The Long Game by Derek Chollet Page B

had helped drive the US economy off a cliff, and he did not want his strategy in Afghanistan to do the same. Beyond costs, he was determined not to allow the war in Afghanistan to consume US policy for another decade.
    T HIS LED TO the most contested part of Obama’s Afghan strategy in 2009—the announcement of a timeline to start withdrawing American troops in less than two years and to transition responsibility to the Afghan government. Announcing such a timeline divided his advisors: Hillary Clinton recalled the timeline was “starker” than she wanted and “there was benefit playing our cards closer to our chests.” 12 Unsurprisingly, some critics were harsher, asserting that this undermined the perception of US resolve, signaling to our friends that they couldn’t count on us and to our enemies that they could wait us out.
    The escalate-to-exit approach did make the strategy more difficult to communicate (I was in Brussels to brief NATO allies with Richard Holbrooke the day after the strategy was announced, and we labored to help them understand how these seemingly contradictory tasks wouldwork). Obama understood these criticisms, yet believed that such clarity was needed to sustain public support for the mission. As he said in one meeting, “The American people need to know that the war is ending.” Importantly, his secretary of defense agreed. “After eight years of war in Afghanistan,” Robert Gates reflected, “Congress, the American people, and the troops could not abide by the idea of a conflict there stretching into the indefinite future.” What after 9/11 had been a war of necessity to root out terrorists—the conflict Obama had believed was the one America needed to fight—had become, in Gates’ words, “an albatross around the nation’s neck, just as the war in Iraq had.” 13
    When describing his strategy, Obama explicitly stressed the attributes of balance, precision, and sustainability. In his December 2009 speech at West Point where he outlined the new policy—the same venue where Bush had announced his “preemption doctrine” seven years earlier—Obama made clear that his Af-Pak decisions were taken in the context of addressing other priorities at home and abroad, especially the financial crisis. Quoting Eisenhower’s adage about national security decisions, Obama said that “each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs.”
    This weighing of ends and means, calibrating an approach within the context of the totality of American interests, is the essence of grand strategy. The military aspects could not be open-ended or considered in isolation. Since America’s prosperity was the foundation of its power, the president explained, and because this new strategy would be so costly, it needed to be limited. Obama was blunt. “The country I am most interested in nation-building is my own,” he said.

    I N TERMS OF US commitment, effort, and resources, this new strategy aimed to put Af-Pak on the same escalate-to-exit trajectory as the other war that had, in Obama’s view, consumed too many American assets up to that point. What Obama set out to achieve withIraq, of course, was a different kind of “resurge”—one whereby American military forces left the country, positioning the US to deal more effectively with its other interests.
    For six years, Iraq had been the most defining, and divisive, issue in American politics. Questions about the war had consumed a generation of politicians and, in 2004 and 2008, dominated the presidential campaigns. Obama’s decisive electoral victory effectively defused the debate. The question therefore was not whether the United States should get out of Iraq, but how—and what we would leave behind.
    Although Iraq had been one of the central issues of Obama’s