Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War (92 page)

My effort between 2009 and 2011 to cut or cap weak, failing, or unnecessary programs and to find “efficiencies” was all about spending the defense budget more wisely, to force more dollars into actual military capabilities. If the budget is slashed and the problems I just described are not addressed, disaster and tragedy lie ahead. And when the next war comes, as it surely will, our men and women in uniform will pay the price for managerial cowardice, political parochialism, and shortsightedness.

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I had lost the argument on Libya. I had lost on the budget. I had had a tough but—I thought—successful run for four years. The last six months were turning out very differently.

As 2011 began, we were wrestling with continuing internal Iraqi disagreement on formation of a government, an increase in attacks on our embassy and other targets by powerful Iranian-provided improvised rocket-assisted munitions (IRAMs), and planning for the post-2011 U.S. presence in Iraq.

The IRAMs were not going to threaten the security gains that had been made, but they had the potential to cause a lot of American casualties, and they reflected increased targeting by Iranian-supported extremists of our troops and diplomats. The Iraqis were making little effort to stop the attacks. In January, I asked General Austin, our commander in Iraq since the preceding September, in a videoconference if he had the authority to go out and kill those firing the IRAMs. He said he was trying to get the Iraqis to do it but would use our troops if he had to. I responded, “If you get the opportunity to kill them, do it.” I asked for a menu of possible actions we could take against the Iranians and their minions in Iraq. I was cautious about going to war with Iran over its nuclear program, but I wouldn’t stand for Iranians killing our troops in Iraq.

The principal question surrounding Iraq that spring, however, was the size of the U.S. military and diplomatic presence after December 31, when—according to the agreement Bush 43 had concluded with
Maliki—all our troops had to be out of the country. Any continuing U.S. military presence would require a new agreement with the Iraqis. I met with Mike Mullen, Austin, our ambassador to Iraq, Jim Jeffrey, and others on January 31. Jeffrey and Austin said that Maliki wanted a U.S. troop presence after December but was doubtful he could get the Council of Representatives to approve a status of forces agreement (legal protections for our troops when stationed in foreign countries). In fact, all the key Iraqi leaders wanted a continuing U.S. military presence, Austin said, but as in 2008, no one wanted to take the political risk of saying so publicly or leading the political fight. Jeffrey said he was looking at a post-December State Department presence of about 20,000, many of them for security.

On February 2, in the middle of the Egypt crisis, the principals were to meet in the Situation Room to discuss all this. I believed that 40,000 Americans—20,000 civilians, 20,000 troops—would be a very hard sell, both in Washington and in Baghdad. Mullen said that Austin was trying to get the numbers down, but we were still looking at a three-to-five-year transition in Iraq. We agreed that if we stayed, we needed to keep our capabilities for intelligence, air defense, logistics, and counterterrorism.

At the principals’ meeting later that day, I said “Whoa” when we quickly dived into the details. Basic questions had to be answered first, including whether we all agreed we wanted a U.S. military presence in Iraq after December 31? (I did.) To what extent did State’s plans after December 31 depend upon a U.S. military presence? What if Congress wouldn’t approve the money for State? As so often, I said, the NSS was already in the weeds micromanaging before basic questions had been addressed.

To a certain extent, as in the Afghan debate in the fall of 2009, I found myself in a different place from both the White House advisers and the military commanders. Recognizing the huge political roadblocks, I believed a substantial U.S. military presence was needed post-2011 to help keep Iraq stabilized, to continue training and supporting their security forces, and to signal our friends in the region—and Iran—that we weren’t abandoning the field. Accordingly, I asked Austin to prepare force options below 20,000. He came back in mid-March with options for 15,000 troops (which would forgo any U.S. presence in southern Iraq) and 10,000 (which would severely limit the support we could provide for the embassy). The lower option would result in virtually no U.S. troops
on the political fault line around Kirkuk between the central government and the Kurds, an area of continuing potential confrontations. Sustaining helicopter support both for our forces and especially for the embassy was vital since it was still too dangerous for civilians to move around Iraq in vehicles.

I made my fourteenth and last visit to Iraq in early April. I couldn’t help but reflect on how far we had come in four and a half years—and on the cost of that progress. I flew into Baghdad from Saudi Arabia and helicoptered to the distinguished visitors’ quarters. As we flew over the city, I marveled at how much had changed since December 2006. The security forces and police were all Iraqi now. There were traffic jams. The parks were filled with families. The markets were bustling. Life had returned to the city.

With each successive visit, my basketball-court-size bedroom had one or another new amenity, like hangers in the closet. The primitive plumbing, however, was the same. After showering the next morning, I looked in the mirror, and to my horror, my white hair had turned yellow. There had been something strange in the shower water, and now, with a full day of meetings and an interview with Katie Couric of
60 Minutes
ahead of me, I looked like someone had peed on my head. Iraq continued to surprise me in new and different ways until the very end.

Apart from wanting to thank the troops, the primary purpose of my trip was to tell the Iraqi leaders they had to make some decisions quickly about whether they wanted us to stay after the end of the year. I reviewed with Prime Minister Maliki the areas in which his forces were deficient: counterterrorism, intelligence, air defense, logistics, training, and capabilities for external defense. Noting that most Iraqi leaders had privately expressed their support for a post-2011 American presence, I asked if he would describe for me his strategy for building support in the Council of Representatives. At the end of our meeting, I warned him that if U.S. soldiers kept getting killed by extremist groups and he did not approve operations to capture or kill those responsible, I had directed General Austin to exercise our right to self-defense under the security agreement and to go after them unilaterally. I had the same messages for Sunni deputy prime minister Saleh al-Mutlaq and for President Talabani. “The clock is ticking,” I said. “Time is short. You need to figure out whether you want some U.S. troops to remain after December. You can’t wait until October or even this summer to figure it out.” I also told Talabani
that Iraq’s leaders needed to reach private agreement to support one another on this issue in public.

In my meetings with junior enlisted troops, they asked me about numerous news reports on the latest budget crisis in Washington and rumors that the troops might not get paid. I told them, “Let me just say you will get paid. All smart governments throughout history always pay the guys with guns first.”

By mid-April, the president asked Austin to explore the feasibility and risks of having 8,000 to 10,000 troops remain in Iraq. There was some grumbling in Defense over the low number; I thought we could make that work. But the thumb twiddling continued in both Baghdad and Washington, and in June, as I prepared to leave, the number of troops that might stay on as well as the size of our embassy post-December were totally up in the air.

I don’t know how hard the Obama administration—or the president personally—pushed the Iraqis for an agreement that would have allowed a residual U.S. troop presence. In the end, the Iraqi leadership did not try to get an agreement through their parliament that would have made possible a continued U.S. military presence after December 31. Maliki was just too fearful of the political consequences. Most Iraqis wanted us gone. It was a regrettable turn of events for our future influence in Iraq and our strategic position in the region. And a win for Iran.

As you will recall, the president had put all of us on notice in the late fall of 2010 that, while he wanted a low-key and swift review of the Afghan strategy in December, he intended to return to the subject in the spring. He didn’t wait that long. He gathered Biden, Clinton, Mullen, Donilon, Lute, and me (and other White House and NSS staff) in the Oval Office on January 20 to begin the strategy review. The key subjects were the troop drawdowns in July and determining what our presence should be in Afghanistan after 2014. Did we want bases? Would we continue to conduct counterterrorism operations? What is “Afghan good enough”? How big should the Afghan national security forces be? How much would they cost, and who would pay for them? Petraeus and the Defense Department were proposing an Afghan force level between 352,000 and 378,000. The president expressed his displeasure that those numbers had leaked, again making it look like the military was trying to “jam” him.
He wondered how our strategy for pursuing “reconciliation” with the Taliban might play out and fit with Karzai’s and Pakistani general Kayani’s view. Obama said we needed a political strategy to accommodate or work around Karzai and Kayani.

It was as if we had never stopped arguing since 2009. The vice president jumped in aggressively, saying the strategy in Afghanistan could never succeed, there was no government, corruption was rampant, and Pakistan was still providing sanctuaries. He proclaimed that neither Karzai nor Kayani wanted a big Afghan army. I countered.

The internal fight heated up again on March 1, when Biden convened a meeting at his residence to push for a dramatic troop drawdown. The residence is a big Victorian-era house on the grounds of the Naval Observatory, first occupied by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller in the mid-1970s. As always, Biden was warm in welcoming us, a cordial host. When we got down to business, he asked whether the strategy had succeeded enough so we could “think bigger about transition sooner.” Could we meet our strategic goals with less “input” over the next two years? He argued again that no one wanted an Afghan army of 300,000 or more and that our commitment in Afghanistan was limiting our ability to deal with both Iran and North Korea. He contended that both public opinion and Congress were becoming more negative about the war. (In my view, virtually no effort had been made by the White House to change that attitude during the fifteen months since the president’s decisions on the Afghan surge.)

The temperature of the Afghan debate rose further a few days later, provoked in no small part by a cable from the U.S. ambassador to NATO, Ivo Daalder, reporting that Petraeus had told a NATO meeting that the transition to Afghan security leadership would “commence” everywhere by the end of 2014, a statement that seemed to contradict the president’s intention that the security transition be completed by then. When the president saw that cable, it looked to him like another case of military insubordination. As a result, the president opened an NSC meeting on March 3 with a blast: “I am troubled by people popping off in the press that 2011 doesn’t mean anything.… My intention is to begin the security transition in July 2011 and complete it by the end of 2014. We will think through the glidepath [of troop drawdowns], but I will push back very hard if anyone proposes moving the drawdowns to the right [delaying them]. I prefer to move to the left [accelerating them]. I don’t want any
recommendations trying to finesse the orders I laid out.” He concluded, “If I believe I am being gamed …” and left the sentence hanging there with the clear implication the consequences would be dire.

I was pretty upset myself. I thought implicitly accusing Petraeus (and perhaps Mullen and me) of gaming him in front of thirty people in the Situation Room was inappropriate, not to mention highly disrespectful of Petraeus. As I sat there, I thought:
The president doesn’t trust his commander, can’t stand Karzai, doesn’t believe in his own strategy, and doesn’t consider the war to be his. For him, it’s all about getting out
. Biden continued to egg him on, and his staff missed no oppertunity to pass him inflammatory news clips and other information raising questions about Petraeus and the senior military leaders.

I called Donilon two days later to express my concern that the vice president was poisoning the well with the president with regard to Petraeus and Afghanistan. I said I thought Biden was subjecting Obama to Chinese water torture, every day saying, “the military can’t be trusted,” “the strategy can’t work,” “it’s all failing,” “the military is trying to game you, to screw you.” I said we couldn’t operate that way. I asked how the Daalder cable could be sent in to the president without someone checking its accuracy. I said, if he or the president had been concerned about the cable, why didn’t they call me instead of posturing in front of thirty people “who will inevitably leak how the president imposed his will on the military” and about mistrust of the military in the White House?

My fuse was really getting short. It seemed like I was blowing up—in my own, quiet way—nearly every day, and no longer just in the privacy of my office with my staff. As we’ve seen, I had blown up at Donilon and the vice president at a meeting on Libya on March 2 and at House Defense Appropriations chair Bill Young on the third, had come close to openly arguing with the president in the NSC meeting that same day, and had gone off on Donilon again on the fifth. Partly, I think, I was just exhausted from the daily fights.

As the debate in Washington over the pace of troop drawdowns cranked up, I wanted to get a firsthand report on how the campaign was going. I also needed to talk with Karzai about the overall relationship and our post-2014 relationship. In addition, I wanted to reassure Afghans that the drawdowns beginning in July would be gradual, that there would still be many American troops fighting in the fall.