332 e lusive v ictories
only 20,000. Yet the sobering truth is that Obama and his advisors
haggled over issues—small variations in troop numbers and questions
of how best to use the few additional troops—that could not possibly
make a decisive diff erence on the ground. It hardly mattered whether
the United States deployed 100,000 or 110,000 troops in a country of
more than 20 million people. Likewise, neither counterterrorism nor
COIN could yield victory, defi ned as peace and stability in Afghanistan
and the elimination of the al-Qaeda threat in the region. Th e military
alternatives, moreover, failed to touch what all saw as the heart of the
problem—the defi ciencies of the Karzai government and the two-faced
role of Pakistan, a supposed ally in the war on terror that permitted its
territory to be used as a haven for the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
Th e policy reassessment was triggered by McChrystal’s request for an
additional 40,000 troops, accompanied by a warning that anything less
invited a Taliban victory. He and Petraeus envisioned a kind of Baghdad
II, a troop surge of indefi nite duration in which American forces and
their NATO and Afghan allies would practice “seize, hold, and build”
tactics to bring population security and economic development to rural
Afghanistan. Obama and those around him had a keen sense of
history, and they saw the request as similar to the one Westmoreland
made in early 1965 when he asked for enough troops to initiate off ensive
operations in South Vietnam. Th e president feared slipping unwit-
tingly into the same kind of open-ended commitment. He wanted a
full debate as a defense against a repeat of the Vietnam tragedy. To
make certain the risks received a full airing, he encouraged Biden, an
avowed COIN skeptic, to push hard for his preferred counterterrorism
alternative.
If we step back from the sequence of the meetings (already chronicled
by Bob Woodward and others) to consider the main choices placed
before the president, the first point that stands out is that he was
presented with a menu of losing propositions. Both counterterrorism
and counterinsurgency seemed plausible on the surface. On close
inspection, though, each suff ered from insurmountable weaknesses
given the actual constraints presented by Afghanistan.
Counterterrorism had a superfi cial allure that masked its military
limits and political costs. Over the previous year, counterterrorism
conducted through aerial drone attacks and a 3,000-man CIA-directed