US President Barack Obama’s advisers wrestled with an intractable problem in the spring and summer of 2015: How could they stabilize Afghanistan while preserving Obama’s longtime goal of pulling out the last US troops before he left office?
In early August that year, when Obama convened a meeting of the US National Security Council, he acknowledged a stark new reality.
“The fever in this room has finally broken,” Obama told the group, according to a person in the meeting. “We’re no longer in nation-building mode.”
What Obama meant was that no one in the room thought that the US — after 14 years of war, billions of dollars spent and more than 2,000 US lives lost — would ever transform Afghanistan into a semblance of a democracy able to defend itself.
The anti-war candidate of 2008 who had pledged to turn around Afghanistan — the “good war” to former US president George W. Bush’s “bad war” in Iraq — had conceded that the longest military operation in US history would not end on his watch. The optimistic president who once thought Afghanistan was winnable had, through bitter experience, become the commander in chief of a forever war.
“When it comes to helping these societies stabilize and create a more secure environment and a better life for their people, we have to understand that this is a long slog,” he said in September last year.
By July 2008, as the Democratic nominee for US president, Obama had embraced Afghanistan as a priority over Iraq.
“This is a war that we have to win,” he declared.
When Obama took office in January 2009, he ordered a quick policy review on Afghanistan by a former intelligence analyst, Bruce Riedel.
However, even before it was completed, he accepted a Pentagon recommendation to send 17,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, bringing the total to nearly 70,000 US troops on the ground.
By autumn 2009, with the Taliban showing increased strength, Obama’s military commanders urged on him an ambitious counterinsurgency strategy that had helped turn around the war in Iraq — a troop-heavy, time-consuming, expensive doctrine of trying to win over the locals by building roads, bridges, schools and a well-functioning government.
The strategy would require as many as 40,000 additional US men and women in uniform in Afghanistan, his advisers told him.
“There was still the afterglow of the surge in Iraq, and the counterinsurgency narrative that had made the military the savior of the Iraq War,” said Vali Nasr, a former US Department of State adviser. “I don’t believe Obama was in a position to pick a debate with the military on Afghanistan, and to assert what would be his worldview.”
Although Obama after months of internal debate agreed to send 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, he placed a strict timetable on the mission, saying they would have to be withdrawn starting in July 2011.
His aides later said he felt hijacked by a military that had presented him with a narrow band of options rather than a real choice.
Even some former military commanders agreed, saying that the troop deployments were framed in a way that made choosing a smaller number — 20,000, for example — look like a path to certain defeat.
“Obama believes the military can do enormous things,” US Deputy National Security Adviser Benjamin Rhodes said. “It can win wars and stabilize conflicts, but a military can’t create a political culture or build a society.”
By the end of his first term, Obama had evolved to the point that he fully embraced the concept “Afghan good enough.” The phrase referred to the shift away from nation-building to a policy that was content with taking out the terrorists, preventing the Taliban from overrunning the country and putting a premium on getting the troops out.
By August 2010, 100,000 US troops were on the ground in Afghanistan and were pushing back the Taliban in some critical areas. Despite uneven progress in the military campaign, Ryan Crocker, a diplomat who had reopened the US embassy in Kabul in 2002 and served there again as ambassador in 2011, recalled thinking: “Wow, this place looks great.”
The US naval raid that killed former al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in May 2011 added to Obama’s conviction that he was on the way to closing the books on the war.
At midnight on May 1, 2012, Air Force One rolled out to pick up the US president for a secret trip to Afghanistan. He was going to sign a strategic partnership agreement with then-Afghan president Hamid Karzai that set the terms for relations after 2014, when the US was scheduled to withdraw its combat troops and turn over Afghanistan’s security to the Afghans.
The agreement promised an “enduring partnership” between the US and Afghanistan. However, the promises obscured a starker reality: Obama had accelerated the timetable for drawing down US troops and he was looking beyond the war.
When Karzai refused to sign a long-term security agreement with Washington, Obama gave up on him to focus on his successor, Afgan President Ashraf Ghani.
The experience left a lasting imprint on the president, his aides said.
He concluded that without the right partner, it was impossible for the US to succeed, no matter how much blood and treasure it poured into a country.
It was an insight that Obama applied to his relations with other countries, from Pakistan to Israel, where his poor relationships with the leaders impeded progress.
“The most underappreciated part of foreign policy is dealing with flawed partners,” Rhodes said.
When Obama convened his National Security Council that day in August 2015, the Taliban were regrouping again.
As the Islamic State group became a dire enough threat to return US troops to Iraq, Obama felt compelled to change course on Afghanistan.
“ISIL [Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant] thrived in a vacuum in Iraq and it pointed to a similar vacuum in Afghanistan,” Rhodes said.
However, as Obama’s war council met that August morning, the level of US support remained the subject of intense debate.
US Vice President Joe Biden argued that the country would revert to chaos.
“It doesn’t matter if we leave tomorrow or 10 years from now,” he said, according to those in the room.
US General Martin Dempsey, who had succeeded Mullen as chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, recommended that the US maintain a military presence in Kabul, and at Bagram and a scattering of bases in the east and south. The 10,000 soldiers in the country would carry out a singular, ruthless mission of killing suspected terrorists and keeping the country from spiraling out of control.
Obama liked that idea. It was in line, he said, with the principles he had laid out in a 2014 speech at the US Military Academy, where he said the US would train and equip foreign armies, but leave the front-line fighting to them.
He acknowledged that it would mean handing off Afghanistan to his successor as unfinished business.
“This goes to the politics of what I’m leaving for the next president,” he told the group, according to one of the participants.
“My interest is not to sign them up for 10 years of X,” he added, referring to troop numbers, “but to lay out a vision and to put stakes in the ground for that vision.”
In an interview in September last year, Obama disputed the suggestion that his policy had failed.
He had, after all, reduced the number of US troops to fewer than 10,000 from more than 100,000. They were training and assisting Afghan troops, even if the line between that and actual combat was sometimes blurry.
“Afghanistan was one of the poorest countries in the world with the lowest literacy rates in the world before we got there. It continues to be,” Obama said. The country “was riven with all kinds of ethnic and tribal divisions before we got there. It’s still there.”
In the end, Afghanistan became the template for a new kind of warfare — a chronic conflict, across an arc of unstable states, in which the US is a participant, if not the principal actor.
At a NATO summit meeting in Warsaw in July, Obama acknowledged that this prospect would disappoint a US public still suffering from combat fatigue.
“It’s very hard for us ever to get the satisfaction of [late US general Douglas] MacArthur and the emperor meeting, and a war being officially over,” he said.
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