i nheriting a b ad h and 335American offi cials admitted that they lacked leverage to secure, no mil-
itary campaign in Afghanistan could achieve long-term success.
Th e diplomatic barriers and unpromising military choices frustrated
Obama, who resented what he saw as eff orts by the Pentagon and mil-
itary to box him into a policy he did not support. Th e military tried to
stack the deck in favor of the McChrystal request. A memo from the
general, leaked to the press in September 2009, advised against either
early disengagement or a narrow focus on killing terrorist leaders. If
Obama decided against escalation in some form, he could be criticized
for rejecting the advice of his military leadership.
In the course of the White House deliberations over Afghanistan in
late 2009, three alternatives were placed on the table. Obama might
pick from among a fully resourced counterinsurgency approach
requiring an additional 85,000 troops; the 40,000 increment; or adding
just 10,000 troops to focus on counterterrorism. It seemed, then, that
the president had options. But as we have seen in the case of Johnson
and the Vietnam escalation decision, when a president receives three
war options, only the middle one will meet the test of military and
political plausibility. Johnson could not have selected all-out war or
disengagement at an acceptable political cost. Likewise, Obama saw
that only the middle option was a realistic possibility. Biden advocated
a focus on counterterrorism, but Gates, Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton, and the military outweighed him. Toward the end, discussion
narrowed to whether to give McChrystal all the troops he wanted or
hold the increase to 30,000. Th e numbers debate was more symbolic
than substantive, though: at issue was whether the president would fl ex
his muscles to show he was in charge. Obama settled on the 30,000
fi gure, then made sure to deny the Pentagon any latitude by spelling
out precisely in writing what the number meant.
Far more important than the number, though, the president shifted
American wartime objectives. In framing his troop request, McChrystal
spoke of defeating the insurgency, a trope that recurred in reports and
statements by Petraeus, Gates, and others on the military side. But the
president and some of his advisors appreciated that conditions in
Afghanistan and Pakistan, coupled with the real limits on available mil-
itary resources, made victory impossible. To seek to defeat the Taliban,
moreover, invited the kind of open-ended commitment Obama refused