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During the three months after the Riedel review, General Lute was trying to shape the 3 Ds—“disrupt, dismantle and defeat”—into an actual policy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. With Riedel returned to his think tank, Lute was getting back into the game. But working from his catacomb West Wing basement office, he still felt on the outs.

Members of his shop privately described the Obama administration in Afghan terms. “Tribes” populated the presidency, reflecting its divisions. The Hillary tribe lived at the State Department. The Chicago tribe occupied Axelrod’s and Emanuel’s offices. The campaign tribe at the NSC—led by chief of staff Mark Lippert and strategic communications director Denis McDonough, both former Obama campaign aides—seemed to flaunt their personal relationships with the president and often circumvented Jones as the national security adviser. Lute’s team dubbed them the “insurgency.”

Lute had been shut out by Lippert. It was as though Lippert suspected Lute of manning a Pentagon outpost deep inside the White House. When Obama visited Iraq in April, Lippert kept Lute in the dark, practically running the trip himself from his BlackBerry.

Lute had lost Iraq from his job portfolio. The three-star Army general was no longer the war czar, having been demoted from deputy national security adviser to coordinator for Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Lute was now drafting the Strategic Implementation Plan (SIP) for executing the Riedel review. This was a chance to reassert himself in the NSC system. Lute felt the plan should correct a flaw in the Riedel review. It had been rushed, in his opinion, a crash project that failed to discuss the “means” to carry out the new Afghanistan and Pakistan strategy. What would it cost in dollars? How many troops might really be needed? How much civilian support was required to improve governance and reduce corruption? What were the timelines? The review didn’t have answers. The SIP would.

By mid-July, Lute was reading the final pieces of feedback about the 40-page draft of the SIP. Gates’s memo concerned him. The mission in Afghanistan could not be to “disrupt” the Taliban, Gates wrote. This needs to be “defeat.”

Lute instantly grasped the magnitude of Gates’s recommendation, which had been pushed by the Pentagon for months and exhibited the strong influence of Petraeus and his COINistas, the true believers in counterinsurgency. This single verb reinterpreted the whole Riedel review, broadening the narrow intention of defeating al Qaeda to include the Afghan Taliban. The review had instructed the military to conduct a comprehensive, “fully resourced” counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, but it didn’t state the purpose or effects of that campaign. Was it to disrupt, dismantle or defeat the Taliban?

Defeating the Taliban would take more troops, money and time than disrupting would. “Defeat” suggested an unconditional surrender—total capitulation, victory, winning in the fullest sense of the word, utterly destroying the Taliban.

Lute thought this upped the ante. He walked upstairs to see Jones.

“I want to highlight this to you, because it is different and it’s significant,” he said, explaining Gates’s last-minute suggestion. “Of the potential action verbs here, they’re boxing, they’re designing for themselves the largest mission, the most expansive mission, to defeat the Taliban.”

That’s not a big deal, said Jones. Verb choice didn’t register with him as a first-order concern. Jones was eager to get the implementation plan out, because McChrystal was in the middle of his own review and the SIP was supposed to be his guiding light. As Jones saw it, “defeat” would get the military to take full ownership of the strategy.

Lute next went to Donilon, the deputy national security adviser, who had a more sensitive political ear than Jones.

When Donilon heard it was Gates making the bid, he too said he was okay with the change.

The classified SIP was signed by Jones and sent to the Pentagon on July 17. Paragraph 3A of the SIP began “Defeat the extremist insurgency …”

Lute spoke by Tandberg, the videoconference phone, with Petraeus every Tuesday and with McChrystal every Friday. Adding “defeat” pleased both generals. It precisely defined the mission. Petraeus had never gotten anything this exact for Iraq.

But back in Lute’s office, one of the Afghanistan directors—one of his own tribe—noted that for a goal this extravagant they should have found an acronym that spelled out GULP instead of SIP.

There was no speech, press briefing, White House statement, news leak or public discussion of this dramatic expansion of the war aims, a classic example of mission creep. The “defeat” mandate sat there as explicit guidance for McChrystal, who as the new commander was asking his own basic questions: What are my orders? And what do I need to carry out my orders?

Richard Holbrooke, the special representative, was pessimistic about the August 20 elections in Afghanistan.

“If there are 10 possible outcomes in Afghanistan,” he told the National Security Council over the summer, “nine of them are bad.” Holbrooke added, “They range from civil war to irregularities.”

But in public, Holbrooke downplayed his concerns, saying at a news conference that he wasn’t “unduly upset” by complaints about Afghan voter registration. He then compared the Afghan presidential race to the litigation-prone 2008 Minnesota Senate election, as if to say all political contests had their problems.

As soon as the Afghan polls closed on August 20, there were widespread reports of fraud. Many State Department and U.N. officials in Kandahar had not left their quarters to visit polling centers out of security concerns. Insurgent attacks did not stop the national election, but some international monitors noted that many of the troops added by Obama in February, ostensibly for election security, had deployed to Helmand province, where a sliver of voters lived. The Afghan National Police barred one group of monitors from checking the tallies in Kandahar, the city controlled by Karzai’s half-brother, Ahmed Wali. A major backer of one failed presidential candidate lamented to a monitor, “The only reaction to this election is to buy an automatic rifle and prepare for war.”

The day after the election, August 21, Holbrooke and Ambassador Eikenberry went to see Karzai in Kabul. The first three hours went fine, until they turned to the future and what life might be like for Karzai if he was reelected.

“Well, I have been reelected,” Karzai said.

Eikenberry and Holbrooke noted that all the votes had not yet been counted.

It was settled, Karzai said, it was over.

“Mr. President,” Holbrooke said, “what would you do if there was a runoff?” Under the Afghan constitution, if no one received at least 50 percent of the vote, the top two candidates would have to stand in another election.

“That’s not possible,” Karzai said, his mood darkening. “I know what the people chose. No one wants a runoff. No one. And no one believes in a runoff. No one.”

“Mr. President,” Holbrooke said, “we’re not saying we want it. I just want to know, if no one gets to 50 percent, will you be okay with that? Will you do a runoff?”

“It is not possible,” Karzai said.

After the meeting, Karzai called the State Department operations center and said he wanted to talk to Secretary of State Clinton or President Obama.

The president, who was vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard, got word of this and reached Eikenberry by secure phone.

“Mr. President,” Eikenberry said, “we had this meeting. Karzai’s trying to go around us. Karzai thinks we’re supporting a runoff. We’re not.” He explained what had happened, how Karzai had become defensive, insisting a runoff was impossible. “I recommend strongly you not take the call.”

Obama agreed. He would stay out of it. Eikenberry and Holbrooke should continue to try to handle Karzai.

Two days later, Eikenberry, Holbrooke and General McChrystal had dinner with Karzai.

“Mr. President,” Eikenberry said, “you’re not going to talk to the president or the secretary of state. Just not going to. I recommended against it, and here’s why. You misunderstood our position. We are not supporting a runoff.” The United States was supporting the Afghan constitutional process—whether there is a first-round victory or a runoff. “And that’s our position.”

The intelligence showed that Karzai was increasingly delusional and paranoid. Even Karzai’s own people were telling that to Eiken-berry and Holbrooke.

“You guys are opposing me,” Karzai answered. “It’s a British-American plot.”

In August, I asked my assistant Josh Boak, a former Chicago Tribune reporter, to conduct background interviews with members of General McChrystal’s strategy review team who had recently returned from Afghanistan. We wanted to find out what was happening on the ground. How was the war going? What was working? What wasn’t?

The idea behind the team had come in part from Petraeus’s 2007 playbook for Iraq. Bring Ph.D. and other think tank experts into a war zone to assess the situation, just as a troubled corporation might hire outside consultants. Part of the strategy was public relations. As scholars at the Brookings Institution, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Council on Foreign Relations, the RAND Corporation and elsewhere, these experts regularly churn out books, position papers and op-ed pieces that could help explain any changes in strategy to the public. And once the team’s weeks-long stint in Afghanistan ended, individual members could continue to advise the war effort as “Afghan Hands.” The 14-person team also included European researchers, military officers and a Pentagon representative.

It was an experienced group of analysts who were willing to challenge the assumptions of high-ranking generals. Josh interviewed half a dozen of them on background to get a sense of what they were seeing on the ground and what they were advising McChrystal (see chapter notes for a list of team members).

McChrystal’s staff had hastily organized the review team in June. One member admitted that signing on was an embarrassing confession to the rest of Washington—a city that values being overly busy—of having a blank calendar. Others frantically rearranged their summer schedules.

Many had been to Afghanistan before, yet few felt they had seen the country as it truly was. Their visits were largely confined to military bases, military transports and military PowerPoint slides.

In a windowless conference room at his headquarters in Kabul on June 25, McChrystal gave the team three guiding questions for their review: Is the mission achievable; if so, what needs to be changed to accomplish the mission; and are more resources necessary to complete the mission?

McChrystal told the group to be pragmatic and focus on things that would actually work. He came across as open-minded, one team member said. The four-star general had previously commanded U.S. Special Forces, leading missions into Afghanistan and Iraq that wiped out terrorists and insurgents. He seemed to have arrived at a counterinsurgency strategy by trial and error, after learning firsthand that America could not simply kill its way out of the war.

The review team traveled across Afghanistan on a fixed-wing aircraft over the next several days, visiting cities and bases in the southern and eastern regional commands.

They found that the military understood relatively little about the Afghan people. It could not measure how the Taliban’s propaganda campaign of fear and intimidation affected the population. McChrystal could order a counterinsurgency strategy, but many of the soldiers from the 42-nation coalition lived on bases designed to isolate them from average Afghans. The intelligence collection was in shambles. “We could already be losing Kandahar,” one team member said, “but we don’t know it because we don’t have enough contact with the population to know what the hell is going on in the city.”

A counterinsurgency plan, in theory, also involved deploying civilian specialists, who as a whole did not exist, at least not in numbers that could be sent to Afghanistan. The specialists had to be passably fluent in Afghan languages such as Dari and Pashto, or discover a reservoir of native translators that billions of dollars and thousands of soldiers had yet to divine. It required a total immersion in Afghan society and tribes. “The kind of COIN doctrine that they’re talking about requires a level of local knowledge that I don’t have about my hometown,” one member said.

The team discovered that some 70 percent of the intelligence requirements were enemy-centric, and some experts said that they had to widen the aperture to focus on the people they wanted to protect. Who are they? Who are their leaders? What do they really want? Security? Jobs? To be left alone?

One senior member said, “What kind of message does it send to the Afghans when Americans are not allowed to travel on foot through an allegedly safe Kabul and the Italians cannot walk on foot through Herat?”

On top of all that, the war was increasingly Americanized. NATO had grown into a fig leaf that gave the cover of an international effort. A team member asked the Dutch commander in the south if the Americans might ask his troops to stay past their scheduled 2010 withdrawal date. “When we told them we were leaving, they said, ‘Thank you for your service,’” Dutch Major General Mart de Kruif recalled, as if their departure was welcome.

Some on the review team figured the war could be fully Americanized in a year or two. The last thing U.S. generals wanted was more NATO forces wandering through Afghanistan, requesting air support to attack suspicious-looking Afghans. The Americans would prefer that the NATO allies provided money and trainers for the Afghan security forces.

At the first interim progress review on July 4, the team told McChrystal nothing but bad news. We could run the finest counterinsurgency campaign in world history and still fail because of the weak and corrupt Afghan government, several members concluded.

McChrystal looked as if he’d been hit by a train. “Thanks so much for that,” he said.

The general claimed that the U.S. could beat the Taliban with one hand tied behind its back. But the enemy was not the problem, protecting the people was. That’s why several team members stressed the importance of intelligence about the population.

The U.S. and its allies must not accidentally kill civilians, even when air strikes were appropriate under the rules of engagement, McChrystal said. A smart tactical move that killed an innocent civilian would be a strategic mistake.

“You may be technically right and long-term stupid,” McChrystal said.

The next day, the team flew to Herat, the western regional command overseen by the Italian army. From past visits, some on the team knew that the restaurant on base served an amazing lobster risotto. The Italians had sent an Afghan chef to culinary school back in their home country and were flying in the lobsters. The Italians might have been in Afghanistan, but against the principles of counterinsurgency they refused to be of Afghanistan.

The Italian commanding general, Rosario Castellano, an ebullient, muscled paratrooper, told the team his thoughts about McChrystal’s inquisitive nature.

“This McChrystal,” Castellano said, “he asks these questions. He asks me my name. I say Rosario Castellano. This McChrystal, he asks me, ‘Why?’” The new commander questioned everything.

But for the most part, the team seldom got satisfactory answers to its questions. When they asked Castellano how he would use additional troops, the Italian general struggled for 10 minutes and then replied, “This is a silly question.”

NATO allies could help train and teach the Afghan police and army, but the impression was that many of the European armies stationed in Afghanistan had not expected to be in combat.

It became painfully obvious how removed the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), McChrystal’s command, was from Afghans the next day in the northern region. Stuck in armored vehicles, the team could only catch periscope-like glimpses of Mazar-i-Sharif’s streets through four inches of bulletproof glass and a two-inch-by-four-inch window.

The team was similarly sheltered in Kabul. They stayed in a contractors’ compound guarded by Nepalese Gurkhas. The British transported them in two armored Toyota Land Cruisers. Under orders of the British government, they wore body armor, even for the 15-minute ride to ISAF headquarters. McChrystal, despite being the most powerful man in Afghanistan, did not have the authority to tell the British sergeant in charge of the convoy that team members didn’t have to put on body armor. Only the British did. It was a sovereignty issue.

The Toyotas raced around Kabul. The drivers honked their horns rather than step on the brakes, madly changing lanes, swerving through traffic and accelerating at every opportunity. The theory was that erratic driving reduced the chances of a roadside attack. Afghans who didn’t jump out of the way could be plowed down. After one of the SUVs ran a bicyclist off the road, Andrew Exum, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security and a former U.S. Army Ranger, asked the driver, “What are you doing, man?”

“You can’t be too careful. Could’ve been a bomb, sir,” was the response. But this kind of commute left Afghans on the street visibly angry. The team could see how an emphasis on force protection was causing the coalition to lose the Afghan people. Exum wrote a onepager for McChrystal about aggressive driving and armored vehicles entitled “Touring Afghanistan by Submarine.”

McChrystal soon became the chief traffic cop and issued a written directive to all his troops in the theater “to drive in ways that respect the safety and well-being of the Afghan people.”

The commanding general seemed to stay calm despite the daily frustrations. If a subordinate officer flubbed briefings at morning updates, he refused to yell as other generals might have. McChrystal did not consider a drop or increase in Taliban attacks to be a reliable measure of progress. During one conversation about a troublesome province, the review team’s well-respected coordinator, Army Colonel Chris Kolenda, noted, “You know, sir, violence dropped 90 percent when my battalion was there.”

“Chris, violence dropped 90 percent when General Lee surrendered at Appomattox,” McChrystal responded.

One outspoken member of the team believed McChrystal should not base his strategy on “what ifs” and “if onlys” as the U.S. had appeared to be doing. What if we increase Afghan forces? If only we can reform Karzai … If only we can improve agriculture … What if we secure the ring road around the country?

Such an approach was not reality-based. “It was hope-based, which is to say, in wartime, illusion-based,” a team member explained to Josh, my assistant.

Some of the team encouraged McChrystal to bargain with the White House, to come in high. But McChrystal was not interested in that. He was prepared to say, as a team member outlined it, “This is what I need. If you don’t give it to me, here are the risks. And if you don’t give it to me, I won’t resign, but I might not win.”

The Pentagon received McChrystal’s classified assessment of the Afghanistan War on Monday, August 31. Secretary of Defense Gates was responsible for giving a copy to the president. The document was so sensitive that even members of the review team who had helped draft parts of it and held security clearances could not obtain a copy.

Senior Pentagon and administration officials who were familiar with the substance of the report provided a basic overview for newspaper articles printed the next day. The Washington Post called the report “a sobering assessment” that is “expected to pave the way for a request for more American troops.” The New York Times warned, “An expanded American footprint would also increase Mr. Obama’s entanglement with an Afghan government widely viewed as corrupt and illegitimate.” But the meaning of the report was interpreted and sifted for journalists by their sources. The actual assessment remained confidential, deepening the mystery as to whether the characterizations were fully accurate. What did it actually say?

Mullen revered McChrystal, and had made him director of the Joint Staff—his previous assignment—in part so that the Senate confirmation could wipe away the role McChrystal had played in the cover-up of the 2004 friendly-fire death in Afghanistan of Corporal Pat Tillman, who had left the NFL to be an Army Ranger. McChrystal had signed off on the Silver Star recommendation that suggested Tillman had been killed by the enemy, a choice he regretted.

The issue resurfaced during McChrystal’s confirmation hearings for ISAF. McChrystal assured the Senate Armed Services Committee that he had recommended the Silver Star with the best of intentions, but he had been too hasty in the investigative process. “What we have learned since is, it is better to take your time, make sure you get everything right with the award, and not rush it,” he told the committee.

When McChrystal’s assessment came in, Mullen embraced it. “Are you worried that you are too invested in McChrystal?” asked Navy Captain John Kirby, Mullen’s special assistant for public affairs. Did it appear that the chairman was too pro-McChrystal? “Are you losing your objectivity?” pressed Kirby, who had been with Mullen for the last 10 years. His job was to make sure some of the tough questions got addressed before they were raised in the media. “Suppose you’re wrong, and he fails?”

“Then,” Mullen replied, “I’ve got to leave because I put him there.”

•   •   •

In August, members of the Senate Armed Services Committee—Senators McCain, Lindsey Graham, Joseph Lieberman and Susan Collins—went for the standard congressional recess tour of the Afghanistan war zone.

McChrystal told them that President Obama wanted to choose from options A, B and C. And that’s what he would get, the general explained.

“There’s only one option the president should consider,” McCain said, “and that’s the winning option.” This business of multiple options was crap. “Don’t water this down. Stand your ground. You go into the president, just tell him, ‘Here’s how you win.’”

No, McChrystal said, he would provide options.

“You’re getting political pressure,” McCain said. “They are putting you under political pressure?”

“No,” McChrystal said. “I can say what I want.”

But McCain would not hear of it. He smelled political pressure coming from the White House.

McChrystal insisted that wasn’t so. He walked the senators through how he could use six or seven brigades more, explaining where and how he might deploy them.

Graham was piecing the puzzle together. It was clear that McChrystal was coming in with an assessment that was grim and he was asking for substantially more troops—seven brigades meant tens of thousands of troops, depending on how the enablers were counted.

Graham stayed behind for about 10 days to serve his reserve time as Colonel Graham, though everyone knew his day job. McChrystal briefed him some more, as did the generals with the 82nd Airborne in Regional Command West and the Marines in the south. The briefings troubled Graham. He heard al Qaeda mentioned only once, causing him afterward to write a strong memo and talk with Petraeus and McChrystal.

Their messaging strategy was a disaster, Graham said. “America is worried about al Qaeda attacking,” but their briefings were all about the insurgent Taliban. “Americans understand that Taliban are bad guys, but what drives the American psyche more than anything is, are we about to let the country that attacked us once attack us twice? And your briefings have absolutely no emphasis on al Qaeda. This is a huge mistake.”

The briefings soon changed. Al Qaeda became part of the regular message.

McChrystal passed word to Gates that he was going to need 40,000 more troops. Gates was stunned. He had been at the CIA in the late 1970s and the 1980s when the Soviets invaded and occupied Afghanistan with 110,000 troops. He was a Soviet specialist and noted that with the advantage of no restraints and no rules of engagement to protect innocent Afghans the Soviets had been unable to win. They had ruthlessly killed perhaps 1 million Afghans, driven millions more from the country and almost destroyed Afghanistan. How could adding more U.S. troops, essentially duplicating the Soviet numbers, get the job done? he asked McChrystal.

The general said his forces would protect the people and demonstrate they were in Afghanistan to help. The Petraeus model from Iraq could be applied to Afghanistan.

After long discussions, Gates found the argument very compelling. “I’ll get you as many troops as I can for as long as I can,” the secretary told McChrystal. “And you’ve got battle space over there, and I’ve got battle space over here.” He would have to fight in Washington to get the troops, but he made it clear he would support McChrystal’s request for 40,000.