Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War

December 2009 marked the end of the third year of my deployment to the Washington combat zone. It began with the president’s announcement at West Point that the United States would surge 30,000 troops to Afghanistan, followed by my spending two full days of hearings on his announcement before the House and Senate with Hillary and Mike. The president had made a tough call on Afghanistan knowing there would be heavy political fallout. Hardly anyone in Congress was happy with his decisions. Republicans, led by McCain, disliked the deadlines—that troop drawdowns would begin in July 2011 and that our combat operations would end by 2014. A few of the president’s fellow Democrats were guardedly supportive, but most were critical and some were downright hostile. At our hearings, the antiwar protesters were out in full force, sitting both at the dais and in the audience. As difficult as I found the House Armed Services Committee, its members were model statesmen compared to those of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, a number of whose members from both parties I again found extraordinarily rude and nasty; as a committee, I thought, it had more than its fair share of crackpots on both the left and the right. I didn’t envy Hillary having to deal with them routinely. The day after the hearings, opponents of the war fingered me as responsible for the president’s decisions and decided, according to the magazine The Nation, “It’s time to fire Robert Gates.”

It was with great relief that a few days later I flew to Afghanistan and Iraq. We had a full contingent of press on the plane, and as usual, I met with them during the flight. There, for the first and only time I was secretary, I said with respect to Afghanistan, “We’re in it to win it.” I had always been careful to avoid using terms like winning or victory because in the case of both wars, I knew such terms had become politically loaded, and that even the best possible outcome would not look to most Americans like winning or a victory. I preferred to use less politically fraught terms like success or accomplishing the mission. There would be nothing like the German or Japanese unconditional surrenders at the end of World War II, or even the Iraqi capitulation in 1991. But on that plane trip to Afghanistan after the president’s speech at West Point, I just felt the troops needed to hear someone say that they weren’t putting their lives on the line for some kind of “reconciliation.”

Foreign travel, especially to war zones, by a secretary of defense is routinely tightly scripted, meticulously planned, and executed with military precision. Not this trip. In Afghanistan, I hoped to visit a Stryker brigade in the south that had lost thirty soldiers, but I was grounded in Kabul because of bad weather. I did have lunch with ten of our younger NCOs. I was struck both by the airmen’s positive attitude about the Afghans they were training and also by their observation that desertion was a problem because some Afghan trainees were disgusted by their officers stealing part of their salaries. I always learned real “ground truth” like this from our troops. And then, just hours before my private meeting with President Karzai, there had been another incident that allegedly involved our coalition operations and civilian casualties. Karzai never waited for the facts before drawing conclusions, so the atmosphere for my meeting wasn’t the best. Still, he and I got along well, and we had a good conversation. An important element of the strategy, I told him, was the need for Afghans to accelerate the recruitment of more young men into their security services. I played to his ego, saying he was the first president of a democratic Afghanistan—the father of his country—and he needed to be constantly encouraging young men to do their patriotic duty to defend their country. He vigorously nodded his agreement, although little came of the conversation.

As usual, he was more supportive in private than in public. He threw me a curve ball in our joint press appearance immediately afterward, saying that Afghanistan would not be able to support its own security forces financially for “fifteen to twenty years”—not a message any American wanted to hear. I tap-danced with the press to avoid the appearance of a major disconnect between us, saying that we could not abandon Afghanistan after our combat operations ended in 2014 and that I anticipated continued assistance. But it was apparent to all that Karzai had blindsided me. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd was traveling with us on that trip, and she wrote a few days later, in her typical sharp-edged style, “Puppets just aren’t what they used to be.” Karzai was no puppet, but the United States probably hadn’t had a more troublesome ally in war since Charles de Gaulle in World War II, perhaps because both were nearly totally dependent on the United States and both deeply resented it.

That evening I took my staff to the CIA’s equivalent of an officers’ club, which had much better food than the military provided—and adult beverages. One of the CIA officers who ate with us that night, a very bright young woman, was among the seven agency people killed in a Taliban ambush three weeks later, a tragic reminder that a lot of Americans not in uniform were also putting their lives on the line in this fight.

The next day, December 10, we were in Iraq, where our role in the war was beginning to wind down. There had been successful provincial elections in January 2009, with international election monitors present in every single constituency. In accordance with the Status of Forces Agreement signed by Bush and Maliki in December 2008, all U.S. combat forces had withdrawn from Iraqi towns and cities by the end of June. General Ray Odierno was well along with planning for the transition of our combat forces to “assistance and advisory” brigades and the withdrawal of some 70,000 U.S. troops and their equipment by the end of August 2010—all the while continuing to hunt down terrorists, train the Iraq security forces, and promote reconciliation among Iraqi politicians. It was a massive and complex undertaking, and the performance by Ray and his team was outstanding.

I was scheduled to meet with Maliki right after my arrival, but he was instead spending six hours of quality time getting scorched by the Council of Representatives—the Iraqi parliament—for his government’s failure to prevent several recent terrorist bombings. When our meeting was canceled, the reporters with us characterized it as Maliki “blowing me off.” I knew from personal experience that Maliki would much rather be meeting with me than getting shellacked by legislators.

The major topic of my meetings with Iraqi leaders was the national election to be held the following March. After a protracted stalemate, the Council of Representatives had passed an elections law in early November. The elections would determine 325 members of the council, which would then choose a president and prime minister. Politicking was well under way. In my meeting with the Presidency Council—President Jalal Talabani (Kurd), Vice President Adel Abdul Mahdi (Shia), and Vice President Tariq Al-Hashimi (Sunni)—I asked Talabani if Iraq’s neighbors were interfering in the elections. “Yes, everyone is interfering,” he said. “Iran, the Gulf States, Syria, Turkey. Only Kuwait is not.” Hashimi was his usual dour self, complaining that the violence was “no joke,” the government was unable to do anything about the attacks, the security team needed to be reshuffled, and the people were disappointed and angry. Hashimi was a habitual complainer, but inasmuch as he was the only senior Sunni official, he had legitimate gripes. When he said the Presidency Council was being marginalized by Maliki, I suspected there was a lot of truth to that.

Maliki rescheduled the meeting with me for early the next morning. We discussed the violence, and he assured me the security forces were working well together. He asserted that al Qaeda did not pose a “great danger to us” but did want to disrupt the elections—“their last opportunity.” We talked about the standoff between the central government in Baghdad and the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) over control of the city of Kirkuk. I told Maliki I was going to Irbil, the Kurdish capital, that afternoon and would urge President Masoud Barzani to play a constructive role.

I was struck in Irbil by the signs of prosperity, including a lot of foreign-financed construction. I thanked Barzani for his help in devising the compromises that allowed the election law to pass, and I assured him of continuing U.S. friendship. I pointedly told him we were committed to preserving Kurdish security and prosperity “within a unified Iraq.” Barzani replied that messages of support from Obama, Biden, and me had been the first such clearly conveyed to him (a statement I knew to be untrue from my Bush days) and had allayed longtime concerns about how the United States viewed the Kurds in Iraq. He said the KRG would always be “a part of the solution” and that “we are committed to national unity if the government in Baghdad is committed to the constitution.” I stressed to him, as I had to the Presidency Council, the need to form a unity government as soon as possible after the election. Delay would only aid the worst extremists in Iraq. I assured him that we would be happy to do anything we could do to help resolve internal differences among the political factions. I then returned to Washington, D.C., and its political factions.

The Iraqi elections took place on schedule on March 7, 2010. There was little violence and a good turnout, but no party even came close to a majority. Maliki’s coalition came in second with 89 seats in the Council of Representatives, while former interim prime minister Ayad Allawi’s party came in first with 91 seats. The new parliament convened on June 14, with its primary task to select a new prime minister to form a government, but no candidate could muster a majority of the votes. Maliki was determined to remain as prime minister and refused to support Allawi (also Shia) even though he had won more seats. The result was a stalemate, with Maliki remaining as prime minister until someone could muster a majority in the parliament. That stalemate would continue for six months, despite the best efforts of Biden, Odierno, and U.S. ambassador Chris Hill to broker a compromise. Finally, Maliki’s government was unanimously approved on December 21. The absence of a return to the kind of sectarian violence that followed the 2005 election was a mark of significant progress.

As President Obama had decided a month after his inauguration, the U.S. combat role in Iraq ended on August 31, 2010, nearly seven and a half years after we invaded. For Americans, the war in Iraq was finally over. Since the March 20, 2003, invasion, 4,427 American troops had been killed and 34,275 injured. Of the 3,502 killed in action, 1,240 died on my watch; of the 31,894 wounded in action, 9,568 had been hurt while I was secretary. During the preceding two years, we had withdrawn nearly 100,000 troops, closed or transferred to the Iraqis hundreds of bases, and moved millions of pieces of equipment out of the country.

The president marked the end of the war, the combat mission named Operation Iraqi Freedom, with a visit to Fort Bliss, Texas, on the thirty-first and with an address to the American people from the Oval Office that evening. He lauded the troops and their sacrifice and noted that because of them “Iraq has the opportunity to embrace a new destiny, even though many challenges remain.” He spoke of the huge cost in lives and treasure America had paid to put the Iraqis’ future in their own hands, of his own opposition to the war, and of its contentiousness in the United States. He discussed Afghanistan and his strategy there and concluded with his views on the need to tackle the many challenges at home. He hit all the political bases in his remarks, and he certainly could not be accused of waving a “mission accomplished” banner marking the end of the Iraq War.

I, too, gave a speech on August 31, to the American Legion in Milwaukee. I, too, waved no banners: “This is not a time for premature victory parades or self-congratulation, even as we reflect with pride on what our troops and their Iraqi partners have accomplished. We still have a job to do and responsibilities there.” I observed that the opportunities in front of the Iraqis had been purchased “at a terrible cost” in the losses and trauma endured by the Iraqi people, “and in the blood, sweat, and tears of American men and women in uniform.” I left the hall and immediately boarded an airplane to Iraq.

I landed at the gigantic Al Asad Air Base in western Iraq, once home to 22,000 Marines. It was now a ghost town, its long runways used mainly for ferrying soldiers home. I visited U.S. troops in nearby Ramadi, the scene of some of the most vicious fighting of the war. The reporters accompanying me asked if the war had been “worth it,” and I responded—in “markedly anti-triumphal remarks,” as they would write—that while our troops had “accomplished something really quite extraordinary here, how it all weighs in the balance I think remains to be seen…. It really requires a historian’s perspective in terms of what happens here in the long run.” I added that the war would always be clouded by how it began—the incorrect premise that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons and an active nuclear weapons program. In stark contrast to the cosmic questions posed by the press, the troops were mainly interested in retirement and health benefits and hardly mentioned the war.

Later the same day, September 1, Biden and I presided over the inauguration of the new U.S. training and advisory mission in Iraq, Operation New Dawn, and the change of command ceremony in which Ray Odierno handed responsibility to his successor, General Lloyd Austin. The ceremony was held in Al Faw palace, crowded with American and Iraqi commanders and as many troops as could be stuffed into the ornate hall built for Saddam. We all made speeches. Biden’s was the longest as he paid tribute to Odierno, his family, and the troops. (It was a little awkward listening to the vice president, knowing that he had vigorously opposed the military surge that had made this relatively peaceful transition possible.) My remarks focused primarily on Odierno’s accomplishments, noting that without his leadership as Multi-National Corps commander under Petraeus in 2007 and his ability to turn plans into results on the ground, “we would be facing a far grimmer situation outside these walls today, and more broadly a strategic disaster for the United States.” I recalled asking him to return to Iraq as overall commander in the fall of 2008; he subsequently kept a boot on the neck of al Qaeda in Iraq and expanded the capabilities of the Iraqi army and police, all while overseeing the drawdown, restructuring, and repositioning of U.S. forces. I also welcomed Lloyd Austin. In addition to praising the troops, both Biden and Odierno called upon the Iraqi government to end its squabbling and get on with forming a government and addressing the country’s challenges. During the speeches, I noticed that my jet-lagged senior staff sitting in the front row, to a man, had fallen sound asleep.

Fifty thousand U.S. troops would remain in Iraq, deployed in six “advise and assist” training brigades, with all American forces scheduled to depart Iraq by the end of December 2011 unless there was a new agreement of some sort with the Iraqis. During my remaining time in office, 26 more Americans would be killed in action in Iraq, and another 206 wounded in action. But the war that President Bush in November 2006 asked me to help salvage and that President Obama two years later asked me to help end was over. The future of Iraq was up to the Iraqis. I was indescribably proud of what our troops and their commanders at every level had accomplished, against all odds at home and in Iraq itself.

AFGHANISTAN

As I’ve said, the president had made a tough decision on the surge in Afghanistan in November 2009, and he had, for all practical purposes, made me, Mullen, Petraeus, and McChrystal swear a blood oath that we would support his decision. Unfortunately, Biden and his staff, the White House staff, and the NSS apparently had not taken the same oath of support. From the moment the president left West Point, they worked to show he had been wrong, that the Pentagon was not following his direction, and that the war on the ground was going from bad to worse. The president’s decision clearly had not ended the rancor and division over war strategy inside the administration, or the White House–NSS suspicion of the senior military—and me—on this issue. Indeed, the suspicion seemed to have increased.

Everything each side said and did was perceived through this distorted prism. A big issue in the fall 2009 debate had been the need to get the additional 30,000 U.S. troops into Afghanistan quickly, as had been done in Iraq in 2007. The logistics challenges in Afghanistan were beyond daunting, but Mullen, Petraeus, and the military’s logistics professionals pretty much pulled it off. When the Defense Department informed the White House in January that the last few thousand troops might not arrive until early September, we were accused of having misled the president. Almost none of the critics in the White House or the NSS—whose ranks were filled primarily by former Hill staffers, academics, and political operatives—had ever managed anything, and so there was no understanding of or sympathy for the challenges involved in what we were trying to do, only an opportunity to accuse us of walking away from our commitments to the president.

Biden, Donilon, Lute, and others bridled when McChrystal referred to his strategy as “counterinsurgency,” accusing him of expanding the mission the president had given him. But words that had been so carefully parsed in the White House debate were not adequate to explain the mission to 100,000 soldiers and Marines, and the core of that mission was, in fact, counterinsurgency, albeit with fairly tight geographical and time limits. Troops risking their lives need to be told that their goal is to “defeat” those trying to kill them. But such terms were viewed in the White House as borderline insubordinate political statements by generals trying to broaden the president’s strategy. Biden publicly asserted that the drawdowns beginning in July 2011 would be “steep.” I said I thought they would, and should, be gradual. When I said in testimony on the Hill that the president always had “the freedom to adjust his decisions” with respect to the timing and pace of drawdowns, it was interpreted by administration skeptics as my saying that the drawdowns might not begin in July.

The same skeptics in the West Wing and the NSS second-guessed McChrystal’s decision to secure several key villages in Helmand early in the campaign. They argued that the significant population center in the south was Kandahar. This was coming from the same critics who had wanted to avoid counterinsurgency—which is focused on population centers—and had demanded a “proof of concept” for his overall strategy.

The gap between the White House and senior Defense leaders became a chasm. Early in 2010, it had widened as the White House criticized the U.S. military relief effort in Haiti, the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was playing out, I resisted major cuts in the FY2011 defense budget, and I wrote my memo on shortcomings in our preparations for a possible conflict with Iran. While the military’s every move in Afghanistan was examined through a microscope, and we were under great pressure to speed the surge, no comparable attention was paid to the civilian side. Commanders in the field were the most insistent in pleading for more civilian expertise, citing one example after another where even a small number of U.S. diplomats or development experts would make a dramatic difference in provincial capitals, villages, and rural areas. One of the few things the NSC principals had agreed upon the previous fall was that a significant increase in the number of American civilian experts was essential to success, but the numbers trickled in far too slowly. Donilon would occasionally raise the problem with Hillary or her deputies in principals’ meetings, but little came of it.

We at Defense certainly at times contributed to White House suspicions. For example, overly optimistic statements by McChrystal and others about the early success of military operations in and around the village of Marjah in Helmand—in particular, the claim of an Afghan “government in a box” ready to insert—gave ammunition not only to skeptics inside the government but also to the press. The more our commanders touted any success in the field, the more the NSS looked for evidence they were wrong. We should have done a better job of explaining what we were doing on the ground to implement the president’s decisions, although God knows we tried. Neither side was really listening.

In mid-January 2010, I made my second and last trip to Pakistan. Mike Mullen and Richard Holbrooke had devoted significant time and energy to cultivating the Pakistanis, reassuring them we wouldn’t abandon them and trying to get them to work more closely with us on the Afghan-Pakistani border. No administration in my entire career devoted more time and energy to working the Pakistanis than did President Obama and all his senior team. On January 21–22, I met with President Asif Ali Zardari, Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani, and most important, the chief of the army general staff, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. My message was consistent: we were committed to a long-term strategic partnership; we needed to work together against the “syndicate of terror” placing Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India at risk; we needed to remove safe havens on both side of the border; Pakistan needed to better control anti-Americanism and harassment of Americans; and the Pakistani army’s “extra-judicial killings” (executions) were putting our relationship at risk. In a speech at Pakistan’s National Defense University, I took direct aim at the many conspiracy theories circulating about us: “Let me say, definitively, the United States does not covet a single inch of Pakistani soil. We seek no military bases and we have no desire to control Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.”

The visit was for naught. I returned convinced that Pakistan would work with the United States in some ways—such as providing supply lines through Pakistan, which were also highly profitable—while at the same time providing sanctuary for the Taliban and other extremists, so that no matter who came out on top in Afghanistan, Pakistan would have influence. If there was to be any reconciliation, the Pakistanis intended to control it. Although I would defend them in front of Congress and to the press to keep the relationship from getting worse—and endangering our supply line from Karachi—I knew they were really no ally at all.

If you’ll remember, in recommending a surge of 30,000 troops to the president the previous fall, I was counting on our coalition partners in Afghanistan to contribute an additional 6,000 to 7,000 troops, which would get us close to the 40,000 McChrystal had requested. At a NATO defense ministers meeting in Istanbul on February 4–5, 2010, I leaned hard on my colleagues to find at least 4,000 more trainers to send to Afghanistan. I told them that effectively training a sizable Afghan security force was the exit strategy for all of us. I promised our allies more training to deal with IEDs and offered to make available to them counter-IED technologies we had developed. I then visited Ankara, Rome, and Paris to urge leaders in those governments to do more. The European governments eventually contributed an additional 8,000 to 9,000 troops. Even with this new infusion, though, we remained short of trainers needed to build up the Afghan army.

Two organizational changes in Afghanistan in early 2010 helped the allied effort considerably. The U.S. leadership had long thought that having a senior NATO civilian in Kabul to partner with the military commander would be important. Earlier efforts along these lines had not been successful, but in January the British ambassador to Afghanistan, Mark Sedwill, was appointed to the senior civilian role. He would prove a valuable partner for the ISAF commander and a useful influence both in Brussels and in Afghanistan.

The second change was solving the U. S. command and control problem once and for all—for the first time, to bring all American forces (including both special operations and the Marines) under the U.S. theater commander, at last establishing “unity of command.” I told McChrystal at the February defense ministers meeting that I wanted him to be like Eisenhower in World War II and have complete command of all forces in the theater. Toward the end of February, I told Mullen and Petraeus the same thing. To accomplish this, Petraeus said, getting the Marines under McChrystal’s command was “the Holy Grail.” After deferring for too long to multiple senior military voices supportive of or resigned to the status quo, I simply directed the command change. By late spring, every American in uniform in Afghanistan was under McChrystal’s command. It had taken far too long to get there, and that was my fault. I had fired several senior officers and officials because once they had been informed about a serious problem, they had not acted aggressively to solve it. I had been guilty of doing the same damn thing with respect to Afghan command and control.

As we surged troops into Afghanistan and McChrystal honed our military strategy, his staff began to tackle a problem that had concerned me all along—the inadequacy of our intelligence on the ground. McChrystal’s intelligence chief, Major General Michael Flynn, prepared a report detailing our ignorance of tribal, social, and political relationships in local areas, and our lack of understanding of power relationships and familial and clan connections. His diagnosis was on target as far as I was concerned, and I thought his proposals to remedy the situation made sense, including having our troops on the ground report what they learned as they went into villages, met with tribal elders, and brokered local deals. My only concern with Flynn’s remarkable analysis was that in January 2010, he published it in a think-tank journal so that everyone, including our adversaries in Afghanistan, could read about our deficiencies. Still, he was on the money in a critically important part of our effort.

I traveled once again to Afghanistan in early March and, as usual, met with Karzai. The prospects for reconciliation with the Taliban and reintegration of their fighters into Afghan society were much on everyone’s mind, especially Karzai’s, since he had convoked a national peace conference in late April. I told him we supported reconciliation but that it had to be on his terms, not those of Taliban chief Mullah Omar. He should negotiate from a position of strength, and I suggested he could probably do that by the coming autumn. I informed him that the request for an additional $30 billion needed to fund the surge would be before Congress about the time of his visit to the United States in May. “You could help Secretary Clinton and me,” I told him.

As always, though—sorry to be predictable on the subject—the high point of the trip was getting out of Kabul to see the troops. I was flown to Forward Operating Base Frontenac near Kandahar to visit the 1st Battalion of the 17th Infantry Regiment, a Stryker unit that had suffered twenty-one killed and sixty-two wounded in its successful campaign. Roughly one out of seven soldiers in that unit had become a casualty. As a memorial to the fallen, they had set up a tepee with shelves along the sides holding photographs of those who had been killed, along with small mementos and coins left by comrades and visitors like me to honor them. It was, I thought, a sacred place, and I stayed in there alone for several minutes.

My spirits were revived by lunch with 10 junior enlisted soldiers and then a meeting with 150 of their buddies. As always, they were refreshingly candid. They were concerned about the tighter rules for engaging the enemy to prevent civilian casualties. Although they understood the consequences of hitting innocent people, they wanted to be able to fire more warning shots. They wanted more female soldiers to help search houses. They said the Afghan army troops were “good but lazy” and the Afghan national police were “corrupt and often stoned.” Someone always caught me off guard in these exchanges, in this case a soldier who said there was a design flaw in the soldiers’ combat uniform (fatigues)—the crotches tore out too easily crossing fences. He added with a smile, “It’s not a problem in the summer, but it can get a little breezy in the winter.” I allowed as how I probably wouldn’t have heard about that problem back in the Pentagon. (It turned out the Army was aware of this problem and had already ordered replacements.)

I was then flown to Combat Outpost Caferetta in northeastern Helmand province to see the 3rd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment. Captain Andy Terrell led me on a walk through the town of Now Zad, once home to 30,000 people and a former Taliban stronghold so laced with IEDs as to render it uninhabitable. The Marines had taken Now Zad the previous December and cleared most of the mines, at a great cost in double amputations. I was told that about a thousand residents had returned, and economic life was reviving. As I walked down the dusty main street, a few shops were open with a handful of men and boys standing around. I wondered, as I saw the significant number of Marines throughout the town and noted the paucity of open shops and the absence of livestock, whether this was a show for my benefit, or whether my visit and the presence of so many Marines to guard me had simply led people to hide. There was no question about the courage and grit the Marines had shown in taking this town or of the sacrifices they had endured. The question in the back of my mind was simply whether it had been worth what it cost them.

Before leaving Afghanistan the next day, I visited Camp Blackhorse, outside Kabul, one of the largest training camps for the Afghan army. Afghan defense minister Abdul Rahim Wardak met me there wearing a three-piece suit. He escorted me to various training demonstrations. I took a few minutes to thank the U.S. soldiers who were trainers there and then spoke to several hundred Afghan trainees through an interpreter. Wardak insisted that I end my remarks with a few encouraging words in Pashto. He wrote them out phonetically for me on a card. I gave it my best shot, which I suspected was none too good, and to this day I don’t know what I actually said to them. Presumably it was nothing too insulting because they didn’t appear offended.

My comments to the press on this trip weren’t exactly brimming with optimism. I told those traveling with me to Now Zad that my visit there had reinforced my belief that we were on the right path, “but it will take a long time.” “People need to understand there is some very hard fighting, very hard days ahead…. The early signs are encouraging, but I worry that people will get too impatient and think things are better than they actually are.” No one could accuse me of looking at Afghanistan through rose-colored glasses. I’d seen our soldiers and Marines and what they’d accomplished, but I also understood what lay ahead for them.

Obama made his first trip as president to Afghanistan on March 28, 2010. He was on the ground for six hours, meeting with Karzai and with American troops at Bagram Air Base. His appearance gave a boost to Karzai, even as the U.S. president delivered some tough messages on corruption, drug trafficking, and governance. They also discussed reconciliation with the Taliban. The troops gave him a tumultuous welcome. Jones later told me angrily that a senior embassy official had told the Afghans prematurely about the visit and that not long after the president’s plane departed Kabul, a rocket hit the tarmac less than a quarter mile from where it had been parked.

The divide over Afghanistan between State and Defense on one side and the White House and the NSS on the other, smoldering since December, flamed again at the beginning of April. Mullen and Michèle Flournoy returned to Washington from separate trips to Afghanistan, both deeply disturbed by what they had seen. Flournoy came to see me on April 2 to express her concerns about Ambassador Eikenberry’s skepticism regarding the president’s strategy, his treatment of Karzai, and State-NSS wrangling over who was in charge of the civilian side of the war effort. Mullen shared those concerns. A few days later I told Hillary I wanted to use my regularly scheduled time with the president that week to discuss these issues and asked if she would join me. She said yes. Jim Jones asked if the three of us could meet first without the president to come up with some ways forward. I said okay.

The next day I was discussing a sensitive personnel matter in private with the president when he asked me about Afghanistan. I told him I had agreed with Jones not to discuss my concerns with him—Obama—until Jones, Clinton, and I met. Obama said, “Consider that overruled.” So I said that Eikenberry seemed convinced the strategy Obama had approved would fail. I said the ambassador, and others, had to deal more positively with Karzai, especially in public statements. It was a matter of Afghan sovereignty and pride. The Department of State and the White House/NSS were wrestling for the steering wheel on the civilian side, I continued, and this was going to take the entire effort into a ditch. Obama was quite reserved in his response, commenting only that the principals needed to work out the turf issue.

A few minutes later Clinton, Mullen, Donilon, and I met with Jones in his office. I repeated my concerns with added vigor and details. I said Eikenberry’s pervasive negativity radiated throughout the embassy and was like a general telling troops going into a fight that the campaign would fail. I was very critical of his, and the White House’s, treatment of Karzai, reminding all that Karzai knew we had interfered in the election the previous fall and noting that press secretary Robert Gibbs’s public statement that very morning—that the United States might withdraw the invitation for Karzai to visit Washington in May—had been a horrible mistake. (Gibbs was reacting to Karzai’s public statement that if foreigners didn’t stop meddling in Afghanistan, he might join the Taliban—yet another of his many impulsive public statements that caused all of us heartburn.) I then described the White House–State problem as we saw it from Defense. Mullen endorsed what I had said, adding that we would be looking at rule of law, corruption, and governance issues in a few months, and yet there were no plans. “The civilian side is not happening,” he said.

Hillary had come to the meeting loaded for bear. She gave a number of specific examples of Eikenberry’s insubordination to herself and her deputy, Jack Lew, including refusals to provide information and plans. She said, “He’s a huge problem.” She agreed with me on the administration’s treatment of Karzai. Then she went after the NSS and the White House staff, expressing anger at their direct dealings with Eikenberry and offering a number of examples of what she termed their arrogance, their efforts to control the civilian side of the war effort, their refusal to accommodate requests for meetings, and their refusal to work with Holbrooke and his team. As she talked, she became more forceful. “I’ve had it,” she said. “You want it [control of the civilian side of the war], I’ll turn it all over to you and wash my hands of it. I’ll not be held accountable for something I cannot manage because of White House and NSS interference.”

At that point, I asked Jones how many people Doug Lute had working for him on the NSS. About twenty-five, Jones said. I angrily said that the entire professional NSC staff under Bush 41 had been about fifty people. “When you have that big an operation at the NSS,” I told him, “you’re doing the wrong things and looking for ways to stay busy.” The National Security Staff had, in effect, become an operational body with its own policy agenda, as opposed to a coordination mechanism. And this, in turn, led to micromanagement far beyond what was appropriate. Indeed, on one visit to Afghanistan, I spotted a direct phone line to Lute in the special operations command center at Bagram Air Base. I ordered it removed. On another occasion, I told General Jim Mattis at Central Command that if Lute ever called him again to question anything, Mattis was to tell him to go to hell. I was fed up with the NSS’s micromanagement.

Both Donilon and Jones were generally quiet in the face of Hillary’s and my criticism, though Donilon said that Holbrooke’s team refused to work within the interagency process. Jones said, “You want a meeting, you get one.” Further, he said, if the secretaries of state and defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs thought Eikenberry should go, “then he should go.”

It was a real air clearing. I called Jones the next day to ask if we would discuss all this with the president. He said yes. But it had become clear that Eikenberry and Lute, whatever their shortcomings, were under an umbrella of protection at the White House. With Hillary and me so adamant that the two should leave, that protection could come only from the president. Because I could not imagine any previous president tolerating someone in a senior position openly working against policies he had approved, the most likely explanation was that the president himself did not really believe the strategy he had approved would work.

I could understand the president’s skepticism even if I didn’t agree with it. I did not believe that Karzai would change his stripes, Pakistan would stop hedging, corruption would appreciably diminish, or the U.S. civilian surge would actually materialize. Just the same, if I had ever come to believe the military part of the strategy would not lead to success as I defined it, I could not have continued signing the deployment orders.

The consistent irony of our NSC meetings, I thought, was that we spent most of our time dissecting the one part of the strategy that actually was working pretty well—the military operations and training of Afghan security forces—while neglecting the same kind of searching examination of those elements that weren’t working. Obama’s skepticism toward McChrystal’s implementation of the strategy was apparent in virtually every meeting that spring. In a videoconference with Mullen and me in early May, Stan expressed his frustration with an NSC meeting the preceding day. He told us he was struck by the negativity and confusion over counterinsurgency expressed there. He said he intended to go through his operational plans for the Kandahar offensive again “so that they better understand it…. I am concerned the president doesn’t understand the campaign plan” for Kandahar. I replied that those advising him at the White House were looking at our operations “through a soda straw” and seemed to have a hard time grasping the larger picture. That said, I knew that if the president didn’t understand the campaign plan, that was our fault at Defense. I told McChrystal I would try to get him some time with the president to talk about the plan.

Meanwhile Hillary’s and my complaints about how Eikenberry as well as White House officials were treating Karzai (especially in public) began to have some effect. Karzai had no use for Eikenberry, Holbrooke, or Biden, and his relationship with Obama was a distant one. McChrystal got along best with him, with Clinton and me coming next. In any event, the White House began to soft-pedal the public criticism of our “ally” in April.

On May 10, 2010, Karzai and a number of his ministers arrived in Washington for a “strategic dialogue.” It began with a dinner that night hosted by Hillary, where everyone was on their best behavior. The next morning a number of cabinet ministers from both sides met for two hours at the State Department to discuss every aspect of our bilateral relationship. I spent another ninety minutes with the Afghan ministers of defense and interior at the Pentagon. I had developed a strong partnership with Defense Minister Wardak, a Pashtun who had been a national leader in the anti-Soviet mujahideen resistance in the 1980s. He was often eloquent, in an old-fashioned way, in expressing gratitude for our efforts in Afghanistan, and he was easy to work with—once I convinced him his forces did not need F-22s, just one of which would have consumed his entire budget. The president met with Karzai on the twelfth, and after they made statements to the press, the two delegations had lunch at the White House.

Those at the White House involved in orchestrating the visit, including NSS chief of staff Denis McDonough and Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes, were on pins and needles worrying about an outburst from Karzai. He had expressed a desire to visit our wounded soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, to go to Arlington National Cemetery, and then to visit Fort Campbell, Kentucky, to thank deploying soldiers and their families. White House officials opposed the visit to Fort Campbell, saying they wanted attention to revert to domestic affairs after three days of nonstop Karzai and Afghanistan. I think they were mainly nervous about what Karzai might say at Fort Campbell. I objected, and they relented. Karzai was at his very best at Walter Reed and at Arlington. I met him in Section 60 at Arlington, where many of those killed in Iraq and Afghanistan are buried, and he was deeply moved as we walked amid the headstones.

The next day I met him at Fort Campbell. Escorted by Major General J. F. Campbell, commander of the 101st Airborne Division, we went to a hangar where some 1,300 soldiers and their families were waiting. From a raised dais surrounded by three-foot-high metal crowd control fences, Karzai expressed his gratitude for all the United States had done to help Afghanistan since 2001. He told the audience that there were “many miles to go, but we are already better thanks to you,” and promised that someday Afghan families would come to Fort Campbell “to thank you.” The crowd of soldiers and family members exploded into a remarkable cheering standing ovation. Karzai was stunned and, energized, stepped off the dais, shook hands along the fence, and then leaped over the fence—nearly falling—to mingle in the crowd and get photos with families. It was an amazing sight. We eventually dragged him away to another building, where he spoke quietly to about 200 soldiers deploying to Afghanistan that day. He thanked them “for what you are doing for me and my country” and then shook every hand. As Karzai’s plane lifted off from Fort Campbell and his visit to America ended, I could only hope the positive feelings on both sides would last awhile. I thought his visit had been a triumph, and I told him so.

In Afghanistan, McChrystal continued executing his plan to devastate the Taliban on their home turf in southern Afghanistan, first in Helmand and then in Kandahar province. After focusing his efforts in the south, he would swing the main effort to the eastern part of the country along the Pakistani border. The surge forces were just beginning to arrive in Afghanistan in May and June, but the pessimists were in full cry. They had plenty of ammunition. The operation to clear Marjah and surrounding areas of Taliban had taken longer than planned (and touted) by the military, and the campaign to clear Kandahar was also unfolding more slowly than expected. (McChrystal was moving more slowly in the Kandahar campaign than originally planned to ensure that more Afghan troops would be working with us and that local authorities were better prepared to offer services when security improved—lessons learned from Marjah.) There had been no real improvement in the standing of the Afghan government outside Kabul, with little or no central government presence in the provinces and villages and continuing corruption at every level—perhaps most harmfully by local officials and police, who routinely shook down ordinary Afghans. Adjudication of local and family disputes, an essential role for Afghan officials, was the occasion for yet more bribes. There were still too few Afghan soldiers and police for real partnering. Obama’s announcement that the United States would begin withdrawing our forces in July 2011 was widely interpreted as an end date, so many Afghans just hunkered down to wait for our departure.

In making his decisions in November 2009, the president had said his national security team would review progress of the new strategy in December 2010. As I said earlier, if we couldn’t see real progress, then we had to be willing to change our approach. By early June, Biden and others in the White House were already pushing us to rethink the strategy.

Because of mounting political pressure both in Washington and in Europe to show security progress in Afghanistan by the November NATO summit in Lisbon, I was worried that NATO ambassadors in Brussels and the NSS in Washington would conclude they should decide which parts of the country were ready to transition to Afghan control. So I was blunt at the June NATO meeting in Brussels in arguing that any announcement of which provinces to transition should depend solely on recommendations from McChrystal, senior NATO representative Ambassador Mark Sedwill, and the Afghan government, based on criteria and metrics they developed. I said the timing of transition must remain dependent on local security conditions and Afghan capacity to govern. I asked the ministers to remember that “transition is the beginning of a process without a predictable timeline; it is not a rush for the door.”

Five days later Mullen and I testified before the Senate Appropriations Committee, ostensibly about the FY2011 budget. Much of the hearing focused on Afghanistan. Mike and I took issue with the negative tone of reporting from Afghanistan and reminded the senators that the surge forces were still arriving. When asked whether the surge could work, I wearily replied, “I must tell you I have a certain sense of déjà vu because I was sitting here getting the same questions in June 2007 when we had just barely gotten the surge forces into Iraq.” We warned that this was going to be a long, hard fight, but that McChrystal “is convinced, confident that he will be able to show that we have the right strategy, and we are making progress, by the end of the year.” Mullen said all the indicators were moving in the right direction, “as tough as it is.” We highlighted Karzai’s formal approval of the Kandahar operation just days earlier. The same day Petraeus and Flournoy testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee along the same lines, then appeared for a second day, Petraeus having fainted at the hearing the day before. In both hearings, the July 2011 drawdown date was hotly debated, with all of us saying that drawdowns would begin on that date, the pace to be determined by “conditions on the ground.” Unrelievedly, the president’s strategy in Afghanistan—and the performance of the U.S. military commander there—was under heavy pressure both from his staff and Biden in the White House and from the news media. We were barely holding our own. Then disaster struck.

Late in the afternoon of Monday, June 21, Mullen called to tell me the magazine Rolling Stone was publishing an article, “The Runaway General,” about McChrystal that was potentially very damaging. He sent the article to my office, and as I read it, I wondered what in the world Stan had been thinking to give this reporter such access. The article cited one aide as describing McChrystal’s first meeting with Obama as a “10-minute photo op…. Obama clearly didn’t know anything about him, who he was. Here’s the guy who’s going to run his fucking war, but he didn’t seem very engaged. The Boss was pretty disappointed.” Another staff aide is quoted as calling Jim Jones a “clown” who remains “stuck in 1985.” Most egregiously, the article portrayed the general mocking the vice president. “ ‘Are you asking about Vice President Biden?’ McChrystal says with a laugh. ‘Who’s that?’ ‘Biden?’ suggests a top adviser. ‘Did you say: Bite Me?’ ” The article by Michael Hastings was harshly critical of the entire Afghan strategy, and I knew the quotes about Biden, the president, and Jones would be dynamite at the White House.

About five p.m., Stan called me to apologize for the article. Deeply fearful of its impact on the war, for once I couldn’t contain my anger: “What the fuck were you thinking?” McChrystal offered no explanation, didn’t say he or his staff had been misquoted or that the article was distorted in any way. The four-star general replied essentially as he had been taught as a cadet at West Point—“No excuses, sir.”

My heart sank. I knew that McChrystal’s critics in the White House could put his command in jeopardy. Jim Jones called twice that evening to let me know the White House was getting very “spun up” about the article, a classic understatement.

The next afternoon I was scheduled to meet privately with the president about potential successors for me, Mullen, and Cartwright. Before the meeting, Biden called and, I thought rather defensively, said, “I didn’t rile him [Obama] up last night, I just asked him if he’d seen the article.” Biden told me that McChrystal had called him to apologize for the comments in the article.

I went in to see the president a little after three p.m. on the twenty-second. The first words out of his mouth were “I’m leaning toward relieving McChrystal.” He went on to say, “Joe [Biden] is over the top about this.” (So much for Biden’s credibility.) I said I was going to see Stan the next morning and would tell him that if he were in any position but commander ISAF, I would fire him myself. But, I went on, “I believe if we lose McChrystal, we lose the war.” I said I feared that any successor would take three to four months to get confirmed, get to Afghanistan, and get up to speed. This loss of momentum, in light of the timelines the president had set, the fragility of the Kandahar campaign, and Stan’s special relationship with Karzai, I said, would be “irrecoverable.”

The president told me my concerns were valid, but he had to think about the institution of the presidency. He said, “Let’s talk substance.” He then reinforced my worst fears. He said, “I don’t have the sense it’s going well in Afghanistan. He [McChrystal] doesn’t seem to be making progress. Maybe his strategy is not really working.” Hearing the president express doubt about the strategy he had approved six months earlier, just as many of the surge troops were arriving in Afghanistan, and his lack of confidence in his commander and the strategy floored me. These feelings did not spring from a magazine article but had been there all along. I replied that the effort was proving harder and taking longer than anticipated, but McChrystal had just briefed forty-four NATO defense ministers in Brussels and all expressed confidence that we were on the right track. “They trust him. And I believe we are making progress and will be able to demonstrate that we are on the right path in December.”

Obama then asked, “What if Petraeus took command?” I told Obama that if Dave would do it, it would address my worst fears—Petraeus knew the campaign plan, knew Karzai, knew the U.S. military leaders in Afghanistan, knew the Europeans, and knew the Pakistanis. I said that under the circumstances, that would be the best possible outcome. Petraeus could hit the ground running, and his reputation would itself bring new energy to the campaign.

I still urged the president to hear out McChrystal. I said McChrystal would offer a letter of resignation and affirm his support for the president’s policy. I urged the president “to flay him” but then be generous and turn down the resignation, and tell Stan he had one last chance. As I left the Oval Office, I was pretty sure the president would not do as I had suggested.

The personal warmth, confidence, and trust that Obama consistently showed me—often at difficult moments between us—never ceased to surprise. Our meeting originally had been scheduled to talk about succession planning at Defense, and when we finally turned to it, I told him I planned to leave early in 2011. I probably had been his most contentious, difficult, and stubborn cabinet member; and yet the president then told me, in the same meeting where he said he was about to fire a field commander I had recommended to him, that he wanted me to stay for at least the remainder of his first term. “I know that’s not possible,” he said. “How about January 2012?” I reminded him that when we had talked the previous December, I’d said that this timing wouldn’t work because it would be hard to get a quality person to serve for potentially only one year. I also said he didn’t want a defense secretary nomination before the Senate early in the presidential primary season, thus providing Republicans an opportunity to use the hearings to attack his national security policies. Obama agreed, then suggested I remain until the end of June 2011, a logical time to leave as we began the transition in Afghanistan. I said okay. As I reflected on the meeting, I was moved by the president’s generous treatment of me. I probably owed him a bottle of vodka.

After that meeting, I went downstairs to the Situation Room for a principals’ meeting. When it was over, I told Hillary I thought the president was going to relieve McChrystal and was thinking about Petraeus as a replacement. She thought Petraeus was a great idea.

When I returned to the Pentagon, I took a call from Karzai, who earlier had had a videoconference with the president. He urged leniency for McChrystal: “I like him. He serves your objectives clearly and purposefully in Afghanistan. I have never had such a clear understanding and productive relationship with any other officer as I have with him.” Karzai said he knew about our system of civilian control but expressed the hope that “this very fine gentleman” could stay in Afghanistan. I told him I would pass along his comments to the president, and that I shared his high regard for McChrystal, but that he had “committed a very serious breach of discipline.” I said I hoped the matter would be resolved quickly to avoid prolonged uncertainty.

At eight-thirty the next morning, Mullen and I met with McChrystal. I again told him, “If you were in any other job than commander in Afghanistan, I’d fire you myself. How could you put the entire war effort at risk with such a stupid decision?” I told him the president was leaning toward relieving him and that the proper thing to do was to offer to resign. Stan said only, “I’ll do what’s best for the mission.” He then left to see Obama.

Just after ten a.m., the president called to tell me he had relieved McChrystal and told me to “come over right away to discuss the way forward.” Mullen and I raced to the White House and joined Obama, Biden, Emanuel, Jones, and Donilon in the Oval Office. We reviewed a list of other possibilities for commander—Marine General Jim Mattis, then commander of Joint Forces Command; Army Lieutenant General Dave Rodriguez, McChrystal’s second-in-command; Marine Lieutenant General John Allen, deputy commander at Central Command; and General Odierno. All present agreed that only Petraeus would work. I said Petraeus was in the White House for a meeting, and the president said, “Get him up here.”

While those two met, the rest of us went to the Situation Room to wait for a scheduled meeting with the president on Afghanistan. Thirty minutes passed. Mullen, Donilon, and I began to look nervously at one another, wondering if something had gone wrong in the Obama-Petraeus meeting. At 10:50, the president came in and told the assembled senior team that Petraeus was the new commander, and he would have full freedom to make military recommendations. Obama expected frankness. He said Dave supported the strategy but could make recommendations for changes, which the president would consider. He then delivered a very stern lecture about divisions within the team, sniping, and leaks. He demanded that everyone get on board. The president wanted to announce the change immediately in the Rose Garden. It all happened so fast that Petraeus had to leave a phone message for his wife that he was headed back overseas.

Because we had another principals’ meeting in the early afternoon, Mullen, Clinton, Petraeus, and I remained in the Situation Room after the Afghanistan meeting to discuss the civilian side of the equation. It was a somber gathering given the drama that had just taken place. We were still trying to fathom the consequences for the war in Afghanistan. Hillary suggested Ryan Crocker as our new ambassador, replacing Eikenberry. (Crocker had been ambassador in Iraq and a close partner of Petraeus’s during the surge.) We all agreed he’d be terrific if he was willing to do it. Hillary said she would raise the idea with the president that afternoon. She later told me that Obama did not want to move on the ambassador’s job until the dust had settled with the military changes, but he had authorized her to reach out very quietly to Crocker. At Clinton’s suggestion, Petraeus called Crocker that evening and reported back to us that Ryan had not said no, but there were some conditions, including that Holbrooke had to go. But the protective umbrella over Eikenberry at the White House was still up, and Crocker would not become ambassador for more than a year.

McChrystal, whose civilian media adviser had thought the general should reach outside the mainstream media to discuss his mission in Afghanistan, had handed Biden and his other adversaries at the White House and the NSS the opportunity to drive him from command. Giving access to the reporter writing for Rolling Stone—a reporter who subsequently would also write very critical articles on both Petraeus and Lieutenant General William Caldwell, in charge of training Afghan security forces—was a terrible blunder. An Army inspector general investigation later concluded that the Army officers on McChrystal’s staff had not made the derogatory comments; nor had the general heard directly the statements in question. (I would hear subsequently that some of the comments in the article were attributable to non-Army members of his staff.) The Department of Defense inspector general reviewed the Army report and, while finding shortcomings in that investigation, concluded that “not all of the events at issue occurred as reported in the article.” The magazine stuck by its reporter.

Whatever actually happened or was said, McChrystal’s refusal to defend himself—to give me any ammunition to use on his behalf—made it impossible for me to save his job. But to this day, I believe he was given the bum’s rush by Biden, White House staff, and NSS who harbored deep resentment toward his unyielding advocacy the previous fall of counterinsurgency and a huge troop surge in Afghanistan; who interpreted his public comments back then as “boxing in” the president; and who continued to oppose the strategy approved by the president and the way McChrystal was implementing it. I am convinced the Rolling Stone article gave the president, egged on by those around him in the White House, and himself distrustful of the senior military, an opportunity he welcomed to demonstrate vividly—to the public and to the Pentagon—that he was commander in chief and fully in control of the military. Absent any effort by McChrystal to explain or to offer mitigating circumstances, I believe the president had no choice but to relieve him. The article simply was the last of several public missteps by the general in the political minefield, a risky battlespace where he had little combat experience. At his retirement ceremony in late July, I told the audience, “As he now completes a journey that began on a West Point parade field nearly four decades ago, Stan McChrystal… does so with the gratitude of the nation he did so much to protect, with the reverence of the troops he led at every level, with his place secure as one of America’s greatest warriors.”

McChrystal’s departure and Obama’s stern lecture did nothing to diminish the split at the highest levels of the administration over Afghanistan. Petraeus made a couple of early moves that had positive effect on the battlefield. To reduce civilian casualties, McChrystal had issued restrictive guidelines about when troops could fire and when air strikes could be called in for support. Unfortunately, to be sure they were compliant with his intent, every subordinate level of command added a margin of error on the restrictive side. The result was that the troops on the front line felt exposed and vulnerable, unable to defend themselves adequately. Petraeus issued a new set of guidelines that were less restrictive and explicitly forbade anyone to add further limitations. This helped morale. Also, while McChrystal had always supported targeting specific Taliban commanders and officials, Petraeus significantly stepped up the intensity of these attacks. By the end of August, we were beginning to see signs of progress in the counterinsurgency effort around Kandahar—above all, a significant decline in Taliban activity—as well as the impact of stepped-up attacks against the Taliban leaders. We had long done both, but the added troop numbers enabled us to show some better results.

Whatever was happening on the battlefield, the debate at home was already beginning to rev up over how fast U.S. forces should withdraw beginning in July 2011. Democrats in Congress were urging steep reductions right away, a view held by Biden and the usual suspects at the White House and the NSS. Mullen, Petraeus, and I reminded everyone that the last of the surge troops were just arriving, and we needed time to show what they could accomplish; the drawdowns would begin as the president said, but they should be gradual. As he had at dicey moments in Iraq, Petraeus now went public, granting interviews to major newspapers in August in which he talked about gains that had been made in routing the Taliban from traditional strongholds in the south and in training Afghan troops. He asked for patience and time, two commodities in short supply in Washington, D.C.

I again visited Afghanistan in early September, flying in from the change of command ceremony in Baghdad. There were several very touchy issues to discuss privately with Karzai. I explained to him what had happened with McChrystal. We then discussed his edict that essentially required all private security contractors to leave Afghanistan, including those guarding development projects intended to help the Afghan people. He had been privately expressing his concerns to U.S. officials about the behavior of these men for many months, and as happened all too often, we didn’t pay enough attention until he blew up and we faced a crisis. Another perennial issue was corruption, this time not the penny-ante stuff that was alienating average Afghans but rather reports that the Kabul Bank’s Afghan chairman and others had looted the bank of anywhere from $800 million to $1 billion. The bank’s troubles were additionally a problem because electronic payments to Afghan soldiers, police, and most civil servants were paid through the bank, and if it collapsed, we would have a huge problem. Karzai furiously asserted that he had taken corrective actions, that he had briefed Petraeus and Eikenberry, but that leaks from our embassy had led to a panic and the withdrawal of huge sums. Karzai said that the U.S. embassy “doesn’t understand the Afghan public” and that he resented Afghan officials “being summoned” to meetings at the embassy. I assured him we would work with and through him on issues and be respectful of Afghan sovereignty. I also told him his government needed to implement corrective measures regarding the Kabul Bank in a way that was credible to the international community and our Congress.

The next day, September 3, I flew to Kandahar to see things for myself. At Camp Nathan Smith, Brigadier General Nick Carter briefed me on what his forces were doing in and around Kandahar City, as well as the surrounding areas—Arghandab, Panjawi, and Zheray, all longtime Taliban strongholds—and the next steps he planned to take in securing the populated areas. We spent a lot of time discussing the local strongman, Ahmed Wali Karzai (AWK), the president’s half-brother. He was powerful and regarded as notoriously corrupt, but every time Hillary or I asked for evidence of his criminality, the intelligence community had nothing to offer. Carter captured the near-term challenge well, I thought. He said that for the foreseeable future, the choice facing us was a theocracy run by the Taliban or a “thugocracy” run by the likes of AWK. He said that working with AWK offered the best way to show results quickly against the Taliban. I told Carter that “if working with AWK helped keep our troops alive and succeed in their mission, then that’s no contest.”

At Combat Outpost Senjaray, twelve miles west of Kandahar, I spent an hour having lunch with ten junior enlisted soldiers. A private first class named Brian told me his wife had stepped on a nail back home, but the Navy hospital nearby, at China Lake, had refused to treat her even with a military ID because she didn’t have the right Tricare (military insurance program) policy. She was told she could go across the hall and sign up for the right policy, but it would take a month to process the paperwork. When she gave up and went to a private doctor to be treated, she was told she was lucky not to have gotten blood poisoning. This was exactly the kind of bureaucratic bullshit that set my hair on fire. I told Brian to send an e-mail to Marine Lieutenant Colonel Kris Stillings, a member of my staff who was notetaker at the lunch. When Stillings e-mailed him back that I would get answers for him, the PFC responded, “Even though I am just a private in this vast military world, it’s nice to see that you and the Sec-Def will always take care of the little guy.” I was so moved by his humility, I sent him the only e-mail I ever sent a soldier:

Brian’s wife would get a personal apology from the commander of the Navy hospital at China Lake, and I was told changes would be made to prevent such a recurrence at any other military hospital. Several new washing machines were helicoptered into COP Senjaray a few days later, and their Wi-Fi was fixed; both had been requested by the soldiers at lunch. If only the bigger problems were so easy to tackle.

On this trip, I heard two stories that brought a smile. A joint U.S.-Afghan patrol had come upon a stolen pickup truck parked near a tree, and everyone concluded it was probably a truck bomb planted by the Taliban. An Afghan soldier decided to fire a rocket-propelled grenade at the truck to blow it up. He missed the truck and hit the tree, where it turned out a Taliban fighter had been hiding. The Taliban was blown out of the tree and onto the truck, which promptly detonated. A nice, if unintended, carom shot. Separately, I was told of a report that Taliban commanders in the Sangin area of Helmand had instructed their fighters not to engage U.S. Marines in large-scale attacks: “Taliban fighters say U.S. Marines are unkillable and invincible…. The Marines are insane. They run toward the sound of our guns rather than run away.”

I came away from my visits to Camp Nathan Smith and COP Senjaray impressed with the commanders and their sense that they had the right strategy and enough forces to implement it. Cautious as always, though, I told the press, “Everybody knows this is far from a done deal. There is a lot of hard fighting to go. But the confidence of these young men and women that they can be successful gives me confidence.” I observed that the question to be addressed in the December review would be whether the strategy was working—was there enough evidence of progress to indicate we were on the right track? “Based on what I’ve seen here today, I’m hopeful we will be in that position.” I also said I thought it would take two or three more years of combat before we could transition to a purely advisory role.

A couple of weeks later, because of the continuing negative public narrative about the course of the war, I sent the House and Senate Armed Services Committees a report on my trip, something I had never done before. I affirmed that we had well-understood, clear objectives. I told them that 85 percent of the Afghan army was now partnered with coalition troops, and that the Afghans had led a successful operation against a Taliban stronghold outside Kandahar, an area never taken by the Soviets. I reported on briefings I had received at Camp Nathan Smith about increasing numbers of Afghans reporting IEDs, working with us to build schools and bazaars, and sending their children to school. I said that our approach “is beginning to have cumulative effects and security is slowly expanding,” although tough fighting still lay ahead and challenges remained in the areas of governance and corruption. I said that a big problem was the fear of many Afghans that we were leaving, causing them to hedge their bets. “We must convince the Afghans that both the United States and NATO plan to establish a strategic partnership with Afghanistan that will endure beyond the gradual transition of security responsibilities.” I concluded, “In contrast to some past conflicts, what I find is that the closer you get to this fight, the greater the belief we are moving in the right direction.”

Despite my own cautious optimism, I had come to realize, as I suggested earlier, that both Presidents Obama and Karzai, whose commitment to the strategy was essential to success, were both skeptical if not outright convinced it would fail. (Bush had seemed to believe wholeheartedly that the Iraq surge would work.) I wondered if we had gotten the strategy and the resources right in Afghanistan too late, after patience there and in the United States had run out. Had the diversion of attention and resources to the invasion of Iraq sown the seeds for future failure in Afghanistan? I believed we had to succeed there because the stakes were higher than perhaps any other senior official in the government understood. For Islamic extremists to defeat a second superpower in Afghanistan would have devastating and long-lasting consequences across the entire Muslim world. For the United States to be perceived as defeated in Afghanistan at the same time we were suffering an economic crisis at home would have grave implications for our standing in the world. Nixon and Kissinger had been able to offset the consequences of U.S. defeat in Vietnam with the dramatic openings to Russia and China, demonstrating that we were still the colossus on the global stage. The United States had no such opportunities in 2010.

In early October, the president announced that Jim Jones would be leaving and that Tom Donilon would become the new national security adviser. Despite our disagreements, Donilon and I had developed a solid working relationship since the air-clearing between us months earlier, and I welcomed his appointment (although he continued to harbor deep suspicion of the senior military and the Pentagon). He had access to and great influence with both Obama and Biden, was comfortable disagreeing with them, and was considered an insider by the rest of the senior White House staff. As with his counterpart in the Bush administration, Steve Hadley, I bridled at the number of meetings Tom summoned us to attend in the Situation Room—but then, the world was a mess and required a lot of tending to.

My last autumn as secretary was a busy one, with the wrap-up of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” review and all the court actions surrounding DADT; a trip to Vietnam and Belgium (a NATO meeting); another to Australia, Malaysia, and Iraq; and my unforgettable visit to Santa Cruz, Bolivia. We had to deal with a very dangerous crisis beginning on November 23 when the North Koreans unleashed an artillery barrage at the South Korean island of Yeonpyeong. South Korea had suffered such provocations for thirty years with restraint, but North Korea’s sinking of its warship Cheonan the previous March had produced a change in attitude in the South, and there were demands for retaliation against the shelling, especially since several innocent South Korean civilians had been killed. South Korea’s original plans for retaliation were, we thought, disproportionately aggressive, involving both aircraft and artillery. We were worried the exchanges could escalate dangerously. The president, Clinton, Mullen, and I were all on the phone often with our South Korean counterparts over a period of days, and ultimately South Korea simply returned artillery fire on the location of the North Koreans’ batteries that had started the whole affair. There was evidence the Chinese were also weighing in with the North’s leaders to wind down the situation. The South Koreans and we agreed to carry out a naval exercise together—led by the aircraft carrier George Washington—in the Yellow Sea to assert our freedom of navigation. Never a dull moment.

The president had insisted all along that he wanted the December review of progress in Afghanistan to be low-key, avoiding the spectacle of the preceding year. Petraeus kicked off the review at the White House on October 30 with a briefing for Donilon and Lute. He had the usual packet of PowerPoint slides. One showed where the surge troops had been deployed; another highlighted that the Afghan security forces had doubled in size to more than 260,000 since 2007. Then he focused on the Kandahar campaign. He said among other things that the current operations were Afghan-led and that nearly 60 percent of the forces involved were Afghan. He was particularly enthusiastic about the “Afghan Local Police” initiative, in which young men were recruited in villages, trained and equipped, and returned to those same villages. The key was keeping them connected to the regular police and Afghan authorities so they didn’t turn into independent militias. The early results had been quite encouraging.

The U.S. senior military leadership had pledged to the president that they should be able to clear, hold, and transition to Afghan security forces places where our troops had been deployed within two years. By the fall of 2010, about a third of the country and an even higher percentage of the population had in fact already been transitioned to Afghan security responsibility. Our two years would expire in Helmand the following July. Although these deadlines grated on the military, that was the deal we had made with the president. I could understand Obama’s insistence on keeping to the commitment. If we couldn’t get the job done in two years, how many years would it take? Down that path lay an open-ended conflict with potentially many more years of fighting. We had agreed on a strategy, and we were going to stick to it. The president would fulfill his part of the bargain despite his reservations, but he would make sure we did too.

The NATO summit in Lisbon on November 20–21 was a milestone in the alliance’s involvement in Afghanistan. Karzai, who attended the Afghan part of the meeting, had proposed at his inaugural a year earlier that foreign forces end their combat role by the end of 2014, transitioning security responsibility for the entire country to the Afghans—not coincidentally, at the end of Karzai’s last year in office. Obama had embraced that date two weeks later in his December 2009 announcement, and the member nations of the alliance did so as well in Lisbon in November 2010. At the same time, they promised to continue helping Afghanistan with military training and equipment, as well as civilian assistance, after 2014.

The president made a surprise visit to Afghanistan just over a week later on December 3. Weather prevented him from helicoptering from Bagram Air Base into Kabul to have a working dinner with Karzai, but the two talked on the telephone. The president spent several hours chatting with U.S. troops, visiting wounded at the medical facility on the base, and meeting with Petraeus and Eikenberry. There was grumbling among the Afghans about the president not making the dinner with Karzai, and some as well among our military about him not getting off the air base and visiting a forward operating base, where the fighting troops were. I thought both criticisms unwarranted, particularly in the latter case. Had I been asked, I would have recommended against him going to a FOB because of the risk; secretaries of defense are expendable, but presidents are not.

I arrived in Afghanistan four days later, partly to get a last personal update before the review concluded, and partly to visit the troops before the holidays. Major General J. F. Campbell, commander of the 101st Airborne and Karzai’s and my host the previous May at Fort Campbell, provided a realistic picture of the tough fight in the east. There were some areas, like the Pesh River Valley, he said, where a long-term U.S. troop presence was actually destabilizing. The locals hated both us and the Taliban, and we were better off leaving them alone. He told me he needed more intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance and more firepower to go after fighters coming across the border from Pakistan. He said he saw progress every day, “but it’s gonna take time.”

I spent two full days with the troops on this trip, the first in Regional Command–East and the second in the south. At Forward Operating Base Joyce, near the Pakistani border, I presented six silver stars, testimony not only to the bravery of the recipients but to the intensity of the fight in eastern Afghanistan.

We helicoptered next to Forward Operating Base Connolly, southwest of Jalalabad, still in the east. This was probably the most emotional troop visit I made as secretary. The week before, six soldiers in one platoon at this FOB had been killed by a rogue Afghan policeman, and I met alone with eighteen soldiers of that platoon. We sat on folding chairs in a tent, and I quietly told them we would do everything humanly possible for the families of those who had been killed, that I had some idea how hard this was for them, and that they had to keep focused on the mission. We talked for about fifteen minutes. I thanked them for their service and signed memory books they had for each of the six. After some briefings, I then spoke to 275 soldiers. I was barely holding it together. I told them I was the guy who signed the orders that sent them here, “and so I feel a personal responsibility for each and every one of you.” I said that to all the troops I talked to, but after my meeting with the platoon, I felt the need to go further. “I feel the sacrifice and hardship and losses more than you’ll ever imagine. You doing what you do is what keeps me doing what I do.” Choking up, I then said something I had never said before and, embarrassed, never said again: “I just want to thank you and tell you how much I love you.”

I returned to Washington to yet another fight over Afghan policy. As I’ve said, the president had made it clear both publicly and privately that the December review was intended simply to examine progress and to identify where adjustments were needed. His intent was then for a small group, early in 2011, to examine the way forward more fundamentally. Unfortunately, the Lute-directed NSS paper prepared for the December review basically questioned whether any progress had been made at all, as he attempted to relitigate the president’s decisions of a year earlier. Clinton and I were furious. Lute had told our representatives that the NSS “had the pen” for the report and resisted attempts by State and Defense to include dissenting views. I told Donilon the NSS might have the pen, but it couldn’t have its own foreign policy. The analytical papers prepared by the interagency group were pretty balanced and included a number of positive developments in Afghanistan. But it was the NSS overview paper, which everyone outside the NSS thought was too negative, that would dominate the process. Some of the “adjustments” it proposed appeared to question the strategy itself rather than identify how to make it work better.

I regretted that the Defense leadership and Lute had come to have such an adversarial relationship. As I wrote earlier, Pete Pace and I had twisted Lute’s arm to get him to take on the newly created job of NSC war czar at the White House in 2007, charged with coordinating the military and civilian components of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama had asked him to remain in the same role. The relationship between him and the senior military leadership began to deteriorate, though, early in the new administration, as he was increasingly viewed as an advocate for views contrary to those of the Joint Chiefs, the field commanders, and me. His disparaging comments to Bob Woodward, for Obama’s Wars, about senior military leaders and me didn’t exactly win him friends in the Pentagon either. The longer he stayed at the White House, and the more senior officers and Defense civilians saw him as an adversary, the more difficult it became for him to return to a promising future in uniform. I got along personally with Doug, always believed he served both Bush and Obama loyally, and felt badly that his bridge back to the Pentagon burned.

The day after I returned from Afghanistan, Saturday, December 11, the principals met for two hours on the draft review. I accused the NSS of trying to “hijack” the policy with its overview paper, which, I said, was not balanced. In fact, it wasn’t even consistent with the topic-specific papers prepared by the NSS itself, based on contributions from other departments and agencies. I argued that the NSS could not just override the views of Defense, State, and CIA. Rather, where there was disagreement on progress, I contended, it should be made explicit—“we shouldn’t have to fight for a week to get our views included.” I took issue with the NSS assertion that “the pace of the strategy is generally insufficient” and said that the paper fundamentally mischaracterized certain elements of Petraeus’s strategy. Panetta disagreed with the NSS assessment of the al Qaeda effort, as did Hillary on the civilian component of the strategy.

The review did have one positive outcome. State had been requested to prepare a paper on corruption in Afghanistan, and I was told that Hillary had personally redrafted major elements. The analysis was the best I had ever seen on the topic. The paper said there were three levels of corruption that needed to be addressed: (1) corruption that was predatory on the people—for example, shakedowns by the national police and bribes for settlement of land disputes; (2) high-level, senior leadership corruption; and (3) “functional” corruption—common bribes and deal making. I said the paper set forth exactly the right way to look at the problem and that, given an overall and deeply ingrained culture of corruption that was highly unlikely to end anytime soon, we needed to focus on those aspects that mattered most to our success—low-level corruption that alienated the Afghan people and high-level corruption that undermined confidence in the entire government. Hillary and I both again raised the contradiction between (not to mention the hypocrisy of) U.S. payments to Afghan officials and our public stance on corruption. We ran into a stone wall named Panetta. The CIA had its own reasons not to change our approach.

On December 16, the president appeared in the White House press briefing room flanked by Biden, Clinton, Cartwright, and me. He began by paying tribute to Richard Holbrooke, who had tragically died three days before from a torn aorta. The president then went on to summarize the review, saying that the United States was “on track to achieve our goals” in Afghanistan and adding that “the momentum achieved by the Taliban in recent years has been arrested in much of the country, and reversed in some key areas, although these gains remain fragile and reversible.” He reaffirmed that U.S. forces would begin withdrawing on schedule the next July. He added that al Qaeda was “hunkered down” and having a hard time recruiting, training, and plotting attacks, but that “it will take time to ultimately defeat al Qaeda, and it remains a ruthless and resilient enemy bent on attacking our country.” The president and vice president decamped as soon as Obama finished reading his statement, leaving the other three of us to take questions. In response to a question as to whether the review “sugarcoated” the picture in Afghanistan, Clinton replied, “I don’t think you will find any rosy scenario people in the leadership of this administration, starting with the president. This has been a very, very hard-nosed review.” I was asked about the pace of the July drawdowns, and I said we didn’t know at that point: “The hope is that as we progress, those drawdowns will be able to accelerate.”

Yet again the contending forces within the administration, like medieval jousters, had armored up and clashed on Afghanistan. Yet again the president had mostly come down on Hillary’s and my side. And yet again the process had been ugly and contentious, reaffirming that the split in Obama’s team over Afghanistan, after two years in office, was still very real and very deep. The one saving grace, as strange as it might seem, was that this fundamental disagreement on Afghanistan never became personal at the most senior level; nor did it ever spill over into other issues, where the national security leadership continued to work together quite harmoniously. But a new source of contention was about to emerge early in 2011, and this time the internal battle lines would be drawn very differently. I would even find myself in agreement with the vice president, a rare occurrence in both the Bush and Obama administrations.

THE ARAB REVOLUTION

The history of revolutions is not a happy one. Most often repressive authoritarian governments are swept out, and power ends up in the hands not of moderate reformers but of better-organized and far more ruthless extremists—as in France in 1793 (the Reign of Terror), Russia in 1917 (the Bolsheviks), China in 1949 (Mao), Cuba in 1959 (Castro), and Iran in 1979 (Ayatollah Khomeini). In fact, it is hard to think of a major exception to this fate apart from the American Revolution, for which we can largely thank George Washington, who rejected a proffered crown, refused to march the army against Congress (however tempting on occasion that must have been for him), and voluntarily gave up command of the army and then the presidency. Revolutions and their outcomes are usually a surprise (especially to those overthrown) and damnably hard to predict. Experts can write about economic hardship, demographic problems such as a “youth bulge,” pent-up rage, and “prerevolutionary” conditions, but repressive governments often manage such conditions for decades. Thus was the Obama administration—and everyone else in the world (including every Arab government)—surprised by the “Arab Spring,” a revolution that shifted the political tectonic plate of the Middle East.

Sometimes revolutions are triggered by singular and seemingly isolated events. This was the case in the Middle East, where, on December 17, 2010, in the small Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid (overrun by German panzers in 1943 on their way to defeating American forces at the Kasserine Pass), a poor twenty-six-year-old street vendor named Mohammed Bouazizi set himself on fire after being harassed and humiliated by a police officer. He died three weeks later. His mother, according to a Washington Post reporter, said, “It was not poverty that made her son sacrifice himself…. It was his quest for dignity.” In an earlier time, before cell phones, Facebook, and Twitter, what happened in the village usually stayed in the village. But not now. A cell phone video of a subsequent protest demonstration in Sidi Bouzid was posted online and went viral across Tunisia, sparking more and larger demonstrations against the regime of President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, a dictator in power for more than twenty years. The video was spread throughout the Middle East not only by the Internet but also by the Qatari-owned television network Al-Jazeera, which was equally detested by authoritarian governments in the region and by the administration of Bush 43. Less than a month later, on January 14, Ben Ali was ousted and fled to Saudi Arabia. According to news reports, more than sixty political parties were created within two months, but the best organized and largest by far was the Islamist Ennahda Party (which would win 41 percent of the vote in elections held ten months later to select a Constituent Assembly charged with drafting a constitution).

President Obama’s first official statement on developments in Tunisia was on the day of Ben Ali’s ouster, January 14, when he condemned the use of violence against peaceful demonstrators, urged all parties to avoid violence, and called upon the government to respect human rights and hold free and fair elections in the near future. He devoted one sentence to Tunisia in his State of the Union address on January 25, saying that the United States “stands with the people of Tunisia and supports the democratic aspirations of all people.”

Young, Internet-savvy Egyptians read Facebook pages and blogs about developments in Tunisia and in the latter half of January began to organize their own demonstrations at Tahrir Square, a huge traffic circle in downtown Cairo, to protest the authoritarian regime of Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s president for nearly thirty years. The first large demonstration was on the same day as the State of the Union address, and the peaceful protests would grow daily as more and more Egyptians of all ages and backgrounds joined. The administration was divided on how to respond, with the NSS staff—perhaps sensitive to the criticism of some conservatives and human rights activists that Obama had been too slow and cautious in reacting to developments in Tunisia—urging strong support for the demonstrators in Tahrir Square.

On January 28, Mike Mullen called me at home to tell me the president had joined a principals’ meeting that afternoon on the Middle East peace process and turned immediately to events in Egypt. Mike walked next door to my house and briefed me on the meeting. He said that the deputies, led by NSS members Denis McDonough, John Brennan, and Ben Rhodes, had proposed “very forward leaning” support of the protesters in Egypt and a change of leadership there. According to Mullen, Biden, Clinton, and Donilon had urged caution in light of the potential impact on the region and the consequences of abandoning Mubarak, an ally of thirty years. The president, Mike went on, was clearly leaning toward an aggressive posture and public statements.

Alarmed, I called Donilon and asked to see him first thing the next day, a Saturday. He said the president might call me that night. The president didn’t call, and I met with Donilon at eight-thirty a.m. on the twenty-ninth. I reminded him that I had been sitting in the office he now occupied with Zbigniew Brzezinski when the shah of Iran was overthrown in 1979, and I spoke about the role the United States had played in that revolution. I expressed my great concern that we were entering uncharted waters and that the president couldn’t erase the Egyptians’ memory of our decades-long alliance with Mubarak with a few public statements. Our course, I said, should be to call for an orderly transition. We had to prevent any void in power because it likely would be filled by radical groups. I said we should be realistically modest “about what we know and about what we can do.” Donilon reassured me that Biden, Hillary, he, and I were on the same page. All of us were very concerned that the president and the White House and NSS staffs were leaning hard on the need for regime change in Egypt. White House staffers worried about Obama being “on the wrong side of history.” But how can anyone know which is the “right” or “wrong” side of history when nearly all revolutions, begun with hope and idealism, culminate in repression and bloodshed? After Mubarak, what?

The internal debate continued through the weekend. I missed a principals’ meeting on Saturday afternoon because of a commitment in Texas, but former ambassador to Egypt and retired career diplomat Frank Wisner was dispatched to Egypt by the president on Sunday to meet with his old friend Mubarak and deliver a message from the president: start the transition of power “now.”

That same morning I made the first of multiple calls to my counterpart in Egypt, the minister of defense, Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi. I urged him to ensure that the army would exercise restraint in dealing with the protesters and to support political reforms that would protect the dignity of the Egyptian people. He was quite gracious and reassuring, saying that the Egyptian military’s primary mission was to defend Egypt and secure critical facilities, “not to harm its people or shed blood in the streets.” I told him we were concerned about the government’s lack of decisive action to develop a political solution to the crisis and that, without moving toward a political transition—including “meaningful discussion” with key members of the opposition—Tantawi would likely be hard-pressed to maintain stability in Egypt. “Nothing bad will happen to Egypt, I assure you,” he said.

The afternoon of February 1, the principals met again with the president, and there was a heated debate about whether he should call Mubarak and, if so, what he should say publicly about the call. We interrupted the meeting to watch Mubarak’s televised speech to the Egyptian people. He said he would change the constitution, not run for president again (his term would expire in the fall), begin a dialogue with the opposition, and appoint a vice president—in short, he promised to do exactly what the administration had asked him to do through Wisner. Timing is everything, though, and I would often wonder whether, if Mubarak had made that speech two weeks earlier, the outcome for him might have been very different. What he promised was now too little, too late.

NSS staffers McDonough, Brennan, and Rhodes, and the vice president’s national security adviser, Tony Blinken, all argued the president should call Mubarak and tell him he should leave office in the next few days. We needed, they said yet again, “to be on the right side of history.” Biden, Clinton, Mullen, Donilon, and I were in strong agreement, urging caution. We had to consider the impact of such a statement throughout the region. What would come next?

I asked what would happen if Mubarak didn’t leave. The president would have scored a few public relations points that would, at the same time, have registered with every Arab friend and ally we had in the entire region, all of whom were authoritarian to one degree or another. Thirty years of American cooperation with the authoritarian government of Egypt, I said, could not be wiped out by a few days of rhetoric. Besides, people in the region didn’t pay any attention to our—I wanted to say “your”—rhetoric anymore. If we humiliated Mubarak, I warned, it would send a message to every other ruler to shoot first and talk later. What if he did go? I asked. Who then? A military dictatorship? Would we have promoted a coup d’état? If you wanted to be on the right side of history, I argued, let Mubarak depart from office with some dignity, turning over power to elected civilians in “an orderly transition.” That would send the message to others in the region that we wouldn’t just “throw them to the wolves.” I repeated, “We have to be modest about what we know and what we can do.”

All the meeting participants finally agreed that the president should call Mubarak and congratulate him on the steps he had announced and urge his early departure. I argued that Obama should not use the word “now” in asking for a change but rather the more vague phrase “sooner rather than later.” The suggestion was rejected. All of the senior members of the team recommended against the president going public with the call and what he said to Mubarak. The president overrode the unanimous advice of his senior-most national security advisers, siding with the junior staffers in terms of what he would tell Mubarak and in what he would say publicly. He telephoned Mubarak and, in a difficult conversation, told Mubarak that reform and change had to begin “now,” with Press Secretary Robert Gibbs saying the next morning that “ ‘now’ started yesterday.”

The telephone lines between Washington and the Middle East were, by this time, burning up. The previous week there had been demonstrations in Oman, Yemen, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. Biden, Clinton, and I were either calling or being called by our counterparts across the Middle East with regard to events in Egypt and in the region. On the second, I talked with Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa of Bahrain and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed of the UAE. The latter, whose insights and judgment I had always regarded highly, gave me an earful, saying that he was getting mixed messages from the United States, that the message from the vice president and me was not the same as what he was hearing from the White House or the media. He went on that “if the regime crashes, there is only one outcome, which is Egypt to become a Sunni version of Iran.” He said that the U.S. stance reminded him of the days of Jimmy Carter during the fall of the shah, “and Obama’s message needs to be tuned differently.” He did not disagree that Mubarak had moved too late, but “we are here.” We agreed to talk every few days.

With violence increasing in Cairo, I talked to Tantawi again that day, stressing the need for the transition “to be meaningful, peaceful, and to begin now,” and for a wide spectrum of the opposition to be included. I expressed concern that if the transition process did not proceed quickly, the demonstrations would continue, food shortages and economic conditions would worsen, and the emotions of the Egyptian people would heighten—all of which could well lead to the situation spinning out of control. Tantawi said that pro-Mubarak demonstrators had gone to Tahrir Square to show support for Egypt’s longtime leader and that there had been clashes between the pro- and anti-Mubarak forces. “We will make efforts to terminate them soon,” he assured me, referring to the clashes (or so I hoped). I commended him for the military’s handling of the protests “so far” and urged continued restraint.

I had lunch that day with White House chief of staff Bill Daley, who had been in the job less than a month. He was smart, tough-minded, open, honest, and funny. Over sandwiches, he told me that he had been doing a press roundtable and “pontificating” about Egypt when he thought to himself, What the fuck do I know about Egypt? Daley said he had had the same thought looking at Ben Rhodes at the NSC meeting the day before. I responded that I thought Ben believed in the power of Obama’s rhetoric and the effectiveness of public communication but was oblivious to the dangers of a power vacuum and the risks inherent in premature elections where the only established and well-organized party was the Muslim Brotherhood. Moderate, secular reformers needed time and help to organize. I told Bill that all our allies in the Middle East were wondering if demonstrations or unrest in their capitals would prompt the United States to throw them under the bus as well.

Contrary to Tantawi’s assurances, violence escalated that day, with pro-Mubarak thugs riding horses and camels into the crowds of demonstrators at Tahrir Square, lashing out with sticks and swords, creating a panic. The next day gunmen fired on the protesters, reportedly killing 10 and injuring more than 800. Our information, admittedly sketchy, suggested that these attacks were enabled, encouraged, and/or carried out by pro-Mubarak officers from the Ministry of the Interior. I called Tantawi again on the fourth. Courageously, I thought, he had gone on foot into Tahrir Square that morning to reassure the demonstrators that the army would protect them. He had been well received and so was very upbeat when I called him. He emphasized there had been no more violence. I asked about reports that Interior forces had lost discipline and attacked their fellow Egyptians. Tantawi rather carefully answered that “if the allegations were true, it is no longer an issue.”

The demonstrations at Tahrir Square continued, intensified, and spread to other parts of Egypt over the next several days despite the efforts of the new vice president, Omar Suleiman, to negotiate with representatives of the opposition. Biden talked with Suleiman on February 8, urging him to move forward with the negotiations, to eliminate laws that had been used to maintain the authoritarian government, and to show that Mubarak had been sidelined. Biden later told me Suleiman had complained that it was hard to negotiate with the young people in Tahrir Square because they had no leaders. Mubarak again addressed the nation on February 10. Most Egyptians—and we—thought he was going to announce his resignation, but to the contrary, he said that while he would delegate some of his powers to Suleiman, he would remain as head of state. Afterward I thought to myself, Stick a fork in him. He’s done. We were all alarmed as Egyptian anger and frustration boiled over. Donilon asked me to call Tantawi to see if we could find out what was going on. The hour was very late in Egypt, but Tantawi took my call. I said it was unclear to us whether Suleiman was acting as president. Tantawi said Suleiman would “execute all powers as acting president.” I asked about Mubarak’s status and whether he was still in Cairo. Tantawi told me that preparations were being made “for his departure from the palace, and there is the possibility he will leave for Sharm el-Sheikh.” He reassured me yet again that the army would protect the people, and I again stressed that it was critical the government implement its commitments to reform.

At six o’clock the next night, February 11, Suleiman announced that Mubarak had resigned and that the Supreme Council of the Egyptian Armed Forces would assume control. The next day the Supreme Council promised to hand over power to an elected civilian government and reaffirmed all international treaties—a subtle way to reassure Israel that the new government would adhere to Egypt’s bilateral peace treaty. On the thirteenth, the council dissolved the parliament, suspended the constitution, and declared it would hold power for six months or until elections could be held, whichever came first.

Six weeks later, I arrived in Cairo to meet with Prime Minister Essam Sharaf, in office three weeks, and Tantawi. Both were, I thought, unrealistically upbeat. I asked Sharaf how they intended to give the many different groups vying for power the opportunity to organize and get experience so they could run credible campaigns. I added that a leading role for the Muslim Brotherhood would send shivers around the region and be a deterrent to foreign investment. Tantawi, who was in the meeting, answered, “We don’t think the Muslim Brotherhood is that powerful, but they are one of two organized groups [Mubarak’s National Democratic Party was the other], so people will need some time to be able to organize themselves as a party and share their positions.”

The next day Tantawi told me that neither the Muslim Brotherhood nor others would have the upper hand: “The Egyptian people will have the upper hand in everything and we will encourage them.” Again I asked whether the leaders of the revolution would have the time and space to organize themselves into competitive political parties for the elections. He replied, “We will give them reasonable time for political organization” but added that the longer the government waited to hold elections, the worse it would be for the economy. He told me that tourism, Egypt’s main source of hard currency, had fallen since January by 75 percent. I told him the U.S. government thought they would be better off electing a president before electing a parliament as a way of providing secular leadership of the country, which, in turn, could help buy time for alternatives to the Muslim Brotherhood to emerge. Tantawi replied that they had been consulting constitutional experts, who told them to hold the parliamentary elections first. When I asked him about rogue elements of the Interior Ministry and extremists showing up to create problems, he was blandly reassuring: “There are no real problems.” His confidence would not be borne out by subsequent events.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin-Zayed’s concern about an Islamist takeover in Egypt initially seemed to have been warranted. In elections that fall, the Muslim Brotherhood and the ultraconservative Islamist Salafist Party, respectively, won 47 percent and 25 percent of the seats in the new parliament—together, nearly three-quarters of the seats. After promising not to nominate a candidate for president, the Muslim Brotherhood reneged and ran Mohammed Morsi, who was elected in June 2012. Not long afterward he “retired” Tantawi, ostensibly taking control of the military. During the fall of 2012, Morsi declared that his decisions could not be reviewed by the courts, a move back toward authoritarianism, but the public outcry forced him to back off, at least partly and for the time being. The new constitution, drafted by an Islamist-dominated constituent assembly, established the role of Islamic (Sharia) law in principle, but the extent of its application was unclear.

As of summer 2013, Morsi has been ousted by the Egyptian army, the Muslim Brotherhood is under attack, and the military—which has led Egypt since 1952—is openly running the country again. Whether they will give genuine democratic reform another chance remains to be seen. While it is hard to believe the clock can be turned back to 2009, Egypt is likely to face difficult days ahead. As I warned, the best organized and most ruthless have the advantage in revolutions.

On February 15, 2011, four days after Mubarak resigned, a group of lawyers in the capital of Libya—Tripoli—demonstrated publicly against the jailing of a colleague. A growing number of other Libyans, perhaps emboldened by what they had seen happen in Tunisia and Egypt via Facebook and other social media, joined the protesters during the ensuing days. Muammar Qaddafi’s security forces killed more than a dozen on February 17, and armed resistance to the government began the next day in Benghazi, in eastern Libya. Unlike the mostly nonviolent revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, what began as a peaceful protest in Libya quickly turned into a widespread shooting war between the government and the rebels, and the casualties mounted. The rebels within days gained control of important areas in the east and launched attacks elsewhere across the country.

The ruthlessness with which Qaddafi responded to the rebels prompted a statement on February 22 by the UN Security Council condemning the use of force against civilians, and calling for an immediate end to the violence, and steps “to address the legitimate demands of the population.” The council also urged Qaddafi to allow the safe passage of international humanitarian assistance to the people of Libya. That same day the League of Arab States suspended Libya’s membership. On February 23, Obama repeated comments he had made the previous week, condemning the use of violence, and announced that he had asked his national security team for a full range of options to respond. He sent Secretary Clinton to Europe and the Middle East to consult with allies about the situation in Libya.

International pressure to stop Qaddafi’s killing of Libyans and for him to step down mounted quickly. The Security Council acted again on February 26, demanding an end to the violence and imposing an arms embargo on the country and a travel ban and assets freeze on Qaddafi, his family, and other government officials. Politicians in Europe and Washington were talking about establishing a “no-fly zone” to keep Qaddafi from using his aircraft against the rebels, and they were becoming increasingly enthusiastic about getting rid of him. Another regime change.

The lineup inside the administration on how to respond to events in Libya was another shift of the political kaleidoscope, this time with Biden, Donilon, Daley, Mullen, McDonough, Brennan, and me urging caution about military involvement, and UN ambassador Susan Rice and NSS staffers Ben Rhodes and Samantha Power urging aggressive U.S. action to prevent an anticipated massacre of the rebels as Qaddafi fought to remain in power. Power was a Pulitzer Prize–winning author, an expert on genocide and repression, and a strong advocate of the “responsibility to protect,” that is, the responsibility of civilized governments to intervene—militarily, if necessary—to prevent the large-scale killing of innocent civilians by their own repressive governments. In the final phase of the internal debate, Hillary threw her considerable clout behind Rice, Rhodes, and Power.

I believed that what was happening in Libya was not a vital national interest of the United States. I opposed the United States attacking a third Muslim country within a decade to bring about regime change, no matter how odious the regime. I worried about how overstretched and tired our military was, and the possibility of a protracted conflict in Libya. I reminded my colleagues that when you start a war, you never know how it will go. The advocates of military action expected a short, easy fight. How many times in history had that naïve assumption proven wrong? In meetings, I would ask, “Can I just finish the two wars we’re already in before you go looking for new ones?”

I had four months left to serve, and I was running out of patience on multiple fronts, but most of all with people blithely talking about the use of military force as though it were some kind of video game. We were being asked by the White House to move naval assets into the Mediterranean to be prepared for any contingency in Libya. I was particularly concerned about moving an aircraft carrier out of the Persian Gulf area to accommodate this request. I ranted with unusual fervor during a meeting at Defense on February 28 with Mike Mullen and others. As usual, I was furious with the White House advisers and the NSS talking about military options with the president without Defense being involved: “The White House has no idea how many resources will be required. This administration has jumped to military options before it even knows what it wants to do. What in the hell is a ‘humanitarian corridor’? A no-fly zone is of limited value and never prevented Saddam from slaughtering his people.” I made the point that, to date, the focus of the opposition in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya had been their own authoritarian, corrupt regimes. I expressed the worry that U.S. military intervention risked making us (and Israel) a target for those demonstrators.

“Don’t give the White House staff and NSS too much information on the military options,” I said. “They don’t understand it, and ‘experts’ like Samantha Power will decide when we should move militarily.” At the same time, I authorized moving significant Air Force assets in Germany to bases in Italy and several additional Navy ships into the Mediterranean. I was adamantly opposed to intervening in Libya, but if the president so ordered, it was my responsibility to make sure we were ready. I was blunt and stubborn, but I wasn’t insubordinate.

On March 1, John McCain lambasted the Obama administration for its handling of events in the Middle East. On Libya, he said, “Of course we have to have a no-fly zone. We are spending over $500 billion, not counting Iraq and Afghanistan, on our nation’s defense. Don’t tell me we can’t do a no-fly zone over Tripoli.” Mike Mullen and I held a press conference the same day, and our comments underscored the distance between McCain’s views and our own. My answers reflected my caution. When asked about U.S. military options in Libya, I replied that there was no unanimity in NATO for the use of armed force, that such an action would need to be considered very carefully, and “our job is to give the president options.” To that end, I said I had ordered two ships into the Mediterranean, including the USS Ponce and the amphibious assault ship USS Kearsarge, to which I was sending 400 Marines. Asked about the potential follow-on effects of a no-fly zone, I said that all options beyond humanitarian assistance and evacuations were complex, and I repeated my other concerns. Mullen echoed testimony that same morning by Central Command commander General Jim Mattis that enforcing a no-fly zone would first require bombing radar and missile defenses in Libya. Mike and I both pointed out that we had seen no evidence that Qaddafi was using aircraft to fire on the rebels. When asked about the strategic implications of the events in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, I said these changes represented a huge setback for al Qaeda by giving the lie to its claim that the only way to get rid of authoritarian governments in the region was through extremist violence.

More than any other previous event, a hearing before the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee (HAC-D) on March 2 confirmed for me that my decision to leave my post in June was the right one. I had simply run out of patience and discipline and a willingness to “play the game,” as illustrated by two exchanges during that hearing. The first was in response to several members pressing me about why we wouldn’t just declare a no-fly zone in Libya. I responded with uncharacteristic force and a borderline disrespectful tone: “There is a lot of, frankly, loose talk about some of these military options” in Libya. It’s more than just signing a piece of paper, I said. “Let’s call a spade a spade. A no-fly zone begins with an attack on Libya to destroy its air defenses. A no-fly zone begins with an act of war.” I went on, “It’s a big operation in a big country” and it’s impossible to say how long it would take or how long it would have to be sustained. I said the U.S. military could do it if ordered by the president, but I warned it would require more planes than were found on a single aircraft carrier.

Several weeks earlier I had asked our four committees of jurisdiction in Congress for approval to transfer about $1.2 billion from several accounts in order to pay for significant additional ISR capabilities requested by Petraeus for Afghanistan. Three of the four committees had approved, but HAC-D, chaired by Bill Young, a Republican from Florida, had not. I learned that Young had blocked approval because the bulk of the transferred funding was to come from the Army’s Humvee budget. (The Army neither wanted nor needed more of those vehicles.) Young had told me the problem would be worked out before the hearing, but it had not been. I couldn’t understand his actions, so I entered the hearing room prepared to do something I had never done: publicly and directly criticize the chairman of one of my most important oversight committees.

At the end of my prepared statement on the budget, I noted that the reprogramming request for ISR had been submitted a month earlier. “Mr. Chairman, our troops need this force protection equipment and they need it now…. Every day that goes by without this equipment, the lives of our troops are at greater risk. I urgently want to get these items under contract so that I can get these important capabilities to Afghanistan.” I said that cuts Congress was proposing to our FY2011 budget and uncertainty over another continuing resolution left us no source of money for the reprogramming other than the Humvee program. I concluded, “We should not put American lives at risk to protect specific programs or contractors.” Young and the committee staff were infuriated by the public criticism. One staffer subsequently said, “Gates was pretty unprofessional at our hearing…. It is outrageous. I think it was unacceptable. He was out of line.” Another called my comments “a cheap shot.” Young said in an interview later that day that he had “no back-home interest in Humvee production.” But Washington Post writer Dana Milbank wrote the next day that AM General—the manufacturer of the Humvee—“happens to be Young’s third-largest campaign contributor. Its executives have funneled him more than $80,000.”

I disliked going after Young like that. He was an old-school gentleman, was always gracious toward me, and had long been a strong supporter of the military and especially the troops; he and his wife often visited our wounded in the hospitals. But after more than four years as secretary, I was fed up with the usual forelock-tugging deference to special interests and pet projects among members of Congress, especially when they got in the way of providing urgently needed help to our commanders and troops. Within a couple of days, Young and I talked on the telephone, and then our staffs worked out a deal—the usual course of action in getting something done with Congress. In the end, $614 million of the $864 million I had requested was transferred from the Humvee program.

As the conflict inside Libya heated up, so did the internal debate inside the administration. The most immediate challenge was the exodus from Libya of tens of thousands of foreign workers of many nationalities—mostly Egyptian—to Tunisia because of the fighting. For a new and weak Tunisian government, 90,000 refugees posed a growing problem. The State Department wanted the U.S. military to establish an “air bridge” to fly these people to Egypt. The size of the undertaking was daunting and, to be effective, would require a number of U.S. aircraft that were already supporting two wars, as well as a lot of Americans on the ground in both Tunisia and Egypt to support the effort. Pointing out these challenges once again made Mullen and me the skunks at the garden party. At a principals’ meeting on Libya the evening of March 2, Donilon told me the president wanted me to provide an air bridge from Tunisia to Egypt to move the Egyptian refugees. Biden then jumped in and said, “No, the president orders you to do the bridge.” I’d had enough of Biden’s “orders.” “The last time I checked, neither of you are in the chain of command,” I said. If the president wanted to deploy U.S. military assets, I made clear, I needed to hear it from him directly, not through the two of them. At the Pentagon, I went further, telling Mullen and Robert Rangel that no military options were to be provided to White House or NSS staff without my approval, “especially any options to take out Qaddafi.” Ultimately, many nations were involved in sending aircraft to evacuate the refugees, including several from us.

Although Obama stated in a press conference on March 3 that Qaddafi “must go” and, as the days passed, the pressure to act militarily grew, it was clear that the president was not going to act alone or without international sanction. He wanted any military operations to be under NATO auspices. At a NATO defense ministers meeting on March 10 in Brussels, where the first subject we discussed was Libya, I told Secretary General Anders Rasmussen privately that we supported planning for a no-fly zone but would need a UN Security Council resolution and explicit regional participation: “This can’t be seen as a bunch of Americans and Europeans intervening in a sovereign Arab state without sanction.” I told him we needed to be able to answer such questions as: Why were we intervening in Libya and not in other civil wars? Was it because of oil? Rasmussen asked me if a no-fly zone would be effective. Keeping his planes down shouldn’t be a problem, I said, but it was tough to keep helicopters down with a no-fly zone. Rasmussen shared with me his concern that Germany would not agree to any NATO action on Libya, mainly because it wanted the European Union to be in the lead. Admiral Jim Stavridis, supreme allied commander Europe, told me that a no-fly zone had to be limited to the coastal area of Libya, but that would cover 80 percent of the population. He said it would require a couple of days of bombing to destroy the air defense system and then, to sustain a nofly zone, at least forty fighters, twenty tanker aircraft, and other support aircraft. (In the event, we needed a lot more.)

Most ministers were supportive of creating a no-fly zone. Still, they spoke about the importance of keeping Afghanistan as the first priority, the need for Arab League support and participation vis-à-vis Libya, and the need to be ready to act by moving planes and ships into position. As Rasmussen had predicted, Germany was not helpful and even opposed relocating some ships, though Stavridis could do that on his own authority. For all the talk, though, the allies were not yet prepared to act.

I flew from Brussels to Bahrain, the headquarters of the U.S. Fifth Fleet. Violence there had begun with a “Day of Rage” demonstration in the capital, Manama, on February 14, during which two were killed. Before the protest, the king (a Sunni) had offered economic concessions, but the Shia—70 percent of the population of Bahrain—wanted political reform. On the seventeenth, the government launched a crackdown at the Pearl Roundabout in Manama, a big traffic circle somewhat akin to Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Six protesters were killed. I called the crown prince, Salman, who told me that Arab rulers in the Gulf saw Bahrain as a proxy in the struggle with Iran and that the lesson they took from events in Tunisia and Egypt was that those governments had erred by showing weakness. Salman nonetheless believed the royal family had to be the voice of moderation. He had met with the Shia al-Wifaq opposition leaders the night before the violence, and they demanded constitutional changes, removal of the prime minister, and political reform. Salman said he was ready to become prime minister if asked and that the road map forward must include Shia representatives in the government. Salman was, I thought, the voice of reason. Unfortunately, he was powerless.

I arrived in Manama late on March 11, aware that there had been widespread demonstrations and clashes between antigovernment Shia protesters and pro-government loyalists that day that reportedly had left hundreds injured. My visit had been intended as a show of support for the kingdom’s royal family, but the message I delivered was hardly welcome. Separately, I told the crown prince and the king that as their strategic partner for more than sixty years, we were deeply concerned about Bahrain’s stability. I told them that they needed to take credible steps toward genuine political reform and to empower moderate voices for change, if they were going to avoid being overtaken by events. I told them that “baby steps won’t do.” Mubarak had finally embraced change, I said, but he was two weeks too late: “Time is not on your side.”

I told the king that developments in the Middle East had come because the regimes had failed to address the legitimate grievances of their people. Iran did not start the unrest but could exploit it. He needed to let the crown prince go forward with the national dialogue and be an example to the entire region, since there were hard-liners on both sides. I suggested to both the crown prince and king that they find a new and different role for the prime minister, who was disliked by nearly everyone but especially the Shia; lift constraints on the media as well as on civil society and human rights groups; announce the results of the investigation into the deaths of demonstrators in a timely and transparent way; move forward in integrating the Shia into the security services and Bahrain defense force; and promote basic civil rights in the social, media, and political arenas. Bahrain had a chance to show the region how to deal with public and political pressures and how to preserve stability, I said. “There can be no return to the status quo ante. You are a close ally, we are prepared to defend you against Iran, and we want to help you here as well. As you make difficult decisions to address the concerns and aspirations of your people, we will stand with you.”

The crown prince and king both were positive in their responses to my suggestions, but the royal family was split, and the hard-liners had the edge. The Sunnis in Bahrain, and elsewhere in the Gulf, were watching apprehensively. The ineffectiveness of my diplomacy became apparent two days after I left Manama, when more than a thousand Saudi troops moved into Bahrain to ensure that the royal family and the Sunnis remained in control.

The same day I was in Bahrain, the Arab League voted to call upon the UN Security Council immediately to impose a no-fly zone in Libya and to protect the Libyan people and foreign nationals in Libya. It also asked for UN cooperation with the Libyan opposition’s Transitional National Council, headquartered in Benghazi. On the plane home from Bahrain, I told reporters that if we were directed to impose a no-fly zone, we had the resources to do it. But, I continued, “the question is whether it is a wise thing to do. And that’s the discussion that’s going on at a political level.”

The situation in Libya forced everyone’s hand. Qaddafi’s forces began to have some military success and pushed east. By March 14, there was real danger they could soon move on Benghazi, and few doubted that the city’s capture would lead to a bloodbath. The president convened the NSC on the afternoon of March 15. He was not happy with the options his advisers offered. He was particularly frustrated when Mullen described for him why a no-fly zone likely would have little effect on the movement of ground forces or in protecting innocent civilians. He told the NSS to come up with better options, and then he, Mullen, and I left for a meeting and dinner with the combatant commanders. Afterward he reconvened the NSC for another two hours. It was plain that to slow or stop Qaddafi’s eastward military progress, a Security Council resolution would need to authorize not just a no-fly zone but also “all necessary means” to protect civilians. Qaddafi’s bloodthirsty rhetoric about killing “the rats” in Benghazi, the action of the Arab League, and strong British and French pressure for NATO to act, I think, together persuaded the president that the United States would need to take the lead at the UN and in organizing the military campaign to stop Qaddafi.

On March 17, the principals met for an hour and a half, and then we met with the president. We rehashed all the arguments, and then the president went around the room one last time. Biden, Mullen, Donilon, Daley, Brennan, McDonough, and I opposed getting involved. Clinton, Rice, Power, and Rhodes argued we had to. The president said it was a close call, but we couldn’t stand idly by in the face of a potential humanitarian disaster—he came down on the side of intervention. There would be no use of American ground forces, except for search and rescue if one of our pilots went down over Libya, or if Qaddafi made a move to use his chemical weapons. We would take the lead in destroying Qaddafi’s air defenses but then scale back our involvement, primarily helping others to sustain the no-fly zone. The active participation of Arab air forces was essential, even if their numbers would be small. Rice was directed to pursue a tougher UN resolution that would provide for the protection of civilians, thus allowing us to bomb a broad range of Libyan military and command-and-control targets (the latter including Qaddafi’s residences). In a private side conversation with me after the meeting, the president said the Libyan military operation had been a 51–49 call for him.

Rice worked a near-miracle at the UN in securing the tougher Security Council resolution. Russia, China, Germany, India, and Brazil abstained. The air campaign against Qaddafi began March 19. It was supposed to be a highly coordinated operation, but French president Sarkozy wanted a little extra publicity, so he sent his planes in several hours before the agreed start time.

The president would have been justified in thinking there was broad support in Congress for what he intended to do. On March 1, the Senate had unanimously passed a resolution calling on the UN Security Council to impose a no-fly zone and to protect civilians in Libya. There was vocal and bipartisan support on the House side as well. He gathered some of the congressional leaders in the Situation Room midday on March 18, and several others were piped into the room via speakerphone. Obama told them about the military role we would play and the limits he had set. There was no real disagreement. The president asserted that he had the authority to act in Libya under the War Powers Act without congressional approval but that he was complying with the provisions of the act in terms of notifying Congress.

When considering military intervention, presidents virtually never consider the cost—Obama included, when it came to Libya. I received estimates that the Libyan operation as we planned it would cost between $800 million and a billion dollars through September. Even the Defense Department didn’t have that kind of cash lying around, especially since Congress was funding us under a yearlong continuing resolution at about $20 billion less than the president’s proposed budget. The debate between us and OMB was whether to add the Libya cost to the FY2011 war supplemental, send Congress a separate supplemental request, or force us to find the money internally.

As is usual when the president makes a momentous decision, the White House wanted key cabinet members blanketing the Sunday talk shows. I avoided that onerous duty the first weekend because I left for Russia and the Middle East on the nineteenth. As I was flying back to Washington on March 25, the White House communications gurus proposed I go on all three network shows the next Sunday to defend the president’s decisions on Libya. Exhausted from the trip, I agreed to do two of the three. Then I took a call from Bill Daley, who pushed me hard to do the third show. I told Daley I’d make him a deal—I would do the third show if he’d agree to get funding for the Libya operation included in the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) appropriation (the war supplemental). I said, “I’ll do Jake Tapper if you’ll do OMB.” Daley whined, “I thought it would cost me a bottle of vodka.” I shot back, “Bullshit. It’s going to cost you $1 billion.” Daley had the last laugh. The president and OMB director Jack Lew refused to approve moving the Libya funding into the OCO. The Defense Department had to eat the entire cost of the Libya operation.

President Obama’s position on his authority to launch military action was rather different from candidate Obama’s in 2008, when he had stated unequivocally that “the president does not have the power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.” In fact, there had been a vigorous debate within the administration over whether he had the authority—without congressional action—to sustain the intervention in Libya for more than sixty days, with the Justice Department and the general counsel of the Defense Department arguing that he did not. He chose to go with the opinion of the White House counsel and State Department legal adviser, that the engagement fell short of “hostilities” as defined in the War Powers Act and therefore the mission could be continued indefinitely without permission from Congress. A small minority of Republicans and Democrats on the Hill strongly objected to this assertion of presidential power, but there was never a serious challenge to the legality of the president’s actions.

There was a challenge, however, to the limitations Obama had placed on the military mission. In a televised speech at the National Defense University on March 28, he explained why he had decided to intervene in Libya, offered justification for acting there and not in such conflicts elsewhere, and described the limited nature of the U.S. military mission. He made clear that we would transfer leadership of the military operation to NATO two days later and reduce the level of our involvement, and he explicitly stated that using the military to bring about Qaddafi’s removal would be a mistake.

Mullen and I caught the full blast of congressional blowback on those limitations when we testified before the House and Senate Armed Services Committees on March 31. The ranking Republicans in both houses—McCain in the Senate and Buck McKeon in the House—asked why the military mission fell short of regime change. I replied that we had to differentiate between political goals and the military mission. The military mission authorized by the UN was to establish a no-fly zone and protect civilians, whereas the U.S. political goal was to get rid of Qaddafi. McCain was bitterly critical of the president’s decision to turn over the military mission to NATO and reduce our support after the initial destruction of Qaddafi’s air defenses, saying that would only make it harder to achieve our policy goals. We should, he said, do whatever was necessary to succeed in Libya, short of sending in ground troops. Senator John Cornyn of Texas said he wished the president had gone to Congress before he went to the UN; he added that the mission in Libya was unclear, that NATO wouldn’t be able to finish the job on its own, and that there was no plan post-Qaddafi. When he asked me about the “ill-defined endgame,” I responded that the last thing America needed was another enterprise in nation-building, other countries ought to take responsibility for Libya, and “I don’t think we ought to take on another war.”

At another point in the hearing, I acknowledged that I was preoccupied with “mission creep” in Libya and that, given our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I needed help from Congress to limit our role. The House committee was far more critical than the Senate of the president’s failure to get congressional approval for the Libya action. Members also pressed me on the cost. I said we had nineteen ships and 18,000 troops committed to the operation, and the cost for the first eleven days was about $550 million, and probably $40 million a month going forward. I agreed with several members that “we should not overestimate our ability to influence” what would happen after Qaddafi fell. I acknowledged we knew little about the rebels, but “we know a lot about Qaddafi and that is reason enough to help them.”

The hearings were awkward for me because many of the members were raising precisely the concerns I had raised during the internal administration debates. Asked if the situation in Libya involved our “vital national interests,” I honestly said I did not think so—but our closest allies felt that it affected their vital interests and therefore we had an obligation to help them. When asked whether there would be U.S. forces on the ground in Libya, I impetuously and arrogantly answered, “Not as long as I’m in this job.” The response was a further reflection of my diminishing discipline in testifying. I simply should have said that the president had been quite firm in prohibiting the use of American ground forces.

I later confided to my staff that I had considered resigning over the Libya issue. I told them I had decided not to leave because I was so close to the end of my tenure anyway; it would just look petulant. Frustrated, I said I had tried to raise all the issues for which the administration was being criticized—an open-ended conflict, an ill-defined mission, Qaddafi’s fate, and what came after him—but the president “had not been interested in getting into any of that.” I was, moreover, at the end of my tether with White House–NSS micromanagement. The same day the military campaign began, I started to get questions at a principals’ meeting from Donilon and Daley about our targeting of Libyan ground forces. I angrily shot back, “You are the biggest micromanagers I have ever worked with. You can’t use a screwdriver reaching from D.C. to Libya on our military operations. The president has given us his strategic direction. For God’s sake, now let us [Defense] run it.” My well of patience had gone dry.

All twenty-eight NATO allies voted to support the military mission in Libya, but just half provided some kind of contribution, and only eight actually provided aircraft for the strike mission. The United States ultimately had to provide the lion’s share of reconnaissance capability and most of the midair refueling of planes; just three months into the campaign, we had to resupply even our strongest allies with precision-guided bombs and missiles—they had exhausted their meager supply. Toward the final stages, we had to reenter the fray with our own fighters and drones. All this was the result of years of underinvestment in defense by even our closest allies.

Libya’s population of 6.4 million is made up of a mix of ethnic groups and indigenous Berber tribesmen. It has been occupied, dominated, or governed over the past 2,500 years by the Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Muslims, Ottomans, Italians, British, and French. Its three historical regions—Cyrenaica, the eastern coastal area; Tripolitania, the central and western coastal area centered on Tripoli; and Fezzan, the southwestern part of the country—were politically unified only in 1934, and the autonomy of the regions was reduced largely through Qaddafi’s repression (although even at his strongest, he had to pay close attention to tribal politics). In short, Libya as a unified entity is a relatively recent phenomenon, created by foreigners. Problems abound there. Can a weak central government hold the country together in the face of long-standing centrifugal pressures? We shall see.

I believe we are in the early stages of what is likely to be a very long period of instability and change in the Arab world. Above all, we must stop pretending to ourselves that we can predict (or shape) the outcome. At a White House meeting at the end of March 2011, U.S. ambassador to Syria Robert Ford asserted that “Assad is no Qaddafi. There is little likelihood of mass atrocities. The Syrian regime will answer challenges aggressively but will try to minimize the use of lethal force.” He would be proven horribly wrong.

Fundamental questions remain unanswered. Will free elections in the Arab countries inevitably lead to Islamist-dominated governments? Will those governments, in time, revert to authoritarianism? Will the military reverse the outcome of elections that bring Islamists to power (as in Algeria and Egypt)? The absence of democratic institutions, the rule of law, and civil society in virtually all Arab states—and the challenges facing secular reformers—do not provide much reason for optimism. Will freely elected governments be able to make the hard decisions necessary to bring economic growth and alleviate the grim existence of most Arabs? If not, will they turn to extreme nationalism, blame Israel and the United States, or ignite sectarian violence as a diversion from their domestic failures? Can states whose boundaries were artificially drawn by foreigners and that are composed of historically adversarial tribal, ethnic, and religious groups—above all, Iraq, Syria, and Libya—remain unified absent repression? Will the monarchies and emirates strive to preserve the internal status quo, undertake gradual but real reform, or face their own violent challenges to stability and survival? I believe the only way the United States will find itself “on the right side of history,” as these revolutions and their aftermath unfold, is to continue to articulate our belief in political freedom and human rights, and to affirm that government exists to serve the people and not the other way around, as well as our belief in the superiority of a regulated market economy. Beyond that, we will have to deal with each country individually, taking into account its specific circumstances and our own strategic interests.

As I had told President Bush and Condi Rice early in 2007, the challenge of the early twenty-first century is that crises don’t come and go—they all seem to come and stay.