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McChrystal finally had a chance to present his troop options to principals only—Obama was not present—at 10:30 A.M. on Thursday, October 8. His face, earnest and somber, appeared on one of the flat-panel monitors hanging on the Situation Room wall. It was 7 P.M. in Kabul.

His briefing contained 14 slides.

The general stuck to his main point: Conditions inside Afghanistan were much worse than he had anticipated and only a fully resourced counterinsurgency would remedy things.

Jones interjected testily that there were essential questions that had not yet been answered. The U.S. still had a long way to go on managing the Afghan-Pakistan border. He circled and starred in his notebook, “It will be impossible to implement ANY Afghan strategy that does not address the safe havens in Pakistan.”

What about the will of the Afghan security forces to fight? Jones asked. What about the will of the Afghan people? What about the potential for reforming local, regional and national governance? They were kidding themselves if they thought adding troops was the solution.

“The plan is not executable without change in governance—fundamental changes,” Jones said.

McChrystal listed his three options. The first called for 10,000– 11,000 troops, mainly for training the Afghan security forces. The middle one would add 40,000 troops for protecting the population, while the last one would double that to 85,000 for the same purpose.

Each option was illustrated on a map of Afghanistan filled with blue bubbles, or “inkblots,” over the areas where the troops would be stationed. The bubbles grew larger and more numerous as the numbers increased.

None of the blots spread along the border with Pakistan. It was blank space, open country for the Taliban insurgents. The missing bubbles underscored a fundamental weakness in the plan, Jones thought. There’s a mismatch between our core objectives and our understanding of the troop request as it currently exists, he wrote in his notebook.

And even with 85,000 more troops—apparently an overshot to make the 40,000 seem more appealing—the U.S. could only protect 60 percent of the population. A full counterinsurgency was impossible with these options. So how could McChrystal presume to “defeat” the Taliban?

The “defeat” goal had been nagging nearly everyone, including Holbrooke, who didn’t consider it necessary or achievable. He had chastised McChrystal about this the other day.

What did defeat mean? Holbrooke asked again.

It means degrade, McChrystal said, stopping the Taliban from taking over substantial parts of the country. This was a major tweak of the definition, which had previously been interpreted as destroying the Taliban, almost literally obliterating them.

So, Clinton asked, if the mission is reduced to degrade, can you do it with fewer troops?

“No, ma’am,” the general said. He was sticking to 40,000.

Obama awoke that next morning to learn that he had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The president called his foreign policy speech-writer Ben Rhodes, who was now the NSC director of strategic communications. Could Rhodes help fashion a few words?

The 32-year-old Rhodes called his lunch date to cancel. Before entering the world of politics, the native of Manhattan’s Upper East Side had aspired to write novels. He had published one short story, “The Goldfish Smiles, You Smile Back,” about an office worker who climbs the corporate ladder thanks to his exceptional note taking. “My notes are so impressive that they have taken on the form of ideas … I capture other people’s words in a manner that not only organizes them, but inserts a clarity and purpose that was not present in the original idea,” reads one passage in the story. Rhodes basically did a similar thing for the president, recording Obama’s thoughts and words before enhancing them with additional “clarity and purpose.”

Obama appeared at a podium by the Rose Garden at 10:30 A.M. His sentiments were grounded in hard realities, rather than the idealism of many other Nobel laureates.

“We have to confront the world as we know it today,” he said. “I am the commander in chief of a country that’s responsible for ending a war and working in another theater to confront a ruthless adversary that directly threatens the American people and our allies.”

It was a revealing turn of phrase. U.S. troops weren’t fighting in Afghanistan. They were “working” in a “theater.”

The full NSC session with the president was scheduled for 2:30 that afternoon. It was their fourth meeting. Petraeus had flown in from his hometown of Cornwall, New York, where a road had been named for him the day before.

The president opened the meeting by asking everyone to tell him what they thought should be done with the war.

As usual, Lavoy, the soft-spoken DNI expert, was up first. He had been gaining immense credibility with most in the room. Some even seemed to anoint him as the review’s oracle. Lavoy was very good, but others believed that no group charged with such immense responsibility should rely too heavily on one person, no matter how informed he might be, particularly when most of them knew relatively little about Pakistan.

Pakistan was obsessed with India, Lavoy reminded them again. The Indians have a $1 billion aid program in Afghanistan, for example, that the Pakistanis think pays for intelligence. Each year, a thousand Afghan agricultural students study in India. The Pakistanis say that means a thousand spies. According to the CIA, it probably only meant a few spies. The Pakistanis also thought the head of Afghan intelligence, Amrullah Saleh, who had been with the Northern Alliance, an ethnic Tajik pre-9/11 group that fought the Taliban, was an Indian agent.

There also was concern that India funded separatist movements in various regions of Pakistan, most notably among the natives of Baluchistan, the same desolate province where some of the Afghan Taliban were camped.

Lavoy said that the Pakistanis were accommodating the U.S. to a degree, but they had continuing reservations about American commitment. They know they’re indispensable to us and our effort in Afghanistan. Pakistan has changed its behavior because of U.S. counterterrorist actions and, more importantly, by actions of extremists against the Pakistani government. This has led to the political and popular support for Pakistan’s recent military operations in the tribal areas.

The Pakistanis, however, Lavoy said, see some risks to a larger U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan. Taliban fighters and refugees entering Pakistan help extremists in Pakistan justify their own attacks in the name of religion.

Afghanistan and Pakistan have contradictory interests, Lavoy continued reminding them. While Karzai wants increased U.S. and NATO presence, Pakistan would view a strong Afghan national government as aligned with their archenemy, India, thereby basically surrounding and isolating Pakistan. The Pakistanis, especially the army and the ISI, worry about having too many U.S. troops. Karzai worries about having too few.

Citing sensitive intelligence, he said, Pakistan was making a halfhearted effort against the insurgents, all the while allowing safe havens for al Qaeda. To make matters worse, the intelligence suggests that money alone won’t influence the Pakistanis to do more because they’re probably getting payments from other countries with competing interests, like Saudi Arabia and China.

I’ve been up at night reading the intelligence reports, Obama said at one point. On one early page, it said—as Lavoy had noted—that Pakistan was overwhelmed with concern that the United States would pull out of Afghanistan and the region as it had done before.

Much later, Obama said, the report warned that Pakistan dreaded having a large Afghan army on its border that might be in an alliance with India. One of the U.S. objectives is to build that army.

How do you explain the contradiction? Obama asked. What exactly was Pakistan worried about—too much or too little? “What am I to believe?”

Mr. President, they’re both true, Lavoy answered. That was the nature of Pakistan. Clinton, Holbrooke and Gates all said that they basically agreed with Lavoy. There was abundant evidence for both cases. Holbrooke later told others he saw the president playing a lawyer’s game. Any lawyer could spot a surface contradiction.

Next, McChrystal made a 30-minute, 14-slide presentation of his assessment and troop options that had been rehearsed the day before.

When he got to the slide stating the goal—to “defeat” the Taliban—there was now a little blue box off to the side of the chart. It read, by defeat, we mean that the Taliban no longer would be an effective threat to the Afghan government, that they could not succeed as an insurgency.

Reversing himself from his position at the rehearsal, McChrystal said that if the mission is modified, then the request for resources would be different. But he presented exactly the same options—10,000–11,000, 40,000 and 85,000.

McChrystal emphasized the importance of training the Afghans. The army and police should have a combined strength of 400,000 by 2013. The 400,000 target had originated during the Riedel review in March. The Afghan army currently had about 100,000 soldiers, while the police totaled about 80,000—a more than doubling would be required.

Ultimately, Afghanistan can only be stabilized by the Afghans, McChrystal said. Improved governing and dealing with corruption were also key.

His pitch for a counterinsurgency was textbook. The objective of a 400,000-man Afghan security force corresponded perfectly with the preferred counterinsurgency ratio of 40 to 50 people for each soldier or policeman. But some felt McChrystal diminished the quality of his presentation by using the charts, PowerPoint slides and maps as a crutch.

The question was put to McChrystal: If you’re doing a population-centric strategy, General, why the discrepancies between where the people live and where you have or want to commit troops? Not all of the bubbles overlapped with the population density map.

McChrystal said they had to have forces in the production centers and around the lines of communication. If they did not connect the population centers, they would be like Fort Apache—vulnerable islands out there by themselves.

Lute wondered why the president did not pursue things further by asking McChrystal to compare all the ink spots to the population density. And to ask questions like, Why do you have all this blue on this map? Why do I need to buy all this? Why are some areas along the Pakistani border not blue?

Biden began a cross-examination. “As I hear what you’re saying, as I read your report, you’re saying that we have about a year,” he said. “And that our success relies upon having a reliable, a strong partner in governance to make this work?”

Yes, sir, McChrystal said.

Biden then addressed Karl Eikenberry, the retired three-star general who was ambassador to Afghanistan and appearing by videoconference. He had graduated from West Point a year before Petraeus. Fluent in Chinese, he had a hard-charging reputation. Serving under him was like an apprenticeship with a pirate captain, according to former junior officers. Eikenberry had served as the military commander in Afghanistan for 18 months from 2005 to 2007. Obama picked him to become ambassador the previous January, despite the rarity of having a retired general in the post.

Instead of calling Eikenberry “Ambassador,” the vice president said, “General, in your estimation, can we, can that be achieved in the next year?”

No, sir, Eikenberry said, because that kind of reliable, strong partner did not exist in Afghanistan.

Eikenberry gave a pessimistic 10-minute summary of his views. He agreed with the assessment that the situation was deteriorating and more resources were needed, but a counterinsurgency strategy was too ambitious and would edge into nation building—a massive undertaking that could be a dramatic overreach.

In counterinsurgency, he said, “We talk about clear, hold and build, but we actually must include transfer into this,” Eikenberry said. The “transfer” was how the U.S. would get out and that required a reliable partner, which was not currently the case.

Are we aligned with the Kabul government? he asked. We assume yes. “I would challenge that assumption,” he said. They were severely hindered by Karzai’s weakness as president, the absence of a strong central government.

“Right now we’re dealing with an extraordinarily corrupt government.” All this, he added, is “depressing and discouraging.” The Kabul mansions belonging to senior Afghan officials had only become more ornate since he had last been in the country as the military commander.

There are limits on what we can do in dealing with corruption, he said. They had to be realistic.

“The Afghans think we’re there because we have to be there, so they don’t have to pay attention to what we want them to do,” the ambassador said. He had almost said it was hopeless.

He said they had to think through the political and psychological implications in neighboring Iran and Pakistan of adding more troops into Afghanistan.

“Before looking at resources,” Gates said, “we’ve gotten ourselves wrapped around three options.” There was: 1. Counterinsurgency, which has come to mean nation building; 2. counterterrorism, which people think means missiles coming from a ship in the ocean; and 3. the counterterrorism plus proposed by the vice president. There obviously are more than these options, Gates said.

The goals that we have set out were right but, “we frame this in a way that is too ambitious.” The objective that we have is right—defeating the Taliban. But then, “What do we mean by defeating the Taliban?”

Gates was elaborating on the box McChrystal had added to his slide about the U.S. goals in Afghanistan.

“The Taliban will probably be an element of the political fabric going forward,” Gates said. “On the security side, we have to deny the Taliban the ability to hold ‘consequential lands and territory.’” Especially, in the south and east of Afghanistan.

A key was denying the Taliban access to cities and driving down violence to a point where the Afghan National Security Forces can handle it.

“We need to redefine the goal,” Gates said. “Not to destroy the Taliban—that sets a bar we probably can’t achieve.” He was retreating from his insistence in the implementation plan that summer that they “defeat” the insurgency.

The U.S. has probably been trying for more than is achievable, Gates said. Good governance is contrary to Afghan history, so the focus should instead be individual ministries that matter. He offered his opinion of Karzai’s government, “This group is way beyond the pale in terms of corruption.

“We’ve talked the talk on corruption, but we’ve never exercised serious leverage.” Once the election is resolved, the U.S. should be willing to hold back on funds.

“We need a new compact that says there won’t be one dollar that will go to a corrupt minister, but we’ll support those who do the right thing,” Gates said.

The secretary of defense recapped. They needed to reframe an alternative to counterinsurgency or counterterrorism. Any final strategic plan should deny the Taliban the ability to occupy and control territory—his new standard—but facilitate the reintegration of the Taliban with the government and improve governance.

As usual, Petraeus had written out a summary of what he wanted to say before the meeting—all aimed to illustrate the dire situation and underscore the urgent need for adding forces.

He seconded Gates, “We’re not going to defeat the Taliban,” but we do need to deny them access to key population areas and lines of communication to “contain” them.

“If we don’t reverse the downward spiral on security, we will enter a security death spiral as we had in Iraq.

“We learned in Iraq”—muted groans from some—“that as violence gets worse, first the local police and then other forces become increasingly challenged.”

Security, which he felt had not been fully explained, was the cornerstone for all other progress in Afghanistan. Without it not only would advancing the Afghan security forces be impossible, but the development of local governance and the reintegration of reconcilables would be highly unlikely. People were too afraid with all the killings and bombings to take the necessary steps, finding it easier instead to submit to the Taliban shadow governments.

“I can understand the reluctance to commit more forces until the political situation in Kabul is sorted out,” Petraeus said, “but time is of the essence. We have to break the Taliban momentum and regain the initiative.”

He pulled out all the stops. “This is important, not just physically, but morally as well. Struggles like these are contests of will. I do think the objectives that we have discussed are important, not just for Afghanistan but for the region, NATO and the United States. And I would contend that we recognize that we don’t know how long it will take to sort out the political situation and need to be sober about that fact, as Karl has noted.

“I understand the government is a criminal syndicate,” he said. “But we need to help achieve and improve security and, as noted, regain the initiative and turn some recent tactical gains into operational momentum. I strongly agree with Stan’s assessment and recommendation, albeit with some clarification,” about the Taliban. “Secretary Gates will provide my formal comments with the chairman and JCS endorsement early next week.”

Biden broke in for a question. “If the government’s a criminal syndicate a year from now, how will troops make a difference?”

No one recorded an answer in their notes. Biden was swinging hard at McChrystal, Gates and Petraeus.

“What’s the best-guess estimate for getting things headed in the right direction?” he asked. “If a year from now there is no demonstrable progress in governance, what do we do?”

No answer.

Biden tried again. “If the government doesn’t improve and if you get the troops, in a year, what would be the impact?”

“The past five years are not heartening,” Eikenberry answered, “but there are pockets of progress. We can build on those.” For the next six to 12 months, he said, “We shouldn’t expect significant breakthroughs.”

Biden admired Eikenberry and privately showered him with his highest accolade, “a goddamned stand-up guy.”