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It was the secretary of state’s turn at the October 9 meeting. “Mr. President,” Clinton began, “the dilemma you face …”

On the back bench, press secretary Gibbs noted that she said “you” as if there was only one person in the boat and she and the others were at a pleasant distance. To Gibbs, it seemed as though Clinton was opining from afar. Memories of the vicious scrap and deep hostility from the Democratic presidential primaries lingered inside the White House, at least for former campaign aides like Gibbs and Axelrod.

Clinton’s use of “you” also floored Holbrooke, since she should have said “we” to underscore and even trumpet her team-player status. Holbrooke suspected the Obamaites would recognize the “you” as distancing on the part of the secretary of state. He held his tongue as Clinton spoke, because interrupting her would be unforgivable when she was in full flower like this. It was “a Freudian giveaway,” Holbrooke later told others. The only question was whether it was conscious or not. Whatever it was, he thought Clinton felt detached from both the policy and the process. And the more hawkish her position, the more she came under suspicion from White House staffers loyal to the president.

The “you” was a formulation used by others. And it was a matter of fact that the decision was Obama’s, so the word was correct. But Gibbs’s and Holbrooke’s reactions revealed how raw the emotions were running.

Clinton said the dilemma was which should come first—more troops or better governance? “But not putting troops in guarantees we won’t achieve what we’re after and guarantees no psychological momentum. Preventing collapse requires more troops, but that doesn’t guarantee progress.”

She tipped her hand further. Afghans had to feel safe before their governance could improve. It was the same logic as Petraeus’s argument that she had seemed to challenge in earlier meetings. Obama “must move on more troops.

“In the absence of a troop commitment, can we achieve our goals in Afghanistan and Pakistan?” she asked. Answering her own question, Clinton said, “The only way to get governance changes is to add troops, but there’s still no guarantee that it will work.”

Clinton then rattled off the reasons why there was no guarantee. If there is a troop commitment, what size? How to coordinate with Pakistan? How to support reintegration and how to conduct partnering? What’s the most effective way forward with the Afghan leadership?

“These are all difficult, unsatisfactory options,” she said. “We do have a national security interest in ensuring the Taliban doesn’t defeat us. The same with destroying al Qaeda, which would be difficult without Afghanistan. It’s an extremely difficult decision, but the options are limited unless we commit and gain the psychological advantage.”

Admiral Mullen echoed the other hawkish comments, saying that Secretary Gates’s reframing of the objectives was correct. “Security is achievable, but time does matter.” In his opinion, the training of a 240,000-man Afghan army in “three to five years is reasonable.”

“Possibly we’ll see by the end of next year if this will work,” Mullen added. “The urgency is there. Psychologically, this is huge. NATO’s commitment and future are in the balance.”

•   •   •

DNI Dennis Blair suggested that domestic politics might be a problem. It would be tough because of casualties, he said. Last month had been tough—40 killed, double the rate of the year before.

“Will this be worth it?” he asked. “The answer is, people will support it as long as they think we’re making progress.” For the first time, the president would have a strategy developed by his full war cabinet, and we’ll be able to tell the American people what we’re doing, he said.

What they could not do, CIA Director Panetta said, is accept the status quo. “You can’t leave.” And, he agreed, “You can’t defeat the Taliban.” They were not talking about a Jeffersonian democracy in Afghanistan, said Panetta, who saw this as a basis for narrowing the American mission and accepting Karzai despite his flaws.

“That leaves you to a targeted mission: to battle against al Qaeda, ensuring no safe havens,” Panetta said.

We have to work with Karzai, he went on, sounding like Karzai’s case officer. The CIA had been in alliance with the Karzai family for more than eight years. A narrower mission still meant securing population centers and pursuing the Taliban. They had to continue targeting Taliban leaders, he said. But the major question was: “Within one year, can we turn the momentum around?”

Susan Rice, the ambassador to the United Nations, spoke next. A former Rhodes Scholar who was a top Obama foreign policy adviser during the 2008 campaign, Rice had been something of a prodigy in Bill Clinton’s administration, serving at 33 years old as the assistant secretary of state for African affairs.

“I have not made a decision yet personally,” Rice said. She believed improved security in Afghanistan was necessary to defeat al Qaeda, since the relationship between al Qaeda and the Taliban was intertwined and the two groups couldn’t be separated.

Rice drew attention to the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, which had a minimal U.S. and NATO presence in the McChrystal plan. There are possible safe havens there, she said.

More actions were needed against corruption, “including possibly Karzai’s brother,” she continued. While others had stressed security, Rice believed that the U.S. strategy should emphasize an anti-corruption campaign.

“If the government removes the worst actors, then our investment may yield dividends.”

The president picked up on the problem with the bubbles on McChrystal’s map. At one point, he noted that the blots didn’t encompass all of the country. Other than a few bubbles, their locations were not necessarily connected to where Afghans lived. One hugged the Iranian border to the west. Based on the counterinsurgency manual ratio of one member of the security force for every 40 to 50 people, Obama noted that would require a total U.S., NATO and Afghan security force of 500,000 to 600,000 to be at Iraq levels.

“Sir,” Petraeus said, holding both his hands high in the air like it was a stickup, “I’m not out there telling people this is like Iraq.”

But the president had made a dispiriting observation for the COIN-istas. These numbers were not in the realm of the possible. Petraeus’s major concern was that this would be a rationale for shortchanging any counterinsurgency strategy.

Stan’s recommendations, Holbrooke said, are good for one country dealing with one issue. You were given the task of Afghanistan, he addressed McChrystal, but your responsibility ends at the border. The resource request did not take into account Pakistan or terrorists coming into Afghanistan from Pakistan.

“If I were fully convinced that there were no other questions, this would be a good request,” Holbrooke said. “But I have concerns.” He noted that General Pasha, Pakistan’s intelligence chief, explicitly opposed having more American troops in Afghanistan.

The two weakest links were corruption and the Afghan police. “Our presence is the corrupting force,” Holbrooke announced. All the contractors for development projects pay the Taliban for protection and use of the roads, so American and coalition dollars help finance the Taliban. And with more development, higher traffic on roads, and more troops, the Taliban would make more money.

He expanded on his concerns about the Afghan police. Over the next three years, the training command planned to grow the Afghan forces to 400,000—160,000 policemen and 240,000 soldiers. Holbrooke felt the police numbers were phony and getting phonier, so he had dispatched some of his staff to Afghanistan to look into things. About 80 percent of the Afghan police force was illiterate. Drug addiction was common. And many police were “ghosts” who cashed paychecks but never showed for duty.

Holbrooke opened one of the briefing folders that had been passed out to everyone before the meeting. He pulled out the documents from McChrystal about the Afghan police.

The yearly attrition rate was more than 25 percent, a figure that exceeded the number of new recruits. With the recruitment levels McChrystal projected, the size of the police force of roughly 80,000 would actually shrink. Doubling it to 160,000 would be mathematically impossible.

“It’s like pouring water into a bucket with a hole in it,” Holbrooke said.

“Richard,” McChrystal answered, “you’re absolutely right. And that’s why we have to lower the attrition rate.”

Holbrooke said that in 2006 he had visited a police center in the western Afghan city of Herat. Two months ago, he returned to the same center. Though everyone said it was much better, he found it hadn’t changed at all.

“The police are the weak link,” he said, and the Afghan policy was only as good as its weakest link.

The muddle on the Afghan presidential elections, Holbrooke said, has hurt U.S. credibility. Almost two months after the vote, Afghans had yet to see final certified results.

Yes, he said, we need more troops. The question was how many and how to use them. We need a significant increase in training personnel, but more forces may result in more dependency.

Like the others, Holbrooke was heavy on diagnosis but light on solutions. Several note takers had learned to do the same thing when Holbrooke embarked on his discourses. They set down their pens and relaxed their tired fingers. The big personality had lost its sheen. He was not connecting with Obama.

“What are we trying to achieve?” asked John Brennan, 55, the deputy for counterterrorism and a former CIA operative who had spent most of his career on Middle Eastern countries. “The security decisions here will be in play in other areas too.”

Brennan’s head, as well as Blair’s and Panetta’s, would be on a pike if there was another successful terrorist attack in the United States. Stopping that attack was his main concern and the focus of his professional life.

Why are we contemplating this in Afghanistan? Brennan asked. He could not realistically envision a fix.

“If you’re talking about a completely uncorrupt government that delivers services to all of its people, that end state won’t be achieved in my lifetime,” Brennan said. “That’s why using terminology like ‘success,’ like ‘victory’ and ‘win,’ complicates our task.”

He said they needed to identify milestones that would measure progress in Afghanistan and align the resources with those milestones. There are very few al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The intelligence analysis indicated the Taliban might not even want al Qaeda back if it reestablished control of the government. Hosting al Qaeda had cost the Taliban Afghanistan in 2001. Why would al Qaeda want to go back to Afghanistan, where the U.S. and NATO already had 100,000 ground troops?

No, Brennan said, they needed to think about places like Yemen and Somalia, which are full of al Qaeda. And al Qaeda is taking advantage of these ungoverned spaces where there is little or no U.S. troop presence. There were larger issues in this decision that had to be considered in a global context.

“We’re developing geostrategic principles here, and we’re not going to have the resources to do what we’re doing in Afghanistan in Somalia and Yemen,” Brennan said.

Afghanistan was a small piece of real estate, the counterterrorism chief said. His worry was the rest of the world.

The clock read 5:05 P.M. They had been meeting for two and a half hours.

“I think these meetings have resulted in a useful definition of the problem,” the president said, “and that redefined efforts against the Taliban are helpful and that a good definition is emerging.” But they were not there yet, he said, adding that he appreciated the late hour for those in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where it was past midnight.

“We won’t resolve this today,” Obama said. “We’ve recognized that we’re not going to completely defeat the Taliban, which we all agree on. Bob’s summary, I think, was clear-eyed and achievable.” The trouble, he said, with the ill-defined notion of defeating the Taliban, which would be hard to achieve, was “We need something that can be in our sights.”

“Second,” the president said, “I’m not of the view that we can simply leave. To the extent that we define counterinsurgency as population security as opposed to a high Taliban body count, that I can embrace and I think it’s sound. We need to determine how broad or narrow the scope of that objective is, though.” They would debate that further.

Obama said he thought the basic inkblot strategy was sound. But they needed more work on defining what those key areas were.

“If I ordered in 40,000 troops, that would not be sufficient for a counterinsurgency strategy for the entire country. So we need to find some key strategic areas to deny the Taliban a foothold and give ourselves a platform to achieve our goals.”

Grappling for consensus, he noted the general agreement on the difficulty of defeating the Taliban and the importance of protecting Afghans.

“The fact that we agree on these pillars of a strategy belies the notion of huge divisions among the team here and it provides a basis for moving forward,” Obama said, overlooking substantial disagreements. Biden and Brennan, for example, were not on board.

But several issues remained for the president that had to be addressed in the next sessions.

“Are the Afghan government’s interests aligned with ours?” On some topics they may not be aligned, he said. There are significant questions about corruption, about dependency.

“On training Afghan troops, are they invested in the strategy we described?” Obama said. “We need to ramp up in a way that we can envision an exit strategy in a meaningful time frame. It’s not enough to have trainers if the Afghans don’t know why they’re fighting. They need to be invested in success.” The Afghans were not fighting with the same commitment in their own country as “our kids,” he said. “They need to be fighting for something.”

As he did at these sessions, the president had a notepad. In very neat, small writing, he would list five or six phrases from the discussion. It was a way for him to exercise control, set the agenda at the end of these meetings by asking questions from his notes.

“Can we get them to a point that will enable us to extract two, three, four years from now?” Obama asked.

Also on his question list was, “Why should Karzai change?” Without giving Karzai the right incentives to reform, the U.S. would be stuck tending to the country for him.

“So the question is: We can clear, hold and build, but how can we transfer?” he asked. Is the strategy sustainable over time? “We’ve put a lot of lives and money in Afghanistan.” Just to put the timeline question in human terms, he added, “I don’t want to be going to Walter Reed and Bethesda eight years from now.” These were the military hospitals filled with those wounded in the wars.

“It will be tough for our allies,” Obama said, as well as the American public.

The key piece for any eventual drawdown, as the president saw it, was reintegration. Not all members of the Taliban were glad to have hosted al Qaeda. Some Taliban warlords were obsessed with tribal matters. They had neither the wherewithal nor the desire to crash airliners into American skyscrapers. Ending the war would involve getting the less zealous Taliban to support the Afghan national government and move to neutral.

“How can we peel off the folks who are fighting against us?” Obama said. That was what Petraeus had done in Iraq.

“Given how much we spend on civilian aid and assistance, we need to make sure we have the right strategy for spending,” he continued. That went to the matter raised by Holbrooke that foreign aid money could be a corrupting influence in Afghanistan.

He returned to the question of timetables, another big debate from Iraq.

“I’m always wrestling with this issue,” Obama said as he weighed the pros and cons out loud. A timetable could send a message that all the enemy needed to do was run out the clock.

“We don’t want our enemy to wait us out, but we also need to show some”—and he lapsed into a worn phrase from Vietnam—“light at the end of the tunnel.

“We can’t sustain a commitment indefinitely in the United States,” he said. “We can’t sustain support at home and with allies without having some explanation that involves timelines.”

The word “timeline” was a red flag for the military. They already planned to protect Afghans, train the Afghan security forces, and help straighten out the Afghan government. The president was now saying all that had to be accomplished on a deadline. For the military brass, it is an axiom that war does not take place on anyone’s schedule.

“How could we ramp up as recommended and have an exit strategy within a reasonable time?” Obama asked. “How do we get to transfer starting eight years after the fact?”

During this period, Obama said that they had all talked about Afghanistan “from here forward,” as though the war was starting anew and the past could be sidestepped.

“We should understand as we talk about this that the American people don’t see this as beginning now. Right?”

No one disputed that.

“Their memories of this extend eight years back,” he continued. Then there was the Iraq invasion. “The endeavor in Afghanistan, in their mind, did not begin in the last six to eight months.”

Underscoring the earlier questions about where McChrystal placed bubbles on the map, Obama repeated, “We’re not sending enough troops for a countrywide insurgency. We have to ask hard questions about where we’re doing population security. Is it in the south? Are there some bubbles in the north?

“Finally, Pakistan is publicly saying they’re opposed to more troops,” Obama said. “If the neighbor says that, what does that say about their buy-in?” If he added troops, he said they had to carefully explain to the Pakistanis what it meant.

Biden seconded the president. “We paid a price for pressing the pause button,” he said. “Everyone agrees that were we to be seen as losing Afghanistan, that would be a victory for al Qaeda and help jihadist recruiting.” But, returning to the dividing line in the room, he worried about making an additional commitment without having the ability to assure any progress in governance.

“We’re not leaving,” Holbrooke said, bolting in as the meeting approached the three-hour mark with the president having given his summary and intent on winding down. He said the civilian programs in place are beginning to produce results. “I’m concerned about setting timelines. This is a long war. It will be longer than Vietnam.

“If it is important, and it is, then we must make a commitment. But we must ensure it’s sustainable.”

The president took over. “We won’t get any more bites at this apple,” he said, adding as if speaking to himself, “it’s been useful to discuss but we have to make a decision.”

But the serious sticking points of Afghan governance and Karzai had yet to be settled.

“You do have one bite at the apple,” Petraeus said, almost pleading. “Make it one that can make a difference. Try to avoid leaving a position that requires us to come back. But I do recognize we have to be able to say by the end of 2010 whether it’s working.”

Rahm Emanuel made a rare comment about how to convey the severity of the U.S. conviction that Karzai must put good people as governors of the 34 provinces.

Nurtured as a political operative in the Chicago political machine, Emanuel was comfortable with sending Karzai the equivalent of a dead fish with an imperial wrapping.

“Tell him we’re going to put our own governors in if we have to,” he said.

The president ignored that impractical, if not impossible, suggestion.

“I’m not an advocate of the timetable,” Obama said, “but it will come from the Hill.” A Democratic Congress would insist on a timetable, he said, even though Congress had shown itself unable to set a timetable for Iraq, the much more unpopular war. The Iraq timetables had finally been set by the Bush and Obama administrations.

“We have to show a plan that will actually enable us to show progress,” the president continued. “These conversations are helpful, and I see conversions” since the first meeting in September. They were coming together, he insisted. “We all looked around and admired the problem. Now it’s time to make some decisions.”

Obama looked around the room as he made one last comment.

“I appreciate not reading about the meetings in The Washington Post,” he said.

Jones wrote in his black book that the Afghan National Police have “always been weak and remains a critical failure.” Not just a problem, but a “failure.”

The president was not completely satisfied with the meetings thus far. One day during this period, Obama was walking toward the Oval Office with Gibbs. The inertia of the debate and boilerplate statements bothered him. He was tired of hearing about how everyone recognized the challenges—Afghanistan had been under-resourced, needed more troops, required a better government. Most of the principals were reiterating what they said in their reports.

“People have to stop telling me what I already know,” he said. “And we have to get to the point where we hear some information about what people want to do.”

Holbrooke went back to his office at the State Department, where his small staff had been complaining that they were up all night drafting analysis papers that went unread.

“There’s one person in the room who reads them,” Holbrooke told them, “and that’s the man they are intended for.” The sleepless nights were worth it and they should prepare another package of reports for the president.