The Fourth Star

by Greg Jaffe

  The fledgling alliance in Ameriyah was just the sort of opportunity that Petraeus had been hoping for. His counterinsurgency manual placed a heavy emphasis on co-opting locals. “These traditional authority figures often wield enough power to single-handedly drive an insurgency,” the manual states. Casey had made some effort to talk with insurgent leaders, but he had been limited by the Bush administration’s reluctance to negotiate with the enemy. Petraeus had a freer hand, and he used it.

  Although Lieutenant Colonel Kuehl didn’t realize it, Petraeus’s command had helped spark the anti-Al Qaeda revolt in his Baghdad sector. Shortly after taking over, Petraeus had created the Force Security Engagement Cell, essentially a department of peace negotiations, to seek out reconcilable enemies. He had put a British general in charge. “The Brits are good at talking to unsavory actors,” he reasoned, citing their experience in Northern Ireland. Several weeks earlier General Graeme Lamb, the first British general to lead the reconciliation effort, had made contact with a Sunni insurgent leader named Abu Azzam who had taken part in some of the first anti-Al Qaeda tribal uprisings in western Iraq in late 2006. By early 2007 Abu Azzam wanted help driving Al Qaeda extremists from his rural village closer to Baghdad.

  Lamb, in turn, had introduced Abu Azzam to Lieutenant Colonel Kurt Pinkerton, the battalion commander in charge of the area. “See what you can do with this guy,” he said. Slowly the two men formed an alliance. In early April, Pinkerton asked the Iraqi for help finding recruits for the local police force in the area around Abu Azzam’s village. “A week or so later, I drove out to a school compound and there were about eight hundred to a thousand men waiting to volunteer,” Pinkerton recalled. He snapped a picture of the teeming crowd that made its way up to Petraeus. As was often the case in Iraq, something big was happening and U.S. commanders were only catching fleeting glimpses.

  When Abu Abed started building his fledgling force in Baghdad’s Ameriyah neighborhood two months later, he borrowed some fighters from Abu Azzam’s group and turned to his fellow Iraqi for advice on working with the United States. The Americans, meanwhile, were also trading information about these potential allies. Pinkerton drafted a seven-page memo outlining his alliance with Abu Azzam that was sent to commanders throughout Baghdad, including Kuehl. “If you are not a very good diplomat, start learning,” Pinkerton advised in the memo. “Reconciliation isn’t about any one party winning, but about all parties’ willingness to compromise.” He suggested a series of gestures that had helped him win Abu Azzam’s trust, such as releasing low-level prisoners, giving him responsibility for security in his village, and rewarding his tribe with small reconstruction contracts.

  Although Petraeus had emphasized the importance of reconciliation, the real work didn’t happen at his level. The enemy was too fragmented. Instead, the reconciliation effort depended on midlevel commanders seizing the initiative and making peace with their former enemies. Throughout the summer, these officers brokered alliances with dozens of Sunni insurgents throughout Baghdad. They organized neighborhood watch groups that guarded checkpoints. Like Lieutenant Colonels Pinkerton and Kuehl, they revised the rules as they went, relying on their best instincts, informal advice from their fellow officers, and their knowledge of the local politics and personalities.

  By late June Petraeus’s command was getting requests from his corps headquarters, which oversees daily military operations, asking for formal guidelines on the alliances. In its four years in Iraq, the United States had issued thousands of regulations governing just about every facet of a soldier’s life; the Army loved rules. Petraeus, however, resisted the urge to put anything in writing that would constrain officers’ options. He wanted them to experiment.

  The Sunni reconciliation program marked a huge shift in strategy. Under Casey the focus had been on building the government and bolstering Maliki. Working with the armed Sunni groups, which were outside of the Shiite-dominated government’s control, undermined the central government’s authority. One of Petraeus’s main tasks over the summer was to convince Maliki, who saw the former insurgents as criminals, to at least tolerate the alliances.

  Even before Petraeus set foot in the country for his third tour, Iraqi officials complained that he was overbearing, arrogant, and pushy. He put demands on government leaders and on rare occasions yelled at them. A regular target was Lieutenant General Ahmed Farouk, who ran Maliki’s Office of the Commander in Chief, a secretive arm of the government that was responsible for firing several Sunni army and police commanders. In one meeting, Farouk announced that the prime minister’s office was forming a special unit to inspect checkpoints in the capital. Petraeus erupted, dismissing the idea as nonsense. It was the equivalent of President Bush forming his own armed unit to scrutinize traffic cops in Washington, D.C. “We all know what the real problem is. It’s that you don’t have an NCO corps or junior officers who will enforce standards on checkpoints,” Petraeus barked. He leaned across the table and stared directly into the eyes of Maliki’s favorite general. “Everyone knows this. We’ve been talking about it for months. What are you going to do about it?” Petraeus’s red-faced rant quickly outran his interpreter, who gave up translating. Petraeus kept yelling. He wanted to stop Farouk from forming the unnecessary unit. But the outburst also had a larger purpose. He wanted to discredit Farouk, whom he saw as a malign and sectarian influence on Maliki, and run him from the weekly security meeting.

  In 2006 and 2007 U.S. officers talked about the Iraqis as if they were an inviolable force of nature: “We can’t want it more than the Iraqis,” generals would grouse. Petraeus believed he could make the Iraqis want what was best for them, though it would take time.

  Petraeus never raised his voice with Maliki, but their relationship grew testy the longer it continued. He and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, a fluent Arabic-speaker, met with the prime minister on Thursdays in his office. Crocker took the chair closest to Maliki. Petraeus sat on the ambassador’s right. “Where are the M-16 rifles you promised us?” Maliki would rail one day. A few days later he’d accuse Petraeus of withholding ammunition from his troops.

  “With respect, Mr. Prime Minister, I am prepared to give you my side of the story if you are willing to listen,” Petraeus would interrupt. To Maliki it looked as if the United States was more interested in organizing insurgents into militias than in building legitimate security forces. The prime minister’s aides began complaining that the United States didn’t even know how many Sunnis were participating in the neighborhood watch units.

  In truth, it was hard for the Americans to keep count. The program was growing too quickly. By early fall Kuehl had 231 citizens on the U.S. payroll in Ameriyah, but there were at least 600 men in Abu Abed’s neighborhood force. Every month Kuehl gave the Iraqi about $160,000, most of which Abu Abed used to pay his men and buy local support. He sat behind a desk wearing a black cavalry hat, a gift from his American benefactors, and doled out money and favors to supplicants who lined up each afternoon outside his door. “I know Abu Abed was cutting deals in Ameriyah that we never saw and didn’t understand,” Kuehl said. Abu Abed also undoubtedly kept some of the money for himself.

  The U.S. military, with Petraeus’s encouragement, had helped the anti-Al Qaeda uprising in Ameriyah take root and spread to other areas of Baghdad, causing violence levels to drop throughout the capital. In the summer of 2007 the military didn’t control these fledgling uprisings. No one did.

  Arlington, Virgina

  May 2007

  As chief of staff, George Casey lived in Quarters One, a Victorian brick mansion at Fort Myer that he’d known since childhood; as a young boy he’d once set off the outdoor sprinkler system there, disrupting a garden party that he was attending with his parents. The house sat atop a hill overlooking Washington’s marble monuments and Arlington National Cemetery, where his father had been buried just weeks after he’d been commissioned as a second lieutenant.

  One of George Casey’s first acts after taking office w
as to invite the retired general Edward “Shy” Meyer for lunch. Meyer, a longtime family friend, had been a protégé of Casey’s father. On the morning the elder Casey was killed, Meyer had tried to talk him out of flying his helicopter in bad weather. Nine years later, with the Army at its nadir, Meyer was named Army chief, the position Casey now held. He had been renowned for his bluntness in the job. In 1980 he had famously told Congress that the Army, still recovering from its defeat in Vietnam, was a “hollow force” that lacked the equipment and the motivated and educated soldiers it needed to prevail against the Soviets. His warning helped spur the Reagan defense buildup.

  Casey and Meyer ate at a small table in his Pentagon office. Casey’s main job as chief was ensuring that the Army was holding up under the strain of two wars and was ready for any future conflicts. Some senior officers were concerned that the service, consumed with occupation duty and counterinsurgency, was losing its ability to fight a conventional war. Artillery units in Iraq and Afghanistan were being used as military police. Armor officers walked foot patrols, and when they were back in the United States, they spent most of their time recovering or preparing to return to the wars. They didn’t have time to practice battalion- or brigade-sized assaults in their tanks. There were troubling indicators with regard to personnel issues. Suicides were rising. The Army was having a hard time retaining enough officers to fill jobs.

  Casey invited Meyer to the Pentagon because he wanted some advice. “What were the early warning signs after Vietnam that the Army was in trouble?” he asked. Had anyone seen it coming? How quickly had the force collapsed?

  It had been almost impossible to pin down the breaking point, Meyer replied. For years the force was strained by Vietnam but still holding together. Then all of a sudden it just fell apart. Experienced captains and sergeants started streaming out of the service, and no matter what the brass tried it was impossible to stanch the bleeding. It took ten years to pull the Army out of the spiral—and shifting to an all-volunteer force at the same time didn’t help. “There’s an invisible red line out there. You won’t know it until you cross it,” Meyer said. “Once you cross it, it’s too late.”

  One key to keeping the Army away from the red line was convincing battle-hardened captains to stay in the military, Casey believed. But, worn down by repeated deployments, they were leaving at a growing rate. It wasn’t nearly as bad as it had been during Vietnam, but the Army had missed its goal for keeping captains two years in a row. Casey settled on the idea of a $20,000 retention bonus aimed at these officers in the Army. The Pentagon had long used cash bonuses to entice enlisted soldiers to stay in the service, but this was going to be the first time it had ever tried such a program out on officers.

  Before he signed off on the bonuses, Casey asked division and brigade commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan to survey their captains and see if the cash payments would make a difference. The answer was mixed. Perhaps the most eloquent response came from Colonel J. B. Burton, who in the summer of 2007 was in charge of U.S. troops in west Baghdad and Ameriyah. “This is a very tough crowd of warriors,” Burton wrote. “They have spent the past four years in a continuous cycle of fighting, training, deploying, and fighting and seen no end in sight. They have seen their closest friends killed and maimed leaving young spouses and children as widows and single parent kids… It’s not about the money, at least not $20,000. What these warriors really want is for their Army to invest in them personally by giving them time back to invest in themselves and their families.”

  The long deployments weren’t the only gripe. Young officers also were frustrated that their Army hadn’t changed its training, equipment, and strategy quickly enough. At lower levels, captains and majors insisted that they had had to adapt to survive on Baghdad’s violent streets, but their generals were a step behind. The growing anger was captured most clearly in an essay written by Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yingling, a rising officer who was just about to take command of a 540-soldier battalion. Yingling published his critique, which was entitled “A Failure in Generalship,” in the June 2007 edition of Armed Forces Journal, a privately owned military publication. The essay was a passionate, angry, and in part naive cry for accountability and change at the top ranks. “America’s generals have been checked by a form of war that they did not prepare for and do not understand,” Yingling wrote. The essay’s most oft-repeated line came at the end: “As matters stand now, a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war.”

  Yingling would admit that some senior officers had pushed for change. Both Petraeus and Chiarelli, for example, had written extensively about their experiences and the need to incorporate the lessons that young officers were learning in Iraq. To Yingling, though, the Army brass’s problems extended far beyond the efforts of a few reformers. The shortcomings in the general officer corps, he maintained, grew out of a personnel system that encouraged conformity and discouraged risk takers.

  Within hours of its publication, the essay was rocketing around the Army by e-mail. Yingling had credibility because he had volunteered for two tours in Iraq, the second one working for Colonel McMaster in Tal Afar. He had a sterling pedigree that included three years teaching in the Sosh department at West Point and a recent selection to command a battalion. In short, he had a lot to lose.

  He had decided to write the essay after attending a Purple Heart ceremony at Fort Hood. As he watched the troops receive their awards, he grew angry at his Army’s failings in Iraq. He was ashamed that he hadn’t spoken out more forcefully about the failures he had witnessed. By the end of the ceremony he could barely look the wounded troops in the eye. “I can’t command like this,” he recalls thinking. He insisted that there wasn’t a lot of original thought in the piece. Rather, the essay was a distillation of conversations with fellow soldiers on patrols, in mess halls, and on training exercises.

  Casey picked up the essay on the recommendation of Lieutenant Colonel Grant Doty, a Sosh alum who had worked for him in Iraq as a major and was now his speechwriter. Doty thought that he might want to send Yingling a note thanking him for writing the controversial piece. It would send a strong message to young officers that the top brass was willing to listen.

  Casey said he would. But try as he might, he couldn’t get through the essay. When he reached the part that accused generals of lacking “moral courage,” he stopped reading. He had made mistakes in Iraq, but so had everyone. And he resented the insinuation that he and his fellow officers had caved in to political pressure. Even the oft-repeated charge that the generals had done little during the 1990s to prepare for insurgencies such as Iraq and Afghanistan left him raw. The country’s history was full of instances in which America had entered wars unprepared and made major changes. “I tried not to be pissed off about it. I did,” he said. He never wrote the note.

  Chiarelli was more sympathetic to Yingling’s argument. If he had been a lieutenant colonel, like Yingling, looking up at the generals in their palaces, he probably would have written the same sort of thing, he told himself. Chiarelli had been deeply frustrated by his last tour and disappointed that he hadn’t been chosen to command. After spending a few weeks without a job, Defense Secretary Gates asked him in early 2007 to become his senior military assistant. Gates had been impressed by Chiarelli’s passionate presentation months earlier when he had been in Baghdad as a member of the Iraq Study Group. Chiarelli jumped at the chance to work with the defense secretary. It would let him stay connected to Iraq.

  Chiarelli didn’t agree with everything in Yingling’s article, but he liked his willingness to prod his superiors to take risks. What Chiarelli didn’t like was some of his fellow generals’ circle-the-wagons reaction to the essay—in fact, it disgusted him. The harshest criticism came at Yingling’s home base at Fort Hood, the vast post in central Texas. After the essay appeared, Major General Jeff Hammond summoned all of the captains on post to hear his thoughts on the officer corps. About 200 officers in their twe
nties and thirties, most of them Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, filled the pews and lined the walls of the base chapel. “I believe in our generals. They are dedicated, selfless servants,” Hammond said. Yingling wasn’t qualified to judge the Army’s generals because he had never been one and probably never would be. “He has never worn the shoes of a general,” Hammond told the captains and majors, many of whom found Hammond unconvincing. They didn’t want to hear a defense of the generals. They wanted someone to take accountability for what had gone wrong.

  The higher Chiarelli rose, the more sympathy he had for officers willing to challenge the status quo in the Army. “The most important thing right now is that we listen to these junior officers. We need to allow them to write. We need to allow them to criticize,” he’d say. His vision was an Army officer corps more like the intellectually freewheeling Sosh department at West Point.

  Chiarelli found that he liked working for Gates, who was pushing the military services to scale back purchases of expensive weapons systems in favor of equipment suited to Iraq and Afghanistan. He helped the defense secretary speed up the fielding of a new armored vehicle with a V-shaped hull that could withstand blasts from roadside bombs better than the Humvee. He also was happy Gates called for a bigger budget for the State Department so that it could play a greater role in reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan.

  Chiarelli’s job as the secretary’s senior aide practically guaranteed that he would get a fourth star. What he really wanted was to be the top commander in Iraq. In the fall of 2007 Chiarelli traveled to the Army War College in Pennsylvania to address generals headed to Iraq and Afghanistan. The darkened room with its big video screens and amphitheater-style seating looked like a NASA command center. Chiarelli had planned his presentation to be provocative. He opened with a searing seven-minute video that had been filmed by a reporter in Ameriyah just eleven days before Lieutenant Colonel Kuehl and the former insurgent Abu Abed met in the Firdas mosque. The lights dimmed and the face of an Army specialist appeared on the big screen. “It’s a joke,” the young soldier from the video said. “We will have spent fourteen months in contact. The first week we were in Baghdad we lost two guys in our battalion and it hasn’t stopped since.” The video shifted to a shot of one of Kuehl’s Bradleys that had been struck by a massive roadside bomb in Ameriyah. Soldiers watched helplessly as six of their colleagues and an interpreter burned to death inside. A few seconds later it cut to a scene of the same troops storming into the house of an elderly woman in search of the triggerman who had killed their friends. The frail woman let out a terrified, feral wail. “God help me! God help me!” she pleaded.