In November 2009, Obama compromised with his national security team. He agreed to 30,000 troops instead of the 40,000 that McChrystal had requested, but not for a national counter-insurgency campaign to defeat the Taliban as Petraeus had wanted. The military effort would be only to "degrade" the Taliban.
And crucially, an evaluation in July 2011 would determine not whether a withdrawal and transfer of responsibility could begin but what its "slope" would be, according to the meeting notes cited by Woodward. Obama even insisted that the military not occupy any area that could not be turned over to the Afghan government.
On November 29, Obama met with Gates, Mullen, and Petraeus to get their formal agreement to the compromise plan. Mullen pledged that he would "fully support" the decision. Petraeus said he would do "everything possible" to get the troops on the ground "to enable"the transfer [to Afghans] to begin in July 2011."
But danger signs appeared almost immediately that the pro-escalation coalition would seek to alter the policy in their favor. The day after Obama publicly announced in a speech at West Point December 1, 2009 that U.S. troops would begin to withdraw in July 2011, Gates and Clinton suggested in Senate Armed Services Committee testimony that the president was not locked into beginning a withdrawal in mid-2011.
Obama responded by insisting that his press secretary tell CBS News that the July 2011 withdrawal was "etched in stone." After hearing about that Obama comment, Petraeus told Sen. Lindsey Graham that was "a problem" and said, "You need to fix that," according to Woodward. Petraeus added that he would let Gates and Clinton "deal with this one."
After taking command of U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan in mid-2010, Petraeus was asked on Meet the Press on August 15 whether he might tell Obama that the drawdown should be delayed beyond mid-2011. "Certainly, yes," Petraeus responded, openly threatening to renege on his agreement with Obama.
In September 2010, John Nagl, a retired colonel who had been on Petraeus's staff and now headed the Center for New American Security, told IPS that Obama would be forced by Republican pressure to "put more time on the clock." And in December, Petraeus revealed to Obama's main White House adviser on the war, Gen. Douglas Lute, "All we have to do is begin to show progress, and that'll be sufficient to add time to the clock and we'll get what we need," according to Woodward.
Whatever Petraeus did in the early weeks of 2011 to raise the ire of Obama in regard to the withdrawal issue, it was against the backdrop of repeated indications that Petraeus was hoping to use both his alliances with Gates and Clinton and pressures from the Republicans in Congress to push back the previously agreed date for beginning withdrawal and hand-off of responsibility to the Afghan government.
Gates knew, therefore, that Obama was reacting to a history of having already been "gamed" not only by Petraeus himself but also by his bureaucratic allies maneuvering to remove the restrictions on the Afghan War that Obama had imposed. The self-serving Gates account conceals the dishonest tactics employed to get Obama's agreement to the Afghan War escalation.
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