Political support for the surge, never strong, appeared to be collapsing. Senator Reid, who in April had pronounced the war lost, now attacked Petraeus personally, charging, somewhat oddly, that the general “isn’t in touch with what’s going on in Baghdad”—as if he could discern better from Washington, D.C. Senior Republicans weren’t far behind him in heading for the exits. Senator Richard Lugar, the centrist Indiana Republican, took to the floor of the Senate on June 25 to call for an end to the surge. “I believe that the costs and risks of continuing down the current path outweigh the potential benefits that might be achieved by doing so,” said Lugar, one of the most respected voices in Congress on foreign policy. “Persisting with the surge strategy will delay policy adjustments that have a better chance of protecting our interests over the long term.” A week later he would be joined by Pete Domenici of New Mexico, who called for following the Iraq Study Group’s recommendations and getting U.S. combat forces out of Iraq by early 2008. Senator George Voinovich of Ohio also was backing away from the president.
“The war in Iraq is approaching a kind of self-imposed climax,” warned Henry Kissinger.
Al Qaeda was chortling. “Today, the wind—by grace of Allah—is blowing against Washington,” Ayman al-Zawahiri, the terrorist organization’s second in command, said in a video posted on a jihadist website.
DEAD MAN WITH AN IPOD
The morale of American troops seemed to be waning as they doubted if their new mission was working. “We’re tired of being lost,” said Sgt. 1st Class Michael Eaglin, who was operating from a small base in Sadr City. “Have you ever been lost and at the same time getting shot at? It’s miserable. . . . I want to be here for a reason, not just a show of force.”
In Yusifyah, a tough little town near the southern edge of Baghdad, Spec. Yvenson Tertulien told the Los Angeles Times that “I don’t see any progress. Just us getting killed. . . . I don’t want to be here anymore.”
Lt. Gregory Weber, an infantry platoon leader in the 2nd Infantry Division, recalled responding to a bombing and RPG ambush of a U.S. patrol in southern Baghdad that summer:
We passed the top half of a HMMWV [Humvee] turret. 1st Squad was so focused on security and assaulting/clearing up to the blast site that they didn’t even see [in the turret] the KIA [killed in action] Soldier, covered in soot, ACH [helmet] blown off, IBA [body armor] barely on, but an iPod headphone still in his ear. On site, there were three HMMWV destroyed. One upside down from an 8 foot deep, 15-foot-wide blast crater, 25 meters away, burning with the remains of 4 soldiers left inside. Another HMMWV was in the blast crater, partially submerged in water from a water main rupturing, and the other HMMWV 25 meters the opposite direction with its back end blown off. It was the most horrific subsurface IED detonation I saw the entire deployment.
Five soldiers were killed in the incident, but the image that haunted Weber was the first thing he saw, the dead soldier in the blasted turret, “iPod still in his ear.” He still wonders, “Did his leadership know he was distracted by music; not being able to hear the battlefield?”
Indeed, there were growing signs of such demoralization and indiscipline. In the hard-hit 1st Battalion of the 26th Infantry Regiment, which had lost five soldiers in one bombing in June, life got even worse in July. The first sergeant of its Alpha Company, while on patrol, said, “I can’t take it anymore,” put a weapon under his chin, and shot himself in front of his men. A few days later, members of a platoon in the battalion’s Charlie Company refused to go out on a mission, saying they were afraid of becoming abusive with Iraqis.
In another unusual act that verged on insubordination, seven 82nd Airborne soldiers placed an opinion piece in the New York Times that called the surge a failure. “We see that a vast majority of Iraqis feel increasingly insecure and view us an occupation force that has failed to produce normalcy after four years and is increasingly unlikely to do so as we continue to arm each warring side.” Legally they were entitled to express their opinions, but for soldiers to write a newspaper piece on policy during a war is almost unprecedented. Three weeks later, two of the writers, Sgt. Yance Gray and Sgt. Omar Mora, would be killed after their truck veered off an elevated highway in western Baghdad and dropped about 30 feet.
The governor of Puerto Rico, Anibal Acevedo Vila, addressing the National Guard Association’s annual conference, called for a new strategy in Iraq that would lead to a withdrawal. He received a standing ovation.
“I have never seen in twenty years the sort of resigned attitude I am hearing from my active-duty counterparts,” reported one Army Reserve colonel. “They are conveying a ‘game over’ attitude where they are going to continue saluting the flag and doing what the NCA [national command authority] wants, but not without realizing it is all horseshit at this point.” After the American military left Iraq, he added gloomily, the Iraqis will “turn on each other like a pack of weasels.”
A SLOW TURNING
In retrospect, it appears that the pattern of the battle of Baghdad from March to June resembles, on a vastly larger scale, that of the assault earlier in the year on the Tarmiyah outpost. In both places, the new U.S. strategy was pushing into enemy strongholds and eliminating safe havens. The enemy reaction was to hit back as hard as it could. Indeed, the U.S. counteroffensive could be said to have triggered some of the bombings, as the enemy faced a “use it or lose it” prospect with its arsenal of prepared car bombs and stashed explosives. “They have previously been, you know, frankly, elusive when we actually got into an area and started to clear it, and we’re seeing that in this area of east Rashid, they are standing and fighting,” Maj. Gen. Joseph Fil Jr., commander of the 1st Cavalry Division, noted in June. Both sides were throwing everything they had into the fight.
Visiting Iraq at the beginning of April, Senator John McCain expressed “cautious, very cautious, optimism” about the effects of the new strategy. “We’ve made tremendous mistakes,” he said in Baghdad on April Fool’s Day, “but we’re finally getting it right. And is it too little, too late? I don’t know, but I don’t think so.”
His traveling companion, Senator Lindsey Graham, added another thought: “We’re doing now what we should have done three years ago.”
The two were mocked for citing a walk through a Baghdad market as evidence of improved security, but in fact they were right. There may have been soldiers protecting the market, but the market was there, with merchants and goods, because of that military presence.
As Kissinger had said, the war was approaching a climax—but not of the sort he envisioned. Quietly, in various corners of Baghdad and its environs, even as the high-profile bombings were escalating, the new strategy was beginning to show results in hundreds of ways. Every day, American troops found that more Iraqis were beginning to talk to them. Better intelligence was coming in, and was being acted on more quickly, by units that lived on the next block instead of on the outskirts of the city. A unit getting a tip on a house where enemy fighters were gathering would begin watching it, not necessarily to hit it immediately, but perhaps to see how it fit into a larger network. With that knowledge, it might then be able to cripple a gang that often had been intimidating and extorting area residents. Maj. James Allen learned this lesson in an odd way as the Iraqi troops he was advising ambushed an insurgent planting a roadside bomb. They aimed to kill the would-be bomber, but their weapons were so poorly maintained that they couldn’t fire. “The dude who was emplacing the IED froze, though, so they walked over and bagged him,” Allen recalled. “He rolled over on the supplier, the supplier rolled on someone else, and we essentially shut down IEDs on that stretch of road for eight weeks.”
Also, having American troops in residence often dramatically improved the effectiveness of their Iraqi counterparts. Having Americans available to come to their aid—and perhaps to feed and outfit them—made Iraqi soldiers more comfortable about being out in the neighborhoods. “They feel as long as the Americans are there, they can pretty much handle anythi
ng that’s going on,” said Sgt. Maj. Michael Clemens, who served with the 82nd Airborne in Diyala Province from mid-2006 to mid-2007. Many of these new “partnered relationships” would begin to show results by midsummer. Of course, the locals also generally found it easier to talk to the Iraqi troops, who often would pass along the information they gleaned to the Americans with whom they shared a post.
Familiarity bred knowledge. One squad of American troops living in a Sunni area began to examine what was being sold in the markets as an indicator of the mood of the population. For example, it noticed one day that heavy portable heaters were being offered in their local market, which they interpreted—correctly—to mean that people were planning on staying there, which in turn meant that the pressure on the population to move brought by Shiite militias must be declining.
Even the language that American leaders used was changing. “There’s a lot less cowboy lingo in the force—‘toss the compound,’ ‘take ’em down,’ ‘roll ’em up,’ ‘get the bad guys,”’ observed Lt. Col. Yingling, on his third tour in Iraq. Col. Grigsby, commander of the third surge brigade, still introduced himself like a traditional armor officer as “Hammer Six,” but his orientation was different. “The quality of life in Jisr Diuala, one nahiya in the qadha,” was improving, he told reporters one day. He also was proud that “we worked out of eight patrol bases and four joint security sites in the middle of the population centers, [and so] we never commuted to work.”
The improvements in American operations were technical as well as doctrinal, tactical, and cultural. One of the reasons that redeploying the troops into small outposts could work in 2007 better than it would have in previous years was that brigade commanders had far more aerial surveillance assets available and under their control. During 2007 the number of these drone reconnaissance aircraft operating in Iraq would increase tenfold, according to an after-action review by Odierno’s headquarters. During his first tour in Iraq, in 2003-4, Odierno noted, the most that could be counted on was two drone reconnaissance aircraft available to him in all of Iraq, and they had to be shared with other divisions. In 2007 all 18 Army combat brigade commanders had their own RQ-7 Shadow UAVs, and could request more surveillance and strike aircraft as needed. This made it far easier, for example, for a commander to keep an eye on potential threats to his outposts.
In addition, in a highly classified operation, new information about al Qaeda and insurgent leaders began to get distributed much more quickly to tactical units. The officer responsible for the change was a military intelligence specialist, Lt. Col. Jen Koch Easterly, who reorganized the collection and analysis of intercepted telephone and computer communications in order to coordinate it better with other intelligence operations and with what units were doing on the ground. She also focused more on going after the networks that were assembling, delivering, and detonating roadside bombs, which has been the single greatest killer of U.S. troops during the war. According to one senior officer, her military intelligence unit’s successes became the undisclosed key to the success of the surge. Her work still remains largely unknown because so much of what was done remains highly classified. But as one operations report by the 1st Cavalry Division put it, “synchronization of ISR/HUMINT/SIGINT [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance /human intelligence/signals intelligence] has significantly reduced IED cells and threat.” Asked about that, Maj. Patrick Michaelis said, “It was a major factor. . . . Cryptological support from Colonel Easterly was critical.” She declined to be interviewed, citing classification issues.
In midsummer, intel people picked up some interesting indications that the insurgency was running out of steam. One smart U.S. Army intelligence officer in Baghdad said that he just didn’t see the signs of a vibrant counterattack forming. “There’s nothing that shows any kind of [enemy] surge in the making,” he said. On intercepts of telephone conversations between insurgent leaders, he noted, “There’s a lot of bitching and moaning, ‘What have you done today?”’ The response, he said, was often along the lines of, “I haven’t done anything, there are too many around, I can’t move.”
One of the emerging lessons was that the increase in regular U.S. troops on the streets of the city improved the effectiveness of the Special Operators who were targeting al Qaeda. It also helped that Odierno was an old friend of Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the head of Special Operations in Iraq, whom he had known since their days together at West Point. Until that point, “We didn’t see how essential conventional forces are in the counterterror fight,” remembered Rapp. American commanders, he said, were surprised to see that having their troops moving around effectively sponged up the sea in which al Qaeda swam. As insurgents found it more difficult to move, they began to communicate more electronically, in part because as senior leaders were caught, they tended to be replaced by younger, less experienced men, which in turn made them more vulnerable to Lt. Col. Easterly’s signals interception operation. “When you stay in the neighborhood, they have no place to stay, they have to talk more, because they’re mobile, so we can catch them, ” Rapp said.
Even as U.S. troop deaths increased, Iraqi civilian deaths appeared to be declining, decreasing steadily from January on. Essentially, by moving out into the population, the military had interposed itself between the attackers and the people. And some of the attacks on them that succeeded were not as bad as previous ones. For example, in March and April, the bombs that detonated were hitting more checkpoints and fewer of the markets and mosques those checkpoints were intended to protect. Roadside bombs also were becoming less effective, for two reasons. Partly, emplacers had less time to dig holes, and some bomb cells were resorting to the hasty method of simply lowering small pressure-detonated bombs through a hole in the floor of a car and then driving off. Soldiers comfortably dismissed those relatively ineffective devices as “drop ’n’ pops.” Even some of the bigger devices used low-grade homemade explosives, indicating that the bombmakers were running low on more lethal material.
COUNTERINSURGENCY INSIDE THE PRISON CAMPS
Two other institutional initiatives also were beginning to have an effect. These were how the Americans handled prisoners and how they raised Iraqi forces. Neither one held the excitement of combat operations, but improving them was essential if the American effort was to become more effective.
For years handling detainees had been the Achilles’ heel of the American operation. Holding and treating prisoners decently didn’t seem the hardest of tasks, but their abuse and torture at the Abu Ghraib facility had been one of the biggest embarrassments, and strategic setbacks, of the war. “We have learned an enormous amount, the very hard way,” Petraeus said later. One hard lesson he listed was that “you cannot safeguard our values by violating them in another country in an endeavor like this.”
Despite that, his counterinsurgency manual didn’t offer much new on the way to deal with detainees. It advised that they should not be abused, but didn’t really have much to say about what to do with them besides that.
Not long after Petraeus took command, he picked Maj. Gen. Douglas Stone, a Marine reservist who had worked for Hewlett-Packard and IBM, to take over the detention operation. At first, there was some question about Stone, with a few officers recommending against him. Petraeus called Gen. James Mattis, a Marine who has had a kind of parallel career to his—first when they were both assistants to a top Pentagon official, then when they both commanded divisions during 2003 in Iraq, and finally overseeing their services’ educational and training establishments. Most important, they are two of the most highly educated generals in today’s military. “Jim, what’s the deal?” Petraeus asked. “Some people advised not to take him.”
“He is the kind of guy you need,” Mattis reassured him. “There will be some degree of care and feeding required, but knowing you, Petraeus, and knowing him, you will be a great team.”
Stone would rewrite the book on effective detention operations. His beginning insight was that there was an i
nsurgency inside the prison camps, and that simply warehousing the prisoners only intensified the opposition there, creating more insurgents out of civilians and more dedicated ones out of existing insurgents. As Stone later put it, “by not emphasizing population protection and the exemplary treatment of detainees, our facilities became breeding grounds for extremist recruitment.” In an official review, he termed U.S. detainment policies for the first several years of the war “an abject failure, a strategic risk to the MNF-I mission and a failure from a counterinsurgency perspective.” In April 2007 alone, the month he took command, there were 10,178 acts of detainee violence inside U.S. prison camps in Iraq.
What was needed, Stone thought, was a campaign that paralleled the larger counterinsurgency effort overseen by Petraeus. He dubbed it “COIN inside the wire.” Stone told his guards to secure the prison population, and especially isolate the roughly 1,000 extremists who had been intimidating the 20,000 other inmates, to the point of holding “trials” of inmates who refused to join them. The first step in separating out the hard core was to learn more about the prisoners, who until that point had been separated by sect but not by ideology. (The sectarian split was about 80 percent Sunni, 20 percent Shiite.) Despite Western perceptions, only a tiny percentage were foreigners. Who were they? What motivated them? The answers they gave in surveys surprised their captors. They were tribally oriented, with 78 percent reporting that they would use their tribal leaders to solve problems. They were not strikingly religious—only 28 percent reported attending services at their mosque on most Fridays. More than 10 percent had been police, soldiers, or security guards at the time of arrest. Most important, only about 4 percent were deemed to be hard-core cases. The vast majority, it seemed, were motivated not by ideology or a sense of grievance, but by minor economic necessity. They planted bombs not to feed their families, but for the cash al Qaeda would pay them, so they could buy small luxuries such as air conditioners or DVD players.
The Gamble: General Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq Page 26