Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War

By fall 2007, the unpopular war in Iraq—the “bad war,” the “war of choice”—was going much better. However, the war in Afghanistan—the “good war,” the “war of necessity”—while continuing to enjoy strong bipartisan support in Washington, was getting worse on the ground. The politics in Washington surrounding the two wars both frustrated and angered President Bush. In a meeting with the Joint Chiefs and me in the Tank on May 10, 2007, he said, “Many in Congress don’t understand the military. Afghanistan is good. Iraq is bad. Bullshit.”

The war to oust the Taliban from power in Afghanistan and to destroy al Qaeda began auspiciously less than a month after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. Within a matter of weeks, the Taliban had been defeated, and their leaders, along with al Qaeda’s, had fled to the border areas inside Pakistan. On December 5, 2001, Hamid Karzai was selected by an informal group of Afghan tribal and political leaders to serve six months as chairman of an “interim administration.” In June 2002, he was chosen by a grand assembly (loya jirga) as interim president for two years, then was elected to a full five-year term the following October. From the beginning, Karzai had strong support from the United States and the international community, which set about trying to help him and his government establish their authority and an effective national government beyond Kabul. When I became secretary, the United States had about 21,000 troops in Afghanistan, while NATO and coalition partners together had about 18,000 troops.

When interviewing with Bush in early November 2006, I had told him that based on what I read, I thought the war in Afghanistan was being neglected. I also said there was too much emphasis on building a strong central government in a country that had virtually never had one, and too little emphasis on improving governance, security, and services at the provincial and district levels, including making better use of local Afghan tribal leaders and councils. On my first trip to Afghanistan in January 2007, I quickly came to believe that, as in Iraq, from early on we had underestimated the resilience and determination of our adversaries and had failed to adjust our strategy and our resources as the situation on the ground changed for the worse. While we were preoccupied with Iraq, between 2002 and 2005 the Taliban reconstituted in western Pakistan and in southern and eastern Afghanistan. Headquartered and operating in Pakistani cities including Peshawar and Quetta, virtually unhindered by the Pakistani government, the Taliban recovered from their disastrous defeat and again became a serious fighting force. They received invaluable, if unintended, assistance from the sparseness of Afghan government presence outside Kabul—Karzai was referred to as the mayor of Kabul—and the corruption and incompetence of too many Afghan government officials at all levels in the provinces.

The first significant American encounter with a revitalized Taliban came in eastern Afghanistan on June 28, 2005, when four Navy SEALs were ambushed in a well-organized attack, and a helicopter with SEAL and Army Special Forces reinforcements sent to assist them was shot down. Three of the SEALs on the ground were killed, as well as sixteen U.S. servicemen on the helicopter. One of the three SEALs on the ground, Navy Lieutenant Michael Murphy, posthumously received the Congressional Medal of Honor for his heroism. American casualties that day were the worst yet in a single engagement in the Afghan War and a wake-up call that the Taliban had returned. The following spring, 2006, the Taliban increased the level of their attacks in both the south and east of Afghanistan. They were further enabled by a deal Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf cut at about the same time with tribes on the border, in which he pledged to keep Pakistani troops out of their tribal lands as long as the tribes prevented al Qaeda and the Taliban from operating in those lands. The feckless deal effectively gave the Taliban safe haven in those areas. The Taliban “spring offensive” was characterized by assassinations, the murder of teachers and burning of schools, the shooting of workers building roads, and other acts of targeted violence. The Taliban were joined in their depredations by other extremist groups, most notably those led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (to whom we had provided weapons when he was fighting the Soviets) and Jalaluddin Haqqani.

By the end of 2006, U.S. commanders in Afghanistan were telling the press that the number of Taliban attacks had surged by 200 percent in December from a year earlier and that since Musharraf’s deal with the tribes had gone into effect in early September, the number of attacks in the border area had gone up by 300 percent. Military briefers reported that suicide attacks had grown from 27 in 2005 to 139 in 2006; the number of roadside bombings in the same period had risen from 783 to 1,677; and the number of direct attacks using small arms, grenades, and other weapons had gone from 1,558 to 4,542. Two thousand six had been the bloodiest year since 2001. When I became secretary, the war in Afghanistan, as in Iraq, was clearly headed in the wrong direction.

Recognizing the deterioration, just prior to my becoming secretary, President Bush had ordered an increase in the number of U.S. troops from 21,000 to 31,000 over a two-year period—what he called a “silent surge.” He also doubled funding for reconstruction, increased the number of military-civilian teams (provincial reconstruction teams) carrying out projects to improve the daily life of Afghans, authorized an increase in the size of the Afghan army, and ordered more U.S. civilian experts to Afghanistan to help the ministries in Kabul become more effective (and less corrupt). Bush also encouraged our allies to do more in all these areas, and to drop the “national caveats” that limited the combat effectiveness of their troops.

It was against this backdrop that I made my first visit to Afghanistan in mid-January 2007, less than a month after being sworn in. As on my first trip to Iraq, General Pace joined me. It was nearly midnight when we landed and rode in a heavily armored motorcade to the main U.S. base in Kabul, Camp Eggers. There was snow and ice everywhere, and the temperature was about twenty degrees. My accommodations at Bader House consisted of a small second-floor bedroom with dim lighting and a bed, couch, easy chair, desk, and drapes that all looked like they had been salvaged from an old college dorm. The staff shared one room with four bunk beds. We all knew we were “living large” compared to our troops, and no one complained.

The first morning, I met with our ambassador, Ronald Neumann; then the senior American commander, Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry; then other U.S. commanders; and finally with the commander of the International Security Assistance Force (the NATO-dominated coalition), British general David Richards. I heard a consistent message from everyone: the Taliban insurgency was growing, their safe havens in Pakistan were a big problem, the spring of 2007 would be more violent than the previous year, and more troops were needed. I was told that NATO nations had not provided some 3,500 military trainers they had promised, and Eikenberry—who was due to rotate out less than a week after my visit—asked that the deployment of a battalion of the 10th Mountain Division (about 1,200 troops) be extended through the spring offensive.

I told Eikenberry that if he thought more troops were needed, I was prepared to recommend that course of action to the president. At the same time, Pace made clear that additional troops for Afghanistan would increase the strain on the U.S. military at least in the short run. While I said I wanted to keep the initiative and not allow the Taliban to regroup, Pace had put his finger on a huge problem. With the surge in Iraq and 160,000 troops there, the Army and Marine Corps didn’t have combat capability to spare. My intent upon becoming secretary had been to give our commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan everything they needed to be successful; I realized on this initial visit to Afghanistan I couldn’t deliver in both places at once.

That afternoon we helicoptered east across the snow-covered mountains to Forward Operating Base Tillman, at an elevation of some 6,000 feet in eastern Afghanistan, only a few miles from the Pakistani border and near a major Taliban infiltration route. When we landed, I couldn’t help but reflect that a little over twenty years before, as deputy director of the CIA, I had been on the Pakistani side of the border looking into Afghanistan and doing business with some of the very people we were fighting now. It was a stark reminder to me of our limited ability to look into the future or to foresee the unintended consequences of our actions. That was what made me very cautious about committing military forces in new places.

I was met by Captain Scott Horrigan, the commander at FOB Tillman, who gave me a tour. His troops were partnered with about 100 Afghan soldiers in this fortified outpost in the mountains, named for Corporal Patrick Daniel Tillman, a professional football player who had enlisted in the Army and was killed in Afghanistan in a friendly-fire tragedy in 2004. The walking tour across snow, rocks, and mud brought home to me just how much we were asking of our young officers and troops in these isolated posts. Captain Horrigan was overseeing road building, negotiating with local tribal councils, training Afghan soldiers—and fighting the Taliban. His base was attacked by rocket and mortar fire at least once a week. The range of his responsibilities and the matter-of-fact way he described them and conducted himself took my breath away. I thought to myself that the responsibilities this young captain had and the authority and independence he enjoyed would make any return to garrison life—not to mention the civilian world—very hard. More than any headquarters briefing, the quiet competence, skill, and courage that he, his first sergeant, and their men displayed gave me confidence that we could prevail if we had the right strategy and proper resources.

In a dramatic shift of setting and circumstance, I met that evening for the first time with President Karzai in the presidential palace in Kabul. Karzai owed his position—and his life—to American support, yet he was very much a Pashtun leader and an Afghan nationalist. Accordingly, distrust and dislike of the British, who had famously failed to pacify Afghanistan in the nineteenth century, was in his DNA. I would meet with him many times over the next four and a half years, often alone, in every subsequent visit. He and I were able to speak very frankly to each other. His wife had given birth to a son a few days before my initial visit, and in future meetings I would always ask about the boy, of whom he was very proud. While dealing with Karzai could be incredibly frustrating and maddening, especially for those who had to do it nearly every day, I quickly understood the importance of actually listening to him—something too many of my American colleagues, including all our ambassadors during my time as secretary, did too rarely—because he was very open about his concerns. Long before issues such as civilian casualties, the actions of private security contractors, night raids, and the use of dogs on patrols became nasty public disputes between Karzai and the international coalition, he would raise these matters in private. We were far too slow in picking up on these signals and taking action. Karzai knew he needed the coalition but he also was sensitive to actions that would anger the Afghan public, undermine their tolerance for the presence of foreign troops in their country, and reflect badly on him in the eyes of his countrymen. “I know I have many flaws,” Karzai once told me, “but I do know my people.”

Wholly dependent upon the largesse and protection of foreign governments and troops, he was exceptionally sensitive about any foreign action or commentary that did not show respect for Afghan sovereignty, Afghan citizens, or himself. He was especially allergic to foreign criticism of him or his family, particularly on the issue of corruption. He tracked the foreign press zealously (or his staff did) and once showed me an article critical of him in The Irish Times. I thought to myself, Who in the hell reads The Irish Times outside Ireland? But all too often, in both the Bush and Obama administrations, American officials failed to calibrate their criticisms of Karzai in terms of what was said, how often, at what level, and whether publicly or privately. The result was to make a challenging relationship more difficult than it needed to be.

I returned from the January 2007 trip determined to provide more American troops, to try to persuade our NATO allies to provide more troops, and to see if we could get better cooperation from the Pakistanis on the border. I wasn’t optimistic about my chances for success.

Getting more American troops was a challenge. With the surge in Iraq, our ground forces were stretched very thin. The expression I most often heard from senior officers when discussing this was “We are out of Schlitz”—meaning there was nothing more available. Thinking it very important to blunt the Taliban offensive in the spring of 2007, within days of my return to Washington I recommended, and the president approved, extending the deployment of the 10th Mountain Division battalion for another 120 days, as Eikenberry had requested. I also asked the president to approve accelerating the deployment of units of the 82nd Airborne Division. All together this provided roughly another 3,200 U.S. combat troops, bringing our number to about 25,000, the highest level yet in the war. I could send no more troops for the rest of 2007, given our commitments in Iraq. The commanders still had an outstanding request to NATO for 3,500 additional trainers for the Afghan army and police.

President Bush was sensitive to the charge that the war in Iraq—and the surge—were holding us back or distracting us in Afghanistan. This was an ongoing source of his irritation with Mike Mullen, whose public commentary suggested just that. In late September, the president expressed his displeasure to me over a statement Mullen had made in an interview to the effect that Iraq was “a distraction.” And he also disliked Mullen’s later repeated characterization to Congress that “in Iraq, we do what we must. In Afghanistan, we do what we can.” Mike was describing reality, however politically uncomfortable, but it was public statements like these that I think led the president to question whether Mullen would continue to support the effort in Iraq under a new commander in chief.

We needed to persuade our NATO allies to do more. As I said earlier, I attended my first NATO defense ministers meeting in Seville in early February 2007, where I asked the Europeans to deliver the combat troops, trainers, and helicopters they had promised. I pressed them to lift restrictions on the kinds of missions their forces could undertake. I told them it was important for the spring offensive in Afghanistan to be an “alliance offensive.” Several ministers, including my German colleague, Franz Josef Jung, countered that a more “balanced, comprehensive” approach was needed in Afghanistan and that the alliance should be focusing more on economic and reconstruction efforts than on boosting force levels. This was a refrain I would hear constantly in the future. The approach favored by the Europeans, however, looked a lot like nation-building, the work of decades in Afghanistan and not the kind of mission accomplished in the middle of a war. The Europeans—especially those deployed in the more peaceful west and north of Afghanistan—wanted to focus on a very broad long-term mission, just as there was growing sentiment in the Bush and then the Obama administration that we had to narrow our objectives to those that could be realistically achieved in the time that an increasingly impatient and war-weary American people would give us. No one ever focused explicitly on this divergence of views between the United States and our NATO allies either in our meetings or publicly, but it was an important underlying source of friction and frustration.

When the Europeans agreed to take on Afghanistan as a NATO mission in 2006, they had thought they were signing up to something akin to armed peacekeeping, as NATO had undertaken in Bosnia, not a full-fledged counterinsurgency. Their publics did not want to be in a war and had very low tolerance for casualties, and most governments faced significant political opposition at home to their military commitment. While I would pester and nag the Europeans for years to do more, I actually was surprised they were so steadfast in supporting the mission, given their domestic politics, especially in the several countries where coalition governments held on to power by a thread. The hardest fighting, and greatest sacrifices, fell to those countries deployed in the south and east (the United States, Britain, Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands, Australia, Estonia, and Romania), but the French, Germans, Italians, and Spanish contributed thousands of troops elsewhere in Afghanistan. Getting many of those troops to venture outside their fortified base camps, however, was a continuing challenge. Over time national caveats would diminish, the numbers of allied troops would gradually increase, and no one would bail out.

I wanted to get the Pakistanis to do more to end safe havens and to stop Taliban infiltration from their side of the border. As important to the United States as Pakistan is, both in Afghanistan and in the region, I would travel there only twice because I quickly realized my civilian counterpart had zero clout in defense matters (dominated by the chief of the army staff). My first and only significant visit was on February 12, 2007, about three weeks after my initial trip to Afghanistan. The purpose was to meet with President Musharraf, who was then also still chief of the army staff, to see if he would step up Pakistan’s military efforts along the Afghan border, especially in anticipation of the Taliban’s spring offensive. I talked about the need for the United States, NATO, Afghanistan, and Pakistan to do more. His response was one that we would hear ad nauseam. The international media and some foreign leaders portray all problems in Afghanistan as coming from Pakistan, he said, but we needed to take on the Taliban where they come from and operate, which was in Afghanistan. He went on to say that only the Pakistani intelligence services seemed to catch high-ranking Taliban and al Qaeda and that “Pakistan is the victim of the export of the Afghan Taliban.” After he reviewed his plans for border control, the refugee camps, and military action in Waziristan (in northwestern Pakistan, on the Afghan border), we retired to a small room for a private meeting. I gave him a list of specific actions we wanted Pakistan to take, actions we could take together, and actions the United States was prepared to take alone. In private, Musharraf acknowledged Pakistani failures and problems on the border, but he asked me what a lone Pakistani border sentry could do if he saw thirty to forty Taliban moving toward the Afghan border. I responded, You should permit the sentry to warn us, and we will ambush the Taliban. He said, “I like ambushes, we ought to be setting them daily.” If only, I thought.

I went through our very specific list of requests: capture three named Taliban and extremist leaders; give the United States expanded authority to take action against specific Taliban and al Qaeda leaders and targets in Pakistan; dismantle insurgent and terrorist camps; shut down the Taliban headquarters in Quetta and Peshawar; disrupt certain major infiltration routes across the border; enhance intelligence cooperation and streamline Pakistani decision making on targeting; allow expanded ISR flights over Pakistan; establish joint border security monitoring centers manned by Pakistanis, Afghans, and coalition forces; and improve cooperation for military planning and operations in Pakistan. Musharraf kept a straight face and pretended to take all this seriously. While the Pakistanis would eventually deploy some 140,000 troops on their border with Afghanistan and endure heavy losses in fighting there, and while there was some modest progress on joint operations centers and border security stations, we’d still be asking for virtually all these same actions years later.

The real power in Pakistan is the military, and in November 2007 Musharraf handed over leadership of the army to General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. At that point, I turned the Pakistani account over to Mike Mullen, who would travel to Pakistan regularly to talk with Kayani.

It became clear to me that our efforts in Afghanistan during 2007 were being significantly hampered not only by muddled and overly ambitious objectives but also by confusion in the military command structure, confusion in economic and civilian assistance efforts, and confusion over how the war was actually going.

The military command problem was the age-old one of too many high-ranking generals with a hand on the tiller. U.S. Army General Dan McNeill had replaced British general Richards on February 1, 2007, as commander of ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) in Kabul. McNeill was the first U.S. four-star commander dedicated to Afghanistan. There he had command of all coalition forces, which included about two-thirds of U.S. forces in country. Because his was a NATO command, McNeill reported to U.S. Army General John Craddock in his NATO role as supreme allied commander Europe. McNeill commanded only about half of some 8,000 to 10,000 additional U.S. and other coalition soldiers assigned to Afghanistan, who, under the rubric of Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF), reported to a separate U.S. three-star general, who in turn reported to the four-star commander of Central Command in Tampa. A significant percentage of the Special Forces operating in Afghanistan reported to yet another commander, also in Tampa.

This jerry-rigged arrangement violated every principle of the unity of command. And to make things worse, Craddock and McNeill did not get along with each other. Craddock guarded his NATO turf zealously; whenever I wanted the ISAF commander to brief the defense ministers at our meetings, Craddock was recalcitrant unless I insisted. I can think of only one occasion in my years as secretary when I directly overruled a senior military officer. It was right after General Stan McChrystal was appointed to command ISAF: on his way to Kabul, I wanted him to join me at a meeting of NATO defense ministers, whose troops he would be commanding, and say a few words. I passed word to Craddock to make it happen. We sat next to each other at a formal luncheon, and he passed me a note formally objecting to McChrystal appearing before the ministers, saying he didn’t think it set a good precedent. I scribbled back to him on his note, “Noted. Now make it happen.”

I heard about this command and control problem in the Pentagon from Undersecretary Eric Edelman, Assistant Secretary Mary Beth Long, and from Doug Lute at the NSC, on my visits to NATO and in Afghanistan. I asked Pete Pace to recommend how to fix it, and he came back to me exasperated with the complexity and the politics. The apparent trouble was that OEF had the mission not only of training and equipping the Afghans but also of carrying out covert (“black”) special operations. The Europeans, especially the Germans, characterized our interest in putting everything under one American commander as having sucked them into Afghanistan as an alliance project and then wanting to take it over again. They also saw it as an effort to make NATO complicit in black special ops, which their publics wouldn’t stand for. Pace concluded that, as Craddock put it, the command and control “is ugly, but it works on the ground.” Actually, it didn’t. This problem would not fully be resolved until the summer of 2010, nearly nine years after the war started.

International civilian assistance and reconstruction efforts were also confused. Scores of countries, international organizations, and nongovernmental organizations were engaged in trying to help the Afghans develop an effective government, improve the infrastructure, strengthen the economy, and carry out humanitarian projects. It was—and is—a massive endeavor, made significantly more difficult because no one knew what anyone else was doing. Each country and organization worked strictly within its own sector on its own projects. There was little sharing of information on what was working or not, little collaboration, and virtually no structure. To make things worse, the outsiders too often did not inform the Afghan government about what they were doing, much less ask the Afghans what projects they would like. Strictly speaking, this was not my area of responsibility as defense secretary, though historically the U.S. military, with its resources and organization, has taken on many traditionally civilian tasks in war zones. But the war was certainly my responsibility, and if we couldn’t get the civilian side right, our chances of achieving the president’s objectives were reduced, if not impossible.

A senior civilian coordinator was needed, someone with a broad international mandate to oversee all the economic development, governance, humanitarian, and other projects under way in Afghanistan and then to work with President Karzai and his government to bring some greater structure, coherence, and collaboration to those efforts—with significant Afghan involvement. We discussed this first at the NATO defense ministers meeting in Seville in February 2007, then for months afterward. I believed the coordinator had to be a European and, if possible, have a mandate from the United Nations, NATO, and the European Union, thus encompassing virtually all the international organizations and countries with projects ongoing in Afghanistan. The effort was sidetracked for months by a strong British push for Paddy Ashdown, a longtime member of Parliament who had served as high representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina from 2002 to 2006. The United States and other allies were all prepared to go along, mainly because the British felt so strongly about his appointment. The problem was that Karzai was familiar with Ashdown’s role in the former Yugoslavia. Karzai told me during my visit to Kabul in December 2007 that his cabinet had unanimously rejected Ashdown as the senior civilian coordinator because Afghanistan was “not interested in a viceroy for development.” He said he was wary of Ashdown because of reports of his high-handedness in the Balkans. Karzai said he wanted the scope of the coordinator’s role and authority clearly defined and his writ limited to making international support more coherent and to lobbying for greater assistance.

In March 2008, Norwegian diplomat Kai Eide was named as senior civilian coordinator, operating under the mandate of the United Nations. Eide, who would develop a good relationship with Karzai and could speak frankly with him about delicate matters, often to good effect, would offer his appraisal of the current situation in Afghanistan at every NATO defense ministers meeting. Kai was frank about the challenges but usually fairly upbeat about how things were going. I got to know him pretty well and strongly supported his role so he was very forthright with me. Given the UN bureaucracy, it took months for him to get additional staff, let alone fulfill his mandate. Despite Kai’s best efforts, the structured coordination of international assistance I had hoped for never developed, just like everything else in Afghanistan involving multiple governments.

No less confusing was determining whether we were making progress in Afghanistan. I was enormously frustrated by the divergent views of intelligence analysts in Washington, who were pretty consistently pessimistic, and the civilians and military on the ground in Afghanistan, who were both much more positive. In my years at CIA and the NSC, I had seen this movie a number of times—in Vietnam, in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and during the Gulf War, to mention only a few examples. It’s hard to say whether the field or the Washington analysts were more accurate, but I gave a slight edge to the experts in Washington (probably reflecting my bias in having been a Washington-based analyst). However, my experience made me wary because, contrary to conventional wisdom, intelligence analysts far prefer showing that the decision makers don’t know what they’re doing rather than supporting them—especially when they can testify to that effect before Congress.

After months of reading and hearing the conflicting analysis, my impatience boiled over during a September 25, 2007, videoconference with McNeill in Kabul, Craddock in Brussels, and the chairman and others in Washington. I vented about the gap between D.C. intelligence evaluations versus “the take of the guys in the field.” I said I didn’t know how to get the most accurate assessment of the situation on the ground. I confessed, “I’m confused and I’m sure others are as well.” I asked Jim Clapper, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, to adjudicate the differences in analysis between those in Afghanistan and those in Washington. He reported a couple of days later that the disconnect was worse than we thought; there were differences in assessment between General McNeill’s headquarters, Central Command, NATO, and both CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency analysts in Washington. Not a good situation in the middle of a war.

In mid-October, Clapper reported that there was a “robust” dialogue under way among all of the different analytical communities with respect to the “real situation” in Afghanistan. He said that analysts from CIA and other agencies had gone to Afghanistan and, working with the experts there, had come up with forty-five to fifty questions to try to sharpen where they disagreed and what they could agree upon. I thought the intelligence folks were missing the point. Too much of the reporting was tactical—day-to-day combat reports—and anecdotal; everyone saw the same data, but interpretation of it varied widely. What was the broader picture?

In mid-June 2008, I again let loose my frustration in a videoconference with the generals in Kabul and Brussels and the senior Pentagon leadership in Washington: “You guys [in Kabul] sound pretty good, but then I get intelligence reports that indicate it is going to hell. I don’t have a feel for how the fight is going! I don’t think the president has a clear idea either of exactly where we are in Afghanistan.” The differences in perspective and views were genuine, but still…

The lack of clarity fed my worry that things were not going well. Our insufficient levels of combat troops and trainers, inadequate numbers of civilian experts, confusing military command and control, the lack of multinational coordination on the civilian side, and deficient civil-military coordination were matched and then some on the Afghan side—corruption at every level, the mercurial Karzai, the scarcity of competent ministers and civil servants, problems between the capital and the provinces. Eric Edelman told me about these Afghan weaknesses as early as mid-March 2007. Eric also said that the Ministry of the Interior was probably involved in the drug trade and that Karzai spent far too much time in his palace and not enough time showing the flag around the country. Edelman, a career diplomat, ended his litany with a line perhaps designed to keep me from getting too depressed: “I’m not discouraged, but there are issues.”

Two weeks later Rice, Hadley, and I met in Washington with NATO secretary general Jaap de Hoop Scheffer. His message was familiar: “I feel we can ‘contain,’ but cannot ‘prevail’ ” against, the Taliban. He questioned the sustainability of the NATO commitment and told us the alliance needed better coordination, better integration of our forces, better training of the Afghan army, and more consistency in the public statements of NATO and contributing governments about the war. He added that someone with real clout was needed who could speak to Karzai on behalf of all the countries working in Afghanistan, someone who “can tell him what the truth is.” We agreed with everything he had to say, and Hadley asked whether we really needed three senior representatives in Kabul—one each from NATO, the EU, and the UN, as at present. I asked if NATO should own the entire role, and Rice chimed in, “You can do it de jure or de facto, but make the NATO guy the strongest.”

During my second visit to Afghanistan, in early June 2007, I continued to worry that we were strategically more or less in the same place as we had been in Iraq in 2006—at best, at a stalemate. In my comments to the press, I said, “I think actually things are slowly, cautiously headed in the right direction. I am concerned to keep it moving that way.” In fact, I was very concerned. In a meeting on July 26 with the senior civilian and military leadership in the Pentagon, I said we were losing European forces because they didn’t have the stomach for the fight; we were doing well in conventional military terms against the Taliban, but the level of violence was rising; a new U.S. president would have to decide whether to put more forces into Afghanistan without much NATO support; the Pakistanis weren’t pushing al Qaeda or the Taliban from their side of the border so that we could take care of them in Afghanistan, nor would they let us go after them unilaterally in Pakistan. The one comparatively bright spot was the Afghan army, which for all its problems was significantly more competent and respected than any other Afghan government institution.

The problems I faced with command personalities, as well as figuring out what was going on in Afghanistan, were demonstrated in a videoconference on September 13. The deputy U.S. commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, Brigadier General Joe Votel, assured me we still held the initiative in eastern Afghanistan, but he went on to describe the situation there as deteriorating, with the Taliban and their allies increasing the number of suicide bombings, kidnapping of women and beheadings, and moving their support bases closer to Kabul. He said there were increased numbers of the enemy across the border in Pakistan; that attacks in the east were 75 percent higher than the previous year; and that collusion was growing among the disparate insurgent groups. General McNeill questioned Votel’s “dire assessment” and asserted, “We’re not going down the tubes here and the Taliban does not have the upper hand. We’re killing a lot of them, getting to sufficient numbers of their leaders and having great effect. I think we’re in pretty good shape when it comes to the Taliban.” I thought to myself, Well, that’s just great. Even the military commanders on the ground don’t agree on how we are doing. Admiral Fallon then added, “I’m with Dan [McNeill] on the prospects in Afghanistan—it’s not as gloomy as some would have you believe.”

I arrived in Kabul on December 4 and helicoptered to Khowst province in eastern Afghanistan. The 82nd Airborne had, in fact, done a superb job there of fighting an effective counterinsurgency, and despite the increase in violence, it was clear, as Votel had said, that we still had the initiative. While in Khowst, I flew to a small village to meet with a group of provincial officials and tribal elders. We landed in a field outside the village, and there didn’t seem to be a living green thing in sight. Everything was brown. As so often in visiting such remote places in Afghanistan, I asked myself, Why are people fighting over this godforsaken place? The officials and elders were already assembled in an open-sided but roofed structure and did me the favor of providing chairs to sit on. There were some stunning beards in the room, many of them white and streaked with red henna. It could have been a scene out of the eighteenth century—until one of the elders told me he had read my recent Kansas State University lecture on soft power on the Internet. It was a useful reminder that traditional customs and dress do not equate with technological backwardness—a lesson to remember in dealing with the Taliban as well. I came away from Khowst impressed with the effective partnering of military efforts with civilian experts from State, AID, and the Department of Agriculture. It was a genuinely comprehensive counterinsurgency, combining military operations with robust reconstruction efforts, with Afghans fully integrated. Khowst at that time was a model of a sort: open-minded and skilled U.S. military leaders, adequate numbers of U.S. civilian experts, Afghan involvement, and a competent Afghan governor.

My briefings in Kabul from the various regional commanders were uniformly upbeat. They said the situation overall was “no worse” than before, “just different.” The commander in the south said that his forces there “had a better year than the media gives them credit for and than the European capitals think.” The west was described as in pretty good shape, and the north has “no insurgency—organized crime and warlords are the biggest threat to security.” In the east, “the counterinsurgency strategy continues to show progress.” Each commander expressed frustration that the growing violence—due to more aggressive coalition efforts to root out the Taliban—was viewed in Washington as evidence of failure. Every commander wanted more troops, and McNeill said he was about four battalions short, plus trainers, of what he needed.

I then met privately with Karzai. I said he’d probably had enough people beating up on him and that I was there to listen. He talked about how the Russians, the Iranians, and the Pakistanis were all meddling in Afghanistan (undoubtedly all true) and that they and the Afghan Northern Alliance were all working against him. In what was, even for him, a particularly conspiratorial frame of mind, he talked about how “inclusiveness” (meaning working with the Northern Alliance) had put the country at risk and that these guys—“Putin’s allies”—were now killing parliamentarians and even children. “This is not done by the Taliban or al Qaeda but by our own bad people,” and his government needed to “consult with the United States on how to handle this.” Because most of the Taliban operations were in southern Afghanistan, he said, the brunt of the war was being borne by the Pashtuns, and they felt we were targeting them. He said that to address this, we needed to work more closely with the tribes. It was classic Karzai—overdrawn and paranoid but not necessarily wrong.

I told the president on my return that there had been significant progress in Afghanistan, but the progress was too slow. The regional commanders were relatively upbeat, I said, but their briefings were discouraging in that they all were asking me to fill military capabilities or equipment needs NATO had not filled. I said we had to be prepared to continue to invest robustly in training and equipping the Afghan security forces, especially the army, and that more trainers and mentors were needed—areas where NATO was falling woefully short. I summarized: NATO didn’t know how to do counterinsurgency, the allied mentoring and liaison teams didn’t know what they were doing, the small Taliban presence in the north was being used by the warlords as a reason to rebuild their militias, in the west it would be better not to have the Italians there, and the south was a mess. My bottom line to Bush: Where we were in charge and Karzai had appointed competent, honest leaders, we were doing okay. Everything else was a holding action. We had to transition from European-favored comprehensive nation-building, toward a more focused counterinsurgency, no matter how much it upset the Europeans. If we had learned one lesson from the surge in Iraq, it was that we had to give the people a sense of security before anything else could work.

As we looked toward 2008, I was eager to have the NATO summit in April 2008 bless a longer-term strategy in Afghanistan, out of necessity. For more than a year, the defense ministers of the countries fighting in Regional Command–South (RC-South: the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, Denmark, the Netherlands, Estonia, and Romania) had been meeting by ourselves to coordinate our countries’ efforts better. We met again on December 13–14, 2007, in Edinburgh. This meeting included foreign ministers for the first time. Condi was represented by her undersecretary for policy, Nick Burns, who I had gotten to know when he worked on the NSC staff with Condi under Bush 41.

I proposed to ministers that the alliance prepare a three-to-five-year strategic plan comprehensively integrating both military operations and civilian development programs. I said such a plan would lift allies’ eyes above heading for the exits at the end of 2008 and focus on the reality that success in Afghanistan was going to take some time. The prologue to such a plan should make clear why we were in Afghanistan and what we had achieved, framing the cause in a way not done before in Europe and providing essential political cover, and political ammunition, for governments. I proposed establishing milestones and goals so we would know if we were making progress. I volunteered the United States to prepare an initial draft and submit it to RC-South partners, then to alliance headquarters, and finally to the NATO summit meeting in Bucharest in April for approval. I also suggested that the British prepare a similar three-to-five-year plan just for the south, to include Helmand, Uruzgan, and Kandahar provinces, which we should review at a meeting in Canada in late January. There was broad support for both initiatives, with a number of useful suggestions from Nick Burns and other ministers. The initiative would never have succeeded without a lot of help from my civilian and military colleagues at the Pentagon and State. We were on course for a positive and useful statement on Afghanistan at the summit.

While home for Christmas 2007, I reflected on the fact that, despite all our problems, we had gotten a free ride from Congress on Afghanistan. The Democrats in Congress had spent the year trumpeting failure in Iraq and trying to change President Bush’s strategy there; central to their approach was to contrast it with the war in Afghanistan, which they steadfastly supported—partly to demonstrate they weren’t weak on national security. In not one of my congressional hearings all year did I hear criticism, much less concern, about the U.S. role or actions in Afghanistan. I consistently heard support for the war from both Democrats and Republicans and calls for our allies to provide more troops and remove restrictions on their use. The irony was that by the end of 2007, the war in Iraq was going much better and the situation in Afghanistan was getting worse. Many in Congress failed to acknowledge either of those realities. Consistent with the approach of the Democrats, they were saying more and more about the need to accelerate the troop drawdowns in Iraq so we could send more to Afghanistan.

In mid-January 2008, I announced we would be sending 3,200 Marines on a “onetime deployment” to Afghanistan in April, bringing our total number of troops to about 31,000. At the same time, I sent a letter to my ministerial colleagues in countries that we thought could do more in Afghanistan. I told them that the Marines were a bridging force to get us to the fall, and that the allies’ failure to step up to the plate placed the entire alliance at risk.

I created a problem in the effort to get a summit statement of strong support for the Afghan mission by putting my foot in my mouth in an interview with Peter Spiegel of the Los Angeles Times, published on January 16. Spiegel asked about the counterinsurgency effort. I told him exactly what I thought: “I’m worried we’re deploying [military advisers] that are not properly trained and I’m worried we have some military forces that don’t know how to do counterinsurgency operations…. Most of the European forces, NATO forces, are not trained in counterinsurgency; they were trained for the Fulda Gap,” the area of Germany where a Soviet invasion of Western Europe was thought most likely to take place.

A favorite saying of mine is “Never miss a good chance to shut up,” but I blew that chance in this interview, and needless to say, all hell broke loose in the alliance. Edelman told me that the allies were very upset, that individual countries thought my criticisms had been aimed at them specifically. Eric called his counterparts in Britain, Canada, and the Netherlands, as well as the secretary general, all of whom were concerned about the impact of what I had said. The next day, at a press conference, I said my comments had been about an overall problem, that I was not drawing invidious comparisons between our troops and others, and that I hoped the allies would take advantage of counterinsurgency training opportunities. The United States had forgotten how to do counterinsurgency operations after Vietnam, I added, and had relearned at huge cost in Iraq and Afghanistan. The squall passed.

A trip to Europe in early February gave me a chance to mend fences. But I would not abandon speaking out publicly about challenges facing the alliance, heartfelt concerns grounded in my belief in its importance. The day before my departure Mike Mullen and I testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee, where I warned that the Atlantic alliance risked becoming a two-tiered organization, divided between some allies who were willing to fight and die to protect people’s security, and others who were not, and that that put the organization at risk. Nearly simultaneously, Condi Rice made a surprise visit to Afghanistan, where she exhorted the allies to do more.

At the NATO defense ministers meeting in Vilnius, Lithuania, on February 7–8, recognizing that my stridency was becoming counterproductive, I softened my tone and my rhetoric but not my message. At the end of the meeting, several countries indicated they were considering increasing their troop commitments, including the French. On February 9, I returned to the Munich Security Conference and directed my remarks to the European people, not their governments. It was exceedingly unusual for an American defense secretary to address himself to foreign publics, but the president, Rice, Hadley, and I thought it would be useful to make the case for why success in Afghanistan mattered to the Europeans, especially since their own governments seemed loath to do so. I reminded the audience of the number of successful and attempted attacks by Islamic extremists in Europe and said the task facing the United States and its allies “is to fracture and destroy this movement… to permanently reduce its ability to strike globally and catastrophically, while deflating its ideology…. The best opportunity to do this is in Afghanistan.”

I felt the outcome on Afghanistan was good at the April NATO summit. The allies unanimously endorsed a Strategic Vision Statement that committed the alliance to remain in Afghanistan for an extended period and to improve governance through greater training of Afghan officials, especially the police. Despite growing concern in Washington about nation-building, the United States acquiesced in the statement’s expression of support for the “comprehensive approach,” including both combat and economic reconstruction. President Bush pledged that the United States would send substantial additional troops to Afghanistan in 2009 but, at my suggestion, kept the number vague. We hoped the commitment would lead other nations to add to their forces. In fact, a number of allies did promise additional forces; France committed to send at least another 700 troops. As a result of the summit and the statement, the risk of significant allied defections at the end of 2008 was much reduced. Amazing to me as an old cold warrior, the Russians even agreed in Bucharest to allow nonlethal alliance military equipment going to Afghanistan to cross Russia. All that said, new troop commitments were modest or vague or both. And the “comprehensive approach” committed us to broad, ambitious goals that I and other U.S. officials were increasingly coming to see as unachievable in wartime.

The level of U.S. troops in Afghanistan remained a major concern for me for the rest of 2008. During my first year on the job, the number of troops had grown from 21,000 to 31,000. General McNeill had been asking for months for more soldiers, but by the time we arrived at the April summit, his request had grown to 7,500 to 10,000 more troops. The United States was the only possible source. Despite broad support in Congress for the war in Afghanistan, some questioned how President Bush could commit the United States to send more troops in 2009, when a new U.S. president would be in office. “I think that no matter who is elected president, he would want to be successful in Afghanistan,” I said at one point. “So I think this was a very safe thing for him to say.” As I told colleagues, as we drew down in Iraq, the United States could consider sending an additional three to five brigades (15,000 to 30,000 troops) to Afghanistan in 2009, but for the rest of my tenure (which I expected to end in January 2009), “I can’t do jack-shit.”

For the rest of 2008, we had to play “small ball,” finding a few more helicopters in one place, a battalion we needed in another, ordnance disposal experts and ISR capabilities in yet another. The president told me he didn’t want a “surge” in Afghanistan, and I told him we couldn’t carry one out if we wanted to. In late July, as we worked the options for meeting commanders’ needs in Afghanistan through November, there were a number of leaks of Joint Staff recommendations. I called Mike Mullen to express my unhappiness about that. I also had to tell Mullen that, once again, he had infuriated the president: on a television news show he said, in effect, that Bush had told him to focus on Iraq and then on Afghanistan. The president also kept saying to me that we needed to get allies who would not contribute troops—Japan, for one—to do more to fund the training and equipping of the Afghan forces. The results were minimal.

General Dan McNeill’s assignment as commander of ISAF was to end in early June 2008. In anticipation of that change, Army chief of staff General Casey and Mike Mullen recommended that Army General David McKiernan be McNeill’s successor. In 2003, McKiernan had commanded all coalition and U.S. ground forces in the invasion of Iraq. He had been appointed in 2005 as the commander of U.S. Army forces in Europe and had done a good job there. He was a fine soldier. With Casey’s and Mullen’s support for McKiernan (Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Cartwright was opposed), I saw no reason to challenge his appointment. With benefit of hindsight, I should have questioned whether McKiernan’s conventional forces background was the right fit for Afghanistan. This was a mistake on my part.

McKiernan had been on the ground in Afghanistan less than three months when I met with him in Kabul. He told me that if he could take care of the safe havens in Pakistan, “we could secure Afghanistan in six months.” I asked him if he thought we were winning. “Some places have governance, others have prosperity, and some have security,” he said. “But few have all three. We are winning slower in some places than others.” He told me he needed three additional brigade combat teams in addition to the 10th Mountain Division brigade due to arrive in January 2009—with support elements, a total of probably 15,000 to 20,000 more troops. (He would soon add a requirement for a combat aviation brigade, a significant addition of helicopters.) McKiernan said he could help beat back the “sky-is-falling narrative.” He was making a not-so-subtle dig at Mullen’s statement to the House Armed Services Committee on September 10 that he couldn’t say we were winning in Afghanistan—again infuriating the White House and, apparently, the field commander.

By midsummer 2008, even before McKiernan’s request for a significant increase in troops, I began to have misgivings about whether the foreign military presence in Afghanistan was growing to the point where most Afghans would begin to see us as “occupiers” rather than allies. Up to that point, all indications—polling and the like—suggested that most Afghans still saw us as allies. But more than anyone else at senior levels in Bush 43’s administration, I had been involved with Afghanistan and Pakistan during the 1980s and had watched the Soviets fail despite having nearly 120,000 troops there: their large presence (and brutal tactics) turned Afghans against them.

Historically, Afghanistan has not been kind to foreign armies. I began to worry aloud about where the tipping point in terms of the number of foreign troops might be and to act on that worry. On July 29, I asked for an analysis of the political and security implications of further troop increases. Ten days later I asked for a review of Afghan airfields, roads, and other infrastructure to determine whether they could support the additional forces being considered, over 20,000 more troops.

By the end of summer, I was deeply worried about our “footprint” and the Afghans’ view of us. Although we were extremely careful to avoid civilian casualties—uniquely, I think, in the history of warfare—they did take place. Of course, the Taliban would hide among the population, use civilians as shields, and kill anyone who opposed them and many others who were just trying to avoid getting involved on either side. That said, we were clumsy and slow in responding to incidents where we caused civilian casualties, every one of which was a tragedy. Our procedure when incidents were reported was to investigate, to determine the facts, and then, if we were in fact responsible, to offer “consolation payments” to the families of victims. (Initial reports almost always exaggerated the number of people killed or hurt, as our investigations would show.)

I visited Afghanistan again in mid-September, primarily to publicly offer my “sincere condolences and personal regrets for the recent loss of innocent life as a result of coalition air strikes.” The press conference at which I spoke those words was televised all across Afghanistan, and I was told by our commanders that the message had a beneficial effect—though, I suspected, a temporary one. I told McKiernan to change our approach: if we thought there was a chance we were responsible for civilian casualties, I wanted us to offer the condolence payments up front and then investigate to determine the facts. Some of our officers disagreed with my approach, but I believed that even if we overpaid, it would be a pittance compared to the bad publicity we were getting. I agreed with the Afghan defense minister to establish a Joint Investigative Group to meet continuously on this issue. I also invited the Afghan (as well as U.S.) media to a briefing I received on the procedures our pilots went through to avoid civilian casualties. Despite our best efforts and repeated directives from McKiernan, McChrystal, and Petraeus to our forces to avoid civilian casualties, the problem would continue to bedevil us.

In my private meeting with President Karzai, I filled him in on the measures we were taking to minimize civilian casualties. I told him that his penchant for going public with information—often inaccurate—was putting his allies in the worst possible light and doing real harm. I urged him to hold off speaking out about civilian casualty incidents until he learned the facts. I also reminded him that the Taliban were intentionally killing large numbers of Afghan civilians, not to mention deliberately placing them in harm’s way, and that he should speak out about that. I was not optimistic I had made any impact.

There were other aspects of our operations that created problems with civilians, and thus with Karzai. Night raids to capture or kill Taliban leaders (and avoid civilian casualties), while militarily very effective, greatly antagonized ordinary Afghans. So did the use of dogs on patrols and especially in searching houses, as I mentioned earlier, which was culturally offensive to the Afghans and about which Karzai complained to me routinely. Our troops were not always as respectful of Afghans as they should have been, including our vehicles barreling down the roads scattering pedestrians and animals. I heard, anecdotally, about an Afghan elder who showed up at the gate of the main coalition base in Kandahar to complain about some insult to his family by troops. He was ignored for three days, returned home—and his three sons then joined the Taliban. While I did not have to deal with incidents as inflammatory as troops urinating on dead Taliban or posing with body parts or burning Korans, there were enough incidents to increase my misgivings about a dramatic increase in foreign forces in the country. No matter how skilled and professional the U.S. military was, I knew that some abusive and insulting behavior by troops was inevitable. Given Afghanistan’s history, if the people came to see us as invaders or occupiers, or even as disrespectful, I believed the war would be lost.

All my overseas trips took a physical toll. Younger by a few years than my predecessor and my successor, I was nonetheless in my late sixties, and it usually took a week or so for me to recover from jet lag—and then I was off again. But the trips to Iraq and Afghanistan took a heavy emotional toll as well. I insisted on meeting and eating with troops on every trip, as I’ve said, and all too often I could see in their faces the cost of their deployments. There weren’t many smiles. The troops all carried weapons, and I would later learn, to my chagrin, that they had to remove the ammunition before meeting with me. I suppose I understood the security precaution—there had to be more than a few who were resentful that I had sent them to such dangerous and godforsaken places—but I still didn’t like the message of mistrust.

The troop visits got harder over time because, as I looked into each face, I increasingly would wonder to myself which of these kids I would next see in the hospital at Landstuhl or Walter Reed or Bethesda—or listed for burial at Arlington cemetery. For those on the front line who ate with me, I realized it might well be the occasion for the first hot meal or shower in days if not weeks. Each forward unit I visited seemed to have its own makeshift memorial in a small tent or lean- to dedicated to those who had been killed—pictures of them, mementos of each, challenge coins. I always went in alone. Although the morale of the troops and their NCOs and officers invariably seemed high, on each visit I was enveloped by a sense of misery and danger and loss. I would fly home with my heart aching for the troops and their distant families. With each visit, I grew increasingly impatient and angry as I compared their selflessness and sacrifice with the self-promotion and selfishness of power-hungry politicians and others—in Baghdad, Kabul, and Washington. One young soldier in Afghanistan asked what kept me awake at night. I said, “You do.” With each trip to the war zones and with each passing day at home, maintaining my outward calm and discipline, and suppressing my anger and contempt for the many petty power players, became a greater challenge. Images of the troops weighed on me constantly.

I didn’t socialize in Washington. Every day I had a fight of one kind or another—usually several—and every evening I could not wait to get home, get my office homework out of the way, write condolence letters to the families of the fallen, pour a stiff drink, wolf down a frozen dinner or carry-out (when Becky was in the Northwest), read something totally unrelated to my work life, and turn out the light.

I got up at five every morning to run two miles around the Mall in Washington, past the World War II, Korean, and Vietnam memorials, and in front of the Lincoln Memorial. And every morning before dawn, I would ritually look up at that stunning white statue of Lincoln, say good morning, and sadly ask him, How did you do it?

I first publicly discussed my concerns about Afghanistan at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on September 22, 2008, five days after a visit to the country. I was accompanied by General Cartwright. I—and everyone else—thought it would be my last hearing as secretary of defense, and so most senators preceded their questioning with very kind words about my time in office. The eulogies complete, we got down to business. Levin asked me why we weren’t responding promptly to the commander’s request for more troops in Afghanistan. I replied that the requirements had been changing, and I mentioned McKiernan’s request just the previous week when I’d been in Afghanistan. But, I continued, “We need to think about how heavy a military footprint the United States ought to have in Afghanistan, and are we better off channeling resources to build Afghan capacity?” I added that without extending tours and deployment schedules again, we didn’t have the forces available, though we might be able to meet the force needs in the spring or summer of 2009.

Levin then asked a politically loaded question: Could we meet the Afghan needs more quickly by reducing forces in Iraq faster? General Cartwright said we would need additional support structure in Afghanistan, and we would need to restructure deployment and training cycles for Afghanistan because currently both were strongly weighted toward the heavy brigade combat teams in Iraq, and the forces needed in Afghanistan would be different. Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama asked if we needed to be more humble “than we have been” in Afghanistan about how much we could change that country. The question went to the heart of many of my concerns. I told him, “We need to listen better to what the Afghan leadership is saying. If the Afghan people view foreigners as occupiers, it will never work—we need to make sure our interests are aligned with those of the Afghan people.”

By fall 2008 the president also concluded that the war in Afghanistan was not going well and directed an NSC-led review of the war, directed by Doug Lute. On September 24, I met with Cartwright (Mullen was out of town); Edelman; the assistant secretary for special operations and low-intensity conflict, Mike Vickers (a former CIA officer I had worked with on Afghanistan in the 1980s, made famous by the book and movie Charlie Wilson’s War), and others to go over the Defense Department contribution to the review. Central Command had advised us that they would not be able to flow the forces requested by McKiernan until June through October 2009. Lighter forces than the brigades coming up next in the rotation for deployment were required (fewer tanks and armor, among other things); facilities needed to be constructed—barracks, air fields, and parking areas for aircraft and helicopters; the infrastructure to support thousands of additional troops.

The intelligence community was nearing completion of a national intelligence estimate—the most authoritative level of analysis—that would portray the situation in Afghanistan as very bleak. Even before publication of the estimate, the view was becoming commonplace in Washington that Afghanistan had a “feckless, incompetent, corrupt government”; the coalition was treading water; Taliban assaults on towns, even when beaten back, were undermining a sense of security and confidence in the coalition and the government; and the insurgents were getting closer to Kabul. As concerned as I was about the course of the Afghan campaign, I complained at that September meeting about the bandwagon effect of pessimism, observing that in terms of perceptions, “this situation has gone from twilight to dark in six to eight weeks.”

To change both the direction of events on the ground in Afghanistan and perceptions at home, we reviewed a number of options: a dramatic acceleration of the growth of the Afghan army; the pursuit of tribal engagement while avoiding the creation of warlords and militias and undermining the central government and army; leveraging competent local governors; providing development aid on the Pakistani side of the border; building commerce and other connections between Pashtuns on both sides of the border; concentrating our forces in those areas strategically most important—the south and east; and planning for a larger and longer-term U.S. troop commitment.

Just as in 2006, when the president decided things weren’t working in Iraq, we ended up with reviews by at least three different organizations inside the administration on what to do in Afghanistan—one at State requested by Condi, several in Defense (the Joint Staff for the military, Eric Edelman’s civilian policy unit in my office, Central Command, and probably others I didn’t even know about), and the NSC review led by Doug Lute. The key effort was at the NSC, and the recommendations looked a lot like what I had discussed with my Defense colleagues in late September: President Bush described the outcome in his memoir as “a more robust counterinsurgency effort, including more troops and civilian resources in Afghanistan and closer cooperation with Pakistan to go after the extremists.” Lute would lead a similar review a year later under Obama and come to very different conclusions.

Given that the administration literally had only weeks more in office, we debated whether to make the review public. Based on past experience, I thought anything publicly identified with the outgoing Bush administration would immediately be junked by a new administration. Everyone agreed that it was better to pass it along quietly. And so, with some 33,000 U.S. troops in-country, several thousand more en route, almost 31,000 coalition troops there, and the commander’s pending request for another 20,000 troops or so, a troubled war in Afghanistan would be handed off to a new president. In December, Bush was prepared to approve the additional 20,000 troops, and Steve Hadley asked Obama’s national security adviser–designate Jim Jones whether the new administration preferred that Bush make the troop decision (and take the heat) or hold off. The new team opted for the second course.

I made what was originally planned to be a farewell visit to the troops in Afghanistan on December 11, 2008. In comments to the press on the trip, I warned the incoming administration to be careful in carrying out a significant buildup in a country where the experience of foreign militaries “has not been a happy one…. I think there is a concern on the part of the Afghans that we sort of tell them what we’re going to do, instead of taking proposals to them, and getting their input, and then working out with them what we’re going to do…. This is their country, their fight, and their future.” We too often lost sight of that and would suffer the consequences.

BUSH’S ENDGAME IN IRAQ

Although several different Democratic legislative efforts to change Bush’s strategy in Iraq failed in September 2007, their criticism of the war did not flag; nor did their efforts to find new ways to get us out of there faster. There was now constant pressure to accelerate the troop drawdowns, and accusations that, despite the obviously improving security situation, the war was still a failure because the Iraqis weren’t enacting laws necessary to advance political reconciliation. As our own economic crisis began, there were growing demands in Congress that the Iraqis pay more of the cost of the war. In September, Congress gave us only enough money to run the war for two months. In October, Senators Levin and Reid began an effort to have the Senate Appropriations Committee include language in our next funding bill calling for the withdrawal of most U.S. combat troops from Iraq within nine months of enactment of the legislation—and to give us only six months of funding. Such legislative maneuvering would continue for much of the following year, but I felt increasingly confident no legislation inhibiting our strategy would pass Congress while Bush was president.

During the fall months after the president’s surge withdrawal announcement in September, even as the security situation continued to improve, we faced a number of Iraq-related problems both in Baghdad and in Washington. One was a blow-up over private security contractors (PSCs). As the contractor presence developed in Iraq after the original invasion, there was no plan, no structure, no oversight, and no coordination. The contractors’ role grew willy-nilly as each U.S. department or agency contracted with them independently, their number eventually climbing to some 150,000. Out of some 7,300 security contractors Defense hired, nearly 6,000 did some kind of stationary guard duty.

The State Department, however, hired a large number to provide convoy security for diplomats, other government officials, special visitors, and some other civilians, and it was those hires who caused most of our headaches. As David Petraeus put it in one of our videoconferences, “They act like the Toad in Wind in the Willows—‘out of my way!’ ” The behavior of some of those men was just awful, from killing Iraqi civilians in road incidents to roughly treating civilians. Obviously, their behavior undermined our efforts to win the trust and confidence of the Iraqis. I told Petraeus I felt strongly that everyone carrying a gun on our behalf in Iraq ought to be under his control, or at minimum, he should know what they were doing.

After some particularly egregious incidents in the summer and fall of 2007, there were growing demands from the Iraqis and from Congress (it took a lot to put those two on the same page) to bring these contractors under the supervision and coordination of State and Defense. This included a debate over whether to bring them under the jurisdiction of the military judicial system or the Justice Department. Turf issues between State and Defense, complicated by aggressive congressional involvement, made solving the matter much harder than it should have been. Secretary Rice and I on too many occasions had to untie bureaucratic knots. There were months of negotiations on this issue, and we finally reached an agreement involving much closer State and Defense oversight of the contractors, coordination of their activities, and their placement under the jurisdiction of the military commander. The situation improved.

We also had to address the problem of Kurdish terrorists in northern Iraq crossing the border and killing Turkish officials, troops, and police. The Turks demanded that the Iraqi government stop this infiltration, even though Baghdad was helpless without the active cooperation of the leaders of Iraqi Kurdistan. The Turks launched a number of ground and air attacks across the border, and the situation was very close to getting out of hand. Petraeus worked hard to get the Turks to at least give us advance warning so we could ensure that Turkish and U.S. forces did not inadvertently clash, but Turkish notifications were haphazard and often after the fact. Some of the Turkish air strikes were very close to the Iranian border. On more than one occasion, the Iranians scrambled fighters to react, and one of our worries was that they might not be able to differentiate between Turkish and U.S. aircraft.

These incursions lasted for some months and included a major cross-border ground operation at the end of February 2008 that began just before I arrived for a visit in Ankara. The Turkish government was being assailed domestically for not being more aggressive. Nonetheless, my message was to stop the current operation, with its attendant risks, and get Turkish troops back across the border. When American reporters with me asked if I thought the Turks had gotten my message, I said yes, “because they heard it four times.” Our inability to help the Turks deal with the Kurdish terrorists, among other bilateral issues, led to a real downturn in the relationship that began to improve only when we provided some new ISR capabilities to help them monitor the border and target those terrorists with much more precision; when we persuaded the leadership in Kurdistan to cooperate better with the Turks; and when President Bush worked out a plan for broader cooperation with Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

One issue that caused a dispute within the administration in the fall of 2007 was what to do with five Iranian Quds Force officers we had captured in Iraq the preceding March. The Quds Force is a special unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards responsible for “extraterritorial operations.” It reports directly to Ayatollah Khamenei. The leader of the group we captured, Qais Khazali, was a particularly bad guy who had been responsible for smuggling the lethal “explosively formed projectiles” and other arms into Iraq, training extremist Shia militias, forming death squads, fomenting sectarian violence, and carrying out kidnappings and assassinations. He also planned the attack in Karbala, Iraq, on January 20, 2007, in which five U.S. soldiers were murdered in cold blood. The Iranians obviously wanted these five Quds Force officers back very badly. They put great pressure on the Iraqi government, and within the Bush administration, some supported returning them. Among that group, much to my surprise, was Admiral Fallon, who told me he thought we ought to let the “Iranian hostages” go if we could get something for their release. I told him we had been approached by the Swiss to negotiate a deal, but that “I am not for it.”

I told Petraeus in one of our regular videoconferences that the issue of release was being hotly debated in Washington. The Iranians apparently had made some sort of commitment to stem the tide of “illicit arms” flowing across the border, and Hadley and Lute were planning to take the question of releasing the Quds Force officers to the president. I told Petraeus there was a divide in the administration: Rice and Hadley wanted to “wring them dry” of information and then release them; Cheney and I wanted to keep them indefinitely. The issue would continue to come up from time to time, and while three of the five were released during the Bush administration, Qais Khazali was not released until January 2010, when he was exchanged for Peter Moore, a British computer consultant in Iraq kidnapped by the Quds Force. After what Khazali did to our soldiers at Karbala, I would never have let him go.

One of my more awkward moments as secretary arose during the fall of 2007, when the president promised Speaker Pelosi a copy of Petraeus’s and Crocker’s Joint Campaign Plan for Iraq—and I had to figure out a way to renege on his commitment. The issue grew out of a request Senator Clinton had made the previous May for our plans for drawing down in Iraq. Eric Edelman denied that request, which prompted the Democrats in Congress to rally around a request for our military plans in Iraq, a request that flew in the face of long-standing Defense Department denial to Congress of military and operational plans. This was another attempt to force the administration to commit to specific drawdown plans, regardless of conditions on the ground, which I thought irresponsible. Legislation had been introduced in the House in mid-July and in the Senate in early October requiring Defense to report regularly on the status of planning for redeployment of our forces from Iraq. A day after the Senate legislation was filed, I received a letter from the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Ike Skelton, urging me to begin the planning; he wanted to know what our “footprint” in Iraq would look like when the transition was complete, among other things, and insisted on detailed briefings.

I told Hadley we could not fulfill the president’s commitment to provide the Joint Campaign Plan to Congress because of the precedent it would set. Over a period of weeks of tortuous negotiations with the Hill, we finally arrived at a compromise, through which I would send senior officers to brief congressional leaders on the key questions we would be addressing as we planned for the drawdowns.

In September, on Petraeus’s recommendation, the president announced that, conditions on the ground permitting, all of the surge would be withdrawn from Iraq by midsummer 2008, a reduction of five combat brigades bringing us back to the presurge fifteen brigades. As a shield against pressure for faster and steeper drawdowns beyond that, I strongly endorsed Petraeus’s proposal that the next review be in March, at which point he would present his recommendations for additional drawdowns during the second half of 2008. I even dangled a carrot in a press conference the day after the president’s September speech. I said that I hoped Petraeus “will be able to say that he thinks the pace of drawdowns can continue at the same rate in the second half of the year as in the first half of the year”—in effect, suggesting a further drawdown to ten combat brigades, or about 100,000 U.S. troops, by the end of 2008. My strategy was to make the continuing reduction in our combat forces in Iraq unmistakable, in an attempt to keep Iraq from being a central issue in the presidential election. It would also provide the new president with political cover for a longer troop presence and a sustainable U.S. role in Iraq’s future for the long term. I wanted to focus the Iraq debate on the pacing of drawdowns, a debate I thought the generals would win every time because it would be about battlefield conditions and the situation on the ground.

I felt strongly about a long-term U.S. troop commitment in Iraq for several reasons. Our presence could continue to play an important role in keeping sectarian conflict from boiling over again; we often mediated confrontations, especially between Arabs and Kurds. Our troops were also a deterrent to Iranian meddling. In this regard, a continuing U.S. military deployment in Iraq would also be reassuring to our friends in the region. There was a continuing need for U.S. participation in the counterterrorism mission and in training the Iraqis. And I did not want to put at risk all we had achieved at such great cost in lives by leaving a fledgling Iraqi government at the mercy of its neighbors and its internal divisions. More time was needed.

After the diversions of the fall, I met privately with Petraeus in Baghdad in December 2007, to discuss the March review and further drawdowns. On troop levels, I said, we shared the same objective but had different perspectives on time: he wanted the maximum possible number of troops in 2008 and early 2009. “I don’t know if I can get to ten brigade combat teams [100,000 troops] by the end of 2008,” he said. I was taking a longer view. I believed that a gradual but continuing reduction in force levels throughout 2008 was critical to getting political support at home for the longer-term presence: “If we end 2008 with thirteen to fifteen combat brigades in Iraq, I fear the next president will order everyone or nearly everyone out on a very short timeline, which will be highly destabilizing and possibly catastrophic.” I told him I had noticed he “back-end loaded” the drawdowns in the first half of 2008 (he grinned sheepishly), that is, he had scheduled most withdrawals toward the end of the six-month period rather than spacing them out evenly. I asked if he couldn’t do the same in the second half, even if he recommended in March that the drawdowns continue. I told him I intended the same decision-making process as the preceding September: he would make recommendations, as would Central Command, the Joint Chiefs, the chairman, and I. It would be great to be able to say again that all the senior military leaders agreed on the recommendations; if they didn’t, the president would have to decide on the pacing.

I told Petraeus during our meeting that the president wanted him to remain in place until January 20, 2009. Petraeus said he would prefer to leave in the summer of 2008 and become commander of European Command (and supreme allied commander Europe). I said that I would try to arrange with the president to get him confirmed by the Senate for the Europe job in the summer if he would remain in Iraq until November.

When I talked with the president about my meeting with Petraeus, he mused that maybe we should keep the troop level at fifteen combat brigades but announce further reductions after the election “to force the new administration to follow our timetable.” Observing that this would be an “unwelcome gift” if a Democrat was elected, Bush said, “You wouldn’t believe what Clinton left for us.” It was a refrain I would hear about Bush throughout my time in the Obama administration.

The president met with Petraeus in Kuwait on January 13, 2008, asking that his recommendations in March be strictly “conditions-based.” Petraeus reported to me that the president shared his concerns about the strain on the force but again made his argument that the biggest blow to the military would be to lose in Iraq. The president, Petraeus said, told him that he would be fine if the U.S. force stayed at fifteen combat brigades “for some time”—a point the president later made to the press.

On January 29, I met alone with the president over breakfast to discuss drawdowns in Iraq. I told him I was focused on “setting the table” in both Iraq and Washington and trying to think forward at least a year. The critical question was how to preserve and expand our gains in Iraq while maximizing support at home for a sustainable long-term presence there. The challenge was that steps to do one could jeopardize the other, so how to find the right balance? I said our gains in Iraq were real but fragile. I was coming to believe that continuing the drawdowns in the second half of the year at the same pace as the first—the hope I had expressed the previous September—“may be too aggressive.” At the same time, standing pat for the rest of the year at fifteen combat brigades would also be risky, signaling that the situation in Iraq had stopped improving. It would send the wrong message to both Iraqis and Americans and could have a potentially significant impact on the campaign debate in the United States and decisions after January 20, 2009. It would relieve both the military and political pressure on the Iraqis. Simultaneously, by making it look like we were staying as “occupiers,” negotiation of the Strategic Framework and Status of Forces Agreements would be harder (the former would lay the foundation for future U.S.-Iraqi economic, political, and security cooperation; the latter would provide the legal basis for a U.S. military presence in Iraq over the longer term). Finally, no additional drawdowns would make it more likely that troop levels would fall off a cliff on January 20 if a Democrat was elected. I don’t think the president had thought through these risks.

Pending Petraeus’s recommendations, I said, the president might announce in April that we could take out “several” more combat brigades by January 2009. I urged him to consider one out in September–October and two more in late November–early December. This would allow us to keep fourteen combat brigades in Iraq until nearly the end of 2008, and a new president would be on a path to twelve brigades in Iraq on Inauguration Day. This would signal that things were getting better in Iraq and could forestall a precipitous withdrawal under a Democratic president.

The president said he would think about what I had said. Then he shocked me as the breakfast ended by saying that he wished he’d made the change in secretary of defense “a couple of years earlier.” It was the only thing I ever heard him say even indirectly critical of Rumsfeld.

Before traveling to Iraq to continue the dialogue with Petraeus on troop drawdowns, I endured another hearing with the Senate Armed Services Committee. It continued my yearlong experience on the Hill of not a single Democrat having anything positive to say about the war in Iraq, even though Levin had publicly acknowledged the success of our military operations. Now Levin echoed the Pelosi-Reid theme that the surge had failed because it had not brought reconciliation among the Iraqi factions, a view disappointingly echoed by Senator Warner, the ranking Republican on the committee.

There was more discussion of possible legislation requiring increased time at home for the troops, a back-door political strategy to cut the number of troops that had been tried by Democrats but blocked by Senate Republicans the previous fall. Senators wanted to make sure the agreements we were negotiating with the Iraqis did not commit us to their defense, and Senator Edward Kennedy pushed for any agreements to be approved by Congress. After the hearing, Speaker Pelosi exploited Mullen’s comment that the U.S. military was accepting significant risk by having so many troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, saying that his testimony “confirms our warning that the war in Iraq has seriously undermined our nation’s military strength and readiness” and that we needed “a new direction.” There was no mention of Afghanistan. She was shameless and relentlessly partisan on the Iraq War. In fact, it was impossible to have a sensible discussion with Democrats in Congress on anything to do with Iraq in the presence of television cameras. I had never liked testifying; I was now beginning to really hate it. Every time someone in a hearing criticized the lack of reconciliation among Iraqi factions, I wanted to suggest the committee members get a mirror and take a long, hard look at themselves and maybe try a little reconciliation nearer to home. The posturing and partisanship were requiring me to exert more and more effort to be respectful, nonpartisan, and deliberative. January 20, 2009, seemed a long way off.

On February 11, I spent nearly two hours with Petraeus in Baghdad. I agreed that getting down to ten brigades before the end of the year was unwise militarily and also that a “pause” for “evaluation and consolidation” after the last surge brigade came out in July made sense. We agreed that the president should announce the pause in April and then, conditions permitting, resume the drawdown in the fall, giving Petraeus fourteen brigades through the end of the year. I said I would support keeping the “glide path” of withdrawals as modest as possible but that we had to keep drawing down. I told Dave I believed most Americans thought the war was a huge mistake and that a continued reduction in troops was key. I repeated my mantra about maintaining minimal public and congressional support for our long-term goals in Iraq. I thought Petraeus and I were on the same page.

On the plane ride home, I told the press aboard that I thought “the notion of a brief period of consolidation and evaluation probably does make sense.” I was thinking of about forty-five days. My comments seemed to make nearly everyone mad. The White House was thinking of the pause in terms of months rather than weeks. Hillary Clinton said she was “disheartened” by what I said and called on the president “to end the war he started.” Obama said he strongly disagreed with plans for a pause in the “long overdue removal of our combat brigades from Iraq.” The chiefs weren’t all that pleased either with my agreement to a pause. The Washington Post, on the other hand, editorialized that “at last, a Bush administration defense secretary listens to his commanders.” And USA Today observed that “the success of the surge quiets the issue of Iraq in the election.”

The day after I returned from Iraq, I passed along to the president what I thought would be Petraeus’s recommendation, one I agreed with: an announcement by the president in early April of a pause for consolidation and evaluation, and resumption of a conditions-based drawdown in the fall. The plan was to announce on September 1 that another combat brigade was coming out and then at some point between October and early December announce that another one or two would come out.

That same evening I slipped on the ice and broke my shoulder, as I mentioned earlier. I had been scheduled for a congressional hearing the next morning, which I could not attend. I had complained so much about hearings that some colleagues jokingly said I had purposely fallen just to avoid another “close encounter” with Congress. I received a very nice note from Ted Kennedy wishing me a quick recovery because “we need you my friend.”

A little more than a week after senators trashed the Iraqis for inaction on key legislation (the pot calling the kettle black), the Iraqi Council of Representatives passed three significant pieces of legislation: a budget, a de-Baathification/amnesty law, and a provincial powers law. After months of deadlock, a grand bargain had been reached that had something for all the major factions. This was a vital step forward for the Iraqis and for our efforts to sustain support in the United States. Also in February, Lieutenant General Lloyd Austin replaced Ray Odierno as the corps commander in Iraq. Petraeus had been the primary architect of the new strategy in Iraq, but Ray had been instrumental in making it work on the ground and deserved great credit for its success. During one week that month fewer than five hundred violent incidents took place in Iraq for the first time since January 2006. In March, the command recorded the fourth-lowest number of incidents in a week since 2004. We still had very bad days—on March 10, five soldiers were killed by a deeply buried IED and a suicide bomber killed three more—but Petraeus was convinced that the insurgents were trying to crank up the violence in anticipation of his and Ambassador Crocker’s congressional testimony in April.

As we approached the April decision point, Petraeus, the chairman, and I were talking every week, often more frequently. Dave gave us a preview of his recommendations in a videoconference on March 20. He said the postsurge mission would remain “security while transitioning.” He spoke of a forty-five-day period of consolidation and evaluation beginning in mid-July, when we were down to fifteen combat brigades; moving two more brigades out by the end of the year; and removing a third just after the Inauguration.

I told Dave I thought the withdrawal of the first additional brigade as early in the process as conditions permitted would be helpful, as would a statement that we were going back to twelve-month deployments. “Trend lines and impressions are what count,” I said. We should also make clear that “evaluation” is a continuous process; that is, we would not be withdrawing brigades if the situation in Iraq went to hell.

Just a few weeks before Petraeus’s and Crocker’s next appearance before Congress, Iraqi prime minister Maliki, frustrated and angered by Iranian-backed Shia extremist actions in Basra, ordered units of the Iraqi army into the city to reestablish control. The U.S. commanders were horrified that Maliki had taken such a risk without proper preparation. They scrambled to provide the logistics, planning, and military advice to support Maliki’s effort; without such help, he almost certainly would have failed. But he didn’t and therefore won significant recognition all across Iraq for acting like a “national” leader by suppressing his Shia brethren. The president told the chiefs, “We ought to say hurray to Maliki for going down to Basra and taking on the extremists.” He characterized it as a “milestone event.” “Maliki used to be a paralyzed neophyte—now he is taking charge.” Bush was right.

In the same meeting where Bush expressed his opinion, he had a wide-ranging dialogue with the chiefs about Afghanistan and, independently, the health of our forces. Mullen observed that success in Iraq would allow a reallocation of forces to address competing demands, above all Afghanistan. “So is Iraq causing Afghanistan to fail?” Bush asked, not expecting—and not getting—an answer. The president asked about post-traumatic stress, and General Casey talked about the efforts under way to “de-stigmatize” it “from commanders on down.” Bush ended by saying, “The worst thing for morale is if you have a president who is apologetic for the action and not confident that it was the right thing to do.”

The congressional response to testimony by Petraeus and Crocker on April 8 and 9 was vastly different in both tone and substance from the preceding September. Petraeus spoke to the fragility of the security gains in Iraq and said that after the last surge brigade returned home during the summer, he had asked for a forty-five-day evaluation period, followed by an indefinite “assessment” period before making a recommendation on further troop drawdowns. On April 10, the president spoke to a veterans group, along with the Department of Defense civilian and military leadership and others, in the cross hall (the intersection between the north foyer and the hallway connecting the East Room and the State Dining Room) at the White House. He confirmed his approval to withdraw the last of five surge brigades from Iraq by July, and his strong support of Petraeus’s request to halt further reductions until after a period of evaluation and assessment. The president said, “I’ve told him [Petraeus] he’ll have all the time he needs.” He said the war was not “endless” and announced that all units deploying after August 1 would have twelve-month tours, not fifteen.

Mullen and I testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee a few hours after the president’s statement. Petraeus naturally had wanted to err on the side of caution in terms of further drawdowns and the president wanted to support him. I described the halt in troop withdrawals as a “brief pause.” “I do not anticipate this period of review to be an extended one, and I would emphasize that the hope, depending on conditions on the ground, is to reduce our presence further this fall.” I said Petraeus would provide recommendations in that regard in September. The senators jumped on the difference between Petraeus’s more open-ended period of evaluation and assessment and my characterization, and I responded, “One of the benefits of being the secretary of defense, I suppose, is that I’m allowed more to hope than the field commander is.” My comments were portrayed as being at odds with—or contradictory to—both the president’s and Petraeus’s statements, and the truth is, they were, at least in tone. I was convinced we needed to keep the drawdown carrot dangling to lower the political temperature.

But my motives in staking out a more forward-leaning position were broader than that. As I’ve said, I was convinced a long-term U.S. military presence in Iraq was in our national interest. I believed that continued drawdowns in 2008 were critical to make that outcome politically possible after our elections. That meant keeping pressure on the president and Petraeus to continue the drawdowns while simultaneously resisting Democratic efforts to change the strategy even as I pressed them to support a long-term approach. I knew I was walking a political tightrope.

I ended my prepared statement at the hearing with a very personal one:

My comments notwithstanding, keeping the temperature down did not mean Iraq had disappeared as a campaign issue. After the president had spoken and Petraeus, Crocker, Mullen, and I had testified, Obama said, “There is no end in sight under the Bush policy. It is time to bring this war in Iraq to a close.” And Hillary Clinton asserted, “It’s time for the president to answer the question being asked of him: In the wake of the failed surge, what is the endgame in Iraq?”

A critical element of the “endgame” was the negotiation of a Strategic Framework Agreement (SFA) and Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with the Iraqi government. A successful SOFA—the legal basis for a continuing U.S. troop presence—negotiation was required during 2008 because at the end of the year the UN Security Council resolution authorizing our military presence in Iraq would expire. The Iraqis weren’t interested in extending, or “rolling over,” the resolution. Our negotiating team was led by Rice, Crocker, Brett McGurk of the NSC staff, and David Satterfield from State. Defense was represented on the team, and there was close coordination with both the department and Petraeus and his staff, but the military was more than happy to let State and the civilians do the heavy lifting in the negotiations. And it was heavy lifting. The obstacles to success were daunting, in substantial part because of the Iraqi political environment and strong opposition to any continuing U.S. presence in several quarters—above all, from the Iranian-supported Shia. Everyone soon realized the plan to sign the agreements on July 31 was completely unrealistic.

The forces agreement was clearly the more problematic, and I suggested that the more it looked like similar SOFA agreements we had with other countries, the more acceptable it would be to the Iraqis. I proposed we tell the Iraqis to talk to the South Koreans and Japanese about their experience with the SOFAs we had with them. That was a monumentally bad idea. Representatives of those countries shared with the Iraqis their frustrations about U.S. troops breaking local laws. Immunities for contractors would be difficult given the Iraqis’ very unhappy experience with them. In a videoconference on February 5 with Mullen, Petraeus, Fallon, Edelman, and others, I set out the Defense Department priorities for the negotiations. Most important would be operational freedom of action (including legal protection for our troops) and keeping detainees (violent extremists we believed the Iraqis might release). “We could compromise on” contractors. The next day Edelman quoted Crocker as saying, with respect to protections for contractors, “This is radioactive and will blow up the SOFA.”

By early summer, all avenues to our military remaining in Iraq seemed radioactive. I heard repeatedly that the SOFA “wasn’t going to happen this year,” the Iraqis hated the Coalition Provisional Authority decrees from 2003, and they hated the UN Security Council resolution. Without one of the three, we had no legal basis for our military remaining in Iraq after December 2008. Despite all the problems, by July 2008 both sides concurred we were close to agreement. The agreement would require us to withdraw our combat forces from Iraqi cities by mid-2009, with the timing of total withdrawal to be negotiated between Maliki and the president. Edelman told me, “This is as good as it is going to get,” and Odierno said it was “enough to do the job.”

In September, jurisdiction over Americans in uniform who broke Iraqi laws became an issue, as we tried to find the balance between assuring our troops that they would never end up at the mercy of Iraqi courts and assuring Iraqis that if someone committed a horrible crime, he could be tried in Iraq. In my last videoconference with Petraeus as commander in Iraq on September 9, I told him that Defense Department lawyers “are gagging” over the contemplated compromise and worried that it could impact other SOFA agreements elsewhere. Here, too, we found a compromise we could live with.

Petraeus told me an Iranian brigadier general had been arrested in Iraq for bribing legislators with $250,000 each to vote against the SOFA. Later in the fall, we learned that the head of the Iranian Quds Force, Major General Qassem Suleimani, had told President Talabani that Iraq should not sign any agreement with Bush.

The same day I talked to Petraeus, September 9, the president announced that another 8,000 troops would come home by February 2009 thanks to the continuing decline in violence. The next day Mike Mullen and I testified before Congress. I said that we had now entered the endgame in Iraq and it was important to get that right. I urged our political leaders to be cautious and flexible and take into account the advice of our senior commanders and military leaders. I said “to keep in mind that we should expect to be involved in Iraq for years to come, although in changing and increasingly limited ways.”

On September 16, 2008, Ray Odierno took Petraeus’s place as commander of the multinational force in Iraq. Immediately before the change of command ceremony, I promoted Ray to full general, a ceremony carried out in the headquarters videoconference room at Al-Faw palace in Baghdad so his wife and family could watch at the Pentagon in the middle of the night. I Velcroed Odierno’s four-star patch onto the front of his fatigues and then, out of the corner of my eye, saw him discreetly remove the patch and re-Velcro it right side up.

While in Iraq for the change of command, I met with Maliki. He expressed his worry that if we were unable to reach agreement on the SOFA and the U.S. forces left, “the situation here would be very complicated. We need American forces here, at least for a while. If they leave, we lose all of our successes and accomplishments.” He said that it was in Iraq’s interest to have U.S. forces in Iraq and “to have a long-term relationship.” In fact, all the key Iraqi leaders wanted the agreements; it was just that no one wanted to be the first to say so publicly.

On November 3, the day before the U.S. presidential election, I attended a meeting at the White House to try to wrap up the agreements. The Iraqis had made 120 suggested changes, of which there were three or four important issues. We made some adjustments and a few days later sent the agreement to the Iraqis one last time. The negotiating process was over as far as the United States was concerned. Both the Strategic Framework Agreement and the Status of Forces Agreement were signed on November 17, 2008, by Ambassador Crocker and Iraqi foreign minister Hoshyar Zebari in Baghdad. The SOFA required U.S. combat forces to withdraw from all Iraqi cities and villages by June 30, 2009, and for the removal of all U.S. forces by December 31, 2011. In Baghdad, on December 14, 2008, President Bush and Prime Minister Maliki signed the agreements.

As I watched the signing ceremony on television, I felt a great sense of relief. Considering the dire circumstances we faced in Iraq at the end of 2006, we had come a long way. The security situation in Iraq had improved dramatically, and while Iraqi politics were messy, and would remain that way, the factions were debating their differences, not shooting at one another. The path toward ending U.S. military involvement in Iraq was set, but thanks to the agreements, we would have three more years to help stabilize the country and work with its military. The end of the U.S. military combat role in Iraq would not be a calamitous failure or defeat but rather a handover to a democratically elected government with a U.S.-trained military. In December 2008 and thereafter, I believed we should and would have a residual military presence in Iraq after the end of 2011 to partner with the Iraqis in counterterrorism and in training their forces, even though that would require a follow-on agreement with the Iraqis.

Given how difficult the negotiations on the SOFA had been in 2008, and the near failure then of the Iraqi legislature to approve it, I should have been more realistic about the challenges we would face in getting Iraqi approval for a post-2011 U.S. military presence. For many Iraqis, we would always be seen as invaders and occupiers, not as liberators. Like us or not, though, we had given them a much different—and brighter—future, though at a very high cost for Iraqis and for Americans.

Inwardly, I was also proud of what had been accomplished on the battlefield that was Washington, D.C., since January 2007. Petraeus had told me the surge needed to last until January 2008; the last surge troops left Iraq in July 2008. Every effort by Congress to reverse or limit the surge, or to accelerate the rate of withdrawal, or to impose conditions on the Iraqis (and the president) had failed.

As the saying goes, success has many fathers, and that is certainly true of the turnaround in Iraq in 2007–8. Among them were the president, for his courageous shift in strategy and the surge; our military commanders and troops, whose skill, steadfastness, and sacrifice made success possible; U.S. civilian officials, including above all Ambassador Ryan Crocker; the Republican minority in the Senate, who, under great pressure, resisted all attempts to thwart what we were trying to do; and the sheikhs of Anbar and the many other Iraqis who at great risk and sacrifice worked to bring a better future to their country.

A new president would not confront significant problems in Iraq, at least for several years. But he would face a deteriorating war in Afghanistan. As Mike Mullen had testified on September 10, we were not winning in Afghanistan, “but I am convinced we can.” Barack Obama assumed the presidency committed publicly to do just that.