role in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The process was so torturous that the journalist Bob Woodward managed to spin an entire book out of disgruntled accounts of it. For ten meetings spanning more than twenty-five hours, the president heard arguments and proposals. Countless more meetings were conducted by lower-ranking officials. The fundamental question: how many troops to deploy and when. The military had already requested a surge of 30,000 troops when Obama began his term, and during the review, military leaders fought tooth and nail for a fully resourced counterinsurgency, with as many troops as possible, as fast as possible, to remain as long as possible. “We cannot achieve our objectives without more troops,” Petraeus argued. After the very first National Security Council meeting on the subject, he said he was going to move forward on the pending troop surge. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel had to rein him in: “Hold on,” he said, according to leaked accounts. “General, I appreciate you’re doing your job, but I didn’t hear the president of the United States give that order.”
Holbrooke was nominally the co-chair of the review process, along with retired CIA veteran Bruce Riedel and, according to Riedel, Petraeus as an “unacknowledged third co-chair.” But Holbrooke was sidelined—by Riedel, who had greater access to the president, by a series of generals, and by the White House itself. The review threw into sharp relief the generational and cultural chasm between Holbrooke and Obama. In a February 2009 National Security Council meeting, Holbrooke compared the deliberations to those Lyndon Johnson conducted with his advisers during Vietnam. “History should not be forgotten,” he said. The room fell silent. Obama muttered: “ghosts.” When Holbrooke brought up Vietnam again several months later, the president was less demure. “Richard,” he snapped, cutting him off. “Do people really talk like that?” Holbrooke had begun taping audio diaries of his experiences, with an eye toward history (and a memoir). “In some of the early NSC meetings with the president, I referred to Vietnam and was told by Hillary that the president did not want any references to Vietnam,” he said in one, his voice sounding tired on the scratchy tape. “I was very struck by this, since I thought there were obviously relevant issues.” “He was incredibly unhappy with the way he was personally treated,” Hillary Clinton reflected. “I was too. Because I thought a lot of what he was offering had real merit and it didn’t somehow fit into the worldview that the White House had.” Holbrooke had allowed himself to be categorized not as someone to be heard but as someone to be tolerated.
But the more meaningful divide was with the military. Holbrooke was no dove. He had supported the invasion in Iraq, and at the outset of the review, he endorsed an initial deployment of troops in advance of the Afghan elections as a stopgap. But he felt military engagement should be organized around the goal of achieving a political settlement. He was alarmed by the force of persuasion the military voices at the NSC table commanded, sometimes crowding out nonmilitary solutions. “I told David Axelrod that we had been dominated much too long by pure mil-think,” he said in another tape. “Military thinking and military domination. And while I had great respect for the military, uh, and Petraeus was brilliant, I liked them as individuals and they were great Americans, they should not dictate political strategy, which is what’s happening now.”
After one meeting, he emerged, exhausted, and told Vali Nasr something absurd: Secretary of Defense Robert Gates had bigger folders. His maps and charts were more colorful. The SRAP team had cranked out voluminous policy papers, but they were going unread by many of the president’s advisers. “Who can make graphics?” he asked in one meeting. Everyone looked at me. “Ageism,” I muttered, and went to work making technicolor PowerPoints out of his policy proposals, which he dictated in minute detail. Often, they focused on political and diplomatic solutions he felt were being given short shrift by the White House. A series of concentric circles showed the complex landscape of global players he felt the United States needed to do more to engage—from international donors, to NATO states, to rising powers like India and China. Triangles linked by arrows illustrated trilateral relations between Pakistan, India and the US. A flow chart, titled “Changing Pakistan’s Behavior Toward the Taliban,” offered a storybook simplification of his plan for the most difficult bilateral relationship in the world:
1 Focus on entire country with new US-led international assistance and new commitments campaign …
2 … Which builds pro-US-sentiment …
3 … Which helps turn the Pakistani government and Pakistani military toward our position …
4 … Which gets Pakistan’s military to take more action against the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
The graphics did little to move the needle. Advocates for a full troop surge were more numerous and had better access than voices of caution. Riedel rode on Air Force One with the president, and briefed him without others present. Secretary of Defense Bob Gates supported his generals and their lobbying for a robust troop surge. Retired General Jim Jones, the national security advisor, did as well. So did his deputy in charge of Afghanistan, Retired Lieutenant General Doug Lute. Hillary Clinton, despite her advocacy for Holbrooke, was fundamentally a hawk. “There’s plenty of blame,” Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security advisor, later recalled. Holbrooke’s “biggest defender was Hillary, and yet she constantly sided with the generals in the policy discussions.”
“I was convinced that Richard was right about the need for both a major diplomatic campaign and a civilian surge,” Clinton said. “I did disagree with him that additional troops weren’t needed to make that work, because I thought, given how the Bush administration had kind of lost interest in Afghanistan because of their hyper-concern about Iraq, that the Taliban was really on the upsurge and that there had to be some demonstration that we’d be willing to push back on them.”
Holbrooke had to hold his tongue, but he knew force alone couldn’t solve the crisis in Afghanistan. “My position was very precise,” he said over a meal with Bob Woodward, who recorded the conversation. “I will support you in any position you take cause you’re my boss but you need to know my actual views. I have serious concerns about the fact that our troops are going to be spread too thin and I’m most concerned we’re going to get into a mission/resource mismatch. A lot of people thought I was overly influenced by Vietnam. It didn’t matter to me. At least I had some experience there.”
“I always had such regret about the Holbrooke thing,” Rhodes said. “It went wrong and it feels very unnecessary when I look back.” It was, he reflected, like “Holbrooke was in a game of musical chairs, and he was the guy without a chair to sit in.”
One of the Kafkaesque qualities of the period was the profusion of seemingly duplicative reviews—not just the White House’s process led by Riedel, but prior assessments by Petraeus, and one by Stanley McChrystal, the new general in charge of Afghanistan. Just before McChrystal released his recommendations, Holbrooke told our team exactly how the process would play out. There would be three choices. “A ‘high-risk’ option,” he said, gesturing above eyeline, “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,” he said, moving his hand down, “which will ask for double the number they are actually looking for. In the middle will be what they want.” Holbrooke had seen this movie before. The first recommendation of the final Riedel report was for a “fully resourced” counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. After months of dithering, the President chose COIN, and a deployment of 30,000 additional troops.
Obama announced the surge with an expiration date: two years later, in mid-2011, withdrawals would begin. Conspicuously absent from either the Riedel report or