Holbrooke thought that Obama was not deciding because he disliked the options before him, and that the National Security Council (NSC) was failing the president by not giving him the right options. What Holbrooke omitted from his assessment was that Obama was failing to press the NSC to give him other options.
The night before Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who in June 2009 was installed as the new U.S. commander in Afghanistan, was to release the report outlining what he needed to fight the war, Holbrooke gathered his team in his office. We asked him what he thought McChrystal would request. He said, "Watch! The military will give the president three choices. There will be a 'high-risk' option" -- Holbrooke held his hand high in the air -- "that is what they always call it, which will call for maybe very few troops. Low troops, high risk. Then there will be a 'low-risk' option" -- Holbrooke lowered his hand -- "which will ask for double the number they are actually looking for. In the middle will be what they want," which was between 30,000 and 40,000 more troops. And that is exactly what happened.
The alternative, which Vice President Joe Biden favored, was a stepped-up counterterrorism effort, dubbed "CT-plus," that would involve drone strikes and Special Forces raids, mostly directed at al Qaeda's sanctuary in Pakistan's wild border region near Afghanistan. But this looked risky -- too much like "cut and run" -- and there was no guarantee that CT-plus could work without COIN. Like Biden, Holbrooke thought COIN was pointless, but he was not sold on CT-plus. He thought you could not have a regional strategy built on "secret war." Drones are no substitute for a political settlement.
During the review, however, there was no discussion at all of diplomacy and a political settlement. Holbrooke wanted the president to consider this option, but the White House was not buying it. The military wanted to stay in charge, and going against the military would make the president look weak.
So Obama chose the politically safe option that he did not like: He gave the military what it asked for. Months of White House hand-wringing ended up with the administration choosing the option that had been offered from day one: fully resourced COIN and 30,000 additional troops. But Obama added a deadline of July 2011 for the larger troop commitment to work; after that the surge would be rolled back. In effect, the president said the new strategy was good for a year.
Holbrooke in Kabul, January 2010
FROM THE OUTSET, Holbrooke argued for political reconciliation as the path out of Afghanistan. But the military thought talk of reconciliation undermined America's commitment to fully resourced COIN. On his last trip to Afghanistan, in October 2010, Holbrooke pulled aside Petraeus, who by then had replaced McChrystal as commander in Afghanistan, and said, "David, I want to talk to you about reconciliation." "That's a 15-second conversation," Petraeus replied. "No, not now."
The commanders' standard response was that they needed two more fighting seasons to soften up the Taliban. They were hoping to change the president's mind on his July deadline and after that convince him to accept a "slow and shallow" (long and gradual) departure schedule. Their line was that we should fight first and talk later. Holbrooke thought we could talk and fight. Reconciliation should be the ultimate goal, and fighting the means to facilitate it.
The Taliban were ready for talks as early as April 2009. At that time, Afghanistan scholar Barnett Rubin, shortly before he joined Holbrooke's team as his senior Afghan-affairs advisor, traveled to Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. In Kabul Rubin met with former Taliban commander Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, who laid out in detail a strategy for talks: where to start, what to discuss, and the shape of the settlement that the United States and the Taliban could agree on. Zaeef said the Taliban needed concessions on prisoners America held at Guantánamo Bay and removal of the names of some Taliban from U.S. and U.N. blacklists sanctioning terrorists. Back in Washington -- on the day he was sworn into government service -- Rubin wrote Holbrooke a memo regarding this trip. That afternoon the two sat next to each other on the U.S. Airways shuttle back to New York. Holbrooke read the memo; then he turned to Rubin and said, "If this thing works, it may be the only way we will get out." That was the beginning of a two-year campaign to sell the idea of talking to the Taliban: first to Clinton and then to the White House and Obama.
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