Believer: My Forty Years in Politics (53 page)

The accelerated pace would project greater force in faster to stem the Taliban’s progress, train the Afghan military and police to the best of our capacity, and allow us to intensify operations against Al Qaeda. An aggressive timetable for the drawdown of our troops would also put pressure on Karzai and the Afghan army to get serious about defending their own country. “Karzai needs to know that this is a no-kidding deal,” the president said.

By the end of November, the president had made his decision. He would accept the military’s revised manpower request, identifying the defeat of Al Qaeda as the core mission and establishing more modest and achievable goals for Afghanistan. Most important, they had agreed on an accelerated timetable—not just to send the troops, but also to bring them home. “It creates an inflection point,” he told me. “It puts this war on a path to end.” Before Obama finalized it, however, he had to be absolutely certain that his commanders were on board.

“I want to make sure everyone is on the same page, and if not, they state a clear alternative,” he told his war cabinet at the ninth and final meeting of what was being called the AfPak review, which went late into the night. “We need to leave here with a unified military and civilian position. Our goal is not perfection in Afghanistan. It is to stabilize key population centers and transfer to Afghan forces. If you don’t think we have a chance to achieve the goal I’ve set out, say so now. If people think that a two-year timetable is not possible, let me know. If we’re not all in, now’s the time to say so . . . I don’t want to be in a position years down the road, where someone says, ‘We’re not there yet. We need more.’”

One by one, they embraced the plan without reservation. “I will, and the military leadership will, support your decision,” Mullen assured the president. For all the controversies that would follow, Obama has kept his promise to bring our troops home: there were nearly 180,000 Americans serving in Iraq and Afghanistan when he took office; at the end of 2014, that would be down to just over 10,000—though the emergence of the brutal Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, would compel him to reengage American forces there.

On December 1, Obama flew to West Point to announce his decision on Afghanistan before an audience of young soldiers. After the speech, the president plunged into the crowd, painfully aware that some of the cadets joyously jostling to shake his hand would lose their lives as a result of the order he had just unveiled.

Susan called me after the speech. As a mom, she was heartsick over the sacrifice that the surge of troops would mean. “I hate this war,” she said, “but tell him I thought he did the best he could.”

I passed her message on. “Tell her the commander in chief probably hates it as much as she does,” he said.

 • • • 

Still, Obama didn’t shrink from his responsibilities as commander in chief. For all of Bush’s bluster, Obama hit Al Qaeda with a fury his predecessor had never mounted. On his watch, drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia systemically eliminated many of Al Qaeda’s top leaders.

He didn’t need any more evidence that Al Qaeda was a threat, though there was plenty in the constant stream of intelligence that greeted him in his national security briefing each day.

Throughout my years in the White House, Obama would have to guard against both large-scale, command-and-control-style attacks such as those on September 11, 2001, and the growing threat of “homegrown” acts of terrorism. Even on Christmas Day.

When Congress finally adjourned on Christmas Eve after the Senate passed its version of the health care bill, the president flew west to Hawaii to join his family’s vacation and I headed to my place in Michigan for some badly needed rest. That blessed peace lasted all of several hours. On Christmas Day, an e-mail arrived from Bill Burton, the deputy press secretary, who’d traveled with the president to Hawaii: “Wanted to make sure you all saw and read this report of an explosion on board a plane landing in Detroit from Amsterdam today. I’m flagging because I know these events of interest sometimes go unnoticed. . . . . but I assume that this will be a story of size once the reports are out. With a fire on board and injured passengers, according to initial reports.”

“Story of size” didn’t quite capture the full impact of it, as we would learn in phone calls throughout the course of the day.

Just before the plane landed in Detroit, a young Nigerian named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had tried to detonate plastic explosives packed in his underwear, but the device failed to trigger properly and, instead, burst into flames. Whisked away after the plane landed safely, the scalded would-be bomber admitted that he had been dispatched by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. There had been vague “chatter” in the intel stream for weeks about the potential for a Christmas Day attack. I surmised that this was, in fact, it. It would be reported that just two months earlier, Abdulmutallab’s father had volunteered concerns about his son’s “extremist” views to a CIA agent at the American embassy in Abuja, Nigeria, but that information had languished on someone’s desk. While his name had been added to a larger terrorist database, he was not included on a No-Fly List that would have tipped authorities before he was allowed to board the plane. In other words, we got lucky.

Obama had been fully briefed, and stayed in constant contact with his team over the weekend. We decided to put Janet Napolitano, the director of homeland security, at the top of several Sunday morning news shows to update the nation on the incident and the ensuing investigation. Gibbs would appear on several shows as well. He asked me if we should also put the president out on Saturday night, so Americans could hear from him directly. “No,” I said. “Napolitano is going to be out tomorrow. She can deliver the message. Let’s give the poor guy some time with his family.”

It was a huge mistake, and one we would never repeat. When big things happen, people expect to hear from their president. It doesn’t matter how many hours he had been working on the phone or in briefings. People want to see the president of the United States and
know
that he’s in charge. Obama didn’t face the cameras until the following Monday, prompting criticism that he had been disengaged. Napolitano’s Sunday show appearances only compounded the problem.

On Saturday night, we held a call to prepare Napolitano. On the call, I confronted her with Republican charges that the security apparatus had failed. Napolitano, a bit defensive, said something about the system “working.” We all jumped on the answer. John Brennan, the president’s Homeland Security adviser, said “human error” might have come into play. This much we knew: there’d been a terrorist with a bomb on a U.S.-bound plane, and the only thing that had prevented a catastrophe was the bomb’s malfunction. It was hard to argue that the system had “worked.”

The next morning, the usually sure-footed Napolitano took the interviewers’ bait. “Once the incident occurred, the system worked,” she said on one show, while using similar phrasing on others. “Everything happened that should have” after the plot was foiled, she said.

Once the incident occurred?
But
why
had the incident occurred in the first place? And what could have been done to prevent it? Napolitano and the administration became piñatas for a bipartisan line of stick-carrying critics.

It wasn’t until Tuesday, when the president addressed the incident for the second time in as many days, that the administration publicly acknowledged a “systemic failure.” Obama ordered a comprehensive review of how the No-Fly List could be strengthened. He also wanted the establishment of a clear protocol for the interrogation of terrorism suspects for intelligence purposes before they were read their rights and charged. In this case, however, none of it mattered. Abdulmutallab provided valuable intelligence to his civilian interrogators, was tried and then convicted in the district court, and was sentenced to four lifetime sentences in a federal supermax prison.

Obama was determined to carry out his responsibilities to protect the American people against these ongoing threats. At the same time, he also was committed to reversing and reforming some of the controversial antiterrorism tactics the Bush administration employed after 9/11. Unwinding the country from this history would prove maddeningly difficult.

He pledged as a candidate to ban the use of torture, which he did almost immediately after taking office. He moved, over the objections of the intelligence community and after much internal debate, to release classified documents detailing acts of torture and other “advanced interrogation techniques,” and the legal rationale behind them, that had been employed by Americans against suspected terrorists. Yet to the chagrin of many of our supporters, other documents remained classified when he felt they would endanger American troops and personnel. The president also refused cries from the Left to prosecute Bush administration figures for their role in this dark past, choosing to spare the country what he felt would be a divisive, backward-looking trauma.

Few issues were more vexing than closing the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. While the Bush administration had released several hundred detainees from Gitmo, more than two hundred detainees, scooped up overseas for suspected involvement in terrorism, were still being held there. Some had been there for years, foreign nationals languishing in “preventive detention,” unable to be tried because of a lack of legally admissible evidence, but deemed too dangerous to release.

Obama and the military wanted to clear these cases and close Gitmo, whose existence not only raised serious constitutional issues but had become an anti-American propaganda gold mine for Al Qaeda and its supporters.

So the president signed an executive order the day after his inauguration to begin an orderly shuttering of Guantánamo, to be completed within a year. But before long, congressional Republicans seized on the issue, stirring “not in my backyard” panic about the prospect of Gitmo detainees on American soil. That panic eventually consumed many Democrats as well. His efforts frustrated, the president turned to developing a sounder legal regimen for the indefinite detainees, but this didn’t satisfy a group of leading civil libertarians Obama invited to the White House in 2009. Some represented organizations such as the ACLU; others, clients at Guantánamo. All believed that this “preventive detention” was an affront to our constitutional principles, and looked to a president, rooted in their community, to do something about it.

“We didn’t choose the field we’re playing on, and we will continue to try to change it,” Obama told the group. “But, to be frank, I don’t think it helps when I’m equated to Bush in your press releases.

“We have different roles,” he explained. “You represent clients, and you are doing exactly what you should. I am the president of the United States, with the responsibility to protect the American people. Do we just release them and take the chance they blow you up? There’s only so much a democracy can bear.”

 • • • 

You come to expect the unexpected in the White House. It’s part of the daily regimen. Yet on October 9, I woke up to some truly startling news. “And word from Norway this morning that President Barack Obama has won the Nobel Peace Prize,” blared the newscaster from my clock radio. It had been a typical too-brief night’s sleep and I wondered if I was dreaming. I bolted up and grabbed my BlackBerry to confirm the news, which I greeted as more of a surreal challenge than a cause for celebration.

Obama had been in office for less than a year. He had banned the use of torture, worked (if unsuccessfully) to close Guantánamo, and pushed for new limits on nuclear weapons—but what, exactly, was he getting the award
for
? Whatever the rationale, my guess was that Obama was being honored for his galvanic, groundbreaking election, which had inspired so many around the world. Still, I anticipated a deluge of questions about the president’s deservedness from a cynical media and what would certainly be an incredulous opposition.

When Gibbs woke him up with the news, the honoree was also nonplussed. “Gibbs, what the hell are you talking about?” the president demanded.

“You won the Nobel Peace Prize,” he said.

“Are you kidding me?”

“I promise you, sir, that I wouldn’t wake you up to play a joke,” Gibbs replied. “You’ve won the Nobel Peace Prize.”

“Gee,” Obama said, absorbing the unlikely news. “All I want to do is pass health care.”

Later that day, he told us about Malia and Sasha’s disarming reaction. “They came in this morning and Malia said, ‘Good news, Daddy. You won the Nobel Prize and it’s Bo’s birthday,’” she said, in reference to the family dog. And Sasha said, “Plus this is a three-day weekend!” At our urging, Obama shared his daughters’ comments with reporters, as he acknowledged the surprise honor with the proper mix of gratitude, humility, and more than a touch of bewilderment.

What made this unsolicited award even more complicated was that it came in the midst of the president’s deliberations about what to do in Afghanistan. He knew the final decision on a troop increase would come shortly before the Nobel ceremony in December. The president of the United States might be stepping out of his war council to accept the Peace Prize. “I want to stress my role as commander in chief,” he told us, thinking ahead. “I don’t want to give our friends on the other side a chance to run this One World stuff against us.”

Occupied with his decision on Afghanistan and the critical speech at West Point announcing the surge of thirty thousand more troops, which would take place just nine days before the Nobel ceremony, the president wouldn’t focus on his Nobel address until after the West Point speech was delivered. Having just been consumed by the debate over the need for war, the president understood the case he wanted to make. A few hours after we arrived, Obama delivered an elegant, well-reasoned speech that, like the man himself, blended genuinely high ideals with cold-eyed realism.

“As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King’s life work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence,” he said. “But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by [those] examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince Al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism—it is a recognition of history, the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.”