The amount of time spent on the process seemed absurd. Every time Holbrooke came back from the White House, he would say, “The president has more questions,” and warn us that we should be ready to go to work the minute formal instruction came from the White House. Frustration was written all over Holbrooke’s and Clinton’s faces as the process dragged on. The White House attributed this to Obama’s meticulous probing and the degree of thought and analysis that went into this historic decision. But increasing numbers of observers and participants began to worry that the delay was not serving America’s interest. President Obama was dithering. He was busybodying the national security apparatus by asking for more answers to the same set of questions, each time posed differently.
Holbrooke thought that Obama was not deciding because he disliked the options before him, and that the NSC was failing the president by not giving him the right options. The job of the NSC, Holbrooke would say, is not to make policy for the president, but to give him choices. The NSC was not doing its job, and hence the president was not making his decision. The decision-making process was broken. To make his point, Holbrooke took to handing out copies of Clark Clifford’s description of how the NSC works from Clifford’s 1991 memoir (on which Holbrooke had collaborated), Counsel to the President.
What Holbrooke omitted from his assessment was that Obama was failing to press the NSC to give him other options. As a result the process had come down to a slow dance in which the president pushed back against the options before him but neglected to demand new ones, and his national security staff kept putting the same options back in front of him.
At the end of the day, President Obama had two distinct choices. The first was “fully resourced” COIN, which meant more troops and more money to reverse the Taliban’s gains and put in place the kind of local security and good government that would make it unlikely they would come back.19 It would be Iraq all over again. But the president was not sold. He did not think a long and expensive counterinsurgency campaign was the way to go, particularly as his domestic advisers were telling him that public support for the war was soft (and getting softer), and especially when the economic news at home was bad. So Obama kept kicking the tires on COIN and kept asking questions. The military’s answer every time was the same: Fully resourced COIN is the way to go.
The night before General McChrystal was to release the report outlining what he needed to fight the war, Holbrooke gathered his team in his office. We asked him what he thought McChrystal would request. He said, “Watch! The military will give the president three choices. There will be a ‘high-risk’ option”—Holbrooke held his hand high in the air—“that is what they always call it, which will call for maybe very few troops. Low troops, high risk. Then there will be a ‘low-risk’ option”—Holbrooke lowered his hand—“which will ask for double the number they are actually looking for. In the middle will be what they want,” which was between 30,000 and 40,000 more troops. And that is exactly what happened, along with the “high-risk” and “low-risk” vocabulary.
All along Vice President Biden had pushed for an altogether different approach. This was in effect option two. Biden noted that we had gone to Afghanistan to fight al-Qaeda, but that al-Qaeda was no longer in Afghanistan; it was in Pakistan. The CIA’s estimate was that there were as few as a hundred al-Qaeda operatives left in Afghanistan.20 Biden thought that over time there had been mission creep. Fighting terrorism (disrupting, dismantling, and destroying al-Qaeda and its affiliates, as the president defined the mission) had evolved into counterinsurgency and nation-building, and the Taliban had replaced al-Qaeda as the enemy we organized our strategic objectives against. We don’t need COIN, a functioning Afghan state, or the billions poured into rural development and local security, Biden argued, to allay America’s fear of al-Qaeda. In fact, for that we did not need Afghanistan at all. We could protect ourselves and advance our interests through a stepped-up counterterrorism effort—which was quickly dubbed “CT-Plus”—mostly directed at al-Qaeda’s sanctuary, the wild border region of Pakistan. We could use unmanned drones and Special Forces to check al-Qaeda activity from bases in Afghanistan, and achieve all the security we needed for a fraction of the money and manpower that COIN would require.
Biden’s argument favored using the resources of the CIA over those of the Pentagon, and was seen at first as an outlier, too far-fetched in assuming you could win without boots on the ground. But Biden’s view had its sincere supporters in Congress and pragmatic ones among White House domestic advisers who thought the American public was tired of the war. Holbrooke, too, thought COIN was pointless, but was not sold on CT-Plus. He thought you could not have a regional strategy built on “secret war.” Drones are no substitute for a political settlement.
There were other criticisms of COIN. In November 2009, America’s ambassador in Kabul, Karl Eikenberry, who had once led American forces in Afghanistan as a three-star army general, wrote in a cable titled “COIN Strategy: Civilian Concerns” that Afghans would have no incentive to take responsibility for government and security in their country if we kept putting more troops in. Karzai was not an “adequate strategic partner,” wrote the ambassador, and “continues to shun responsibility for a sovereign burden.”21 A troop surge would only perpetuate that problem. Holbrooke thought Eikenberry had it right.
During the review, there was no discussion of diplomacy and a political settlement at all. A commitment to finding a political settlement to the war would have put diplomacy front and center and organized military and intelligence operations in Afghanistan to support it. Holbrooke wanted the president to consider this option, but the White House was not buying. The military wanted to stay in charge, and going against the military would make the president look weak.
CT-Plus, too, looked risky—too much like “cut and run”—and there was no guarantee that CT-Plus could work without COIN.22 In Iraq, Special Forces had taken “kill and capture” missions to industrial scale, decimating the ranks of al-Qaeda and the insurgency, and yet this did not turn the tide of that war. Counterterrorism, unlike COIN, did not win territory or win hearts and minds of the local population; CT merely amplified the impact of COIN on Iraq.
So President Obama chose the politically safe option that he did not like: he gave the military what they asked for. Months of White House hand-wringing ended up with the administration choosing the option that had been offered from day one: fully resourced COIN. But he added a deadline of July 2011 for the larger troop commitment to work; after that the surge would be rolled back. In effect, the president told both Karzai and the Taliban that our new strategy was good for a year.
Fully resourced COIN, however, failed to achieve its objective. There were ambitious pushes into Taliban territory, but gains were temporary. A much-ballyhooed counterinsurgency operation in the spring of 2010 failed to pacify Marjah.23 In mid-2010, six months after 30,000 troops were sent, an internal intelligence review presented the White House with a dire account of the security situation in Afghanistan. COIN was not bringing safety and security to Afghans as promised; more of them were dying.