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On the morning of November 27, Obama again invited Colin Powell to the Oval Office for another private talk. The president said he was struggling with the different points of view. The military was unified supporting McChrystal’s request for 40,000 more troops. His political advisers were very skeptical. He was asking for new approaches, but he just kept getting the same old options.

“You don’t have to put up with this,” said Powell, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs. “You’re the commander in chief. These guys work for you. Because they’re unanimous in their advice doesn’t make it right. There are other generals. There’s only one commander in chief.”

When I asked the president about this advice, he said, “General Powell and I talk. And I consider him a friend. And since he’s now out of that building [the Pentagon], every once in a while I’ll check in with him. I’ll leave it at that.”

“Why are we having another meeting about this?” the president asked that day after Thanksgiving as his White House national security team filed into the Oval Office—Jones, Donilon, Emanuel, McDonough, Lute and Colonel John Tien, an Iraq combat veteran and former Rhodes Scholar on the NSC staff. “I thought this was finished Wednesday.”

Donilon and Lute said there were open questions from the Pentagon. Were the enablers already authorized?

No.

What does the 10 percent apply to?

The 30,000, an exasperated president said, and that’s it. “Why do we keep having these meetings after we have all agreed?”

Well, we’re still working with the military on these questions.

The president said he had reached agreement with the secretary of defense—why was there still a debate? That should have ended it. But the Pentagon was not used to or comfortable with being held to such precise standards.

The Pentagon seemed to be reopening every question. Donilon started ticking them off. Most came by phone from Mullen or the JCS staff, though Donilon and Lute were also talking with General Cart-wright and Michèle Flournoy, the undersecretary for policy.

Like what?

Well, the estimate that they could get all the 30,000 troops into Afghanistan by summer.

“We didn’t come up with that,” the president said. “Petraeus told us that.”

Now the Pentagon was saying they were unsure.

“It wasn’t us that concocted …” the president said.

The Pentagon was also questioning the withdrawal date of July 2011. At one point earlier, Gates had said he preferred six months later—the end of 2011.

“I’m pissed,” Obama said, but he didn’t raise his voice much. That was their date as well, he said. It was actually on the chart they briefed to us—the one with the longer trajectory. They identified it as the point when Afghans would be able to take the lead and responsibility in certain areas. Was this a negotiating tactic or what?

It seemed every issue was back up for discussion, negotiation or clarification. Obama said he was ready to go back and just give them 10,000 trainers. That would be it.

This was a contest that pitted the president against the military establishment. Donilon was stunned by the political power the military was exerting. But, he reasoned, the White House had to be the longdistance runner in the contest. From studying Vietnam and George W. Bush’s Iraq War, he knew one common theme was miscue after miscue. Presidents being surprised, presidents not getting into the details enough, presidents not being clear about what they wanted, presidents not understanding the implications of seemingly simple decisions.

Jones left the meeting and spoke with Mullen, who was indeed saying that getting the 30,000 there might take longer than the end of the summer. McChrystal had been told he could decide which units composed the 30,000. Not surprisingly, he wanted units from the legendary 101st Airborne Division, the “Screaming Eagles” that Petraeus had commanded during the 2003 Iraq invasion. These units would not be ready until September.

No, Jones told him, it would really not be a good idea to go back to the president now and say it couldn’t be done. Assertions had been made. The president wanted everyone to keep his word. In essence, this was military advice Obama didn’t want.

“Got it,” Mullen said, disappointed that Jones, a retired four-star, didn’t seem to comprehend.

In the Oval Office, Obama continued with Donilon, Lute and the others. The meeting went on for hours, almost the entire day, as they tried to nail down the president’s orders. They had all read Lessons in Disaster. One of its conclusions was that Johnson failed to translate his Vietnam decisions into specific orders for the military.

Obama began to dictate precisely what he wanted, composing what Donilon called a “terms sheet,” making it similar to a legal document used in a business deal. He took Gates’s memo and agreed that the strategic concept would be to “degrade” the Taliban—not dismantle, not defeat, not destroy. He pasted Gates’s six military missions from the memo into his own orders. The six military missions involved reversing the Taliban momentum and then denying, disrupting and degrading them.

As the contest went on through the afternoon, the Pentagon civilians and the Joint Staff had an ever expansive view of the strategy, seeking to broaden it.

“You can’t do that to a president,” Donilon kept saying. That was not what Obama wanted. He wanted a narrower mission.

But the push continued.

Put in restrictions, Obama ordered.

Donilon tried, but back it would come from the Pentagon with more, not less. One addition had to do with messaging to al Qaeda.

“We’re not going to do it,” the president said when he received word.

Donilon felt like he was rewriting the orders ten times, and he finally told the military interlocutors that the president only wanted matters directly related to the goal. “If you guys have a bunch of other bullshit you want to do,” he said, the president would not accept it.

Say it directly, Obama dictated. In final form, his orders said that the military mission “will be limited in scope and scale to only what is necessary to attain the U.S. goal.” Period. It couldn’t be clearer. When all the words were filtered and reworked, he had two goals—defeat al Qaeda and degrade the Taliban.

But expansive, protect-the-population counterinsurgency ideas and side missions kept coming from the Pentagon.

No, Obama said. Again, he would say it directly, dictating the line, “This approach is not fully resourced counterinsurgency or nation building.” It couldn’t be clearer, and he couldn’t be more emphatic.

Still, some were clinging to the original McChrystal request for 40,000. It was as if no one had ever told them no.

No, Obama said. On the troop number, he was picking the low end of Option 2A, the proposal for 35,000 to 30,000. It was 30,000. Let’s be clear, he said. He had picked Option 2A with “the narrower mission and the express tighter timeline.” He was sticking to July 2011. It was not just to begin withdrawing U.S. forces, but on that date “we will expect to begin transferring lead security responsibility from these forces to the ANSF,” he dictated.

In case anyone did not understand the big change, he said for the terms sheet, “In July 2011, we will assess progress nationwide and the president will consider the timing of changing the military mission.” The mission would not grow. It would only contract.

Around dinnertime—after nearly eight hours of wrangling and clarifying with the Pentagon—Obama went over a final draft, dictating and crafting the language.

“Maybe I’m getting too far down in the weeds on this, but I feel like I have to,” he said. The president polished the document until 9:15 P.M.

When he was done, the orders were typed out, six single-spaced pages. That’s what he would issue, he said. His decision wasn’t just going to be a speech or a general sense on the numbers game of 30,000. It would be this directive. And everyone was going to read it and sign up. That was the price he would exact, the way he would end the contest—for the moment, at least. Because, as they all knew now, the contest, like the war, would probably not end, and the struggle would continue.

Among the most top secret elements were not only stepped-up CIA drone and other attacks against al Qaeda in Pakistan, but the president’s directive that McChrystal increase the tempo of counter-terrorism attacks against the Taliban inside Afghanistan.

In some respects, McChrystal was the perfect wolf in sheep’s clothing. After years as Special Forces commander (JSOC) in Iraq, no one in the U.S. military knew more about these operations than he. Now McChrystal was the Afghanistan commander who had embraced the kinder, gentler protect-the-people counterinsurgency, putting limits on combat operations in order to reduce Afghan civilian casualties and even instructing his forces on the road to treat Afghans with respect.

But under the radar, McChrystal had his own wolf, Vice Admiral William H. McRaven, a Navy SEAL, who had taken command from him of the Joint Special Operations Command in June 2008. The scale and lethal intensity of McRaven’s attacks in Afghanistan was at a level almost unimaginable to anyone without TOP SECRET CODEWORD clearances. The “jackpot rate”—when the strikes got the intended target—had jumped from 35 percent to 80 percent. Slapping a table for emphasis on each word, one senior civilian official with those clearances said, “Every single night they are banging on these guys with a pace and fury that is pretty impressive.” And the 18 months to July 2011 would give the special operators time and space to disrupt, degrade and perhaps in a significant way decimate the Taliban insurgency. It might give new meaning to the word “degrade.”

Obama’s strategy was built on the idea that the time, space, intensity and success would allow the politics to come together. At least that was his hope.

Word circulated in the highest reaches of the Pentagon that the decision was about to implode. The Pentagon was saying that the secretary of defense thought he had received permission for the 4,500 plus the 10 percent.

Obama thought he had been clear, so he made it clearer and talked to Gates about 7 P.M. “I thought we’d straightened this out on Wednesday,” he said, obviously bewildered. He hated wasting time, and this was to him a complete rehash. But Donilon and Lute wanted absolute clarification.

How many times did he have to say it?

The number was 30,000, the president said, and the overall deal was that the 10 percent of that 30,000 was only for exceptional circumstances. But the 4,500 enablers would have to be part of the 30,000. It would have to be built into or come out of that 30,000 somehow, but it was not on the table. Period. His number was 30,000. It was a hard cap.

Later that night, Obama gave a final read of his six pages of orders. The relitigation and debate were over. “I’m comfortable with this decision,” he said. “I’m comfortable with the way that it’s been set forth here. I’ll call Bob tomorrow, I’ll call Hillary, and we’ll have them in tomorrow or Sunday and I’ll go through it with them face-to-face.”

Donilon felt that the document was an assertion of presidential and civilian control of the military. The uniformed military had had too much of a say in the later years of the Bush presidency. The embodiment of that was Dave Petraeus, who, with his team, had made important and sound decisions in Iraq beginning in about 2007. But a lot of poor decisions had been made before that by Bush and others in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Petraeus had been engaged in damage limitation. To Donilon, President Obama was trying to ensure that his administration was not engaged in damage limitation five years from now. No nationwide counterinsurgency in Afghanistan was necessary to protect the United States.

The question Obama had attempted to answer was: How do you draw down, his ultimate goal, in the face of a serious and deteriorating situation? The answer was they had to break enemy momentum and then leverage that by going faster in “an extended surge.”