The only distinctly new alternative offered to Obama came from outside the military hierarchy. Vice President Biden had long and loudly argued against the military's 40,000-troop request. He worked with Gen. James E. Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to develop a "hybrid option" - combining elements of other plans - that called for only 20,000 additional troops. It would have a more limited mission of hunting down the Taliban insurgents and training the Afghan police and army to take over.
When Mullen learned of the hybrid option, he didn't want to take it to Obama. "We're not providing that," he told Cartwright, a Marine known around the White House as Obama's favorite general.
Cartwright objected. "I'm just not in the business of withholding options," he told Mullen. "I have an oath, and when asked for advice I'm going to provide it."
When word of the hybrid option reached Obama, he instructed Gates and Mullen to present it. Mullen had other ideas. He used a classified war game exercise - code-named Poignant Vision and held at the Pentagon on Oct. 14, 2009 - to support his case against the option.
Believing the game was rigged, Army Lt. Gen. Douglas E. Lute, Obama's representative from the National Security Council, boycotted it. According to participants, Poignant Vision did not have the rigor of a traditional war game, in which two teams square off. This exercise was a four-hour seminar.
Mullen and Petraeus both attended, as did Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair, a retired admiral who had once headed the Pentagon's war gaming agency. Blair had suggested the game, thinking it might help in assessing various troop levels.
As the exercise ended, Blair hinted at its limitations. "Well, this is a good warm-up," he said. "When is the next game?"
Blair realized that Mullen and Petraeus had no intention of taking the issue further.
At the Nov. 11 meeting in which Obama expressed his frustration, Petraeus cited the war game as evidence that the hybrid option would not work.
It would alienate the Afghan people whom U.S. forces should be protecting, he said. "You start going out tromping around, disrupting the enemy, and you're making a lot of enemies. . . . So what have you accomplished?"
Petraeus saw what Biden and Cartwright proposed as a repudiation of his protect-the-people counterinsurgency approach, the model he had designed and implemented in Iraq as commander of U.S.-led forces.
"This is not a stiletto, this is a chain saw," Petraeus told Obama.
"So," Obama asked, "20,000 is not really a viable option?"
Mullen, Petraeus, Gates and McChrystal all said it would result in mission failure.
"Okay," Obama said, "if you tell me that we can't do that, and you war-gamed it, I'll accept that."
No one contradicted the claim. Cartwright and Blair weren't at the Nov. 11 review session. Biden later told the president that the war game was "bull----."
By: Brant
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