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For six years both as Marine commandant and NATO commander, General Jones had gone to Afghanistan to make his own assessments. He suggested to the president that he go again, evaluate how the strategy was working and send a message to the generals on the ground to stop agitating for more troops. Jones wanted to get to General McChrystal early. “Generals always want more force,” he said.

Jones invited me to travel with him at the end of June for what would be a six-day trip to Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. I accepted.

Taliban and insurgent attacks in Afghanistan were escalating, reaching an all-time high of more than 400 attacks during one week in May. Though that did not rival the violence in Iraq, which had peaked at 1,600 attacks in one week two years earlier, it signaled an alarming trend.

Jones and a traveling party of about 40, including his staff and Secret Service protection, took off Sunday night, June 21, from Andrews Air Force Base in a giant C-17 cargo plane that can carry 160,000 pounds. The plane came equipped with about 100 standard airline seats and dozens of bunks. Jones occupied a security pod in the center of the cargo hold that contained a well-appointed office and several bunks.

During an hour-long conversation mid-flight, he laid out his theory of the war. First, Jones said, the United States could not lose the war or be seen as losing the war.

“If we’re not successful here,” Jones said, “you’ll have a staging base for global terrorism all over the world. People will say the terrorists won. And you’ll see expressions of these kinds of things in Africa, South America, you name it. Any developing country is going to say, this is the way we beat [the United States], and we’re going to have a bigger problem.” A setback or loss for the United States would be “a tremendous boost for jihadist extremists, fundamentalists all over the world” and provide “a global infusion of morale and energy, and these people don’t need much.”

Jones went on, using the kind of rhetoric that Obama had shied away from, “It’s certainly a clash of civilizations. It’s a clash of religions. It’s a clash of almost concepts of how to live.” The conflict is that deep, he said. “So I think if you don’t succeed in Afghanistan, you will be fighting in more places.

“Second, if we don’t succeed here, organizations like NATO, by association the European Union, and the United Nations might be relegated to the dustbin of history.”

Third, “I say, be careful you don’t over-Americanize the war. I know that we’re going to do a large part of it,” but it was essential to get active, increased participation by the other 41 nations, get their buy-in and make them feel they have ownership in the outcome.

Fourth, he said that there had been way too much emphasis on the military, almost an overmilitarization of the war. The key to leaving a somewhat stable Afghanistan in a reasonable time frame was improving governance and the rule of law, in order to reduce corruption. There also needed to be economic development and more participation by the Afghan security forces.

It sounded like a good case, but I wondered if everyone on the American side had the same understanding of our goals. What was meant by victory? For that matter, what constituted not losing? And when might that happen? Could there be a deadline? What was the role of protect-the-people counterinsurgency, the Petraeus strategy highlighted in the Riedel report but not embraced directly in President Obama’s speech?

The next day, Tuesday, June 23, I attended the last 15 minutes of Jones’s meeting with President Karzai. Sensitive intelligence reports on Karzai claimed he was erratic and even “delusional.” “Off his meds” was a common description, while high on “weed” was a description by others. Jones said that several months earlier President Obama had told Karzai that he must get his act together. Curtailing corruption had to be Karzai’s first goal. As I entered the spacious office inside the Arg-e-Shahi presidential palace, Karzai was exceedingly gracious and warm. He wore his signature lamb’s wool cap and mentioned right off his familiarity with my book Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981–1987, about Reagan’s CIA director, William J. Casey.

His interest in the CIA did not surprise me, given his brother’s ties to the agency.

I asked Karzai what he might do differently if he won a second term as president in the election, which was two months off.

“I would become a figure of unity,” he said, casting himself as a statesman. “I would not become a political player. I would not become a member of a party.

“I would bring the U.S. to the table on the peace process with the Taliban. President Obama announced this on March 27, and we haven’t seen much movement on this. In fact the United States is dragging their feet.”

Jones shook his head, as did the new U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, retired three-star Army General Karl Eikenberry.

They knew the Taliban currently felt it had the upper hand and would be in no mood to negotiate. But Karzai, as he often did, placed the blame on the Americans.

That night, we flew into the heart of the Taliban insurgency in Helmand province, southern Afghanistan. Here was the war without the filter of a Situation Room briefing. The cool evening air hit my face as the plane’s rear loading ramp was lowered. Jeeps, trucks and buses wheeled around the airfield. Flashing lights pierced the darkness to a dizzying effect. The noise and clamor of it all felt surreal, yet the manic scene seemed to unfold in slow motion. All that was missing was the haunting and elegiac theme music from Oliver Stone’s movie Platoon, Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings. We boarded a bus to take us from the airfield to Camp Leatherneck. The moment was exhilarating and frightening.

Helmand is the largest of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces, but is sparsely populated and accounts for about half of the country’s poppy harvest. Locals call the area the Desert of Death because of its scorching heat (up to 116 degrees) and an annual rainfall that averages less than four inches. A strong headwind can pick up the fine dustlike sand in a blast that is blinding and choking.

I was given luxury quarters in an air-conditioned tent with one of Jones’s senior staffers. In the middle of the night I awoke in desperate search for a washroom. With no mountains or high ground surrounding the camp, it is supposedly safe from sniper and mortar fire. I wrapped a towel around my waist. As far as I could see, the concrete T-wall shielding the base might be the only option. I stopped there first, but finally found a small washroom a football field away. A sign on the door said, “Commanding General and Master Sergeant Only.” I used it anyway, and padded back, anticipating a random shot into the camp, but there was none. I took a sleeping pill, but I would not call the next several hours restful as I lay with my eyes closed. My mind raced. What would it be like to spend a full year here? How do I show reverence for those who did? What were the real dangers? Suppose the commanding general caught me using his toilet? Did anyone understand this war? Why was 12 percent of the U.S. troop presence in an area with less than one percent of the population? What did protecting the population mean here?

During the night, Jones said he had read Gordon Goldstein’s book about the Vietnam War, Lessons in Disaster, and reached Lesson Three on page 97, “Politics Is the Enemy of Strategy.” Goldstein records how President Johnson’s focus on winning the 1964 election blotted out any urgency to reconsider the American strategy in Vietnam. “The preemptive concern: win, win, win the election, not the war,” recalled Johnson’s then national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy.

Some 9,000 Marines, which included forces that President Obama ordered into the war, had built Camp Leatherneck across a hardscrabble plain where there had been desert six months earlier. It is a sprawling encampment of small and large tent-style facilities, canopied warehouses and fenced-in storage areas in the middle of a desolate wilderness 370 miles from the capital of Kabul.

In the morning, the commander, Brigadier General Lawrence Nicholson, a compact and small-framed Marine, stood outside the tents with Jones and several others.

I joined them, and I will never forget what happened next.

“We lost a Marine last night,” Nicholson said with stoic regret.

There was a long silence.

Corporal Matthew Lembke, age 22, from Tualatin, Oregon, had both his legs blown off by an improvised explosive device (IED) while on patrol in Now Zad, a ghost town in Helmand that had been abandoned three years earlier. Taliban fighters, land mines and the howls of wild dogs had replaced the 10,000 to 35,000 people who once lived there. The British troops who were previously garrisoned at the site had summarized life in Now Zad for the U.S. Marines by spray-painting onto a wall: “Welcome to Hell.”

Lembke was assigned to a company of fewer than 300 that patrolled Now Zad. This was not counterinsurgency. There was no population to protect. It was an aimless stalemate in the town. I asked a number of Marines what had happened. A trusted senior civilian adviser to Nicholson said that not a single member of the Afghan National Army (ANA) had been with the Marine company. Without any Afghans, no one spoke the language, nor could anyone supply the “eyes and ears” for the patrol. “If we had several ANA in Now Zad, we might not have lost that Marine,” the civilian said.

General Nicholson echoed this thought to Jones. He said in the six months that he built Camp Leatherneck and brought in the 9,000 U.S. Marines not a single additional member of the Afghan forces was assigned to him. He said he needed “Afghanistan security forces—all flavors,” soldiers, police, border guards and other specialists.

Lembke was airlifted out of Afghanistan and later died at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland on July 10. I can only imagine the sense of danger and uncertainty that must have accompanied Lembke and the Marines trying to patrol a ghost town when the mission is to protect and live among people who weren’t there. What intelligence did they have about the danger? How many Taliban held the town? How deadly were the Taliban in Now Zad?

No one could answer these questions, which only led to additional questions. Had the military thought through its plan? Did they know what they were doing? This led to the hardest questions of all: What about Corporal Lembke’s sacrifice? What did it mean in terms of the overall war effort?

The Oregon governor honored Lembke by ordering the flags at public institutions to be flown at half-mast. Lembke was the 104th Oregonian to die in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.*

Later that morning, Nicholson led Jones into a makeshift air-conditioned command headquarters for a 30-minute briefing. Nicholson and his senior staff, 20 Marine colonels and lieutenant colonels, arrayed themselves around a table made of new unfinished plywood about the size of three Ping-Pong tables.

Nicholson said that he was fully committed to a protect-the-population counterinsurgency campaign in which “killing the enemy is secondary” and the death of one innocent Afghan could result in the loss of support from an entire village.

“We don’t have enough forces to go everywhere,” he said, and overall he was “a little light,” more than hinting that he could use more troops.

“At a table much like this,” Jones began, referring without irony to the polished wood table in the White House Situation Room, “the president’s principals met and agreed to recommend 17,000 more troops for Afghanistan.”

Obama approved that recommendation in February during the first full month of his presidency, Jones reminded them. The deployments included Nicholson’s Marines.

Soon after that, Jones said, the principals such as Clinton, Gates and Mullen told the president “oops,” we need an additional 4,000 to help train the Afghan National Army.

“They then said, ‘If you do all that, we think we can turn this around,’” Jones said, reminding the Marines in front of him how quickly the president approved and publicly announced the additional 4,000.

Now suppose you’re the president, Jones said, and the requests come into the White House for yet more troops? How do you think President Obama might look at this? Jones asked, casting his eyes around the colonels in their combat camouflage uniforms. How do you think he might feel?

This question was being asked by someone who was not only the president’s national security adviser but also a former Marine commandant.

It was an unusual question. Jones let it hang in the air-conditioned chill and bright fluorescent light. Nicholson and the colonels kept their poker faces, perhaps realizing that Jones was there to answer his own question. Sitting on the side, I thought I probably had never seen so many maintain expressionless stares for so long.

Well, Jones said, after all those additional troops, 17,000 plus 4,000 more, if there were more requests for forces now the president would quite likely have “a Whiskey Tango Foxtrot moment.” Everyone in the room caught the reference to the acronym WTF—which in the military and elsewhere means “What the fuck?”—the universal outburst of astonishment and anger.

Nicholson and his 20 colonels sat riveted. Jones had taken them inside the White House to offer a brief glimpse of the commander in chief’s perspective. Nearly all were veterans of Iraq and they seemed to blanch at the explicit message that this might be all the troops they were going to get.

It was easy to imagine the dismay that might be conveyed by a “What the fuck?” eruption from the quintessentially calm 47-year-old commander in chief, a man without military experience.

But in case the message was unclear, Jones said that Afghanistan was not Iraq. “We are not going to build that empire again,” he said flatly.

Jones met privately with McChrystal, delivering Whiskey Tango Foxtrot in a slightly less confrontational way for the commanding general.

“Put yourself in the president’s place,” Jones said. “What would you think if you heard all of this coming up in different—public, private, media—forums? This doesn’t make sense.”

The national security adviser felt the military had already had its opportunity to give its advice during the Riedel review. Not much had changed with regard to the intelligence since then.

McChrystal said Afghanistan was much worse than he had expected. His 60-day assessment would be highly critical. There are good reasons to be concerned, McChrystal warned, and if the situation is not reversed soon, it might be irreversible.

Jones asked politely if McChrystal could provide specific examples that backed up his statements.

McChrystal ran down a litany of problems.

“The number of Taliban in the country is higher than anything I thought,” McChrystal said. “There are 25,000.”

That figure intrigued Jones. When he had gone to Afghanistan in 2003 as NATO commander, the estimated size of the Taliban was 4,000. Jones concluded that the reason for the substantial growth was the 2006 treaty between Pakistan and its tribes, which cut out a large swath of Pakistan where new Taliban recruits could train without interference.

Graphs of insurgent attacks also reinforced what McChrystal was saying. The number of attacks was approaching 550 a week and had nearly doubled within the past month. IED incidents were also spiking. The roadside bombs were on a pace to kill 50 coalition troops a month, compared to just eight a month at the same point last year.

But Jones remained somewhat skeptical. He wondered if McChrystal was giving the initial response of any brand-new four-star who was flexing his muscles. Jones had anticipated that might be the case, so he simply wanted to impart to McChrystal what the landscape was like in Washington. It was unfriendly to generals asking for more troops.

The new strategy, Jones said repeatedly during the course of the trip, has three legs, each of which he said had to be dramatically improved: 1. Security; 2. Economic development and reconstruction; and 3. Governance by the Afghans under the rule of law.

There had been an imbalance with too much emphasis on the military, he said. Economic development and improved governance by the Afghans needed full attention.

“This will not be won by the military alone,” Jones said. “We tried that for six years.” He also said, “The piece of the strategy that has to work in the next year is economic development. If that is not done right, there are not enough troops in the world to succeed.” The plea for a focus on the long-range efforts to build the government and the economy seemed to be met with shrugs by the military.

Jones heard repeatedly the complaint that Afghanistan and particularly its leader, President Karzai, had not mobilized sufficiently for their own war.

He emphasized that it was a new era, and Obama would not automatically give the military commanders whatever force levels they requested—a frequent practice of former President Bush in the Iraq War.

But Jones said, “The president realizes it’s on the razor’s edge,” suggesting not only a difficult, dangerous time, but a situation that could cut either way. “And he’s worried that others don’t.”

•   •   •

It is 25 minutes by helicopter from Camp Leatherneck to Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand province, where Jones met with the leaders of a Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT), a unit of about 160 British, U.S., Afghan and other civilians and military officers attempting to rebuild the economy, improve security, and foster a responsive and effective government.

The PRT resembled a fortress. Before getting out of the helicopters we were advised to wear protective body armor. Most donned flak jackets and hustled toward the compound, ducking behind buildings to avoid sniper fire. We walked at the fastest clip possible without breaking into a full sprint.

In a meeting, the PRT leaders told Jones that there had been 58 IED attacks during the last week in the province. They stressed that the biggest problem was “Afghan capacity” because the Karzai government was not really committed.

“The only way we will make security work here is to have this gated community,” one of the British team leaders told Jones. “More Afghan National Security Force, army and police, is a lot more important than more U.S. troops. If we go into an area without Afghans of any sort, then all they think is here come the Russians again.” But the inherent contradiction was that the successful development of Afghan capacity “can only be delivered by the United States.”

Jones said President Obama wanted a strategy designed to reduce the U.S. involvement and commitment. The president didn’t think Afghanistan should only be an American war, but there had been a tendency to Americanize it. “We didn’t consult, we didn’t ask, we didn’t listen,” Jones said of the attitude toward other countries supplying troops. “We basically said, stand aside, we know how to do this. And we and the Brits will do this. The rest of you don’t even play. You French guys stay over there. The Germans, you won’t fight, so we don’t need you.” Several in the room laughed at the mention of the Germans. “So what we’ve tried to do is rebalance the relationships, make people feel like they are contributing, even a small amount, but to make them feel like they’re valued and respected. We all know who’s going to do the bulk of the work.”

Nonetheless, the British leader of the PRT said the key to progress in Helmand was provincial governor Gulab Mangal, who over the previous 15 months had moved on nearly all fronts to modernize, improve governance and reduce corruption.

The British had identified what they call “the golden 500”—government and other officials, beginning with Mangal, they wanted to stay in their positions in Helmand province.

Reliable information in the hands of the U.S. and British showed that President Karzai planned to replace Governor Mangal with a crony of questionable administrative and anti-corruption credentials. To ensure his reelection, one official said, Karzai was cutting deals with a number of unsavory Afghan politicians.

Jones promised to intervene personally with Karzai. As a first step, he called in about a dozen Afghan reporters and sat down on a couch outside the PRT headquarters next to Governor Mangal for a press conference. He praised Mangal, 52, a soft-spoken leader with charcoal-colored hair and a trimmed beard, and said, “I know of no place in Afghanistan that has more potential.”

We then flew to Islamabad and stayed two nights at the ambassador’s residence, a large and comfortable home. Anne Patterson, a 60-year-old career Foreign Service officer appointed in 2007 by Bush, was a favorite of Obama because, as acting ambassador to the United Nations in 2005, she had done an exceptional job hosting a visit by the then senator. A small, forthright woman, she gave a candid private assessment of the situation. “I worry that all of this is just going to blow up. Zardari doesn’t know anything about governing. He will never get out from being Mr. Benazir Bhutto, but he’s basically on our side.”

Jones met next afternoon with President Zardari, and I joined them for the last 15 minutes. Zardari sat between two photographs of his late wife—one of her campaigning, the other a pensive close-up. His black hair was pomaded to his scalp and his suit had the smart cut of an expensive tailor. He beamed with a wide smile that appeared whenever I asked troubling questions. Zardari acknowledged the influence of the Taliban in Pakistan and said, “It is a thin line to walk with the Taliban. We must walk in small steps.”

On relations with India, he took pride in what he deemed a significant liberalizing moment. “I’ve allowed Indian movies for the first time.”

I asked what had caused him over the past six months to view the Taliban as a lethal threat to Pakistan and its government. Zardari claimed this was not a recent transformation for him.

“I’ve been fighting terrorism for 30 years,” said Zardari, who had spent eight years in jail on charges of corruption and the alleged murder of his brother-in-law. “Khalid Sheik Mohammed [the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks] tried to assassinate my wife.”

Afterward, Jones and his staff debated whether they should worry more about Pakistan or Afghanistan. Several members of his staff said the chief problem was Pakistan—Zardari’s political vulnerability, the continuing dominance of the country’s military-intelligence complex, its nuclear weapons, the persistent presence of al Qaeda training camps in the ungoverned regions, and the possibility of a misstep with the CIA drone attacks that could dramatically shift the political calculus.

Jones said that the problem is Afghanistan. That’s where the U.S. troops were, approaching 68,000 total, and a presence of that size engaged in combat operations would always be the center of gravity. Afghanistan’s troubles were compounded by what he called “the Karzai problem,” adding, “He doesn’t get it, or he doesn’t want to get it.” He said that at best Karzai was “mayor of Kabul,” and the reach of the national government did not extend much farther than the capital, other than to promote, encourage and facilitate corruption.

“We haven’t been tough enough on him, given the sacrifice in lives that we are making,” Jones said.

Jones thought that there was another group that President Obama was not tough enough on—his senior White House political advisers, whom he saw as major obstacles to developing and deciding on a coherent policy. This group included Emanuel, Axelrod, press secretary Robert Gibbs, and the two former Senate operatives now placed in the NSC—Denis McDonough and Mark Lippert. He privately called them “the water bugs,” the “Politburo,” the “Mafia,” or the “campaign set.”

“There are too many senior aides around the president,” Jones said privately. “They’re like water bugs. They flit around. Rahm gets an idea at 10 A.M. and wants a briefing by 4 P.M., and I will say no” because the work can’t be done in a day. The water bugs did not understand war or foreign relations, Jones felt, and were too interested in measuring the short-term political impact of the president’s decisions in these areas.

He would invite them to strategy briefings on some of these matters but more often than not they didn’t show. When he talked with them, they would often invoke Obama, saying, “The president wants this, the president wants that.”

At one point, Jones had told Emanuel, “You have enough juice to say it on your own.” In the military, the number two to the commander is not supposed to use the boss as the cover for his orders. He is supposed to establish enough authority to issue orders on his own. But Emanuel and the others continued to invoke the president.

Worse for Jones, he often felt sidelined by Emanuel, who would regularly come to the national security adviser’s suite and see his deputy, Donilon. So Jones told Emanuel, “I’m the national security adviser. When you come down there, come see me.” It got better for a short time, but the practice of visiting only Donilon soon started up again. Jones hadn’t realized what a clique the White House was. He concluded that if he had understood that dynamic when he was picking a deputy, he never in a million years would have gone with Donilon.

Jones also was unsure about Gates. The defense secretary tended to hang back, figure out which way decisions were going, where everyone else, including the president, was leaning and then jump that way. So his comments seemed a studied calculation of the likely outcome. The trademark skepticism was often a cover to delay taking a stand.

At first Jones had had a positive impression of Secretary Clinton, but then there was the Zinni incident. Early in the administration, Clinton was looking for somebody to be the ambassador to Iraq.

“Why not Tony Zinni?” Jones proposed. Anthony Zinni was a retired four-star Marine general, like Jones, former Central Command commander (from 1997 to 2000), and later an outspoken critic of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Jones and Zinni were close friends.

Clinton thought it was a good idea, had an excellent interview with Zinni, and it looked like it was going to happen. Zinni thought he had been offered the job when she told her assistant, “Let’s get the paperwork moving.” Obama liked the idea and Biden called Zinni to congratulate him, but nothing was announced for several days, so Jones asked Clinton about the status.

“Oh,” she said, “we decided on Chris Hill,” a former Bush negotiator with North Korea.

“Has anyone told Tony Zinni?” asked Jones.

All he got was a blank look, so Jones called Zinni, who unloaded on his old friend, telling him, “Stick it where the sun don’t shine.” Jones mentioned the possibility of the ambassadorship to Saudi Arabia, and Zinni blew up even more.

Jones told the president how distressed he was. “We decided and it didn’t happen. It changed. No one called Zinni to tell him.” It appeared no one was in charge of the process or coordinating it. “It was just chaotic,” Jones said. “This has essentially destroyed an important friendship I had.”

But the real offense by the water bugs took place during the president’s first European trip in March. Jones was on the trip and asked to see the president. “My access was cut off,” he said. One of the water bugs said no. Jones couldn’t believe it. He was humiliated. Here they were in Europe and the national security adviser couldn’t talk to the president?

Jones complained to Emanuel and explained what had happened. He was offended at the personal slight. As a matter of process, it was malfeasance for someone to block the main foreign policy coordinator for the president from advising the president anytime, let alone when the president was abroad. Jones almost threatened to quit, but instead brought up the subject directly with the president.

“This has got to stop,” Jones said.

The president calmed him down and promised, “We’ll take care of it.”

The situation improved with everyone but one—Mark Lippert, his NSC chief of staff and someone so close to Obama that he was like a favored younger brother.

Jones was convinced that Lippert was trying to derail his role in the Obama administration. But the matter would have to wait while Jones built his case that Lippert was engaged in a massive campaign of leaking, regularly providing criticism and derogatory information to other NSC staffers and the media about Jones and his performance as national security adviser.

Back from Afghanistan, Jones reported to the president that the situation was puzzling. There was a disconnect between what they had been told for the past several months and what General McChrystal was now seeing.

“I wasn’t sure what was going on,” Jones said. “I wasn’t sure on the eve of one commander’s departure and another one coming in how things could be so catastrophically different.”

On the question of how many troops were needed, Jones told Obama, “The jury is still out on this.” It might not matter how many troops were added unless the other legs of the stool—economic development and Afghan governance—accompanied them, he said. Without those other elements, Afghanistan would simply gobble up additional troops.

A few days after returning from Afghanistan, I published a front-page story in The Washington Post on Wednesday, July 1. The news value of what had occurred was obvious. I was sure the military would not give up on requests for more troops, no matter what Jones had told the generals in Afghanistan.

Headlined, “Key in Afghanistan: Economy, Not Military: Preventing Another Iraq,” the article, datelined from Camp Leatherneck, said that Jones had told the U.S. military commanders on the ground that “the Obama administration wants to hold troop levels here flat for now and focus” on a strategy of economic development, improved governance and increased Afghan participation.

The second paragraph said, “The message seems designed to cap expectations that more troops might be coming, though the administration has not ruled out additional deployments in the future.” It reported in detail Jones’s warning that a request for more troops would likely give President Obama a “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” moment.

The sixth paragraph stated: “The question of the force level for Afghanistan, however, is not settled and will probably be hotly debated over the next year. One senior military officer said privately that the United States would have to deploy a force of more than 100,000 to execute the counterinsurgency strategy of holding areas and towns after clearing out the Taliban insurgents. That is at least 32,000 more than the 68,000 currently authorized.”

In the Oval Office that morning, the president told Jones, Axelrod and several others that it was the precise message he wanted to convey. As far as he was concerned, they had just started to implement the Riedel review and talk of more troops was premature.

At the Pentagon, the reaction was radically different.

“Jim,” Admiral Mullen told Jones in a phone call, “you just capped us.” By “cap,” Mullen meant that Jones had put a limit on how many troops the U.S. would send to Afghanistan.

“No, I didn’t,” Jones said.

“Bullshit,” said the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“I don’t think of it that way,” Jones said. “My problem with it, as I told you before, is that I think it’s not fair to the president to take the decision that he took in March, decide before you ever even got the 21,000 troops there that things are going so bad you need another 40,000 to 80,000.”

“That’s a cap,” Mullen said, unconvinced. The admiral had some sympathy for Jones, who he felt was trying to manage the political pressures that were coming not from the president but from Emanuel, Axelrod, Lippert and Donilon.

But Jones wanted to drive the point home, so that Mullen would stop pushing for more troops until McChrystal’s 60-day assessment was finished. “Stick with what you’ve got because the rest of it is just kind of innuendo and kind of loose talk.

“Mike,” he continued, “think very hard about your role in all of this. Because you’re on the record as having done certain things, recommending certain things. You got everything you wanted. Now you’re on the record of going around NATO and ginning up allies before the president’s even agreed on these others, whatever it is you’re doing. I’ll tell you as a friend, that’s a risky position to be in.”

Jones thought Mullen understood.

Afterward, Mullen called Petraeus.

“It’s a cap,” the chairman said.

When McChrystal called Mullen to inquire what the article and Jones’s warning meant, the chairman made it clear.

Oh, it was a cap, he said. Clearly, the president was sending them a message. “I get that,” Mullen said. “There’s no question about that.”

Mullen then gave an interview to Ann Scott Tyson of The Washington Post and claimed that it was not a cap. McChrystal had been told he had full latitude to make his assessment and say, “Here’s what I need,” he said. “There were no preconditions. He’s been told, ‘In this assessment, you come back and ask for what you need.’”

McChrystal spoke with General Lute at the NSC about the pressure on troop levels.

“Look, I haven’t even put pen to paper yet in terms of my assessment,” McChrystal said. He thought Jones “was on a traveling road show to go out and sort of sense this from the bottom up,” not to pass on a message from the White House.

“I don’t need the national security adviser coming out here and telling me what to do,” McChrystal said.

At his daily briefing, press secretary Gibbs basically backed up Jones. “I think there are several hundred years of evidence that military might alone is not likely to solve all of your problems in that country,” Gibbs said. “The onus is also going to have to be on the Afghans to improve their security situation.” He added, “But if we don’t get good governance and improvement in governance, if we don’t get an increase in development and a change in the economy, I think the president and I think General Jones would agree that no amount of troops are going to leave that country in a situation that is sustainable.”

Gates was upset. He told his staff that it was probably best to let him, as secretary of defense, handle these communications to the ground commanders through the military chain of command.

Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon spokesman, sent a stern e-mail to McDonough at the National Security Council that in effect said, Don’t do this, leave it to Gates.

It was evident that Whiskey Tango Foxtrot was never going to stop the Pentagon and the generals. Rather, WTF was a clarion call to plan, mobilize and launch a counteroffensive. A growing divide existed between the White House and the Pentagon just four months after the Riedel review, when the president had unveiled a new strategy. In a column for The Weekly Standard, conservative writer Bill Kristol suggested that Jones was in over his head and that Obama was on the path of a “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot presidency.”

* Five months later, December 4, 2009, about 1,000 U.S. Marines, British and Afghan troops swept into Now Zad—a tacit acknowledgment perhaps that back in June the U.S. command did not know the extent of the danger and problem in that village in the rugged valley. On the first day of the offensive into Now Zad, no U.S., British or Afghan deaths were reported, but several Taliban were killed.