Conflicting strategies in 'Obama's Wars'

Obama's Wars. By Bob Woodward, Simon & Schuster, 441 pages, $30

The essential outline of the story journalist and political historian Bob Woodward sets out to tell in Obama's Wars actually is fairly well known. US President Barack Obama's agonised march to a decision on how to move forward in what he has called "a war of necessity" in Afghanistan has been widely reported and analysed.

It is well known, for example, that the lack of good options bitterly divided the president's advisers and that the chief executive immersed himself in the details of the decision that ultimately produced a modified version of the "surge" strategy that the Bush administration used to stabilise — temporarily, at least — Iraq. The Joint Chiefs were similarly split over what to do in Afghanistan, as were the commanders on the ground.

There are sobering revelations aplenty in Obama's Wars, including intelligence appraisals on Al Qaida's ongoing effort to recruit terrorists from among the 35 countries whose nationals don't need visas to enter the United States.

According to one briefing Obama was given, at least 20 holders of American, Canadian or Western European passports are being trained by Al Qaida in Pakistani safe havens. Other threats abound: During the last presidential election, for example, US intelligence agencies caught the Chinese hacking into the computers both the Obama and McCain camps used to run their campaigns.

When the president-elect got his private briefing from Admiral Michael G. Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, he discovered that eight years into it there was "no strategy" for fighting the Afghan war, that the contingency plan for military action against Iran dated to the Carter administration and had no plans at all for dealing with the growing Al Qaida presence in Yemen and Somalia.

Lack of contingency plan

While no contingency plans exist for dealing militarily with a collapse of nuclear-armed Pakistan, there is "a retribution plan" in place, developed by the Bush administration, if the US suffers another 9/11-style terrorist attack.

That would involve bombing and missile strikes to obliterate the more than 150 Al Qaida training and staging camps known to exist, most of them in Pakistan, which presumably would suffer extensive civilian casualties.

Woodward gives a grim account of the secretive visit Vice-President Joe Biden and Senator Lindsey Graham made to Islamabad and Kabul on Obama's behalf early in his term. They confronted Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari over his intelligence agency's ties to the Taliban and the impunity with which Al Qaida operates in his country and came away without much confidence in his ability to remedy matters.

Things were worse in Kabul, where there was an angry confrontation with President Hamid Karzai — who, according to US intelligence, is a manic-depressive subject to wild mood swings despite medication — over his government's corruption and general ineffectuality.

Former Clinton White House of Chief of Staff John Podesta, who managed the transition for Obama, compared the president to the hyper-rational, unemotional Mr Spock in Star Trek. "He was unsentimental and capable of being ruthless. Podesta was not sure that Obama felt anything, especially in his gut.

He intellectualised and then charged the path forward, essentially picking up the emotions of others and translating them into ideas. He had thus created a different kind of politics. ... But, Podesta thought, sometimes a person's great strength, in this case Obama's capacity to intellectualise, was also an Achilles' heel."

In his one-on-one interview with Woodward, Obama explained his predecessor's failure to do critical strategic and contingency planning with some empathy: "Wars absorb so much energy on the part of any administration that even if people are doing an outstanding job, if they're in the middle of a war — particularly one that's going badly ... for a three-year stretch there in Iraq — that's taking up a huge amount of energy on the part of everybody. And that means that there are some things that get left undone."

Taken together, Podesta's insight and Obama's analysis may tell us a great deal about why this presidency has foundered as it has.