Worldmaking (88 page)

President Obama was placed in a quandary. There was no obvious median point between stay and go. The ranking commander in the field, General Stanley McChrystal, made the president's decision all the trickier in September when he requested forty thousand additional troops, noting that not doing so “will likely result in failure” in Afghanistan—namely, the collapse of the Karzai government and victory for the Taliban. More cheerily, McChrystal observed that while “the situation is serious, success is still achievable.” All General McChrystal needed was what he wanted and all the time in the world to use it.
53
To older, more cautious hands, there was a distinct echo of General Westmoreland in March 1968.

But during the campaign, Obama had identified Afghanistan as the central theater in the ongoing fight against Islamist terrorism. It was well-nigh impossible for him to decline McChrystal's request without looking shabbily opportunistic. And besides, Obama's views on Afghanistan's importance were sincerely held. Bush
had
taken his eye off the ball; Afghanistan
was
the war of necessity. Yet the president did not want to be bounced into a decision by a pair of generals acutely aware of their political power. Colin Powell, with whom Obama met frequently during his first term, furnished some sound advice on this subject:

Mr. President, don't get pushed by the left to do nothing. Don't get pushed by the right to do everything. You take your time and you figure it out … If you decide to send more troops or that's what you feel is necessary, make sure you have a good understanding of what those troops are going to be doing and some assurance that the additional troops will be successful. You can't guarantee success in a very complex theater like Afghanistan and increasingly with the Pakistan problem next door.
54

Powell had served in Vietnam, had strategized the first Iraq War, and had better cause than most to lament the origins and course of the second. He was a man who commanded Obama's respect. This made it doubly pleasing that Powell's advice amounted to a triangulation of sorts—it was a call to ignore both the left and the right and follow his own instincts. Maybe there was a plausible middle point between Stanley McChrystal and Joe Biden.

*   *   *

On December 1, 2009, at West Point, Obama announced his policy decision on Afghanistan and spoke broadly about America's role in world affairs, which the president believed had to become more modest. He would send thirty thousand additional troops to Afghanistan but on a strictly time-limited basis: they would begin leaving in the summer of 2011. Obama made clear that he would not accept “a nation building project of up to a decade” while at the same time rejecting the Vietnam comparisons that had been drawn frequently by the press—and indeed by members of his administration. The Vietnam analogy “was a false reading of history,” Obama said. “Unlike Vietnam, we are not facing a broad-based popular insurgency. And most importantly, unlike Vietnam, the American people were viciously attacked from Afghanistan.” On America's place in the world, Obama noted that since “the days of Franklin Roosevelt, and the service and sacrifice of our grandparents and great-grandparents, our country has borne a special burden in global affairs … We have not always been thanked for these efforts, and we have at times made mistakes. But more than any other nation, the United States of America has underwritten global security for over six decades.” But times were changing and the nation had to refocus its energy on self-improvement: “That's why our troop commitment in Afghanistan cannot be open-ended—because the nation that I'm most interested in building is our own.”
55

This Beardian flourish was one of the few aspects of the speech cheered by the left of his party. The right, meanwhile, excoriated Obama for setting a deadline for withdrawal—surely the Taliban would now simply wait America out—and for not furnishing all the troops that McChrystal requested. There was certainly something in the speech to annoy everyone, a quality that Obama shared with Henry Kissinger. But it was a typical Obama performance in its methodical nature, its precision, restraint, and apparent reasonableness. It was surge and withdrawal at the same time, a final roll of the dice before he pulled the troops home—come what may.

But there was also sufficient material there to stoke the concern of America's allies. One European journalist observed, “For the first time, I can envision the United States returning to isolationism.”
56
It is no challenge to surmise why Obama's preference for rebalancing toward the domestic sphere caused this reaction. The president had approvingly quoted Eisenhower's farewell address on national security—“Each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs”—before adding ominously, “Over the past several years, we have lost that balance. We've failed to appreciate the connection between our national security and our economy.” The president did his best to bathe the speech in optimistic rhetoric and references to the American fundamentals: “freedom,” “justice,” “hope,” “opportunity,” which taken together form “the moral source of America's authority.”
57
But the core message was jaded, its deliverer battle-worn.

*   *   *

The year 2010 was the deadliest of the conflict—499 American troops were killed in Afghanistan. The McChrystal surge was not replicating the Petraeus one in Iraq in terms of impact. How could it? The antagonists, political context, and terrain were so different. Obama began to worry that he had made a mistake in escalating the war, even on this time-limited basis. “You know,” warned Strobe Talbott, deputy secretary of state during the Clinton administration, in the summer of 2010, “he could lose the presidency on this one.”
58
On the decision to order a surge in Afghanistan,
New York Times
journalist David Sanger observed that Obama “regretted it almost instantly.”
59

In the summer of 2010, Obama was forced to put General McChrystal to the sword—for reasons quite unrelated to battlefield tactics.
Rolling Stone
had run an article titled “The Runaway General” in which McChrystal and his advisers were quoted deriding President Obama and Vice President Biden. After McChrystal's first meeting with the president, one aide noted that Obama “clearly didn't know anything about him, who he was. Here's the guy who's going to run his fucking war, but he didn't seem very engaged. The Boss was pretty disappointed.” Biden was lampooned—“Biden? Did you say: Bite Me?”—and his hostility to counterinsurgency doctrine was rubbished. (Obama had earlier reprimanded McChrystal for stating that Biden's retrenchment would create “Chaos-istan.”) More generally, according to McChrystal, Obama was unsure of himself when surrounded by military brass: “uncomfortable and intimidated.” The impression the article conveyed was that President Barack Obama was weak-minded and effete, compared, at least, to that hard-headed, nunchuck-carrying leader of men: Stan “the Man” McChrystal.
60

It is hard to believe that McChrystal did not realize by the end of the interview that the article might spell the end of his military career. No president could ignore that level of insubordination—a perspective that carried broad bipartisan support. Obama fired McChrystal the day after the article appeared, following a tense meeting at the White House. Afterward, Obama said, “I welcome debate, but I won't tolerate division,” adding that it was essential that individual soldiers and officers—no matter what their rank—observe “a strict adherence to the military chain of command and respect for civilian control over that chain of command.”
61
The president said that McChrystal's departure would not alter his strategic priorities in Afghanistan, appointing the like-minded David Petraeus to take his place. Others were not so sure, sensing a gradual disillusionment with the course the president had launched at West Point. Reflecting on the
Rolling Stone
article, Bruce Riedel observed, “The description that it portrays of how our commander in the field is operating, and how some of the people around him are behaving, will definitely undermine support for the war.”
62

By late 2010 there were one hundred thousand troops in Afghanistan, a significant increase over the thirty-eight thousand stationed there when Obama assumed the presidency. Throughout 2011, however, Obama moved sharply toward de-escalation in pursuit of a final withdrawal. Riedel's prediction had been right. On June 22, the president returned to West Point to make another major speech on Afghanistan. Over the course of the address, Obama did precisely what George Ball and others had urged LBJ to do in 1965 and 1966. He declared victory and announced his intention to get out: “When I announced this surge at West Point, we set clear objectives: to refocus on al Qaeda, to reverse the Taliban's momentum, and train Afghan security forces to defend their own country. I also made it clear that our commitment would not be open-ended, and that we would begin to draw down our forces this July. Tonight, I can tell you that we are fulfilling that commitment.”

Obama's address also signaled a sharp break with the counterinsurgency doctrine propounded by McChrystal and Petraeus—at least in its Afghan incarnation—making clear that it was time for the Afghan people to step up and take control of their destiny. Addressing the camera directly, Obama said, “We won't try to make Afghanistan a perfect place. We will not police its streets or patrol its mountains indefinitely.” He reiterated a theme that he had first introduced, to the vexation of some, during his speech announcing the surge eighteen months previously. “Over the last decade,” Obama said in conclusion, “we have spent a trillion dollars on war, at a time of rising debt and hard economic times. Now we must invest in America's greatest resource—our people … America, it is time to focus on nation building here at home … Let us responsibly end these wars, and reclaim the American Dream that is at the center of our story.”
63
In making his decision to wind down the war, Obama directly rebuffed David Petraeus. A year later, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta (who replaced Robert Gates) announced that America's combat mission in Afghanistan would end at the close of 2013. Obama had drawn a line under his predecessor's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He had shown himself more than capable of reversing course when events on the ground counsel such a course. He appeared to agree with John Maynard Keynes's question to a dogmatic critic: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” Obama's critics called him a hypocrite; hawkish Republicans attacked his lack of spine. To his admirers the president was refreshingly flexible.

*   *   *

Over the course of his presidency, George W. Bush had ordered forty drone strikes: targeted assassinations of high-value targets using unmanned drones carrying Hellfire missiles, operated at a remove of thousands of miles by CIA “pilots” in Langley, Virginia.
64
Barack Obama's presidency witnessed a step change in the number of strikes—more than four hundred at the time of writing—a widening of the program's geographical remit, and a willingness to kill radicalized American citizens if the need arose and the opportunity presented itself. The CIA-led drone program was extended beyond Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq to include the targeted killing of alleged terrorists (or aspirants) in Libya, Yemen, and Somalia. In September 2011 in Yemen, a Reaper drone, operated by the CIA, killed Anwar al-Awlaki, a firebrand Islamist cleric, al-Qaeda operative, and American citizen—along with three other Americans “not specifically targeted.”
65

Obama could not resist the temptation to celebrate a program that diminished and terrorized al-Qaeda without putting American boots on the ground. In one speech he observed, “We have had more success in eliminating al-Qaeda leaders in recent months than in recent years.”
66
Drone strikes were the reason Obama shifted from supporting counterinsurgency in 2009 to rejecting it two years later. One foreign-policy adviser to Obama described the appeal of drone strikes succinctly: “precision, economy, and deniability.”
67
Drone strikes also took no prisoners. And the last thing America needed was more of those in Guantánamo Bay.

These were advantages, but Obama's increased propensity to launch drone strikes also posed large ethical questions. This was a policy of high-tech assassination, after all, that flouted the sovereignty of other nations. The Bush administration elevated preventive defense to the status of official policy—invading states on the basis of potential threats. Obama rejected this strategy on the metalevel but was evidently comfortable applying it to the micro. Eliminating individuals on the basis of their prospective threat to a state sounds like a plotline from George Orwell's
1984
or Philip K. Dick's short story “The Minority Report.” And because the United States was the first nation in the world to weaponize drones, Obama was setting a precedent that other nations will eventually follow. David Sanger asks the right question in
Confront and Conceal
: “What is the difference—legally and morally—between a sticky bomb the Israelis place on the side of an Iranian scientist's car and a Hellfire missile the United States launches at a car in Yemen from thirty thousand feet in the air? How is one an ‘assassination'—condemned by the United States—and the other an ‘insurgent strike'?”
68

Even though the drone program officially did not exist—the “deniability” element of its appeal—Obama realized that he needed an intellectually plausible and convincing answer to searching questions such as Sanger's. The president certainly had a well-credentialed individual in-house to carry out this task. Harold Koh, the State Department's top lawyer, had clerked for Harry Blackmun, the author of
Roe
v.
Wade
, was a former dean of Yale Law School, and was well regarded among liberal Democrats and touted by many as a future appointee to the Supreme Court. Koh had his work cut out for him. It is difficult to conceive of a more challenging or important legal commission.