By Steve Luxenberg Washington Post Staff Writer
President Obama urgently looked for a way out of the war in Afghanistan last year repeatedly pressing his top military advisers for an exit plan that they never gave him according to secret meeting notes and documents cited in a new book by journalist Bob Woodward. Frustrated with his military commanders for consistently offering only options that required significantly more troops Obama finally crafted his own strategy dictating a classified six-page terms sheet that sought to limit U.S. involvement Woodward reports in Obamas Wars to be released on Monday.
According to Woodwards meeting-by-meeting memo-by-memo account of the 2009 Afghan strategy review the president avoided talk of victory as he described his objectives.
This needs to be a plan about how were going to hand it off and get out of Afghanistan Obama is quoted as telling White House aides as he laid out his reasons for adding 30000 troops in a short-term escalation. Everything were doing has to be focused on how were going to get to the point where we can reduce our footprint. Its in our national security interest. There cannot be any wiggle room.
Obama rejected the militarys request for 40000 troops as part of an expansive mission that had no foreseeable end. Im not doing 10 years he told Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton at a meeting on Oct. 26 2009. Im not doing long-term nation-building. I am not spending a trillion dollars.
Woodwards book portrays Obama and the White House as barraged by warnings about the threat of terrorist attacks on U.S. soil and confronted with the difficulty in preventing them. During an interview with Woodward in July the president said We can absorb a terrorist attack. Well do everything we can to prevent it but even a 9/11 even the biggest attack ever . . . we absorbed it and we are stronger.
But most of the book centers on the strategy review and the dissension distrust and infighting that consumed Obamas national security team as it was locked in a fierce and emotional struggle over the direction goals timetable troop levels and the chances of success for a war that is almost certain to be one of the defining events of this presidency.
Obama is shown at odds with his uniformed military commanders particularly Adm. Mike Mullen the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and
Gen. David H. Petraeus head of U.S. Central Command during the 2009 strategy review and now the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan.
Woodward reveals their conflicts through detailed accounts of two dozen closed-door secret strategy sessions and nearly 40 private conversations between Obama and Cabinet officers key aides and intelligence officials.
Tensions often turned personal. National security adviser James L. Jones privately referred to Obamas political aides as the water bugs the Politburo the Mafia or the campaign set. Petraeus who felt shut out by the new administration told an aide that he considered the presidents senior adviser David Axelrod to be a complete spin doctor.
During a flight in May after a glass of wine Petraeus told his own staffers that the administration was expletive with the wrong guy. Gates was tempted to walk out of an Oval Office meeting after being offended by comments made by deputy national security adviser Thomas E. Donilon about a general not named in the book.
Suspicion lingered among some from the 2008 presidential campaign as well. When Obama floated the idea of naming Clinton to a high-profile post Axelrod asked him How could you trust Hillary?
Cant afford any mistakes
Obamas Wars marks the 16th book by Woodward 67 a Washington Post associate editor. Woodwards reporting with Carl Bernstein on the Watergate coverup in the early 1970s led to their bestselling book All the Presidents Men.
Among the books other disclosures:
- Obama told Woodward in the July interview that he didnt think about the Afghan war in the classic terms of the United States winning or losing. I think about it more in terms of: Do you successfully prosecute a strategy that results in the country being stronger rather than weaker at the end? he said.
- The CIA created controls and pays for a clandestine 3000-man paramilitary army of local Afghans known as Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams. Woodward describes these teams as elite well-trained units that conduct highly sensitive covert operations into Pakistan as part of a stepped-up campaign against al-Qaeda and Afghan Taliban havens there.
- Obama has kept in place or expanded 14 intelligence orders known as findings issued by his predecessor George W. Bush. The orders provide the legal basis for the CIAs worldwide covert operations.
- A new capability developed by the National Security Agency has dramatically increased the speed at which intercepted communications can be turned around into useful information for intelligence analysts and covert operators. They talk we listen. They move we observe. Given the opportunity we react operationally then-Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell explained to Obama at a briefing two days after he was elected president.
- A classified exercise in May showed that the government was woefully unprepared to deal with a nuclear terrorist attack in the United States. The scenario involved the detonation of a small crude nuclear weapon in Indianapolis and the simultaneous threat of a second blast in Los Angeles. Obama in the interview with Woodward called a nuclear attack here a potential game changer. He said: When I go down the list of things I have to worry about all the time that is at the top because thats one where you cant afford any mistakes.
- Afghan President Hamid Karzai was diagnosed as manic depressive according to U.S. intelligence reports. Hes on his meds hes off his meds Woodward quotes U.S. Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry as saying.
The cancer is in Pakistan
Obama campaigned on a promise to extract U.S. forces from Iraq and focus on Afghanistan and Pakistan which he described as the greater threat to American security. At McConnells top-secret briefing for Obama the intelligence chief told the president-elect that Pakistan is a dishonest partner unwilling or unable to stop elements of the Pakistani intelligence service from giving clandestine aid weapons and money to the Afghan Taliban Woodward writes.
By the end of the 2009 strategy review Woodward reports Obama concluded that no mission in Afghanistan could be successful without attacking the al-Qaeda and Afghan Taliban havens operating with impunity in Pakistans remote tribal regions.
We need to make clear to people that the cancer is in Pakistan Obama is quoted as saying at an Oval Office meeting on Nov. 25 2009. Creating a more secure Afghanistan is imperative the president said so the cancer doesnt spread there.
The war in Iraq draws no attention in the book except as a reference point for considering and developing a new Afghanistan strategy. The books title Obamas Wars appears to refer to the conflict in Afghanistan and the conflicts among the presidents national security team.
An older war - the Vietnam conflict - does figure prominently in the minds of Obama and his advisers. When Vice President Biden rushed to the White House on a Sunday morning to make one last appeal for a narrowly defined mission he warned Obama that a major escalation would mean were locked into Vietnam.
Obama kept asking for an exit plan to go along with any further troop commitment and is shown growing increasingly frustrated with the military hierarchy for not providing one. At one strategy session the president waved a memo from the Office of Management and Budget which put a price tag of $889 billion over 10 years on the militarys open-ended approach.
In the end Obama essentially designed his own strategy for the 30000 troops which some aides considered a compromise between the military commands request for 40000 and Bidens relentless efforts to limit the escalation to 20000 as part of a hybrid option that he had developed with Gen. James E. Cartwright the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
In a dramatic scene at the White House on Sunday Nov. 29 2009 Obama summoned the national security team to outline his decision and distribute his six-page terms sheet. He went around the room one by one asking each participant whether he or she had any objections - to say so now Woodward reports.
The document - a copy of which is reprinted in the book - took the unusual step of stating along with the strategys objectives what the military was not supposed to do. The president went into detail according to Woodward to make sure that the military wouldnt attempt to expand the mission.
After Obama informed the military of his decision Woodward writes the Pentagon kept trying to reopen the decision peppering the White House with new questions. Obama in exasperation reacted by asking Why do we keep having these meetings?
Along with Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan at the time they kept pushing for their 40000-troop option as part of a broad counterinsurgency plan along the lines of what Petraeus had developed for Iraq.
The president is quoted as telling Mullen Petraeus and Gates: In 2010 we will not be having a conversation about how to do more. I will not want to hear Were doing fine Mr. President but wed be better if we just do more. Were not going to be having a conversation about how to change the mission . . . unless were talking about how to draw down faster than anticipated in 2011.
Petraeus took Obamas decision as a personal repudiation Woodward writes. Petraeus continued to believe that a protect-the-Afghan-people counterinsurgency was the best plan. When the president tapped Petraeus this year to replace McChrystal as the head of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan Petraeus found himself in charge of making Obamas more limited strategy a success.
Woodward quotes Petraeus as saying You have to recognize also that I dont think you win this war. I think you keep fighting. Its a little bit like Iraq actually. . . . Yes there has been enormous progress in Iraq. But there are still horrific attacks in Iraq and you have to stay vigilant. You have to stay after it. This is the kind of fight were in for the rest of our lives and probably our kids lives.
