NY Times Book Review of Obama's Wars

[johnkarls]

.
New York Times Book Review – September 22, 2010

BOOKS OF THE TIMES
Afghanistan as Obama and Others Game It
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI (Reading Liberally Editorial Note = Though not identified by the NY Times, Kakutani, 55, is a Pulitzer-Prize winning literary critic for the NY Times.)

It’s no secret that there have been ferocious arguments within the Obama administration over the war in Afghanistan: both substantive policy debates, encouraged by the president during meetings as a means of fully exploring various military and diplomatic options; and nasty public exchanges and orchestrated leaks from the Pentagon and White House, exposing rifts over America’s mission and strategy there as well as heated disagreements over troop levels, timetables and tactical priorities.

Bob Woodward’s new book, “Obama’s Wars,” underscores just how vociferous and highly personal those altercations and message wars often became. Although the volume essentially retraces a narrative that will be familiar to readers from articles in The New York Times and The Washington Post and from Jonathan Alter’s recent book, “The Promise,” Mr. Woodward adds lots of detail and anecdotal color to the story of how the White House’s policy on Afghanistan evolved over the administration’s first 18 months, and how the decision was made to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan (to try to wrest momentum away from a resurgent Taliban) with a drawdown of American forces scheduled to begin in July 2011.

Like all Woodward books, “Obama’s Wars” plows relentlessly forward like a shark. It is all about narrative and scenes and relationships among its principal subjects, not policy assessments or evaluations of conditions on the ground. Readers looking for historical perspective on the long walk-up to Sept. 11 will find Steve Coll’s “Ghost Wars” and Lawrence Wright’s “Looming Tower” more useful; for those seeking analysis of what went wrong in Afghanistan after America’s routing of the Taliban in late 2001, Seth Jones’s “In the Graveyard of Empires” is the book to look at.

In “Obama’s Wars,” Mr. Woodward, as usual, eschews analysis and commentary. Instead, he hews to his I Am a Tape Recorder technique, using his insider access to give readers interested in inside-the-Beltway politics lots of granular detail — harvested from interviews conducted “on background,” as well as leaked memos, meeting notes and other documents. Some of this information is revealing about the interplay of personality and policy and politics in Washington; some of it is just self-serving spin. As he’s done in his earlier books, Mr. Woodward acknowledges that attributions of “thoughts, conclusions or feelings to a person” were in some cases not obtained directly from that person, but “from notes or from a colleague whom the person told” — a questionable but increasingly popular method, which means the reader should take the reconstructed scenes with a grain of salt.

Many administration members in this volume express a decidedly gloomy view of the under-resourced war they inherited from President George W. Bush. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. is said to be “pessimistic and more convinced than ever that Afghanistan was a version of Vietnam.” Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, the president’s coordinator for Afghanistan-Pakistan, is quoted saying that it’s likely, by July 2011, that “we’re not going to be a whole lot different than we are today.”

“When you look at all the things that have got to break our way,” General Lute says, “I can’t tell you that the prospect here for success if very high.”

Mr. Woodward reports that Mr. Obama was so determined to avoid a Vietnam-like morass that he drew up his own six-page “terms sheet” — “similar to a legal document used in a business deal” — to contain the military’s push for an expanded footprint. This November 2009 memo, included at the end of the book, specifies American goals (including to “deny safe haven to al Qaeda” and to “degrade,” rather than defeat, “the Taliban insurgency”), and it provides guidelines for “building sufficient Afghan capacity to secure and govern their country,” noting that “this approach is not fully resourced counterinsurgency or nation building, but a narrower approach.” Like other reporters, Mr. Woodward describes Mr. Obama as engaged in a methodical decision process that is nearly the polar opposite of the gut calls and out-of-channels policy making of the Bush administration, which Mr. Woodward mapped in four earlier books. Mr. Obama is seen repeatedly questioning his aides and the military about the actual United States mission in Afghanistan and underlying assumptions about the war.

According to Mr. Woodward, Mr. Obama consulted with Gen. Colin Powell, the former secretary of state, who said in a private meeting in September 2009: “don’t get pushed by the left to do nothing. Don’t get pushed by the right to do everything.” Two months later, he advised the president to stand up to the generals who kept insisting on a higher number of troops, reminding him that “you’re the commander in chief.”

Throughout this volume, the Obama administration is depicted as deeply divided and riven with suspicions: the president feeling boxed in by the Pentagon, members of the military battling the White House and one another. In addition to the well-known putdowns of the president’s national security team by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, then the commander of forces in Afghanistan (which appeared in Rolling Stone magazine and led to his firing last June), and the much-chronicled tensions between senior military officers and Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, Mr. Woodward recounts a cornucopia of conflicts and adversarial agendas — and much pettiness, in-fighting and score-settling that stand in awful contrast to the sobering realities of a nearly nine-year-old war that has already claimed more than 1,000 American lives.

Hillary Rodham Clinton’s former campaign strategist Mark Penn is described as urging her to take the job of secretary of state because, in Mr. Woodward’s words, “if she did the job for four years, Obama might be in trouble and have to dump Biden and pick her to run with him as vice president.”

Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is described as trying to withhold a “hybrid option” — requiring a fewer number of troops — from consideration, and even knocking heads with Gen. David H. Petraeus, then the commander of the United States Central Command, over a memo about prospects in Afghanistan.

Mr. Biden is quoted telling President Obama that Richard C. Holbrooke, the State Department’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, is “the most egotistical bastard I’ve ever met,” although he “may be the right guy for the job.” And Michael Hayden, the former C.I.A. director, is quoted calling his successor Leon Panetta “Rahm Emanuel’s goombah.” As for Gen. James L. Jones, the national security adviser, he is depicted in these pages as a disgruntled whiner who regards the president, in Mr. Woodward’s words, as “cerebral and distant,” who is “unsure about” Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and who describes the president’s aides (including Mr. Emanuel, David Axelrod and Robert Gibbs) as “the water bugs” or the “Politburo.” According to Mr. Woodward, Mr. Jones uses “the kind of rhetoric that Obama had shied away from” (calling the conflict “a clash of civilizations,” a “clash of religions”), and language that ups the ante in Afghanistan, contending that a setback or loss there would be “a tremendous boost for jihadist extremists, fundamentalists all over the world.” Why did Mr. Obama select General Jones in the first place? Mr. Woodward writes that John Podesta, the director of Mr. Obama’s transition team, “had the strong impression that Obama wanted a national security adviser who wasn’t perceived as his guy, a mere extension of the president.”

“He seemed to have reached the baffling conclusion that the lack of a personal relationship could be an asset,” the book continues.

Considerable space is devoted to the debates in national security meetings about the relationship between Afghanistan and Pakistan, the nature of the linkage between Al Qaeda and the Taliban, and the continuing threats posed by Al Qaeda.

A 2009 President’s Daily Brief and another highly restricted report, Mr. Woodward writes, “said that at least 20 al Qaeda converts with American, Canadian or European passports were being trained in Pakistani safe havens to return to their homelands to commit high-profile acts of terrorism.”

“They included half a dozen from the United Kingdom, several Canadians, some Germans and three Americans,” the book continues. “None of their names was known.”

In “Obama’s Wars,” Mr. Woodward also reports that President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan — whose government the United States has been trying to buttress — “had been diagnosed as a manic-depressive, according to intelligence.” And he depicts General Petraeus, who now commands the American forces in Afghanistan, as believing that he could “add time to the clock” and “get what we need” as long as some progress is shown — an argument sharply dismissed by General Lute, who called it “a dramatic misreading of this president.”

An administration review of the Afghanistan war is scheduled for this December. “I’m not signing on to a failure,” President Obama is quoted saying near the end of this book. “If what I proposed is not working, I’m not going to be like these other presidents and stick to it based upon my ego or my politics — my political security.”