed he could reach an agreement on the debt ceiling within a month. Then they all could move on to talking about economic growth and jobs.

THE BIDEN TALKS ROLLED ON. CANTOR SENT AN E-MAIL TO House Republicans noting he was “cautiously optimistic” they would cobble up an agreement meeting Boehner’s one-for-one demand. Then the negotiators moved to the tough stuff: revenues.

At a June session, Geithner presented a series of revenue proposals. He discussed closing loopholes and eliminating deductions. This included ending subsidies for oil and gas companies and tax breaks for corporate jets. All told, the Democrats were looking at an estimated $500 billion in added revenue as part of perhaps a $2 trillion deal.

“It was mainly cat-and-dog stuff, small stuff,” said a Democratic staffer.

The Democrats could see Kyl and Cantor stiffening, as Geithner went through the revenue options, and the two Republicans responded without much enthusiasm.

“Their attitude,” a White House official later recounted, “was, ‘We’ll let them talk about revenues. Raising the debt ceiling is enough of a concession for us.’ ”

A Democratic negotiator recalled, “We’d say, ‘We know you don’t want to do revenues, but which of these do you hate the least? How about corporate jets?’ They didn’t engage.”

At one session, Kyl asked Lew and Sperling for clarification on a point that puzzled him: You say Medicare savings are good policy, but you will agree to them only if there are revenue increases? Yes, they said. Kyl scratched his head. But if the Medicare reductions are good policy, why not simply agree on this? The tax fight, he suggested, could be waged separately.

Lew and Sperling explained that the only way a package with Medicare savings could be acceptable to the Democrats was if it included revenues.

Kyl repeated his question: Why can’t we go with what we can agree on? He seemed genuinely bewildered. Kyl didn’t appear to realize he was asking them for total capitulation.

Throughout the talks, Biden was in touch with McConnell, who was urging the vice president to get Medicare into the mix of whatever deal his group was cooking up. Biden didn’t have to guess why. If a bipartisan budget accord contained Medicare reductions, Republicans could say that everyone in Washington was for some sort of Medicare reform. The Democrats’ most effective line of attack would be diluted.

Biden told McConnell to find an excuse to add revenues to the package.

AFTER THE BIDEN GANG’S NINTH MEETING ON JUNE 16, THE VICE president noted that crunch time was at hand. He told reporters that around-the-clock staff work and several meetings the following week would be necessary for his group to bang out that “real down payment” on a $4 trillion plan. But the final swaps, he noted, had yet to be made: “I’ll trade you my bicycle for your golf clubs.”

Yet this fiscal swap meet was becoming even more problematic because the Republicans were becoming more divided. Senate Republicans were saying a long-term debt deal looked unlikely and that Washington would have to settle for a short-term extension—that is, a repeat of this whole process later in the year.

Kyl publicly groused that the Biden talks had not generated sufficient cuts to warrant raising the debt ceiling at all. Asked by a reporter what sacred cows Republicans were willing to sacrifice to reach an agreement, Kyl sarcastically replied, “Gee, I can’t think of any.”

Cantor, though, was still hoping for an agreement that would avoid a replay in six months. “I don’t see how multiple votes on a debt-ceiling increase can help us get to where we want to go,” he said.

The White House was bargaining with a Republican Party at odds with itself.

IN WHAT WOULD BE THE LAST MEETING OF THE BIDEN GROUP, the Republicans pushed for Medicare reductions that would hit beneficiaries, not merely providers. The Democrats demanded closing tax loopholes and other revenue generators. The group had spent more than a month detailing significant cuts, but Kyl and Cantor had continued to resist a full conversation about revenues. Geithner reviewed revenue options.

“We have to get something,” he said.

Van Hollen insisted that Medicare beneficiaries not take a hit—especially if corporations and well-off taxpayers were not paying more. The median income of a Medicare recipient, he pointed out, was under $23,000 a year. Why should Washington place greater financial burdens on these Americans than on oil companies, corporate jet owners, and hedge fund managers?

Cantor was not accepting any of the Democratic revenue proposals. But, he noted, the negotiators might be able to include revenues if they don’t look like revenues. To the Democratic negotiators, he appeared to be seeking a sleight of hand with which he could fool the Tea Partiers.

Biden reminded the Republicans that ever since the opening minutes of these talks he had repeatedly stated that there could be no deal on any of the cuts without revenues.

Cantor replied that they still didn’t have $2.4 trillion in cuts.

Biden pointed out that just about every serious deficit-reduction plan produced by think tanks, policy shops, and commissions included revenues.

Geithner was annoyed; the GOP side was demonstrating no flexibility.

Cantor responded, “We always said we have a vote problem”—meaning Boehner and Cantor couldn’t sell a package with revenues to their caucus.

“The idea that we have to pay to avoid default—as secretary of the Treasury, I’m offended by that,” Geithner said.

“We’re running out of runway,” Biden remarked.

VAN HOLLEN HAD WORRIED FROM THE FIRST MEETING THAT during the talks Kyl and Cantor would pocket spending cuts the Democrats offered (provisionally!) and offer little in return. And that was now coming true.

“We were willing to take difficult measures in the context of a balanced agreement with shared sacrifice,” a Democratic negotiator recalled. “We assumed we would have a revenue part.”

Before the June 22 meeting concluded, Biden scheduled two more for later that week. His aim was to wrap up these talks and then kick the negotiations upstairs to Obama and Boehner. Only those two could ultimately decide how far to go on Medicare and what revenue proposals would be acceptable.

After the session, Biden told waiting reporters, “We’re still moving.”

Baucus stated, “There will be an agreement.”

Following this meeting, Biden was chatting with Cantor and casually referred to a pending get-together between Boehner and Obama later that day at the White House and was surprised to see that Cantor wasn’t aware of it. The meeting was being kept a secret, but Biden figured that Cantor was in the know.

The previous weekend, Obama and Boehner had played a high-profile round of golf at the course at Andrews Air Force Base. That outing had led them to schedule this private Oval Office tête-à-tête to explore what sort of debt-ceiling deal might be possible.

Obama had not told top White House aides because he did not want to disrupt the Biden talks. And Boehner had his own reason for the secrecy. House Republicans, especially those eighty-seven die-hard freshmen, were still smarting from the CR fight, and many never stopped worrying that Boehner might cut another deal with the big-government socialist in the White House that would be a sellout of their cherished smother-the-government principles.

But Boehner not telling Cantor? Biden found that strange.

“The whole scene on the Republican side was weird,” a senior administration official later said. “We really had no idea at times who we were dealing with.”

THE NEXT DAY CANTOR CALLED THE VICE PRESIDENT’S OFFICE and left a message that he was pulling out.

This stunned Biden and the Democrats. It also surprised Boehner. Cantor had not told the speaker he was withdrawing.

Throughout the negotiations, Cantor had regularly appeared at House GOP caucus meetings to report progress. “He’d come in with decks showing all the cuts he was squeezing out,” recalled a senior House Republican. “But when the talks were getting real and involved revenues, he didn’t want to own it.”

For Cantor, the hush-hush Obama-Boehner meeting was cause to worry that the speaker was undercutting his position in the Biden talks. Moreover, this was a good moment for Cantor to skedaddle, before he got stuck in the tar of revenue increases. He would let Boehner get in trouble for any compromises on that front.

THE BIDEN NEGOTIATIONS HAD YIELDED A LIST OF CUTS IN DISCRETIONARY defense and nondefense spending to the tune of about $1.1 trillion, reductions in non-health mandatory programs (farm subsidies, college aid, federal worker pensions, and more), and savings in Medicare and Medicaid. The negotiators had talked about raising the Medicare eligibility age, means-testing the program, and wringing money out of Medicaid by shifting costs to hospitals, states, and providers. They had considered ending mail delivery on Saturdays. But few details had been nailed down for much of this.

“It was like a menu,” a White House official later said. “If we do this, then we can do that or that.”

The negotiators had delved into the complicated plumbing of the federal budget and developed a substantial set of cuts totaling, depending on how you counted it, about $1.6 trillion—which fell short of the $2.4 trillion needed to meet Boehner’s demand. But it was all conditional. And the Republicans wouldn’t fill the hole with new revenues. For all their toil, the Biden group ended up stuck.

The Republicans, naturally, responded to the Cantor walkout by . . . blaming the president.

“For weeks, lawmakers have worked around the clock to hammer out a plan that would help us to avert a crisis we all know is coming,” McConnell bellowed. “So it’s worth asking, where in the world has President Obama been for the last month?”

This was misleading hyperventilation. Obama had sent Biden and his senior economic advisers to bang out a budget accord. The president’s involvement, or lack thereof, was not the issue. The dispute was over revenues. At the White House, Carney said, “These talks are in abeyance.”

BUT THERE WAS A NEW TRACK. THE SECRET OVAL OFFICE MEETING between Obama and Boehner prompted a series of covert negotiations. The president and the speaker had delicately discussed the possibility of a big deal, in which Obama would sign off on significant entitlement reductions while Boehner would yield on significant revenues. And they agreed that a small number of their respective aides would conduct follow-up conversations.

Late that week, Jack Lew, who was in New York, flew back to Washington—not telling his aides why—so he and Rob Nabors could secretly meet with Barry Jackson. In the White House, other senior aides did not know what Lew and Nabors were up to.

The initial conversations indicated that Boehner might consider a revenue boost of $800 billion achieved through tax reform (the elimination of loopholes and deductions), not the raising of rates—though there was the bedeviling issue of what baseline to employ (a wonky issue that made all the difference in the world). Given that Congress could move quickly on cuts but would need time to produce tax reform legislation—and there was no surfeit of time at the moment—both sides would have to agree on an enforcement mechanism, a so-called trigger.

If tax reform did not yield the promised $800 billion revenue hike, this backup measure would generate that amount. The trigger had to be unsavory enough to compel the Republicans to stay true to the tax side of the deal.

Boehner indicated he would consider a trigger that decoupled the Bush tax cuts for the rich from those for the middle class. This would allow Obama and the Democrats to extend only the tax breaks for the middle class and gain close to $800 billion in revenues. (If tax reform did happen, the Bush tax cuts would disappear, with new tax rates and rules established for all taxpayers and corporations.)

In return, Boehner was requesting a long list of entitlement changes: increasing the eligibility age for Medicare, rejiggering the cost of living adjustment (known as a COLA) for Social Security recipients to slow the increase in benefits, direct cuts in Medicare and Social Security benefits, higher copayments for Medicare, and more.

After conversations with their GOP counterparts, Lew and Nabors met with Geithner, Sperling, Plouffe, and Reed in Daley’s office and briefed them on their back-and-forth with Boehner’s office. The question was whether the president should seriously engage with Boehner.

The $800 billion was far better than the zero revenues the Republicans had offered during the Biden talks. But was that enough—and would it seem enough to Obama’s party? After all, if Obama merely blocked the extension of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy (as he had vowed to do), he could produce roughly the same amount—and in the deficit-reduction framework he had unveiled in April, Obama had included hundreds of billions of dollars in additional revenues from taxes on top earners. Could he settle for less than that?

Then again, who knew what would happen during the next skirmish over the Bush tax cuts? A bloc of Senate Democrats could side with the Republicans to extend all the Bush tax cuts—or back a compromise ending the Bush tax cuts only for the very wealthy (which would not yield as much revenue). Now the White House had a chance to lock in $800 billion.

Boehner had a similar problem on his end. Compared with the Ryan budget, this deal would be pretty good for the president.

Obama’s top economic advisers agreed they should seize this opportunity. They knew they could not give Boehner everything he requested on entitlements. They calculated they would have to concede one or two iconic issues, and they opted for raising the Medicare eligibility age and adjusting the Social Security COLA. To get an overarching agreement, a senior administration official later said, “these were the poisons we had to pick.”

The president’s aides figured that Obama’s health care overhaul would help ameliorate the negative consequences of lifting the age for Medicare—and these changes, they believed, would not undermine the basic structures of these two critical programs.

The president was particularly torn over the Social Security concession. Lew told him there was a way to adjust the COLA to protect older seniors and even yield an increase in benefits for the poorest recipients. Lew was confident he could fiddle with the numbers to make it acceptable on a policy level—though Obama and his aides realized it would still be an explosive political decision.

Obama yearned to move past the never-ending budget-and-deficit scuffles and show investors and the markets—whoever they were—that the US government could address its long-run fiscal challenges. And deficit reduction was also necessary for creating the political space he needed to pursue his future-oriented investments.

Obama and his advisers realized that downsizing government programs could possibly create a drag on the economy. But they were looking for a game changer to lift the economy out of the doldrums. A major deal might do this by removing uncertainty and encouraging confidence among businesses and consumers. Confidence, though, was a tricky business. It could be derided as the last-gasp defense of any policy. Yet at this point, Obama and his aides were searching for something that could flip the economic script.

Were Obama to broker such an ambitious bipartisan accord—overcoming the fierce opposition that would come from both sides—he could claim to be a postpartisan and pragmatic leader who put results ahead of ideology and party orthodoxy. He would be Washington’s adult in chief, who pulled together the bickerers of the capital for the mother of all deals. It would be a monumental act of consensus crafting. Independent voters, David Axelrod and others assumed, would just love it—perhaps enough to reelect Obama during a period of historically high unemployment.

The president and his team bore the responsibility of preventing a default, and Boehner had established a high bar: $2.4 trillion. Clearing that height would require unpalatable actions. Obama thought that if he and Congress were going that far, they might as well suck it up, suffer the extra political grief, and slog all the way to a grand bargain.

He instructed his team to proceed with the secret Boehner talks. He was hoping he and the speaker—two very different types of politicians who hailed from two very different political traditions—could fashion a historic compromise that would resolve several long-running policy battles of the nation’s capital, restore the country to a sound fiscal footing, and demonstrate that Washington could function.

He might have been hoping for too much.

OBAMA WAS ALWAYS JUGGLING. THE DAY HE MET SECRETLY WITH Boehner, he was overseeing the military action in Libya, and he announced a crucial decision on the Afghanistan war.

At 8:00 that night, June 22, Obama addressed the nation and declared that in the next month he would begin withdrawing troops from what had become the longest war in US history, costing the lives of over seventeen hundred US service members and more than $1 trillion. Ten thousand troops would be removed by the end of the year, and another twenty-three thousand by the following summer.

The withdrawal would continue “at a steady pace” after that. Obama was de-surging to meet a target date of 2014 for handing over full security responsibility to the Afghan government and its military and police forces.

“The tide of war is receding,” Obama said, adding, “America, it is time to focus on nation-building here at home.”

The president, over the reservations of his top military advisers, was delivering on a promise he had declared eighteen months earlier.

IN DECEMBER 2009, OBAMA, AFTER A MONTHS-LONG, INTENSIVE review of US policy on Afghanistan and Pakistan, had ordered an influx of 30,000 troops into Afghanistan. This would raise the number of US troops there to about 100,000, almost triple the 34,000 troops on the ground when Obama inherited the war. These troops, he maintained, would target the Taliban insurgency, secure key population centers, and contribute to the training of Afghan security forces—all to establish better conditions for the United States to increase the pace of transferring security operations to the Afghans.

The US interest, Obama explained then, was in disrupting al-Qaeda and in ensuring that the Taliban was in no position to overthrow the Afghan government and once again provide al-Qaeda or other anti-American jihadists a safe haven.

In announcing this surge of troops, which would cost about $30 billion, Obama pledged that in eighteen months he would start to bring these troops home. The US commitment in Afghanistan, he said, “would not be open-ended.”

As part of the strategic review, General Stanley McChrystal, then the commander of US forces in Afghanistan, had requested forty thousand extra troops (with no foreseeable end to their deployment) to be part of a broad counterinsurgency mission. McChrystal had warned in a report to the Pentagon that the United States risked failure without this boost in troops, and that report had been leaked to Bob Woodward at the Washington Post—a move some White House officials regarded as an attempt to bully Obama into okaying McChrystal’s request.

The ten-year cost for McChrystal’s request was possibly $1 trillion, and for Obama this eye-popping price tag and the prospect of a decade of further involvement in Afghanistan was too much—especially for a war that might be beyond traditional victory. Obama and most of his top national security aides assumed that there could be no total defeat of the Taliban, an indigenous force integrated into the fabric of Afghan society. The endgame would have to be some sort of political resolution or a situation with the Taliban existent but not strong enough to threaten seriously the central government.

But Obama had come to believe it made sense to throw extra forces at the Taliban temporarily to knock it back and afford the Afghans the opportunity to beef up their own capacity and take over more of the fight. He altered the plans McChrystal and the Pentagon had presented him, opting for a smaller number of additional soldiers and instructing the military to deploy these new troops at a faster rate so they could be withdrawn sooner. Obama had essentially drawn up his own blueprint: there would be more troops to pave the way quickly to fewer troops. If this worked.

It was a decision that would satisfy neither the hawks nor the skeptics. This was not a battle plan to achieve complete triumph, and John McCain and other champions of expanded military engagement in Afghanistan derided the notion of setting a withdrawal date as defeatist and strategically counterproductive.

Critics of the war saw Obama upping the investment in an enterprise that was beyond salvaging, especially considering the rampant corruption of the government and the ineptitude of the Afghan security forces.

As Obama discussed his decision with aides and military commanders, he made sure they all understood he was serious about the July 2011 withdrawal date. That’s when the surge would reverse. He would not consider additional troops. Yet a week after Obama announced the additional troops deployment, McChrystal testified on Capitol Hill: “I don’t view July 2011 as a deadline. At that time, we’ll evaluate the time and scope of a possible drawdown.”

A possible drawdown. It looked as if the military had not taken the president seriously.

About this time, Senator Carl Levin, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, saw the president and warned him: They’re trying to “make mush” of your date. They’re trying to turn your deadline into a goal.

“It’s an order, not a goal,” Obama replied. The withdrawal would happen.

In the following year and a half, whenever Levin saw the president, he always pressed Obama to build up the Afghan military and adhere to the July 2011 date. Obama constantly assured Levin the deadline was firm.

WITH THE SURGE UNDER WAY, THE WAR CHUGGED ON WITHOUT much public debate. It was rarely in the news. It never became an issue in the 2010 midterm elections. During this time, the dicey relationship with the erratic President Hamid Karzai, who had been reelected in a contest tainted by fraud, continued to be a strategic nuisance for US policymakers. Widespread corruption remained an obstacle. Afghan security forces grew and received greater training—but questions regarding their effectiveness persisted.

Yet US and NATO military forces were able to push the Taliban from several critical areas, and the US counterterrorism efforts—including the CIA’s not-that-secret drone program targeting al-Qaeda and related outfits in the tribal regions of Pakistan—severely set back bin Laden’s operations.

Come spring 2011, with the due date for the initiation of the drawdown looming, Obama had to decide how many troops he would remove and at what pace. In December 2009, he had said that the number would depend on the conditions at the time. Now it was time to make the call.

In a Washington consumed with deficit reduction and spending cuts, congressional support for the war was ebbing. In mid-May, a House measure requiring that Obama establish a firm timetable for withdrawing US forces from Afghanistan lost on a close 215–204 vote, with dozens of Republicans joining progressive Democrats to oppose the war.

In the following weeks, signs of unease continued. Levin was calling for withdrawing fifteen thousand troops by the end of the year. Twenty-seven senators, including two Tea Party Republicans, urged Obama to proceed with “sizable and sustained” reductions.

Senator Richard Lugar, who was not part of this group, observed, “It is exceedingly difficult to conclude that our vast expenditures in Afghanistan represent a rational allocation of our military and financial assets.”

AS HE CONSIDERED THE SIZE OF THE WITHDRAWAL, OBAMA CONDUCTED a narrow set of deliberations. After what happened in 2009—a long review process that produced leaks and an apparent effort on the part of the military to box him in—the president was not interested in another comprehensive interagency evaluation.

He held individual meetings with his defense secretary and his secretary of state, conferred with his national security staffers, and chaired three full NSC meetings in the two weeks before announcing his decision.

In all these discussions, Obama was unambiguous: the reductions of troops would be meaningful, not perfunctory; the transition to Afghan control would be significant, not for show.

Obama was leaning toward removing all the surge troops by March 2012—within nine months. Robert Gates, Hillary Clinton, and General David Petraeus, who now commanded US forces in Afghanistan (and whom Obama had recently nominated to become CIA chief), preferred slower and smaller reductions. Gates, who would soon be leaving the Pentagon, was advocating an eighteen- to twenty-four-month time line for bringing home the surge troops. And he was hinting as much in public. Petraeus urged Obama to remove only five thousand in 2011 and the same amount in 2012.

Military officials contended that a larger withdrawal would not allow them to protect the gains they had achieved in key provinces. (In one leak, military sources told the Wall Street Journal that removing more than ten thousand troops would undercut the progress they had achieved.)

Obama, Levin later noted, “was under great pressure to draw down no more than 5,000 troops in the first year and another 5,000 to 10,000 by the end of 2012.”

Obama stuck with the larger number: all thirty thousand surge troops (plus a few thousand support troops). But he was flexible on the speed of the drawdown. Petraeus asked that these troops not be entirely withdrawn until the end of 2012—nine months beyond the March 2012 deadline Obama had in mind.

Gates proposed September 2012 as a compromise. This would keep the troops in Afghanistan through most of a second fighting season. Obama agreed.

Resisting the calls from Gates, Mullen, and Petraeus for a less consequential withdrawal, the president—who certainly was in a stronger position to deny the Pentagon after the bin Laden raid—stayed true to his pledge to add troops only on a temporary basis.

OBAMA’S SPEECH ON JUNE 22, 2011, UNVEILING THE WITHDRAWAL schedule was meant to be an unequivocal signal that the war was heading toward a conclusion. Still, the president was defending a not-yet-over conflict that was unpopular—and he was promoting a complicated message that might come across as contradictory: this war was essential for the security of the United States, but the US commitment to it was limited.

Regardless of the number of troops Obama was ordering home, the war remained a hard sell. Some of the progress that the military claimed was debatable. The capabilities of Karzai’s corrupt government and Afghan security forces were still uncertain. Then there was the question of the rationale for the whole endeavor.

During a background briefing hours before Obama’s speech, a senior administration official told reporters that “we haven’t seen a terrorist threat emanating from Afghanistan for the past seven or eight years” and that only fifty to seventy-five “al-Qaeda types” were operating within Afghanistan. These fighters, he explained, were merely members of “tactical fighting units inside of Afghanistan.” There was “no indication at all” of any al-Qaeda efforts within Afghanistan to use it “as a launching pad to carry out attacks outside of Afghan borders.”

At the same time, this official said, the United States’ efforts had damaged “al-Qaeda’s core capabilities significantly.” Washington’s secret warriors had killed senior leaders of al-Qaeda in addition to bin Laden. Waziristan in Pakistan was no longer a safe haven for al-Qaeda. Drone attacks and special forces assaults targeting terrorists were continuing.

This official summed it up: “We don’t see a transnational threat coming out of Afghanistan in terms of the terrorist threat.”

This sounded like a declaration of victory and raised the question: If the overall goal of the Afghanistan mission was to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaeda and protect the United States from attacks that could be devised and launched from Afghanistan, was it still necessary to wage a full-scale war to achieve that end?

White House aides noted that the United States had to guarantee Afghanistan didn’t reemerge as a safe haven for a down-but-not-out al-Qaeda, and this meant ensuring, as one staffer put it, “a degree of stability in Afghanistan” and a government that “could stand on its own two feet and not be overrun by the Taliban.” But could these conditions be met in the next two years?

OBAMA WAS ONCE MORE POSITIONING HIMSELF BETWEEN THE ardent champions of the war and its exasperated opponents.

McCain, predictably, led the charge from the right: “I am concerned that the withdrawal plan that President Obama announced . . . poses an unnecessary risk to the hard-won gains that our troops have made thus far in Afghanistan.”

Critics of the war pointed out that even after this withdrawal, Obama would still have more troops in Afghanistan than he had at the start of his presidency.

“It has been the hope of many in Congress and across the country,” Pelosi remarked, “that the full drawdown of US forces would happen sooner than the president laid out.” The Center for American Progress noted that “many important questions about Afghanistan, including our core objectives, future costs, how military operations will support the political and military transition between now and 2014, and our relations with Pakistan, remain unanswered.” It called for pulling out sixty thousand troops by the end of 2012.

But Obama’s decision didn’t lead to much of a firestorm. The disappointed hawks seemed uneager to stir too much of a ruckus, perhaps because polls continued to show the costly war was unpopular.

Obama, his aides believed, was in a sound place; he was ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—even if too slowly for some—without having to worry that large portions of the voting public would perceive him as weak on national security and not interested in victory. (Later in the year, he would withdraw all US troops from Iraq, in accordance with an agreement negotiated by the Bush administration and the Iraqi government.) The risky bin Laden operation had proved that he was damn serious about killing America’s enemies.

“We could shrug off the far Right,” a senior administration official said. “And to the far Left we could say we share the goal of ending the war. This was a good spot.”

Obama’s plan for Afghanistan was one more reflection of his pragmatism. He had factored resource allocation and political will into the equation. He had focused more on finding a measured path to a satisfactory outcome than on achieving an ideal goal.

His counterterrorism strategy was not aimed at grand geostrategic initiatives. It was narrow and concentrated on individual terrorists—killing them with drones and other means (which in some instances led horribly to civilian casualties). And his political desire was to conclude the Afghanistan war without being seen as opposed to the war.

The overarching message was that the 9/11 era was over. A decade later, after killing Osama bin Laden, Obama was winding down the wars that had been launched in response to bin Laden’s attack on the United States.

Obama and his national security aides hoped to recalibrate US foreign policy to place more emphasis on the Pacific region—even as they would continue to contend with the Arab Spring, Iran and its nuclear program, the anemic Middle East peace process, and the ongoing effort to crush al-Qaeda and its allies in the Af-Pak region and beyond.

Yet determining how many troops to withdraw over the next fourteen months would not remove Afghanistan from Obama’s to-do list. The demanding tasks of collaborating with Karzai and handling the assorted complexities of Pakistan would not cease. Afghan government corruption and military ineptitude would not quickly fade as threats to stability and progress. (In early 2012, the Pentagon would announce its intention to end combat operations in Afghanistan in mid-2013, a year ahead of schedule.)

Obama had placed US engagement in Afghanistan on a gradual downward slope. But the war was far from done.