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Two weeks before his election, Obama had asked retired General James L. Jones to Richmond, Virginia, for a private meeting. Jones, 64, was a figure out of a Marine Corps brochure, 6-foot-5, with a brush haircut, a long handsome face, bright blue eyes, a boyish smile and a genial manner. He was called “Gentleman Jim” because he treated everyone from presidents to corporals with respect. His national security credentials appeared gold-plated, having served in the Marines for 40 years and rising to the top position, commandant, then four years as NATO commander, the top U.S. and allied commander in Europe, before retiring in 2007.
Jones had expressed distaste for Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s leadership, publicly confirming a report that the secretary had “systematically emasculated” the Joint Chiefs and warning a fellow Marine general, then Chairman Pete Pace, “You should not be the parrot on the secretary’s shoulder.” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had asked him to be her deputy, a post he declined. Jones instead served as Rice’s part-time envoy for security in the Middle East, but he made no secret of the fact that he found the Bush administration woefully disorganized and embarrassingly unserious about Middle East peace.
In the Richmond hotel, Obama told Jones, “It looks like I might win this.” He wanted to talk to him about being secretary of state or national security adviser.
Jones said he would be a better fit as secretary of state than as a presidential aide. “What I can do is set up an organization to get the best people to help you as president” at State, he explained. Noting that he had served as chief aide to the Marine commandant and later as senior military aide to Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen, Jones acknowledged, “I wasn’t very good” at being an aide.
Obama drew him out on how he thought the National Security Council should work.
Jones said he had seen the Bush NSC up close. It was understaffed, under-resourced and deeply dysfunctional. The national security adviser had little clout and failed to think strategically by plotting out the detailed steps and plans of a policy for a year or two. This was the biggest missing piece in the Bush operation. The national security adviser had to develop measurements to ensure reasonable progress was being made toward the goals. If not, the plans had to be revised—radically if necessary. Too much policy was on automatic pilot. Second, Jones said, the national security adviser had to find a way to get results without “micromanaging” what the departments and agencies should do.
How should that be done? Obama asked.
Convince your subordinates that your vision is their vision, Jones said. That meant giving them a stake, creating “buy-in” so they also have personal ownership of the policy. If a president tried to do all the work by himself, he added, his subordinates would let him. An example of this was President Bush’s secure videoconferences every two weeks or so with the leaders of Afghanistan and Iraq. That meant no one else in the U.S. government had any real leverage or could speak with authority. Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki always insisted on taking up any dispute directly with Bush, who effectively had both the Afghanistan and Iraq accounts, living deeply in the tactical weeds—precisely where a president didn’t belong.
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From that meeting on, Obama made it clear to Podesta and his foreign policy campaign aides that he wanted Jones as national security adviser. It would, he said, give him someone outside the Pentagon with the credibility to deal with the secretary of defense and the generals on a more or less equal footing. It looked like Jones could manage big personalities, and he had a theory on how to energize the National Security Council.
After hearing Obama out, Podesta had the strong impression that Obama wanted a national security adviser who wasn’t perceived as his guy, a mere extension of the president. He seemed to have reached the baffling conclusion that the lack of a personal relationship could be an asset. Jones would not only be speaking on behalf of Obama, but as a retired Marine general, a former commandant and NATO commander. It could give Obama more leverage with the Pentagon. Jones’s record of outspokenness and independence might make him a counterweight to the military establishment.
But most of all, Jones knew the military as well as anyone, and that was the terrain Obama knew the least. In the White House, Jones could help him navigate what could be a difficult relationship, particularly given Obama’s fervent opposition to the Iraq War. Jones could be an inoculation, guide and shield.
Podesta and several of the others were coming to realize that once the president-elect got an idea for who should fill a critical post, he stuck with it, unless something disqualifying was found. Podesta examined Jones’s record and talked to several people in the national security community. He did not find Jones to be very strategic, certainly not in the mold of what he called “the Kissingerian, master-, über-strategist.”
Maybe that would be less crucial under Obama, Podesta thought, because Obama’s approach was so intellectual. He compared Obama to Spock from Star Trek. The president-elect wanted to put his own ideas to work. He was unsentimental and capable of being ruthless. Podesta was not sure that Obama felt anything, especially in his gut. He intellectualized and then charted the path forward, essentially picking up the emotions of others and translating them into ideas. He had thus created a different kind of politics, seizing the moment of 2008 and driving it to a political victory.
But, Podesta thought, sometimes a person’s great strength, in this case Obama’s capacity to intellectualize, was also an Achilles’ heel.
Obama had several more phone conversations with Jones. Since Clinton was going to get State, the top foreign policy job, he offered national security adviser to Jones. If it was a consolation prize, it certainly had its own appeal. It required no Senate confirmation and the corner West Wing office carried its own highly visible cachet.
Jones was astounded that the president-elect would give such a position of responsibility and trust to someone he hardly knew. His basic philosophy was that everything hinged on personal relations, and he didn’t have one with Obama.
Jones told Obama that he would have to consult his family.
In retirement, he was heading the energy program for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, serving on several boards, consulting and speaking, earning over $2 million a year. Accepting would mean an 80 percent pay cut. But the family agreed it was worth the chance to cap his career with one of the most important posts in government. What sealed the deal for Jones was a promise Obama made. If he accepted, Obama said that on national security issues, “I will always ask your opinion or judgment before I do anything.” It was a personal pledge. To the former commandant of the Marines, whose motto is “Semper Fidelis” (“Always Faithful”), it meant everything. Jones said yes.
One of the first orders of business for Jones was picking a deputy—a key post that had been occupied by half a dozen men who had then gone on to be promoted to national security adviser. Obama had told him that he could pick whomever he wanted. His deputy would occupy a small, closet-size office critically located in the West Wing suite of the national security adviser. All other senior NSC staffers were down one floor in the basement or in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. Most importantly, the deputy would run the deputies committee meetings to tee up issues and decisions for the principals and full NSC.
Emanuel had suggested Jones consider Tom Donilon, a 53-year-old lawyer and former chief of staff to Secretary of State Warren Christopher in the Clinton administration. A political junkie and workaholic who attended foreign policy seminars as recreation, Donilon was a detail man and extremely close to Vice President–elect Biden. Donilon’s wife, Cathy Russell, would become Jill Biden’s chief of staff. He was a member of nearly every council, advisory board, group or institute that dealt with foreign affairs, and had served as co-head of the transition team for the State Department. His friendship with Emanuel went back several decades.
Donilon had been preparing all his life for a top national security post. He had helped Democratic presidential candidates going back to Jimmy Carter. He had advised Obama in the presidential debates and wanted to be deputy secretary of state. But Donilon had served seven years as in-house counsel to Fannie Mae, the federally chartered mortgage giant that had nearly gone bust in the financial crisis, costing taxpayers billions of dollars. The Fannie Mae connection was toxic, and Donilon might have serious problems in a Senate confirmation.
Emanuel lowered the hammer. First he had suggested and now he was almost insisting. He wanted Donilon in the White House.
Jones did not know Donilon but agreed to interview him. They hit it off. Clearly a Democratic Party insider with what appeared to be sterling national security credentials could be a help, since Jones didn’t know the political insiders. He quickly decided to pick Donilon, and could almost hear the collective sigh of relief from Obama’s political and transition teams.
On Wednesday, November 26, President Bush convened one of his last National Security Council meetings. It was to consider a highly classified report on the Afghanistan War. The report was the work of Army Lieutenant General Douglas Lute, the “war czar” Bush had appointed the year before as the top NSC deputy for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Lute, 56, lived under the public radar as much as General David Petraeus lived in it. The West Point class of 1975 graduate—a year after Petraeus—had also earned a Harvard master’s degree in public administration. It might be easy to assume he was another “Bush general,” but Lute had a streak of daring independence. His favorite military book was Thucydides’ history of the fifth-century B.C. Peloponnesian War between Sparta and Athens. The book taught him about the relationship between the military and civil society, two cultures he now bridged at the NSC. He remained a three-star general, yet by serving in the White House he was no longer among the Army brotherhood.
Lute personally briefed Bush about both wars each morning at 7 A.M. Because Bush was sometimes early, Lute made sure to be outside the Oval Office at 6:45. That summer, Bush had ordered Lute to do an Afghanistan strategy review. Go deep, go wide, Bush had said, get to the bottom of where we are after seven years. Lute wasn’t entirely sure whether he was on a fact-finding or a rescue mission. Perhaps both. He wanted to see the entire horizon and the ground truth in a way that he couldn’t from a Washington office. Lute traveled with a high-powered team from the departments of State and Defense and the CIA.
In his 33-year Army career, Lute had punched some of the key command and operational tickets overseas and on the Joint Staff. But nothing was quite like being at the center of the turmoil in the White House, where he acted as unofficial information link with cabinet officers, generals, admirals, diplomats and intelligence officers in two wars. He kept in touch with an exhaustive list of officials through secure telephone calls and one-to-one conferences on a Tandberg video phone.
Lute had arrived in Afghanistan from Iraq, where the United States had 150,000 troops, a 1,000-person embassy that coordinated with the military, and a foreign assistance program of several billion dollars a year. In Iraq, Prime Minister Maliki had shown surprising leadership skills, while the Iraqi security force was becoming stronger and better. The United States had stared failure in the eye in Iraq, and, for the moment, failure had blinked. Overall, the strategy that accompanied the 2007 troop surge seemed to be working as planned.
The contrast with Afghanistan was stark. Afghanistan had about 38,000 U.S. troops, plus 29,000 from NATO and other allies. They were thinly dispersed across the country, so it was impossible for the troops to have a big impact. The U.S. embassy was not working well with the military. Economic development for most Afghans was minimal. Afghan President Hamid Karzai proved a growing disappointment, while the Afghan security force remained woefully inadequate. Put simply, all the hopeful signs in Iraq were missing in Afghanistan.
Lute also found that while Taliban insurgents had a clear presence in the southern Afghan provinces along the Pakistani border, the U.S. hadn’t dedicated the resources to stop them. Over the summer, attacks and security incidents had doubled to about 200 a month in the south alone. The insurgents’ capability was deemed “strong, effective” or “demonstrated” in nearly half the country, predominantly in southern Afghanistan, according to intelligence reports.
As Lute examined the situation there, he found about 10 distinct but overlapping wars in progress. First, there was the conventional war run by a Canadian general in charge of the region for NATO. Second, the CIA was conducting its own covert paramilitary war. The Green Berets and the Joint Special Operations Command each had their own wars, tracking down high-value targets. The training and equipment command ran its own operations. The Afghan National Army, the Afghan National Police and the Afghan National Directorate for Security, the country’s CIA-sponsored intelligence agency, were also fighting separate wars.
Lute and his team visited the southern province of Kandahar, which had 2 million people in its namesake city and the surrounding area and was the cradle for the Taliban movement, which had governed the country from 1996 to 2001. The province and the city appeared to be slipping back into Taliban control.
By placing different icons on a map of the regional command that included Kandahar, he could see how the ten different wars were sprinkled around. They looked like the scribbles of a child. Nobody was in charge. There was no unity of effort or command.
Afghanistan was the poor man’s war, Lute concluded. But as the czar of both wars knew, the only way to get more resources and capabilities would be to remove them from Iraq. This was a zero-sum game. There were no more troops, the military was stretched to the brink.
Upon returning to Washington, Lute set up a series of 19 in-depth meetings over six weeks with all the interagency representatives—State, Defense, CIA—in Room 445 of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House. In all, these meetings took some 45 hours, grinding down to the finest detail. They grilled Afghan ministers, the military commanders and the CIA people about what was really going on.
Lute and his team summarized their findings in a report of about 25 pages, keeping it short so it would be easy to read.
“I know this is kind of bad timing, but here it is,” Lute said when he delivered the review to President Bush earlier in November. He was tossing a rock into a quiet pond. There would be ripples.
“I’d rather not be reading this,” Bush said, “but I appreciate your candor. You’re doing what I asked you to do.” Bush took the review with him for the weekend.
“We’re not losing, but we’re not winning, and that’s not good enough,” was one of the opening lines in the review. The effort was barely enough to keep from losing, but that was all.
The report identified Pakistan as a much more strategically troubling problem than Afghanistan, because the sanctuaries there for al Qaeda and other affiliate groups were more of a threat to the United States.
The review concluded that the U.S. couldn’t prevail in Afghanistan unless it resolved three large problems. First, governance had to be improved and corruption curtailed. Bribes and embezzlement were rampant. There were, for example, about 42 steps to get an Afghan driver’s license, nearly all an opportunity for someone to pocket a bribe. Second, the opium trade was out of control. It fueled corruption and partially financed the Taliban insurgency. And third, the Pakistani safe havens had to be reduced and eventually eliminated. If the United States didn’t accomplish these three things, it could never claim to be done in Afghanistan.
With Pakistan, the review said the U.S. should expand the scope of its aid beyond that country’s military and try to stabilize its economy. If Pakistan’s $168 billion economy collapsed, the chaos in the tribal areas would then spread to the country’s more cosmopolitan cities.
Bush’s secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, was unhappy with the review. After four years as national security adviser and then three and a half as secretary of state, she treated this as a legacy issue, kind of a last semester report card. She pushed back on the notion that Pakistan was more important than Afghanistan. She thought they were doing better than the disorder and weakness suggested in the review, arguing that they were doing more than just hanging on.
On Wednesday, November 26, Bush convened a National Security Council meeting to consider what should be done with the highly classified and critical document.
“We’re not going to release this publicly,” Bush said. “Look, I’m in my last couple of months. A public release will just make people scratch their heads.” Release could also prejudice the incoming administration from at least taking the review under consideration, he said. What was left unsaid was that the review could also be embarrassing because it exposed the extent to which the Afghanistan War had been neglected.
“I don’t want any public rollout,” Bush said. “There won’t be any rollout plan. The rollout plan will be up to the new administration coming in, because this is going to be their bailiwick now.”
Just as Bush was deciding not to release the damning Afghanistan War report, 10 gunmen were roaming the Indian city of Mumbai, effectively holding its 15 million people captive. The gunmen created a spectacle of chaos and violence on live television for about 60 hours. Terrorist theater had not been anything like this since the 9/11 attacks.
When the gunfire ended, the body count totaled 175, including six American citizens. The siege had been organized by a group called Lashkar-e-Taiba, which means the Army of the Pure and is commonly referred to by the acronym LeT. One of LeT’s primary goals is to overthrow India’s control of Kashmir, a Muslim-majority province that borders Pakistan. Its broader mission involves founding an Islamic nation across South Asia. Intelligence showed that ties between LeT and al Qaeda were increasing.
The open secret is that LeT was created and continues to be funded and protected by the Pakistani ISI. The intelligence branch of the Pakistani military uses LeT to inflict pain and hardship on India, according to U.S. intelligence. These gunmen had, quite possibly, committed an act of war.
President Bush called his national security team into the Oval Office as Mumbai sorted through the blood and rubble.
You guys get planning and do what you have to do to prevent a war between Pakistan and India, Bush told his aides. The last thing we need right now is a war between two nuclear-power states.
But what worried the president was not just tensions between India and Pakistan. Americans had been killed in an act of terrorism. In his nationally televised address on the evening of 9/11, Bush had declared what became known as the Bush Doctrine: “We will make no distinction between those who planned these acts and those who harbor them.” The doctrine was the basis for launching the war in Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban, which had harbored and given sanctuary to al Qaeda.
Bush was extremely proud of the hard-line doctrine and told me in an interview the doctrine meant, “We’re going to root out terror.” A foundation of his presidency was this zero tolerance for terrorists and their enablers.
The Mumbai attacks presented him with something of the same problem—hard-core LeT terrorists and their enablers, the Pakistani intelligence service. An upset Bush asked his aides about contingency plans for dealing with Pakistan.
This is like 9/11, he said.
The United States military did not have “war” plans for an invasion of Pakistan. Instead, it had and continues to have one of the most sensitive and secret of all military contingencies, what military officials call a “retribution” plan in the event of another 9/11-like attack on the U.S. by terrorists based in Pakistan. Under this plan, the U.S. would bomb or attack every known al Qaeda compound or training camp in the U.S. intelligence database. Some locations might be outdated, but there would be no concern, under the plan, for who might be living there now. The retribution plan called for a brutal, punishing attack on at least 150 or more associated camps.
Within 48 hours of the Mumbai attack, CIA Director Hayden contacted Pakistan’s ambassador to the U.S., Husain Haqqani. CIA intelligence showed no direct ISI link, Hayden told him. These are former people who are no longer employees of the Pakistani government.*
Bush informed the Indians himself. He called Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, with whom he had a strong personal relationship. My intelligence shows that the new Pakistani government is not involved, Bush said.
It looked like a war had been averted for the moment.
In a call to Lieutenant General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, the head of the Pakistani ISI, Hayden said, “We’ve got to get to the bottom of this. This is a big deal.” He urged Pasha to come clean and disclose all. On the day after Christmas, Pasha flew to the United States, where he briefed Hayden at CIA headquarters.
Pasha admitted that the planners of the Mumbai attacks—at least two retired Pakistani army officers—had ISI links, but this had not been an authorized ISI operation. It was rogue.
“There may have been people associated with my organization who were associated with this,” Pasha said. “That’s different from authority, direction and control.”
He provided details that fit with the picture developed by U.S. intelligence. Hayden told Bush he was convinced it was not an official Pakistani-sponsored attack, but it highlighted the problem of the sanctuaries in Pakistan. The ease of the planning and execution, the low cost, and the alarming sophistication of the communications system that LeT had used were all troubling. The attackers relied on an easily obtainable global positioning system device, Google Earth maps, and commercially available encryption devices and remote control triggers.
They spoke with handlers back in Pakistan with satellite phones that went through a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone service in New Jersey, making the calls difficult, if not impossible, to trace and routed them in a way that also concealed the locations of those talking.
The FBI was horrified by the low-cost, high-tech operation that had paralyzed Mumbai. American cities were just as vulnerable. A senior FBI official responsible for thwarting similar attacks in the United States said, “Mumbai changed everything.”
* The CIA later received reliable intelligence that the ISI was directly involved in the training for Mumbai.