When President Obama unveils his new Afghanistan strategy at West Point tonight, he will present it as the outcome of a confidential two-month policy review, including nine private meetings with his key advisers in the top-secret situation room of the White House.
Yet Obama’s long-awaited decision has been shaped every bit as much by a fierce clash on a much more public, all-too-familiar front in Washington: the battleground of anonymous leaks and spin in the media.
The first offensive in this war came on September 21, when official Washington awoke to a blockbuster story in The Washington Post. Legendary investigative reporter Bob Woodward had obtained details of the recommendations of the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Stan McChrystal — before McChrystal even officially presented his plan to the President.
Usually, when asked for military advice, generals offer Presidents a range of options, in order to give them wiggle room to reconcile what might work militarily with what they can sell politically. But the original 66-page McChrystal report, as summarize by Woodward, was striking in its rigidity. The general argued that nothing short of 40,000 more troops — sent to the countryside to win over the Afghan population, with no enforced deadlines or exit strategy — would work.
Where did Woodward get the report? Who was his Deep Throat? He wasn’t telling, but given Woodward’s impeccable contacts, it was widely assumed the report came directly from McChrystal himself or a high-level ally in the military or on Capitol Hill.
Thus, before the President convened his first situation room meeting, the terms of the public debate were set. If he decided on anything substantially less than McChrystal’s “all-in” plan, this young Democratic commander-in-chief with no record of military service would be defying his battle-hardened generals “on the ground.”
Push back
Faced with a major setback in this first confrontation in the spin wars, the administration skeptics of the McChrystal plan began to push back.
Suddenly reports attributed to knowledgeable sources portrayed Vice President Joe Biden as advocating a more minimalist “counter-terror” campaign, focused on containing al-Qaida rather than taking on the Taliban, and fighting mostly with drones and special forces rather than boots on the ground.
Appearing on the Charlie Rose show, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel dutifully went through the motions of refusing to discuss the private advice he was giving the President. Then he threw red flags all over Rose’s round wooden table about the need for a credible “partner” — signaling Emanuel’s own widely-presumed wariness about giving more support to the corrupt and paranoid government of President Hamid Karzai.
As the weeks stretched on and the situation room meetings continued, the President seemed to be looking for alternatives to the McChrystal strategy. Word filtered out from the White House that he was reading and passing around “Lessons in Disaster,” a new book about the Kennedy administration’s fights over escalation in Vietnam.
Still, the public relations predicament remained: The military was united behind McChrystal, while the skeptics were all second-guessing civilians in Washington.
Another bombshell
Then on Nov. 12, both The Washington Post and The New York Times published another front-page bombshell. The papers had learned the contents of internal cables that the U.S. Ambassador to Kabul, Karl Eikenberry, had sent to headquarters arguing against any major increase in U.S. troops until the Karzai government cleaned up its act.
This was significant because Eikenberry wasn’t just any old pin-striped diplomat. He was a retired general, the former commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan until 2007. In the external expectations game, the President now had two “outside” options from his generals on the ground, and the coast was clear for him to chart a middle course between them.
That is what Obama is widely expected to do tonight, opting for somewhere in the neighborhood of 30,000 new troops rather than 40,000, stressing training Afghan troops as much as winning hearts and minds, and talking about a need for benchmarks and off-ramps without setting any firm timetable for withdrawal.
When the Afghanistan debate began three months ago, the one thing advocates on all sides agreed on was that the President shouldn’t simply split the difference between his advisers and opt for half-measures. But boxed in by the spin on all sides, it was all but inevitable that he would end up doing just that.
Asked in an interview with Chip Reid of CBS whether he considered an aide going public with private advice about Afghanistan a “firing offense,” Obama responded: “Absolutely.”
It was an empty threat. In reality, the death of confidentiality in this process was like that Agatha Christie novel where everyone on the train is guilty of the murder. If the President were to fire everyone who had been involved directly or indirectly in the leaking, he would have almost no one left to implement his new policy.
Meanwhile, if the policy doesn’t work, the top players are now on the record about what they really wanted to do — all completely “off-the record,” of course.
