The Longest War (58 page)

During the Situation Room meeting McChrystal advocated the middle 40,000 option and elaborated that “I’m actually looking for American troops here; I’m not really interested in allied troops. And in my estimate,
we’ll know if this is working
in 2013. And in the course of doing this, we need to build an Afghan national security force of 400,000. And the building of that ANSF will be about $10–12 billion a year for five years.”

Since the beginning of 2009, 33,000 additional American troops had already poured into Afghanistan and now the military was asking for 40,000
more
. This provoked a case of severe sticker shock in the Situation Room. One of the participants recalls: “In the course of’09, we doubled the number of American troops on the ground in Afghanistan. And at the very tail end of that, we got McChrystal, who said, ‘Oh, that was a down payment, OK’ … One comeback was—‘Wait a second, what happened to the 33,000 we sent you this year?
Where are those fuckers
?’”

Another problem with McChrystal’s troop request was that he envisaged those additional 40,000 U.S. soldiers to be on the ground through 2013. A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation showed that was going to cost $160 billion in addition to the
$55 billion
a year the Afghan operation was already consuming. The reaction around the Situation Room to this was quite negative, with a number of officials saying versions of “Given the other priorities of the administration, we’re not going to go to 100,000 Americans in Afghanistan all through this term and into the next term—all through the 2012 election season, no end in sight.”

A White House official said a further problem with the McChrystal plan was the cost of doubling the size of the Afghan army and police—at a cost of up to $60 billion—something that America could ill afford at a time of economic crisis and that also conflicted with other Obama priorities such as extending health-care coverage. And, in any event, it was well known at the White House that the Afghan security services were quite weak. A 2008 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office had found that $10 billion had
already
been spent to develop the Afghan army, yet
only two of its
105 units
were fully capable of operating, and a further $6 billion had been spent on the Afghan police and none of its units were fully capable of operating. A White House official recalls, “
There was a whole debate
about whether it was necessary or even possible to double the size of the Afghan security forces.… The conclusion of our review was that no, that wasn’t necessary and it might not be possible.”

The sum result of the McChrystal presentation about how much a fullblown counterinsurgency campaign would cost was a reevaluation of whether such a strategy was really necessary anyway, something the Riedel review had not considered in any detail. “There was a general assessment that Riedel had done
a bit of a rush job
and, gosh, you know, we should have done this in the spring,” recalls one national security official advising Obama. Another political appointee says, “The idea of a nationwide nation-building effort seemed to be beyond our capacity, both in terms of the drain on military resources, economic resources, and then third—less important, but nonetheless real—
political capital was included
. Would we be able to sustain that?”

Simultaneously, senior military officers came to realize that the Obama administration would not simply rubber-stamp their requests for large-scale ramp-ups in troops and resources that would then go on for more than four years. One national security official says, “
There was a point
where the Defense Department realized that there had been an election in November of’08. This is not the [era of] ‘Just tell us what you need; you’re going to get it.’ And there was a real ‘ah-ha’ moment that this was going to be a two-way street between what was requested and what was provided. And once that soaked in—and it wasn’t immediate, because remember who you’ve got around the table: you’ve got McChrystal, who got everything he ever wanted as the JSOC [Joint Special Operations Command] commander; you’ve got Petraeus, who got everything he ever asked for—and they’re sort of saying, ‘Hey look, we don’t understand what the problem is: We’re the military. We’re all together on this. We’re telling you what this is going to take. We kind of expect you to deliver it.’”

One official says, Obama’s national security advisor, James Jones, a former U.S. Army four-star general, was “the most effective intermediary because of his links back into the Pentagon. So he was able to go back to [Chairman of the Joint Chiefs] Mullen, for example, and Gates and Petraeus, and say ‘Look, you know, I’ve got all this, but it’s
not in the cards
, guys.’”

The real costs of a full-scale counterinsurgency campaign in terms of blood and treasure prompted a narrowing of the focus of the American effort in Afghanistan.
The key question became: Was it really necessary to “defeat” the Taliban? “
Several folks argued
, including Biden, that it was neither possible nor necessary to defeat the Taliban … They were going to be part of the fabric of Afghan society, whether we liked it or not,” recalls one White House official.

Another official says, “The president led us to the conclusion that even the Riedel objective, which was intended to be circumscribed, and constrained and focused on al-Qaeda, was not. And there was this sort of ‘ah-ha’ moment that we had really
bitten off more than we needed to chew
and probably could chew, with regard to defeating the Taliban, and that was central. Now, once you got past that, all sorts of things open up. So now, reintegration, reconciliation, a political settlement of some sort, a counterinsurgency that’s limited in scale, and scope and duration—all those things start kicking in, because you no longer have to defeat them; you just have to degrade them to a point where they can’t take over Kandahar, and Kabul.”

During these discussions, Obama, the former law professor, did not show his hand but rather asked focused questions throughout, synthesizing the debates at the end of each meeting by saying, “
OK, here’s what I’ve taken
out of this.”

Outside the White House, the deliberative pace of the Afghan review was drawing fire. On October 22, former vice president Cheney charged in a speech that “the White House must
stop dithering
while America’s armed forces are in danger.” This was, of course, quite rich coming from the number-two official of the administration that had shortchanged Afghanistan for most of the eight years that it was in office.

October was also the deadliest month of the war so far for American troops;
fifty-nine had died
. On October 29, Obama
visited Dover Air Force Base
in Delaware late at night with a small group of journalists to salute eighteen American servicemen and Drug Enforcement Administration officials who had recently been killed and whose bodies were coming home for burial. Obama’s visit to Dover signaled that the rising death toll in Afghanistan was going to play an important part in his calculations about what he planned to do there. On the forty-five-minute helicopter ride home to the White House, the normally affable
president was silent
.

If one ghost hovering over the discussion of Afghanistan was that of Vietnam, another ghost was that of the Iraq “surge,” which had been opposed by many of the officials presiding over the Afghan review, including the president himself,
the vice president, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Of course, the surge in Iraq had succeeded for a number of reasons, including the Sunni Awakening, but Obama, who had never publicly conceded that he had been wrong about the Iraq surge, ironically now used its success as an important way of informing his way forward in Afghanistan. A national security official recalls, “
He admitted
inside the Situation Room that ‘look, basically [the Iraq surge] worked. Now, we’re not going to settle, today, why it worked.’ … And there was the laughter around the table [and someone said] ‘OK, Mr. President, we’re just going to leave that where it is.’”

On November 11, Obama examined what the military had named “
Option 2A
” for the deployment of new troops to Afghanistan. The 2A schedule would take a year and a half to get all the additional troops into place. Obama was annoyed when he saw the chart describing this option, saying, “
I don’t know how
we can describe this as a surge.”

Obama jokingly quizzed General McChrystal about the leisurely pace of this new deployment, saying, “
Wait a second, Stan
. You know, I read your assessment in the
Washington Post
. I had my own version but I could have read it in the
Post
. And you paint a very urgent picture here. So OK, how does that urgent picture get addressed by deploying troops deliberately over eighteen months?” Obama turned to General Petraeus, telling him he was “looking for a surge” and peppering him with questions about how he had implemented the surge in Iraq: “How fast did we get them in? How many were there? How long? How long did they stay before we started thinning them out?”

Obama was looking not only for a surge into Afghanistan but also for a deployment that pulled the soldiers of the surge out far faster than the 2013 pull-out envisaged by his senior military officers. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates
came up with a compromise
, saying, “We propose to surge troops for eighteen to twenty-four months and then we can begin to come down,” which translated into a withdrawal date for at least some of the surge troops in July 2011.

While a target withdrawal date could send a message of lack of resolve to the Taliban, it also provided an important signal to both the American domestic audience and to the Afghan government that the large U.S. troop commitment would not run on for many years into the future. “
Obama, at the end of the day
, thought it was more important to light a fire for the Afghans as well as to demonstrate to our own people this was not an open-ended thing. That weighed more heavily than any risk in sending a message to the Taliban, that it could wait us out,” says a national security official.

The July 2011 withdrawal date also papered over the real policy differences that continued to exist between senior officers in the Pentagon and top White House officials about what the ideal length of the Afghan deployment should be. Both sides could take from the July 2011 date that they had won the battle: for the Pentagon the important point about the timing of the withdrawal was that it would be “conditions based,” which meant that the drawdown could be relatively token if, as seemed likely, conditions in Afghanistan continued to be largely insecure, while White House officials could point to a date certain for a real withdrawal.

During the course of the review an important signal of growing American impatience with his government had been sent to Karzai: that he had to abide by the electoral laws of his own country. When the votes in the August presidential election were finally tallied Karzai had only
49 percent,
just under the 50 percent he needed to be declared the outright winner, which meant that under the Afghan constitution he had to go to a runoff election with his main challenger, the former foreign minister Dr. Abdullah.
Karzai refused to do this
, which added to the aura of illegitimacy that now surrounded his government. As Holbrooke recalls, the stakes were quite high if Karzai refused to accept a constitutionally mandated runoff: “
It would turn him
from a legitimately elected leader to a man whose tenure in office was so tainted by the refusal to follow procedures he had sworn to uphold, that we would have had a constitutional political crisis which could have ended or destroyed our venture in Kabul.”

Over several days in late October, Senator John Kerry, the head of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, met with Karzai in Kabul for twenty bruising hours of talks. Kerry recalls, “
I think we were able
to work through things in constructive ways so that he felt comfortable that I was helping to guarantee a structure for a second round [of elections] that wouldn’t be artificial; that wouldn’t be a trumped-up, ‘Remove Karzai’ initiative.” Finally Karzai acceded to the American pressure and agreed to the runoff, which in any event his challenger Dr. Abdullah had never had the votes to win. Recognizing that fact, Dr. Abdullah announced he was
standing down on November 1
, leaving Karzai the legitimate winner of the presidential election.

Five days later, U.S. ambassador Karl Eikenberry filed the first of two stinging cables to his boss, Hillary Clinton, and the rest of the participants in the review. The first described Karzai as “
not an adequate strategic partner
”
and raised serious questions about the abilities of the Afghan army and police to grow in size and efficacy.
In his next cable
, Eikenberry poured considerable cold water on McChrystal’s counterinsurgency plan, which he pointed out was not matched by a similar effort on the civilian side, and would cost a great deal, while it had scant chance of success if the Taliban continued to have a safe haven in Pakistan. Eikenberry’s cable
came as a surprise
to the military, especially to McChrystal and his staff, who typically met with Eikenberry three times a week. The broad outlines of Eikenberry’s dissents, of course, quickly leaked.

Meetings of the Obama national security team continued through November, yet the participants remained unsure where the president would finally come down. In the
penultimate meeting, on November 23
, Hillary Clinton, a vocal opponent of the surge in Iraq, sided with the military and was the most forceful advocate in the room for a substantial troop increase. The
final meeting took place
on Sunday, November 29. Obama
appears to have made his decision the day before
. As dusk fell Obama gathered Gates, Mullen, Petraeus, Jones, and Rahm Emanuel in the Oval Office to tell them that his mind was made up: he would be sending 30,000 more troops, asking NATO for at least 5,000 more; a review of the strategy would take place in December 2010; and at least some of the troops would be coming home in July 2011. From there Obama went to the Situation Room, where he had a videoconference with General McChrystal and Ambassador Eikenberry, who would be responsible for implementing the new strategy.