"You don't have to put up with this," said Powell, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs. "You're the commander in chief. These guys work for you. Because they're unanimous in their advice doesn't make it right. There are other generals. There's only one commander in chief."

When I asked the president about this advice, he said, "General Powell and I talk. And I consider him a friend. And since he's now out of that building [the Pentagon], every once in a while I'll check in with him. I'll leave it at that."

"Why are we having another meeting about this?" the president asked that day after Thanksgiving as his White House national security team filed into the Oval Office-Jones, Donilon, Emanuel, McDonough, Lute and Colonel John Tien, an Iraq combat veteran and former Rhodes Scholar on the NSC staff. "I thought this was finished Wednesday."

Donilon and Lute said there were open questions from the Pentagon. Were the enablers already authorized?

No.

What does the 10 percent apply to?

The 30,000, an exasperated president said, and that's it. "Why do we keep having these meetings after we have all agreed?"

Well, we're still working with the military on these questions.

The president said he had reached agreement with the secretary of defense-why was there still a debate? That should have ended it. But the Pentagon was not used to or comfortable with being held to such precise standards.

The Pentagon seemed to be reopening every question. Donilon started ticking them off. Most came by phone from Mullen or the JCS staff, though Donilon and Lute were also talking with General Cart-wright and Michele Flournoy, the undersecretary for policy.

Like what?

Well, the estimate that they could get all the 30,000 troops into Afghanistan by summer.

"We didn't come up with that," the president said. "Petraeus told us that."

Now the Pentagon was saying they were unsure.

"It wasn't us that concocted ..." the president said.

The Pentagon was also questioning the withdrawal date of July 2011. At one point earlier, Gates had said he preferred six months later-the end of 2011.

"I'm pissed," Obama said, but he didn't raise his voice much. That was their date as well, he said. It was actually on the chart they briefed to us-the one with the longer trajectory. They identified it as the point when Afghans would be able to take the lead and responsibility in certain areas. Was this a negotiating tactic or what?

It seemed every issue was back up for discussion, negotiation or clarification. Obama said he was ready to go back and just give them 10,000 trainers. That would be it.

This was a contest that pitted the president against the military establishment. Donilon was stunned by the political power the military was exerting. But, he reasoned, the White House had to be the longdistance runner in the contest. From studying Vietnam and George W. Bush's Iraq War, he knew one common theme was miscue after miscue. Presidents being surprised, presidents not getting into the details enough, presidents not being clear about what they wanted, presidents not understanding the implications of seemingly simple decisions.

Jones left the meeting and spoke with Mullen, who was indeed saying that getting the 30,000 there might take longer than the end of the summer. McChrystal had been told he could decide which units composed the 30,000. Not surprisingly, he wanted units from the legendary 101st Airborne Division, the "Screaming Eagles" that Petraeus had commanded during the 2003 Iraq invasion. These units would not be ready until September.

No, Jones told him, it would really not be a good idea to go back to the president now and say it couldn't be done. Assertions had been made. The president wanted everyone to keep his word. In essence, this was military advice Obama didn't want.

"Got it," Mullen said, disappointed that Jones, a retired four-star, didn't seem to comprehend.

In the Oval Office, Obama continued with Donilon, Lute and the others. The meeting went on for hours, almost the entire day, as they tried to nail down the president's orders. They had all read Lessons in Disaster Lessons in Disaster. One of its conclusions was that Johnson failed to translate his Vietnam decisions into specific orders for the military.

Obama began to dictate precisely what he wanted, composing what Donilon called a "terms sheet," making it similar to a legal document used in a business deal. He took Gates's memo and agreed that the strategic concept would be to "degrade" the Taliban-not dismantle, not defeat, not destroy. He pasted Gates's six military missions from the memo into his own orders. The six military missions involved reversing the Taliban momentum and then denying, disrupting and degrading them.

As the contest went on through the afternoon, the Pentagon civilians and the Joint Staff had an ever expansive view of the strategy, seeking to broaden it.

"You can't do that to a president," Donilon kept saying. That was not what Obama wanted. He wanted a narrower mission.

But the push continued.

Put in restrictions, Obama ordered.

Donilon tried, but back it would come from the Pentagon with more, not less. One addition had to do with messaging to al Qaeda.

"We're not going to do it," the president said when he received word.

Donilon felt like he was rewriting the orders ten times, and he finally told the military interlocutors that the president only wanted matters directly related to the goal. "If you guys have a bunch of other bullshit you want to do," he said, the president would not accept it.

Say it directly, Obama dictated. In final form, his orders said that the military mission "will be limited in scope and scale to only what is necessary to attain the U.S. goal." Period. It couldn't be clearer. When all the words were filtered and reworked, he had two goals-defeat al Qaeda and degrade the Taliban.

But expansive, protect-the-population counterinsurgency ideas and side missions kept coming from the Pentagon.

No, Obama said. Again, he would say it directly, dictating the line, "This approach is not fully resourced counterinsurgency or nation building." It couldn't be clearer, and he couldn't be more emphatic.

Still, some were clinging to the original McChrystal request for 40,000. It was as if no one had ever told them no.

No, Obama said. On the troop number, he was picking the low end of Option 2A, the proposal for 35,000 to 30,000. It was 30,000. Let's be clear, he said. He had picked Option 2A with "the narrower mission and the express tighter timeline." He was sticking to July 2011. It was not just to begin withdrawing U.S. forces, but on that date "we will expect to begin transferring lead security responsibility from these forces to the ANSF," he dictated.

In case anyone did not understand the big change, he said for the terms sheet, "In July 2011, we will assess progress nationwide and the president will consider the timing of changing the military mission." The mission would not grow. It would only contract.

Around dinnertime-after nearly eight hours of wrangling and clarifying with the Pentagon-Obama went over a final draft, dictating and crafting the language.

"Maybe I'm getting too far down in the weeds on this, but I feel like I have to," he said. The president polished the document until 9:15 P.M P.M.

When he was done, the orders were typed out, six single-spaced pages. That's what he would issue, he said. His decision wasn't just going to be a speech or a general sense on the numbers game of 30,000. It would be this directive. And everyone was going to read it and sign up. That was the price he would exact, the way he would end the contest-for the moment, at least. Because, as they all knew now, the contest, like the war, would probably not end, and the struggle would continue.

Among the most top secret elements were not only stepped-up CIA drone and other attacks against al Qaeda in Pakistan, but the president's directive that McChrystal increase the tempo of counter-terrorism attacks against the Taliban inside Afghanistan.

In some respects, McChrystal was the perfect wolf in sheep's clothing. After years as Special Forces commander (JSOC) in Iraq, no one in the U.S. military knew more about these operations than he. Now McChrystal was the Afghanistan commander who had embraced the kinder, gentler protect-the-people counterinsurgency, putting limits on combat operations in order to reduce Afghan civilian casualties and even instructing his forces on the road to treat Afghans with respect.

But under the radar, McChrystal had his own wolf, Vice Admiral William H. McRaven, a Navy SEAL, who had taken command from him of the Joint Special Operations Command in June 2008. The scale and lethal intensity of McRaven's attacks in Afghanistan was at a level almost unimaginable to anyone without TOP SECRET CODEWORD clearances. The "jackpot rate"-when the strikes got the intended target-had jumped from 35 percent to 80 percent. Slapping a table for emphasis on each word, one senior civilian official with those clearances said, "Every single night they are banging on these guys with a pace and fury that is pretty impressive." And the 18 months to July 2011 would give the special operators time and space to disrupt, degrade and perhaps in a significant way decimate the Taliban insurgency. It might give new meaning to the word "degrade."

Obama's strategy was built on the idea that the time, space, intensity and success would allow the politics to come together. At least that was his hope.

Word circulated in the highest reaches of the Pentagon that the decision was about to implode. The Pentagon was saying that the secretary of defense thought he had received permission for the 4,500 plus the 10 percent.

Obama thought he had been clear, so he made it clearer and talked to Gates about 7 P.M P.M. "I thought we'd straightened this out on Wednesday," he said, obviously bewildered. He hated wasting time, and this was to him a complete rehash. But Donilon and Lute wanted absolute clarification.

How many times did he have to say it?

The number was 30,000, the president said, and the overall deal was that the 10 percent of that 30,000 was only for exceptional circumstances. But the 4,500 enablers would have to be part of the 30,000. It would have to be built into or come out of that 30,000 somehow, but it was not on the table. Period. His number was 30,000. It was a hard cap.

Later that night, Obama gave a final read of his six pages of orders. The relitigation and debate were over. "I'm comfortable with this decision," he said. "I'm comfortable with the way that it's been set forth here. I'll call Bob tomorrow, I'll call Hillary, and we'll have them in tomorrow or Sunday and I'll go through it with them face-to-face."

Donilon felt that the document was an assertion of presidential and civilian control of the military. The uniformed military had had too much of a say in the later years of the Bush presidency. The embodiment of that was Dave Petraeus, who, with his team, had made important and sound decisions in Iraq beginning in about 2007. But a lot of poor decisions had been made before that by Bush and others in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Petraeus had been engaged in damage limitation. To Donilon, President Obama was trying to ensure that his administration was not engaged in damage limitation five years from now. No nationwide counterinsurgency in Afghanistan was necessary to protect the United States.

The question Obama had attempted to answer was: How do you draw down, his ultimate goal, in the face of a serious and deteriorating situation? The answer was they had to break enemy momentum and then leverage that by going faster in "an extended surge."

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Saturday, November 28, was another day for the devoted at the National Security Council staff, including Tom Donilon and Doug Lute. They realized they probably should have been out doing something else on the weekend after Thanksgiving, but the strategy review was the all-consuming center of their universe. So the two were there at the White House sharing their frustrations. The president and all of them were being rolled by the military, they agreed. No matter what questions, leading or otherwise, the president or anyone asked, the only viable option was 40,000 U.S.

"How many of these guys who are pushing that option are going to be here to see the effects by July of 2011?" Lute lamented to Donilon.

They ticked through the list. "There's no chance in hell Petraeus is going to be in CentCom until the summer of '11," Lute said.

Mullen's second two-year term as chairman would almost be up, so he would be heading out too.

"McChrystal's probably rotated out," Lute said. "He says he's willing to stay three years but my guess is that probably won't happen."

Gates, they noted, had only planned to stay for the first year of the administration, so he would almost certainly be gone.

"So," Lute summarized, "the bottom line is, you're left with the president standing here, owning this thing that these guys sold to him but who have since exited stage right." He added, "Everybody else is going to have their White House commission hanging in their den."

"My God," Donilon said, "what are we getting this guy into?" The president would be the one left when the bill came due in 2012, the year he would be running for reelection. The bill was not only in terms of money but in terms of results. What could they accomplish by 2011 or 2012?

The president was not going to get any relief that Thanksgiving weekend. The debate was still going on-in his house and in his head. He met in the Oval Office with Emanuel, Donilon, Lute, Brennan and Colonel Tien that Saturday for a kind of rump session. Clinton, Gates and Jones were away or had out-of-town guests for the Thanksgiving weekend.

Obama sounded like he was back to tentative on the 30,000 troops with the beginning of the withdrawal in about 18 months, July 2011. "This is the way I'm leaning," Obama said, adding sharply, "but the door is not closed. I got Rhodes writing two speeches. And I want to hear from you guys one last time."

Donilon and Lute said the backers of the 40,000 would likely not be around in July 2011, but Obama would be.

The president simply took it in.

Colonel Tien was junior in rank, so he spoke first. There are thousands of active duty colonels in the American military and it was unusual for one to be able to advise the commander in chief directly, particularly just before a defining decision.

"Mr. President," Tien said, "I don't see how you can defy your military chain here. We kind of are where we are. Because if you tell General McChrystal, I got all this, I got your assessment, got your resource constructs, but I've chosen to do something else, you're going to probably have to replace him. You can't tell him, just do it my way, thanks for your hard work, do it my way. And then where does that stop?"

The colonel did not have to elaborate. His implication was that not only McChrystal, but Petraeus, Mullen and even Gates might go-an unprecedented toppling of the military high command. Perhaps no president could weather that, especially a 48-year-old with four years in the United States Senate and ten months as commander in chief.

Lute could see the president had reached a fork in the road and was pausing.

"Mr. President," Lute said, "you don't have to do this. I know you know this, but let's just review the bidding here. How do we think things are going to look in July of '11?"

Lute told Obama he saw four main risks in the ongoing war. First there was Pakistan, the heart of many of the problems without solutions in sight. Two, governance and corruption in Afghanistan-huge problems with no practical fix readily available. Three, the Afghan National Security Forces-army and police-could probably not be cured with a massive decade-long project costing tens of billions of dollars. Four, international support, which was in peril.

"These are cumulative risks," he said. The risk in one increases the risk in another. "You can't look at these in discrete bites and say, well, with Pakistan, I can take a few mitigating steps" to reduce the risk. Each of the four risks overlaps and reinforces each of the others. The Afghan governance and corruption problem, for example, made the security force problem worse, and vice versa.

"So when you look at these discretely," Lute continued, "like we did in the review, Mr. President, you might be left with the impression we can manage this risk. But I would offer you another model. That is, look at them as a composite. Look at them as a set, and then you begin to move, in my mind, from a calculated risk to a gamble."

Lute did not have to add that gambling was no way to make policy. "When you look at all the things that have got to break our way," Lute added, "I can't tell you that the prospect here for success is very high. And if you add those risks up and ask me where I think we'll be in July 2011, sort of your big decision point, I'm telling you I think that we're not going to be a whole lot different than we are today.

"I'm sure there are going to be political consequences that other people appreciate better than I do.

"It still smells to me like a gamble," Lute said. "You shouldn't base this on sort of an unexpected windfall of luck." He had the floor and was comfortable giving bad news to presidents, so he drove his point home. "We want to get from here to there, but, my God, you know, the Himalayas, you know, the Hindu Kush, is between here and there. How in hell are we going to do this?"

It was a telling moment. Was the general a pessimist? Or a realist?

"Yeah," the president said graciously, indicating that he did not disagree. "Thanks for being candid. It can't be easy for you to come in here and tell me that. Basically, we're going to have to execute our heart out to make this work." The July 2011 date, he said, was the key.

His new strategy and approach was different from the "all in" Bush model. "This is not as much as it takes for as long as it takes, but that we are going to have a turning point here and it's going to be July of 2011."

From his frequent private discussions with Brennan, Obama knew his counterterrorism chief's views. Brennan opposed a large troop increase.

Donilon agreed about the risks, calling them "key dependencies"-success would depend on all these working one way or another.

"We're just taking on a lot," Donilon said. "If you ask yourself where are we going to be in December 2010"-a year out from then when the president planned follow-up review-"or go another six months, July 2011, and the answer's going to be we're not a whole lot different than we are today." In other words, there could not be that much improvement in 12 months or 18 months, he said. The war, he said, would still be precarious "because of these four risk factors, which look hard to mitigate." He asked bluntly, "How do you mitigate any one of those?"

Neither the president nor anyone else had an answer for the short run.

Donilon said the fundamental issue was the new strategy with 30,000 troops. "Then the question is, why did you do this?" he asked. Why was there a need for a big surge in troops? The best answer Donilon had was that the U.S. needed to be in a position to deliver a big punch to stop the Taliban's momentum and give the Karzai government a chance. It would create more space to continue executing counterterrorism operations. This would demonstrate resolve to Pakistan, or so the idea went.

"I didn't come in with a blank slate," Obama had said to his team at one point. Afghanistan had drifted for too long, the victim of a poor military strategy and being under-resourced. He had inherited a war with a beginning and middle, but no clear end.

After the meeting, Lute and Tien went downstairs together.

"Well, you know," Lute said, "giddy up."

They laughed slightly, recognizing that it looked like a decision.

"This is what you work for," the three-star general (West Point 1975) told the colonel (West Point 1987). "You work your butt off, you get an opportunity to have a small group discussion with the president of the United States on the eve of a big decision, and all you can say is, Did you get a chance to say what you wanted to say?"

Lute felt that the military establishment was really rolling the president, though he didn't want to assign motives. It wasn't deliberate on McChrystal's part. As far as Lute could tell, McChrystal didn't have a conspiratorial bone in his body. If there was someone trying to roll Obama, it was Petraeus. But he had done so subtly and with a light touch, Lute believed. On the other hand, Mullen had failed to maintain the integrity of the process, which required the serious presentation of something other than the one recommended option. He adamantly wouldn't budge and give a hard look at alternatives. To Lute, Gates also had failed to expand the horizon of alternatives for the president, which in his view was the job of the secretary of defense. The secretary was supposed to give his own advice and bottom-line recommendation, but he was also supposed to be the final window into the larger world of choice for a president. Because a president did have choices, and in this case his had been significantly limited, perhaps to the disadvantage of all.

Lute thought Gates overly deferential to the uniformed military. The secretary of defense is the president's first line of civilian control. If the secretary did not assert civilian control at his level and say, wait a minute, then it got bumped up to the president to do it. Gates didn't serve the president very well, Lute felt, and his practice of holding his cards close-being so quiet, so subdued-wore thin. And then writing a personal memo to the president about the issue of whether the goal should be to "defeat" the Taliban or to "disrupt" them. Gates had, of course, created a new definition, to "degrade" the Taliban. Though the president had accepted the new definition, the personal memo defied and circumvented the rigorous process of the strategy review. It was a process on which Obama, at the very least, had staked his standing and reputation as commander in chief, and, at most, his presidency. And Gates was playing the role of the new Cheney-whispering confidentially in the ear of an inexperienced commander in chief. It gave him extraordinary leverage.

For his part, Donilon was hugely skeptical of the entire uniformed military chain of command. McChrystal was hardly an innocent. He took command, got out first by writing his long, classified assessment, staking his ground and then hiding behind the uniform and the flag. Petraeus and Mullen had joined in after that.

"I want to have a meeting Sunday," the president told Biden by phone. He would call the whole national security team to the Oval Office and give them his terms sheet and orders.

"Mr. President," Biden said, "I want to meet you before you go in."

"No," Obama replied.

"I'll meet you in the residence."

"No, no, we're fine."

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