The review did have one positive outcome. State had been requested to prepare a paper on corruption in Afghanistan, and I was told that Hillary had personally redrafted major elements. The analysis was the best I had ever seen on the topic. The paper said there were three levels of corruption that needed to be addressed: (1) corruption that was predatory on the people—for example, shakedowns by the national police and bribes for settlement of land disputes; (2) high-level, senior leadership corruption; and (3) “functional” corruption—common bribes and deal making. I said the paper set forth exactly the right way to look at the problem and that, given an overall and deeply ingrained culture of corruption that was highly unlikely to end anytime soon, we needed to focus on those aspects that mattered most to our success—low-level corruption that alienated the Afghan people and high-level corruption that undermined confidence in the entire government. Hillary and I both again raised the contradiction between (not to mention the hypocrisy of) U.S. payments to Afghan officials and our public stance on corruption. We ran into a stone wall named Panetta. The CIA had its own reasons not to change our approach.
On December 16, the president appeared in the White House press briefing room flanked by Biden, Clinton, Cartwright, and me. He began by paying tribute to Richard Holbrooke, who had tragically died three days before from a torn aorta. The president then went on to summarize the review, saying that the United States was “on track to achieve our goals” in Afghanistan and adding that “the momentum achieved by the Taliban in recent years has been arrested in much of the country, and reversed in some key areas, although these gains remain fragile and reversible.” He reaffirmed that U.S. forces would begin withdrawing on schedule the next July. He added that al Qaeda was “hunkered down” and having a hard time recruiting, training, and plotting attacks, but that “it will take time to ultimately defeat al Qaeda, and it remains a ruthless and resilient enemy bent on attacking our country.” The president and vice president decamped as soon as Obama finished reading his statement, leaving the other three of us to take questions. In response to a question as to whether the review “sugarcoated” the picture in Afghanistan, Clinton replied, “I don’t think you will find any rosy scenario people in the leadership of this administration, starting with the president. This has been a very, very hard-nosed review.” I was asked about the pace of the July drawdowns, and I said we didn’t know at that point: “The hope is that as we progress, those drawdowns will be able to accelerate.”
Yet again the contending forces within the administration, like medieval jousters, had armored up and clashed on Afghanistan. Yet again the president had mostly come down on Hillary’s and my side. And yet again the process had been ugly and contentious, reaffirming that the split in Obama’s team over Afghanistan, after two years in office, was still very real and very deep. The one saving grace, as strange as it might seem, was that this fundamental disagreement on Afghanistan never became personal at the most senior level; nor did it ever spill over into other issues, where the national security leadership continued to work together quite harmoniously. But a new source of contention was about to emerge early in 2011, and this time the internal battle lines would be drawn very differently. I would even find myself in agreement with the vice president, a rare occurrence in both the Bush and Obama administrations.
THE ARAB REVOLUTION
The history of revolutions is not a happy one. Most often repressive authoritarian governments are swept out, and power ends up in the hands not of moderate reformers but of better-organized and far more ruthless extremists—as in France in 1793 (the Reign of Terror), Russia in 1917 (the Bolsheviks), China in 1949 (Mao), Cuba in 1959 (Castro), and Iran in 1979 (Ayatollah Khomeini). In fact, it is hard to think of a major exception to this fate apart from the American Revolution, for which we can largely thank George Washington, who rejected a proffered crown, refused to march the army against Congress (however tempting on occasion that must have been for him), and voluntarily gave up command of the army and then the presidency. Revolutions and their outcomes are usually a surprise (especially to those overthrown) and damnably hard to predict. Experts can write about economic hardship, demographic problems such as a “youth bulge,” pent-up rage, and “prerevolutionary” conditions, but repressive governments often manage such conditions for decades. Thus was the Obama administration—and everyone else in the world (including every Arab government)—surprised by the “Arab Spring,” a revolution that shifted the political tectonic plate of the Middle East.
Sometimes revolutions are triggered by singular and seemingly isolated events. This was the case in the Middle East, where, on December 17, 2010, in the small Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid (overrun by German panzers in 1943 on their way to defeating American forces at the Kasserine Pass), a poor twenty-six-year-old street vendor named Mohammed Bouazizi set himself on fire after being harassed and humiliated by a police officer. He died three weeks later. His mother, according to a Washington Post reporter, said, “It was not poverty that made her son sacrifice himself…. It was his quest for dignity.” In an earlier time, before cell phones, Facebook, and Twitter, what happened in the village usually stayed in the village. But not now. A cell phone video of a subsequent protest demonstration in Sidi Bouzid was posted online and went viral across Tunisia, sparking more and larger demonstrations against the regime of President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, a dictator in power for more than twenty years. The video was spread throughout the Middle East not only by the Internet but also by the Qatari-owned television network Al-Jazeera, which was equally detested by authoritarian governments in the region and by the administration of Bush 43. Less than a month later, on January 14, Ben Ali was ousted and fled to Saudi Arabia. According to news reports, more than sixty political parties were created within two months, but the best organized and largest by far was the Islamist Ennahda Party (which would win 41 percent of the vote in elections held ten months later to select a Constituent Assembly charged with drafting a constitution).
President Obama’s first official statement on developments in Tunisia was on the day of Ben Ali’s ouster, January 14, when he condemned the use of violence against peaceful demonstrators, urged all parties to avoid violence, and called upon the government to respect human rights and hold free and fair elections in the near future. He devoted one sentence to Tunisia in his State of the Union address on January 25, saying that the United States “stands with the people of Tunisia and supports the democratic aspirations of all people.”
Young, Internet-savvy Egyptians read Facebook pages and blogs about developments in Tunisia and in the latter half of January began to organize their own demonstrations at Tahrir Square, a huge traffic circle in downtown Cairo, to protest the authoritarian regime of Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s president for nearly thirty years. The first large demonstration was on the same day as the State of the Union address, and the peaceful protests would grow daily as more and more Egyptians of all ages and backgrounds joined. The administration was divided on how to respond, with the NSS staff—perhaps sensitive to the criticism of some conservatives and human rights activists that Obama had been too slow and cautious in reacting to developments in Tunisia—urging strong support for the demonstrators in Tahrir Square.