Since the Vietnam War, Democrats have been terrified that voters will see them as weak on national defense, soft on using the military to protect America from her enemies, whether that enemy is the Soviet Union, China, or stateless terrorism. Jimmy Carter’s short presidency didn’t help the party overcome its national security issues at all—if anything, it made things worse, thanks to the perceived weakness of America on the world stage at that time, particularly with regard to Iran and the hostage crisis there. The ghosts of both LBJ and Carter still haunt Democrats to this day.
After the attacks on September 11, 2001, in the brief run-up to war in Afghanistan against the Taliban and al Qaeda, and the longer, but rushed, run-up to war in Iraq, Democrats who wanted a future in national politics faced another test: should they stick with the commander in chief, George W. Bush, and authorize the use of force in a Middle East ground war, or listen to the louder voices in the activist base, who didn’t believe the Bush administration’s claims that Saddam Hussein was harboring weapons of mass destruction?
Moral decisions aside, the political calculus was fraught. Standing with the commander in chief, at a time when Bush’s approval ratings soared to almost unprecedented heights, would be politically popular with independent voters but could hurt relations with the Democratic base, the segment of the population most opposed to war. Standing against the war in Iraq, a war the vast majority of Americans wanted to fight, would be politically damaging in the short run. But if the war went badly, as Americans grew weary of the fighting and the steep cost in blood and treasure, opposing the war early would start to look like a smart decision. If the war went well, however, it could only widen the perception gap with the public about the two parties on the issue of national security.
When the Senate voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq, shortly after midnight on October 11, 2002, the top Democrats who were considering running against Bush in the 2004 election universally opted to stick with the president. John Kerry, John Edwards, Joe Lieberman, Chris Dodd, Tom Daschle, and Hillary Clinton were among the twenty-nine Democrats who voted for the bill.1 Dodd, Daschle, and Clinton would ultimately back away from running in 2004, but of the candidates who did make the race, only two—Howard Dean, a little-known governor of Vermont who had announced his candidacy six months earlier and who was lucky to register at all in public opinion surveys, and Dennis Kucinich, the ultraliberal congressman from Cleveland—stood against the war from the beginning. It should not go unremarked that the Democrats who apparently supported the war early on were all older Democrats, baby boomers who recalled the dark days of seeing the party painted as weak on defense. The younger, non-Vietnam-era Democrats had an easier time keeping old political analysis from creeping into their thinking.
Nine days before the Senate voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq, an Illinois state senator named Barack Obama delivered a speech in Chicago outlining his opposition to the war—a speech that, miraculously, someone recorded. Imagine the Obama candidacy without that recording. Is it possible he still would have been able to steal some of the moral high ground on the war from Clinton? Perhaps. But the recording gave the young Obama some much-needed gravitas and, frankly, evidence that he wasn’t a finger-in-the-wind politician. After all, he could say that in 2002, when the war was popular, he wasn’t afraid to speak out. Had there been no recording, opponents likely would have called into question his claims and, who knows, may even have succeeded in painting him as an opportunist. But the recording does exist, and it was among Obama’s most important campaign trump cards in that 2008 primary battle.
“I don’t oppose all wars,” Obama said at the time. “What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.”2
At the time, Obama’s opposition made few headlines. He was a long-shot candidate running in what would certainly be a crowded field of candidates seeking the Democratic nomination to take on U.S. senator Peter Fitzgerald, a first-term Republican who had a reputation for centrism.3 And one could easily imagine the local press, if there was any covering him at the time, glossing over this speech as simply a Democrat attempting to stand out in a crowded field, or even a Democrat trying to carve out an issue that appeals to some parts of the state’s Democratic base.
Throughout his presidential campaign in 2007 and 2008, the political bet Obama had made turned out to be correct. As the war in Iraq dragged on, as the body count rose, public opinion swung heavily the other way. Americans wanted out of Iraq, a feeling magnified among Democratic voters. For Clinton and Edwards, their votes in October 2002 became weights around their necks. For Obama, his little-noticed 2002 speech became a touchstone. He would get the country out of Iraq, he promised, and he had shown the judgment to be right at a time when it was politically unpopular.
But left unspoken in that 2002 speech was the other war in which American troops were fighting and dying. If Iraq was the “dumb war,” then Afghanistan must have been the “smart one,” or so it seemed the young Senate candidate was implying. Obama had said he supported the Bush administration’s fight against terrorism and the terrorists who had killed 3,000 Americans on September 11. In the 2002 speech, Obama had not uttered the word “Afghanistan,” and that one missing word would prove, seven years later, to be the greater military challenge President Obama would face.
Obama, too, wanted to walk the fine line between being soft on defense and ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. During the campaign, the way Obama’s team decided to show off his hawkish side was to make it clear that as president, he would not hesitate to unilaterally go into, say, Pakistan to pursue a terrorist. That he wouldn’t wait for diplomacy or permission but would act unilaterally as commander in chief. His pledge caused a bit of a stir at the time, but it was designed to make the case that he would not be a total dove. Still, promising to pursue terrorists in Pakistan wasn’t enough. By the time he reached the general election, Obama had pledged to send two more combat brigades to Afghanistan. Iraq, he said, had become a distraction to American efforts in Afghanistan. “Our troops and our NATO allies are performing heroically in Afghanistan, but I have argued for years that we lack the resources to finish the job because of our commitment to Iraq,” he said in a July 2008 speech. “That’s what the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said earlier this month. And that’s why, as President, I will make the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban the top priority that it should be. This is a war that we have to win.”4
Later, the president would complain of being boxed in on Afghanistan by the Pentagon, but one could read that July 2008 speech and come away believing he actually had boxed himself in more than he wanted to admit.
As empires throughout the ages have proved, Afghanistan is no easy terrain on which to win a war. Between 1839 and 1842, the British Empire invaded, was repulsed, and withdrew from the country. For nine years in the 1980s, the Soviet Union fought mujahideen rebels, including many trained by the United States, to a stalemate. After billions of dollars spent and hundreds of thousands of lives lost, Mikhail Gorbachev withdrew the last Soviet forces on February 15, 1989.
On October 7, 2001, less than a month after al Qaeda terrorists hijacked four planes and crashed three of them into buildings, the first coalition forces of Operation Enduring Freedom arrived to liberate the country from Taliban rule and hunt out the al Qaeda terrorists the Taliban had been harboring. But like the British and the Soviets before them, American forces and their coalition partners soon found that driving out one set of leaders and installing another would be complicated by realities on the ground: Afghanistan is a tribal nation, riven by sectarian violence and centuries of mistrust between warring factions. Simply installing a president—in this case, the U.S.-backed former mujahideen Hamid Karzai—wouldn’t be enough to leave an Afghanistan capable of governing itself. It was a country that in many ways was still two or three centuries behind the rest of the world—a conclusion the president would come to before he ever took the oath of office, but given the pledges he had made during the campaign, he didn’t know how to turn back.
By the middle of 2008, it had become clear to U.S. commanders in Afghanistan that the war was stagnating. Little progress was being made, either in rooting out the remnants of Taliban forces who still terrorized civilians throughout the country, or in setting up a democracy that could govern effectively when the last Americans flew home. While a troop surge in Iraq, first announced back in 2007, had given American forces and the Iraqi government space in which to achieve some goals, there had been no similar investment in Afghanistan. At the time of Obama’s July 2008 speech, there were still five times as many U.S. forces in Iraq as there were in Afghanistan.
Bush’s commanders on the ground in Afghanistan, and those at the Pentagon, were pushing to change that. Defense secretary Robert Gates, Joint Chiefs chairman Mike Mullen, and David McKiernan, the commander in charge of the International Security Assistance Force (the umbrella organization of coalition forces in Afghanistan), asked Bush to send new troops to Afghanistan—in essence, to repeat the surge strategy that had worked in Iraq.
But Bush said no. A troop surge would take up to a year to complete; he recognized that any actions he took in his final months in office would saddle the incoming president, whether it was Obama or McCain, with his policy. In a meeting in the Oval Office, Bush told Gates and Mullen that he wanted to leave it to the new president to implement his own policy, not Bush’s. Privately, the Obama folks were at first glad Bush did this, but publicly, some of the Obama spinmeisters liked to use this as a way to attack Bush, saying he left them unfinished business. Eventually, the more they learned about the situation in Afghanistan, the more they came around to believing their spin—that Bush should have acted first.
After Obama won, Gates, Mullen, and many at the Pentagon wondered just how the new president would act. Here was a candidate who had built his political career by opposing the wars they had fought. The new commander in chief had never served in uniform. He had not served on the Senate Armed Services Committee. And he had developed few relations with the Pentagon brass. He had reached out to Gates to see whether Gates would stay on through the beginning of his term, but only indirectly. Mullen recalled meeting Obama only once, at one of Bush’s State of the Union addresses, and then just for a moment.
Shortly after winning, Obama asked Mullen to fly to Chicago to meet in the transition team’s offices.
Mullen, who was then sixty-two years old, had spent a career in the navy before being elevated to the top job at the Joint Chiefs by President Bush. Unlike David Petraeus or Stanley McChrystal, commanders who were almost household names, Mullen hadn’t cultivated an image in the media. He spoke with journalists frequently, but rarely on the record. But you shouldn’t be fooled by his seeming anonymity; though he was just as image conscious as the more preening Petraeus, Mullen was more subtle. When he appeared in Chicago with just a single aide in tow, the receptionist at the transition office didn’t recognize him.5
But Obama did. He was solicitous, interested in Mullen’s thoughts and advice. The president-elect made it a point to introduce Mullen to Emanuel; the very distracted incoming chief of staff said hello while, Mullen recalls, simultaneously pressing a cell phone to each ear. Halfway through their meeting, Michelle Obama poked her head into the room; the president-elect introduced her to Mullen as well.
Obama told Mullen he needed a better understanding of the situation on the ground in Afghanistan. One of the first decisions he would have to make as commander in chief would be how many additional troops were sent to Afghanistan; McKiernan, the commander on the ground at the time, had requested 10,000 additional troops. Mullen delivered his assessment: the lack of resources, caused by the war in Iraq, had put Afghanistan on America’s back burner. Consequently there was no strategy, no plan to get the country back on its feet.
The two men came away impressed with each other; Obama had made his views clear—he wanted American troops to leave Iraq, and he wanted to focus more on Afghanistan—without being overly demanding. He had sent the message that his policy would guide U.S. strategy, but not without flexibility to help commanders do their job.
It was the first meeting on Afghanistan that Obama had held with a senior military commander, but even in the midst of an economic crisis, with so many impending and barely averted disasters competing for his attention, it wouldn’t be the last. The situation in Afghanistan would come to suck up more of Obama’s time than he, or anyone on his team, could begin to imagine.
Obama understood that Afghanistan and Iraq were fundamentally different countries, and solving the problems that would allow American forces to leave would require different approaches. For one thing, Iraq had a natural resource—oil—that can provide its government with a significant amount of funding over the long term. And for the most part, Iraq had the infrastructure to cultivate that oil and get it to global markets. Highways, shipping ports, and pipelines crisscrossed the country. In short, Iraq had the ability to become a twenty-first-century country.
Afghanistan, on the other hand, had little that interested the global market. (A 2009 United Nations report claimed Afghanistan exported $403 million in goods. Iraq exported goods worth more than a hundred times that number, almost $42 billion.)6
A mountainous country without direct access to an ocean, Afghanistan offered few main roads; those that existed gave Taliban insurgents prime opportunities to target convoys and allowed warlords to set up roadblocks to extort the local population, at times under the guise of providing security.
The natural resources found in Afghanistan are rare-earth minerals and rich lodes of metal that lie deep within remote mountains. Analyses by the Pentagon indicated more than $1 trillion worth of iron, copper, cobalt, and gold,7 but there were few mines, and any new ones would require years of development and billions in investment. The real money to be had short term was drug money—not exactly the way to build a country for the future. That left the Afghan government dependent on other countries—chiefly the United States—to give it the cash it needed to survive. Very early in his presidential term, the young chief executive was giving his unvarnished, off-the-record take on Afghanistan to a small group over lunch. He admitted that the U.S. goal wasn’t democracy in Afghanistan, it was simply getting the country to some form of stability. He said the country was still stuck in the sixteenth century; with luck, he opined, perhaps the United States could leave an infrastructure that would allow the country to enter the eighteenth, maybe the nineteenth, century.
It didn’t help, either, that Hamid Karzai, America’s partner in Afghanistan, was increasingly viewed as entirely off his rocker—acting irrational, even suggesting in private that he might quit the government to join the Taliban. Some United Nations officials even believed Karzai might have a drug problem.8 A key question Obama would have to answer would be whether Karzai was stable enough to run a country, even with U.S. support.
Obama’s transition team, for the most part, had been thoroughly impressed by the extent to which the Bush administration had dedicated itself to a smooth transition. But with time, Obama’s foreign policy advisors were deeply unhappy that Bush had decided to hold off on ordering a troop surge in Afghanistan. The delay, they believed, had allowed the situation to deteriorate even further. “The president saw it as, ‘Wait a second, I have to do this [order the surge] because we have a five-alarm fire,’ ” recalled Ben Rhodes. But imagine the response if Obama had been stuck with a decision Bush had made and he had to finish implementing a policy he didn’t agree with. Although there was no easy answer on this one for Bush, finger-pointing didn’t matter now; there was a fire.
And there was little sense of how to put it out. Afghanistan’s elections were just a few months away, and the new troops, the generals hoped, would provide security to ensure that one of the most critical moments in the long and arduous process of setting up a government wouldn’t turn into an opportunity for the Taliban to strike back. But the details within the request for additional troops themselves kept changing. The surge that had worked in Iraq had sent an additional 30,000 American troops to key regions around the country; McKiernan had requested that an identical number be sent to Afghanistan. A later Pentagon report sent to Obama’s National Security Council said they would need 13,000 troops. A few days later, they revised the number upward, to 17,000. When Obama sat down with his NSC to discuss Afghanistan for the first time, on Friday, January 23, 2009, no fewer than three different strategic reviews of the situation in Afghanistan were under way or had been recently completed. Lieutenant General Douglas Lute, who had been Bush’s top NSC advisor on Afghanistan, had delivered his version of the situation three weeks after Obama had been elected. General David Petraeus, who had left Iraq to take over Central Command, had assigned a top aide, retired colonel Derek Harvey, to assess the situation as well. Mullen, as head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had his own review under way.9
Obama wanted those reviews consolidated, and he wanted one of his people to do it. At the end of January he called Bruce Riedel, a veteran of the U.S. intelligence community who had served as an advisor to the campaign, to head up a two-month review for the NSC. Riedel would report to Jim Jones, Obama’s national security advisor, and to the president.10
The Pentagon brass came over to the White House and met again on February 13, two days after Riedel’s review was announced, to present the president with options for troop deployments to Afghanistan. One would be to decide on troop levels only after Riedel’s work was finished. A second would send an additional 17,000 troops immediately. A third option would send the 17,000 troops in two stages, to give the president time to change his mind if need be. A fourth option would send 27,000 troops—in effect, filling McKiernan’s original request.
Withdrawal was clearly not on the table. The Pentagon wanted more troops sent to Afghanistan, and the most influential names on his national security team—Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates, Mike Mullen, and David Petraeus, even Riedel himself—agreed that those troops were needed. Obama had campaigned on a pledge to send more troops to Afghanistan, and those campaign promises, his war cabinet, and the pressure he felt from the Pentagon conspired against him. The new president felt he had no alternative than to acquiesce and send more troops.
Obama took the weekend to consider his options, or lack thereof. Not surprisingly, Obama decided on the third option—to send 17,000 troops to secure the Afghan elections. In hindsight, it was pretty obvious that Riedel was essentially leading Obama to that decision when he presented the three options in the first place. But answers to the larger questions—beyond those 17,000, how many more troops would be sent, how long would they stay there, and what, in fact, would constitute an American victory in Afghanistan?—would be delayed as Riedel and his team at the NSC conducted their review. And it was at this point that Obama started to calibrate his expectations of what success in Afghanistan would look like. It was not “democracy” that was going to define success, but simple stability. As Obama saw it, Afghanistan was a country struggling to become something other than a relic of the Middle Ages.
When it arrived, Riedel’s review suggested much of the change in strategy Obama had hinted at during the campaign: the United States should shift its focus from Afghanistan to Pakistan, where terrorists had increasingly found safe haven and taken root, and America would define its goal as disrupting, dismantling, and defeating al Qaeda. To accomplish the mission, it was recommended that the U.S. military focus on growing an Afghan military by more than 130,000 troops, while increasing aid to Pakistan in order to bolster the besieged government there.
Most of the senior members of the NSC—Clinton, Gates, Mullen, Petraeus—endorsed the review. Only Biden, who had become a pessimist and fought against almost every troop increase the Pentagon proposed, wanted to add his objections. What isn’t clear is whether Biden was disagreeing because that’s what he believed or because he’d been encouraged to do so, because the president needed someone to take another position in order to rein in the Pentagon. As the years pass there is more circumstantial evidence suggesting that Biden was perhaps playing a version of “good cop/bad cop,” if for no other reason than to force an alternative view to the table, given how much the groupthink taking place on Afghanistan was frustrating the president.
Gates and Biden disagreed on almost everything related to foreign policy. But Gates, working for his third president in twenty-five years, began to believe that the vice president wasn’t fully leveraging the power he held. During his tenure in the Reagan administration, Gates had watched Vice President George H. W. Bush keep his cards much closer to the vest. Bush would be at the table during NSC briefings, but he never offered his advice, and he never voiced a preference in public for one strategy or decision over another. Bush had scheduled private time with Reagan every week; he could offer his opinion to the president, and Reagan would hear it independent of the rest of his NSC. What’s more, for the purposes of an increasingly inquisitive national media, no one ever knew whether Reagan was accepting Bush’s advice or rejecting it outright.
Biden was the opposite. He would offer his opinion with little prompting, holding forth for twenty minutes when he’d promised to take just two. Whether he agreed with his fellow cabinet members or not, his views were expressed publicly. Meanwhile, the press always seemed to get wind of Biden’s thoughts, even when the vice president had lost the argument.
Riedel’s review suggested what the NSC principals believed were two realistic options with regard to troop levels: Biden’s suggestion, which would leave levels static and focus on counterterrorism in Afghanistan (this would become the shrinking footprint strategy that would eventually be rejected); and an additional 4,000 trainers aimed at bolstering the ranks of Afghanistan’s army, which McKiernan, Petraeus, and Gates formally suggested. Every member of the NSC except the vice president supported sending the additional trainers.
Obama, the only vote that mattered, joined the majority. A few days later, on March 27, 2009, Obama used Riedel’s words to describe the U.S. mission in Afghanistan. “I want the American people to understand that we have a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future,” Obama said. “To achieve our goals, we need a stronger, smarter and comprehensive strategy. To focus on the greatest threat to our people, America must no longer deny resources to Afghanistan because of the war in Iraq.”11 What wasn’t included in the statement was a full-throated endorsement of a free, independent, and democratic Afghanistan. There would be no pledge of nation building.
With the directional shift in the works, Gates and Mullen were slowly realizing that they had another problem in Afghanistan: their commander on the ground. McKiernan had spent his career overseeing conventional forces, and in Afghanistan the United States faced no conventional enemies. While the war in Iraq had been turned around by Petraeus, General Raymond Odierno, and others who relied more on special forces and counterinsurgency tactics, the war in Afghanistan had flagged under McKiernan.
Mullen had signed off on McKiernan’s appointment to head the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan in 2008. As his doubts grew, he shared them with Petraeus, who agreed that McKiernan’s approach wasn’t working. Mullen then approached Gates, who also agreed. Gates and Mullen went to Obama; the president told them he trusted them and that McKiernan should be relieved.
In filling McKiernan’s place, Gates and Mullen turned to a career special operations officer, Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal. McChrystal had been a close aide to Mullen as director of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In Iraq, he had overseen the teams that had captured Saddam Hussein and killed Abu Musab al Zarqawi, among other insurgent leaders.12 He had been a Green Beret, and he had been known to accompany his special forces teams on some of their nighttime raids in Iraq, which was unusual for such a high-ranking officer. More important, though, McChrystal had developed a reputation similar to that of Petraeus, as an unconventional thinker when it came to the battlefield. Compared to his contemporaries, McChrystal was thought of as someone who simply seemed more nimble in his thinking, and if any country needed nimble commanders, it was Afghanistan.
Any new commander in a war zone needs to conduct his own review. McChrystal was already well versed in the intricacies of the war in Afghanistan, and especially in the tremendously troubled relationship between Afghanistan and Pakistan. As director of the Joint Chiefs, McChrystal had begun a campaign to bring officers who had served in Afghanistan into the Pentagon to share their experiences and their insights.
But what McChrystal saw on the ground as he toured the war zone that was now his responsibility was beyond anything he had expected. The Afghan army was a wreck, the American strategy was still ill defined, and the United States faced a real risk of defeat. In a sixty-six-page memo to Gates, who passed it on to the White House, McChrystal said he needed more troops in Afghanistan within the next calendar year, or the entire war—an eight-year investment of American blood and treasure—“will likely result in defeat.”
McChrystal’s warning came on August 30, five months after Obama had approved the initial round of 17,000 new troops. By then, 68,000 American servicemen and -women were in the theater, but the new commander made clear that he would request even more, from 10,000 to as many as 45,000.13 He later told Gates that he would request 40,000 more troops, the number he believed he needed to turn around the situation on the ground.
Obama’s national security staff was frustrated. Instead of simply assessing the situation without specific recommendations, which is what the White House believed McChrystal’s mandate had been, the commander had started asking for more resources—more troops, more money—even before the president had heard McCrystal’s own assessment. Every White House during wartime expresses aggravation with a Pentagon that answers every question with “more troops,” but in this case McChrystal had skipped to Go without fully describing the game board—and the Obama White House staff knew the American media would focus only on the troop number, not the strategy. Once a troop number gains traction, it’s hard for any other part of a military debate to materialize. Even in private, the debate comes back to numbers.
What’s more, the core of Riedel’s report had been to refocus the American goal in Afghanistan, to essentially aim to do less, and thus complete the task with fewer resources. Did the United States, which already had 68,000 troops in Afghanistan, really need another 40,000 more to “disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan,” as Obama had said almost five months earlier?
Obama had a habit of asking his advisors for three options, but everyone quickly figured out how to game that system, which meant in this case the president felt he had only one plausible choice. Like Riedel, McChrystal had offered two alternatives that felt implausible—sending 80,000 additional troops, which would stretch an already-exhausted military that had been engaged in two wars for most of a decade even further; and sending 10,000 to 15,000 troops to train the Afghan military. McChrystal’s third option, sending 40,000 troops specifically to reinforce American forces in regions with a strong Taliban presence, was the only serious one.14
The White House felt that it was getting rolled by the more experienced generals across the Potomac. “What was interesting is that even as the analysis changed, the Pentagon requests never changed. It was always 40,000 troops,” said Ben Rhodes. “So on the one hand you’ve got this whole process that is focused on trying to set resources to goals and strategy, and yet the resources never change, and they just keep coming up with a rationale for why you need 40,000 troops for this mission.”
The NSC staff concluded that the military wasn’t taking Obama seriously. Pentagon officials kept showing up at the White House with various charts projecting troop levels off into the future; one chart Rhodes remembers showed a projection of the 40,000 troops arriving in Afghanistan and staying for three years. Another scenario presented to Obama showed that even if he served two full terms, he would leave office with more troops on the ground than had been there when he took the oath. Had it been lost on the Pentagon that Obama had been elected while campaigning on ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, even if it meant sending reinforcements to Kabul and Kandahar on a short-term basis? Finally, in one meeting Obama lost it. “You keep giving me one option,” he shouted. “I’m asking for options, and every option [is] the same!”
Two weeks after McChrystal’s report arrived at the Pentagon and the White House, Mullen caused a stir by agreeing with its assessments in public—even though the report was still a work in progress and hadn’t even been presented publicly. During a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Mullen hinted at McChrystal’s conclusions, which he and the White House had already seen. “I do believe that having heard [McChrystal’s] views and having great confidence in his leadership, a properly resourced counterinsurgency probably means more forces,” Mullen told the senators. He said the situation in Afghanistan would deteriorate further if left up to the Afghan army, and that McChrystal had been “alarmed” by what he found on the ground, including the strength of the insurgency opposing the American-led coalition. It was, Mullen said, “very clear we need more resources to execute the president’s strategy.”15
The White House was incensed. Mullen realized he had given one side of the Afghanistan debate—the side that wanted more troops—a huge political advantage. The only way to strain the White House’s relationship with the Pentagon even further would be if McChrystal’s report landed in the hands of a journalist. Lo and behold, the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward reported the contents of McChrystal’s review on September 20, 2009.16 The newspaper even posted a PDF of the report, with a few redactions made at the request of the Pentagon, on its website that evening.17
Woodward’s report had come a week after Obama and his National Security Council sat down for the first of an almost unprecedented string of meetings for the president. On September 13, Obama had met with Biden, Clinton, Gates, Jones, Mullen, Mullen’s vice chairman, General James “Hoss” Cartwright, and Michelle Flournoy, Gates’s deputy at the Pentagon, among others, to begin to formulate a plan of action; over the next three months, the principals would meet another fourteen times, almost every session stretching over three hours or more. One cannot overstate how unprecedented it is for a senior group of leaders to meet for this long so often. The president never did so on the economy, on health care, you name it. But that’s how complicated the Afghanistan debate had become. On the Friday after Thanksgiving, the meetings lasted eleven hours.18 Once again Obama found himself contemplating whether to acquiesce—a second time—to McChrystal’s request or to go the other way and take on political ownership if the situation deteriorated further.
The debate broke down along familiar lines: Gates, Clinton, and Mullen wanted to send more troops, to give the commanders what they said they needed—Clinton usually favored sending even more than Gates did. Biden steadfastly stuck to his opposition, and while he continued to make his point clear in meetings, he also took to writing private memos to Obama to lay out his case.
The review took so long, Obama’s closest advisors said, because Obama simply hadn’t been convinced by either side. “He really wasn’t persuaded, and they had to keep going back and coming up with more information to persuade him,” said Valerie Jarrett, one of his closest confidants.
For eight years under George W. Bush, the Pentagon was used to getting its way. When a president didn’t agree with the generals, they could go to supporters in Congress to put the pressure on, or even use powerful pro-military lobbyists to also help. It did not go unnoticed in the White House that Mullen, unlike many of his predecessors as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, enjoyed warm relations with the media, or that Petraeus, who some of Obama’s advisors secretly worried might harbor an interest in presidential politics himself in 2012, was a rock star who enjoyed almost nothing but favorable media coverage. These were men who knew the power of the media and its ability to leverage public opinion and political pressure to get what they wanted.
The one person in the equation who wasn’t media savvy was the man who had, however inadvertently, caused many of the fissures that had opened between the White House and the Pentagon—Stanley McChrystal.
McChrystal had tried to keep a tight lid on the report he would send to Obama, distributing it to Gates and Mullen in person rather than electronically, and strictly limiting the number of people who had access to it before it reached Washington. Still, it had leaked. He had allowed a camera crew and CBS’s David Martin to follow him around for a profile piece several months before he completed his assessment. CBS held it until September 27, a week after Woodward had reported the existence of McChrystal’s review, when it ran on 60 Minutes. Regardless of the protestations from McChrystal and the Pentagon, White House conspiracy theorists detected the beginnings of another Petraeus, a media-friendly general, one who was trying to corner them into a troop decision.
When McChrystal addressed military specialists at the Institute for Strategic Studies in London on October 1—less than a month after the Obama-led NSC review of Afghanistan had begun—he made sure to vet his remarks through the West Wing before he delivered them. But after his speech, when an audience member asked whether he would support an exclusive focus on al Qaeda rather than the Taliban—an option Biden had been recommending in private, which had leaked in the media19—McChrystal wandered off his White House–approved remarks. “The short answer is no,” he said. “A strategy that does not leave Afghanistan in a stable position is probably a short-sighted strategy.”20
The White House went ballistic. McChrystal was taken aback by the fury. Senior Obama advisors began giving quotes to reporters, strictly anonymously, pushing back at what they increasingly saw as an orchestrated campaign to push Obama toward the Pentagon’s view.
As the sniping across the Potomac grew worse and the tensions more fraught even as the review continued inside the White House, Gates, whose role as the civilian in charge of the Defense Department meant he straddled the two competing worlds, took the unusual step of using a speech before the Association of the United States Army in October 2009 to urge both sides to call a truce and stop fighting in public—in essence, according to a close aide, “to shut the fuck up.” In his speech Gates left out the “fuck.”
“I believe that the decisions that the president will make for the next stage of the Afghanistan campaign will be among the most important of his presidency,” he declared. “So it is important that we take our time to do all we can to get this right. And in this process it is imperative that all of us taking part in these deliberations—civilian and military alike—provide our best advice to the president candidly but privately. And speaking for the Department of Defense, once the commander-in-chief makes his decisions, we will salute and execute those decisions faithfully and to the best of our ability.”21
Gates’s remarks were seen as a shot at some of the commanders, including McChrystal, but Gates also intended his remarks for the White House political folks as well. Bottom line: for the next two months, the intramural feuding died down. The fact of the matter was, both Gates and Mullen knew the White House was losing faith in them; and Mullen in particular, trying to see things through the West Wing’s prism, saw that it looked as if the generals were trying to roll the civilians.
In the end it was Gates who brokered the compromise that ultimately underpinned the conclusions Obama reached. In a speech to cadets and the nation at the United States Military Academy at West Point on December 1, Obama said he would deploy 30,000 additional troops—not 40,000—to Afghanistan, with a goal of targeting the insurgency and securing population centers. Another 10,000 non-U.S. troops (NATO allies) were likely to be added, so technically, McChrystal got what he wanted.
But while the plan looked much more like the counterinsurgency strategy that had worked in Iraq, it came with an important caveat: a drawdown date. By July 2011, just over a year and a half from the day Obama announced the new strategy, the first U.S. forces would begin leaving Afghanistan, as part of the beginning of the end of what had already become America’s longest war. “These additional American and international troops will allow us to accelerate handing over responsibility to Afghan forces, and allow us to begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011,” the president explained. “This effort must be based on performance. The days of providing a blank check are over.”22
After nearly a year of continuous planning, review, and strategy, after sessions that lasted for hours on end, the “war of necessity,” as Obama the candidate called it, he had altered the strategy and the goals, and announced the beginning of the end. It had finally become the president’s own.
A President McCain would likely have sent the 40,000 troops and done it sooner. Ditto with a President Hillary Clinton. Obama essentially gave the commanders what they wanted in troops, but the difference between what McCain would have done and what Obama did do was pledge an end date. And while the ultimate result should have been viewed as something that emerged after a healthy debate, it was actually anything but. The cost to his administration, after the fights required with that other rock-solid member of the Washington establishment, the Pentagon, took a heavy toll.
One consequence of the mistrust on both sides of the Potomac was the withdrawal date. Some saw it as politically timed, coming a year before Obama faced voters one final time. But inside the White House, the drawdown date sent a clear message to the generals: there will be no blank check—not to Afghanistan, and not to the Pentagon. “It was really a policy decision,” claims Rhodes, because it was the only way to convey to the Pentagon that Obama would leave office with fewer boots on the ground in Afghanistan than he had inherited when he arrived. “It was the only way to discipline the resource issue, for the president to say this is a temporary surge to achieve limited objectives. And we’re going to set a timeline here so that everybody understands that this is not an open-ended commitment to remake Afghanistan.”
In retrospect, there was no grand conspiracy within the Pentagon to force Obama to capitulate. If there had been, the generals involved couldn’t have chosen a clumsier way to go about it—public testimony, public speeches, leaking a review that was supposed to have limited circulation, all of which would have pointed to the conspirators. If there had been an effort to force Obama into an untenable position, it would have been pretty obvious who was behind it. “These guys wouldn’t know how to orchestrate a political conspiracy or pressure plan if their lives depended on it. They’re not that savvy,” concluded Geoff Morrell, who as Defense Department spokesman found himself in the midst of more than a few Pentagon versus White House spats. “It’s too ham-handed to actually be a real conspiracy.”
But conspiracy or not, the effect was the same: Obama felt boxed in by the various dribs and drabs because, well, he was. And he had a war cabinet that was sympathetic to the generals, and in particular to Gates and Clinton. Some observers might have gone too far in connecting the dots and assuming an orchestrated Pentagon campaign, but with the dots so close together, it was hard not to do a little sketching of one’s own.
“It’s very difficult for a president to push back [against the Pentagon] in a reasoned way,” Mullen said later, reflecting on the series of events. “We did [Obama] a disservice by boxing him in, even though it was accidental. Of course, the White House thought it was on purpose. We’re not that smart.”
But perception can become reality, and, as Mullen told his fellow members of the Joint Chiefs along with Petraeus and McChrystal, “This is a scar that will not go away with this president,” he told them. “Ever.”
If there was a lesson the president took away from his experience with the Pentagon that first year of his presidency, it was the feeling that he had little influence—even as commander in chief. And he wasn’t going to let that happen again. Gates had been great for sending the message that continuity and experience mattered to the new president; now his departure would send a message, too. It’s no accident that with each subsequent defense secretary, the president chose someone he believed would be more of an administration team player. First came Leon Panetta (who didn’t turn out that way, at least as far as the West Wing was concerned), and then in Chuck Hagel, Obama selected someone who was decidedly more cautious in general on the use of the military and, more important to the president, pro–West Wing.