The Obama's War
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.
Doug Mills/The New York Times
From left, President Obama, Gen. David H. Petraeus, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Adm. Mike Mullen after General Petraeus was named to lead operations in Afghanistan.
OBAMA’S WARS
By Bob Woodward
Illustrated. 441 pages. Simon & Schuster. $30.
Stuart Ramson/Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Via Associated Press
Bob Woodward
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.”
