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Saturday, November 28, was another day for the devoted at the National Security Council staff, including Tom Donilon and Doug Lute. They realized they probably should have been out doing something else on the weekend after Thanksgiving, but the strategy review was the all-consuming center of their universe. So the two were there at the White House sharing their frustrations. The president and all of them were being rolled by the military, they agreed. No matter what questions, leading or otherwise, the president or anyone asked, the only viable option was 40,000 U.S.

“How many of these guys who are pushing that option are going to be here to see the effects by July of 2011?” Lute lamented to Donilon.

They ticked through the list. “There’s no chance in hell Petraeus is going to be in CentCom until the summer of ’11,” Lute said.

Mullen’s second two-year term as chairman would almost be up, so he would be heading out too.

“McChrystal’s probably rotated out,” Lute said. “He says he’s willing to stay three years but my guess is that probably won’t happen.”

Gates, they noted, had only planned to stay for the first year of the administration, so he would almost certainly be gone.

“So,” Lute summarized, “the bottom line is, you’re left with the president standing here, owning this thing that these guys sold to him but who have since exited stage right.” He added, “Everybody else is going to have their White House commission hanging in their den.”

“My God,” Donilon said, “what are we getting this guy into?” The president would be the one left when the bill came due in 2012, the year he would be running for reelection. The bill was not only in terms of money but in terms of results. What could they accomplish by 2011 or 2012?

The president was not going to get any relief that Thanksgiving weekend. The debate was still going on—in his house and in his head. He met in the Oval Office with Emanuel, Donilon, Lute, Brennan and Colonel Tien that Saturday for a kind of rump session. Clinton, Gates and Jones were away or had out-of-town guests for the Thanksgiving weekend.

Obama sounded like he was back to tentative on the 30,000 troops with the beginning of the withdrawal in about 18 months, July 2011. “This is the way I’m leaning,” Obama said, adding sharply, “but the door is not closed. I got Rhodes writing two speeches. And I want to hear from you guys one last time.”

Donilon and Lute said the backers of the 40,000 would likely not be around in July 2011, but Obama would be.

The president simply took it in.

Colonel Tien was junior in rank, so he spoke first. There are thousands of active duty colonels in the American military and it was unusual for one to be able to advise the commander in chief directly, particularly just before a defining decision.

“Mr. President,” Tien said, “I don’t see how you can defy your military chain here. We kind of are where we are. Because if you tell General McChrystal, I got all this, I got your assessment, got your resource constructs, but I’ve chosen to do something else, you’re going to probably have to replace him. You can’t tell him, just do it my way, thanks for your hard work, do it my way. And then where does that stop?”

The colonel did not have to elaborate. His implication was that not only McChrystal, but Petraeus, Mullen and even Gates might go—an unprecedented toppling of the military high command. Perhaps no president could weather that, especially a 48-year-old with four years in the United States Senate and ten months as commander in chief.

Lute could see the president had reached a fork in the road and was pausing.

“Mr. President,” Lute said, “you don’t have to do this. I know you know this, but let’s just review the bidding here. How do we think things are going to look in July of ’11?”

Lute told Obama he saw four main risks in the ongoing war. First there was Pakistan, the heart of many of the problems without solutions in sight. Two, governance and corruption in Afghanistan—huge problems with no practical fix readily available. Three, the Afghan National Security Forces—army and police—could probably not be cured with a massive decade-long project costing tens of billions of dollars. Four, international support, which was in peril.

“These are cumulative risks,” he said. The risk in one increases the risk in another. “You can’t look at these in discrete bites and say, well, with Pakistan, I can take a few mitigating steps” to reduce the risk. Each of the four risks overlaps and reinforces each of the others. The Afghan governance and corruption problem, for example, made the security force problem worse, and vice versa.

“So when you look at these discretely,” Lute continued, “like we did in the review, Mr. President, you might be left with the impression we can manage this risk. But I would offer you another model. That is, look at them as a composite. Look at them as a set, and then you begin to move, in my mind, from a calculated risk to a gamble.”

Lute did not have to add that gambling was no way to make policy. “When you look at all the things that have got to break our way,” Lute added, “I can’t tell you that the prospect here for success is very high. And if you add those risks up and ask me where I think we’ll be in July 2011, sort of your big decision point, I’m telling you I think that we’re not going to be a whole lot different than we are today.

“I’m sure there are going to be political consequences that other people appreciate better than I do.

“It still smells to me like a gamble,” Lute said. “You shouldn’t base this on sort of an unexpected windfall of luck.” He had the floor and was comfortable giving bad news to presidents, so he drove his point home. “We want to get from here to there, but, my God, you know, the Himalayas, you know, the Hindu Kush, is between here and there. How in hell are we going to do this?”

It was a telling moment. Was the general a pessimist? Or a realist?

“Yeah,” the president said graciously, indicating that he did not disagree. “Thanks for being candid. It can’t be easy for you to come in here and tell me that. Basically, we’re going to have to execute our heart out to make this work.” The July 2011 date, he said, was the key.

His new strategy and approach was different from the “all in” Bush model. “This is not as much as it takes for as long as it takes, but that we are going to have a turning point here and it’s going to be July of 2011.”

From his frequent private discussions with Brennan, Obama knew his counterterrorism chief’s views. Brennan opposed a large troop increase.

Donilon agreed about the risks, calling them “key dependencies”—success would depend on all these working one way or another.

“We’re just taking on a lot,” Donilon said. “If you ask yourself where are we going to be in December 2010”—a year out from then when the president planned follow-up review—“or go another six months, July 2011, and the answer’s going to be we’re not a whole lot different than we are today.” In other words, there could not be that much improvement in 12 months or 18 months, he said. The war, he said, would still be precarious “because of these four risk factors, which look hard to mitigate.” He asked bluntly, “How do you mitigate any one of those?”

Neither the president nor anyone else had an answer for the short run.

Donilon said the fundamental issue was the new strategy with 30,000 troops. “Then the question is, why did you do this?” he asked. Why was there a need for a big surge in troops? The best answer Donilon had was that the U.S. needed to be in a position to deliver a big punch to stop the Taliban’s momentum and give the Karzai government a chance. It would create more space to continue executing counterterrorism operations. This would demonstrate resolve to Pakistan, or so the idea went.

“I didn’t come in with a blank slate,” Obama had said to his team at one point. Afghanistan had drifted for too long, the victim of a poor military strategy and being under-resourced. He had inherited a war with a beginning and middle, but no clear end.

After the meeting, Lute and Tien went downstairs together.

“Well, you know,” Lute said, “giddy up.”

They laughed slightly, recognizing that it looked like a decision.

“This is what you work for,” the three-star general (West Point 1975) told the colonel (West Point 1987). “You work your butt off, you get an opportunity to have a small group discussion with the president of the United States on the eve of a big decision, and all you can say is, Did you get a chance to say what you wanted to say?”

Lute felt that the military establishment was really rolling the president, though he didn’t want to assign motives. It wasn’t deliberate on McChrystal’s part. As far as Lute could tell, McChrystal didn’t have a conspiratorial bone in his body. If there was someone trying to roll Obama, it was Petraeus. But he had done so subtly and with a light touch, Lute believed. On the other hand, Mullen had failed to maintain the integrity of the process, which required the serious presentation of something other than the one recommended option. He adamantly wouldn’t budge and give a hard look at alternatives. To Lute, Gates also had failed to expand the horizon of alternatives for the president, which in his view was the job of the secretary of defense. The secretary was supposed to give his own advice and bottom-line recommendation, but he was also supposed to be the final window into the larger world of choice for a president. Because a president did have choices, and in this case his had been significantly limited, perhaps to the disadvantage of all.

Lute thought Gates overly deferential to the uniformed military. The secretary of defense is the president’s first line of civilian control. If the secretary did not assert civilian control at his level and say, wait a minute, then it got bumped up to the president to do it. Gates didn’t serve the president very well, Lute felt, and his practice of holding his cards close—being so quiet, so subdued—wore thin. And then writing a personal memo to the president about the issue of whether the goal should be to “defeat” the Taliban or to “disrupt” them. Gates had, of course, created a new definition, to “degrade” the Taliban. Though the president had accepted the new definition, the personal memo defied and circumvented the rigorous process of the strategy review. It was a process on which Obama, at the very least, had staked his standing and reputation as commander in chief, and, at most, his presidency. And Gates was playing the role of the new Cheney—whispering confidentially in the ear of an inexperienced commander in chief. It gave him extraordinary leverage.

For his part, Donilon was hugely skeptical of the entire uniformed military chain of command. McChrystal was hardly an innocent. He took command, got out first by writing his long, classified assessment, staking his ground and then hiding behind the uniform and the flag. Petraeus and Mullen had joined in after that.

“I want to have a meeting Sunday,” the president told Biden by phone. He would call the whole national security team to the Oval Office and give them his terms sheet and orders.

“Mr. President,” Biden said, “I want to meet you before you go in.”

“No,” Obama replied.

“I’ll meet you in the residence.”

“No, no, we’re fine.”