The Long Game by Derek Chollet

Afghanistan a central part of his foreign policy critique: instead of starting a “dumb war” by invading Iraq, we should have kept our eyes on the ball and finished the job where the 9/11 terrorist attacks had been conceived. Obama entered office calling for the need to resurge in Afghanistan—for more troops, more civilians, more assistance, more intelligence assets, and more international support.
    During the 2008 transition, the outgoing Bush team conceded to those of us coming in that Afghanistan was “not where they wanted it to be,” and had begun their own policy review to take stock of what they would do if they had more time. Perhaps the most revealing—and concerning—thing the Bush team told us was that, a decade after the initial invasion of Afghanistan, the United States did not have a clearly definedgoal for what it was trying to do. You would get a different answer depending on whom you asked—to some, it was about fighting al-Qaeda; to others, we were there to help build a new society. Obama wanted his own assessment, so he ordered a process to be led by Bruce Riedel, a longtime CIA analyst and former Clinton White House official. Riedel’s charge was to come up with a set of specific goals and a strategy to achieve them. (Having been on the NSC transition team and taken a position as deputy director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, I was assigned to Riedel’s small team to help craft the document.)
    For Obama, the most difficult questions were about military force. All of the campaign commentary that he was “antiwar” and therefore ideologically a dove grossly missed the point. He believed the military component was essential, and had pledged to do more. The challenge, however, was how much force to add and for what purpose. In Afghanistan, as elsewhere during his time in office, Obama was determined not to overextend the United States on projects it couldn’t deliver on and, he believed, would only bleed the country further after it had bled for over a decade.
    This is why Obama approached the question of how to resurge in Afghanistan so carefully. As a result of the “Riedel review,” the administration settled on a clearly defined goal: to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and prevent their return to either country. This was reinforced by another strategic review the president initiated in the fall of 2009. Taking several months, this latter review—which was started after the military had asked for additional troops—was a far more systematic process in which the president was more directly involved (he had been distant from the Riedel-led review, focusing instead on the urgent priority of saving the US economy).
    T HE STRATEGY ’ S PREMISE was straightforward: instability in Afghanistan contributed to terrorism and insurgency in Pakistan, and safe havens in Pakistan were driving the insurgency in Afghanistan.Therefore, both issues needed to be addressed together. The innovation was to frame this as one interlinked challenge, and as one theater of operations—“Af-Pak.”
    Militarily, this called for an initial surge of 20,000 troops into Afghanistan to add to the more than 30,000 already there, and replacing the American commander on the ground with a leader more focused on counter-insurgency, General Stanley McChrystal. Later in 2009, in response to McChrystal’s request for more forces, Obama ordered more troops into combat. As of February 2010, just a little over one year after he took office, around 77,000 American troops were at war in Afghanistan, along with approximately 39,000 forces from forty other countries (while Americans were the bulk of the fighting force, Afghanistan was technically a NATO-led mission). By August 2010, the number of US troops in Afghanistan reached nearly 100,000.
    Alongside these military deployments was a civilian surge. The