Woodward: Obama Threatened Afghan Defeat

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Woodward: Obama Threatened Afghan Defeat


Tuesday, 28 Sep 2010 08:25 AM Article Font Size

By: William Chedsey



In a point-blank confrontation in the Oval Office on the day before

Thanksgiving last year, President Obama gave Defense Secretary Robert

Gates a gun-to-the-head choice on Afghanistan.



Obama told Bush Administration holdover Gates he could either endorse

the president's idea of 25% fewer new troops than the military wanted

- or the president could go with what he described to Gates as a "hope

for the best" plan of "10,000 trainers," under which Afghanistan would

almost certainly be lost to the Taliban.



The meeting was recounted in the first of three planned excerpts in the Washington Post from Bob Woodward's new book, "Obama's War," which appeared in the newspaper on Monday.



"Can you support this?" Woodward quotes Obama as asking Gates.

"Because if the answer is no, I understand it and I'll be happy to

just authorize another 10,000 troops, and we can continue to go as we

are and train the Afghan national force and just hope for the best."



Woodward then commented: "'Hope for the best.' The condescending

words hung in the air."



Condescension seems to be Obama's modus operandi in regard to the

military, if Woodward's account can be believed. Obama's deputy

national security adviser Thomas E. Donilon warned that "Gates might

resign if the decision was 10,000 trainers, an option the military

leaders had all rejected in the early stages of the review," according

to Woodward.



In Woodward's account, Obama told his National Security Adviser James

L. Jones and Donilon at an Oval Office meeting, "It'd be a lot easier

for me to go out and give a speech saying, 'You know what? The

American people are sick of this war, and we're going to put in 10,000

trainers because that's how we're going to get out of there.'"



And so Gates was apparently faced with accepting what Obama called a

"hard cap" of 30,000 added troops in Afghanistan - far less than the

40,000 new troops that Obama's "top three military advisers were

unrelenting advocates for," according to Woodward - or perhaps having

to resign in protest at a strategy sure to lead to another Vietnam-like defeat.



As Woodward describes it, Obama's 30,000-troop plan was a compromise

between the 40,000 new personnel the military wanted and a "hybrid

option" being touted by Vice President Joseph Biden.



Gen. David Petraeus, who managed President Bush's successful surge

strategy in Iraq, believed that Biden's plan wouldn't work. "It would

alienate the Afghan people whom U.S. forces should be protecting,"

Woodward quoted Petraeus as warning. "You start going out tromping

around, disrupting the enemy, and you're making a lot of enemies. . .

. So what have you accomplished?"



Last month, Petraeus - named commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan

in June - told the BBC, "The momentum that the Taliban have

established over the course of recent years has been reversed in many

of the areas of the country and will be reversed in the other areas as

well."



But Petraeus warned that when President Obama's planned withdrawal

begins next year, there should not be a sudden exodus of troops from

Afghanistan. His forces won't be looking "for the exit and a light to

turn out," Petraeus told the British media outlet.



Petraeus on Monday told reporters that high-level Taliban leaders have approached the highest levels of President Hamid Karzai's Afghan government about negotiating a reconciliation.





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