“In January, Vice President Biden travels to Afghanistan and meets with Petraeus. “It’s a little uncomfortable with those two,” says a White House official. “Petraeus views him as the competition.” During one of his meetings, Biden listens to Petraeus’s reports on progress. Biden sees the larger game ahead: The military is making its case for why it needs to stay longer, testing out the arguments they’ll make to avoid the planned drawdown in July 2011. “He could tell they were going to try to stay as long as possible,” says a White House official. At another stop along the trip, an American civilian talked to Biden about a well they were building. “Why do they need a well?” Biden says, sensing “mission creep.”
Over the next few months, Biden quietly presses the president to change the mission in Afghanistan, to get as far as possible away from the decade-long nation-building commitment that Petraeus wants and to the counterterrorism proposal he’d advocated for two years earlier. White House officials start to make the case: The surge worked, let’s declare victory and go home.
Two days after the report is finished, the White House announces that President Obama appointed McChrystal as an unpaid advisor to military families. Mary Tillman, Pat Tillman’s mother, is outraged. “It’s a slap in the face to all soldiers,” she says of the choice. “He deliberately helped cover up Pat’s death. And he has never adequately apologized to us.” In the following months, McChrystal will sit down and give off-the-record interviews to a number of high-profile journalists. He’ll tell one television pundit that the generals in the Pentagon don’t trust the White House. In another talk, he’ll say that if he were Obama, he’d have fired himself “several times,” while describing Afghanistan as stuck “in some kind of post-apocalyptic nightmare.” In the fall of 2011, on the tenth anniversary of the war, he tells the Council on Foreign Relations the war is just “a little better than 50 percent” done. General Michael Flynn takes a job in intelligence analysis back at the Pentagon, and gets his third star. His brother Charlie gets a promotion to general, too. Duncan Boothby moves to DC, determined to continue his career. The family of Sergeant Michael Ingram will set up a foundation in his honor called Mikie’s Minutes, which donates calling cards to troops serving in Afghanistan.
In Afghanistan, both the UN and International Red Cross say that violence is the worst it has been in nine years, and security across the country is deteriorating. A group of highly respected academics and Afghanistan experts publish an open letter to President Obama, saying that negotiating, not an increase in military operations, is the only way out. “We are losing the battle for hearts and minds,” the experts write. “What was supposed to be a population centered strategy is now a full-scale military campaign causing civilian casualties and destruction of property.”
On July 12, Ahmed Wali Karzai is assassinated. Military officials try to put a positive spin on it, saying now a “more constructive local leadership” can take his place. Fifteen days later, Mayor Ghulam Hamidi, who I had interviewed months before in Kandahar, is also killed.
In Washington, political pressure to get out is building. According to the latest poll, 64 percent of Americans—a record level—don’t think the war is worth fighting. On Capitol Hill, 204 congressmen voted against funding for the war last year, up from 109 in 2010. A host of think tanks express serious doubts: The left-leaning Center for American Progress is calling for an “accelerated withdrawal,” and the bipartisan Council on Foreign Relations has concluded that “at best, the margin for U.S. victory is likely to be slim.”
In late February, President Obama meets with his national security team in the White House room. Hillary is there, Doug Lute is there, Tom Donilon, Bob Gates, Admiral Mullen. The topic of discussion: negotiations with the Taliban. They want to start with secret, high-level talks as quickly as possible. Lute says that the current strategy is no longer tenable. They discuss possible places to negotiate: Turkey and Saudi Arabia are the two biggest contenders. They can’t make the missteps of the past summer, when they were duped into giving millions to a Taliban impostor. It signals a significant change—finally, after years of expensive and fruitless fighting, plans to negotiate. At the meeting, Vice President Joe Biden comes in with about five minutes left, according to sources familiar with the meeting. He’s exuding confidence, White House officials tell me, sure that he’s been proven right by history. The plan Biden had called for a year earlier is the plan that the Pentagon is going to be forced to adopt. It only took an additional 711 American lives and 2,777 Afghan lives for the White House to arrive at this conclusion.
July 2011 is approaching. That’s the date Obama promised to start bringing troops home. In June, he holds a series of meeting with Petraeus. Obama tells Gates and Mullen to warn Petraeus—no leaks this time, no getting fucked by the press. No repeat of the “Seven Days in May dynamic” of 2009, says one national security official to a reporter—a reference to the film about American military generals staging a coup against the president. Petraeus is playing nice. Obama meets with Petraeus three times—he wants options for the drawdown. Petraeus suggests keeping the thirty thousand troops until the end of 2012. Petraeus wants to move the troops to eastern Afghanistan, where the fighting has gotten worse. Obama shuts the door on the plan. He says he’s going to bring ten thousand home by the end of the year, and twenty thousand more home by the end of the summer of 2012. Petraeus’s allies complain to the press, and the next general in charge of the war, General John Allen, will go on the record to say that the president isn’t following the military’s advice. What the president decided, says Allen, “was a more aggressive [drawdown] option “than which was presented,” and “was not” what Petraeus had recommended.
This time, though, the charges don’t stick. Obama has regained control of his policy from the Pentagon. The war is too unpopular, the myth of progress too obviously a lie.
Obama gives a speech on June 24, 2011, announcing his decision to start the drawdown. “The tide of war is receding,” he says. “It’s time to focus on nation-building here at home.”
