Chapter 13
The man who walked into the Pentagon on Tuesday, September 19, had a private appointment with Secretary Rumsfeld. On first glance, you might swear he worked with his large hands and measured his hours in sweat. At 6-foot-3 and 240 pounds, he had a boxer's faceóred and ruddy and hard, framed by tightly cropped hair. He was retired Army General Jack Keane, a 37-year veteran and former vice chief of staff, the number two man in the U.S. Army.
At 63, though no longer on active duty, Keane couldn't shake the dread that accompanied his thoughts about the Iraq War. As a paratrooper in Vietnam, he had seen the multiple confusions of that war shatter his beloved Army and drain his country of spirit, resources and moral authority.
Few had more command experience than Keane. He had led a full corps of 50,000 soldiers. He'd become a Rumsfeld favorite among the generalsóno small feat, given the mutual contempt between Rumsfeld and many of his military officers. In 2002, Keane had agreed to Rumsfeld's request to become the chief of staff of the Army, but he had later changed his mind and retired because his wife, Terry, was seriously ill with Parkinson's disease. Rumsfeld had shown him compassion and understanding.
Like many, Keane found Rumsfeld abrasive, dismissive and distrustful of the uniformed military leaders. But he believed Rumsfeld was right about the need for dramatic change within the military, especially in the Army. As a member of the Defense Policy Board, an outside group of advisers that received regular top secret briefings, Keane stayed up to date on Iraq. He shared his frustrations over the war with a fellow policy board member, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who urged him to lay out his concerns to the secretary.
When Keane got to Rumsfeld's office, he found General Peter Pace as well. The three men sat around a small conference table.
Keane said he had been reluctant to come. "I just don't want to be another critic. You have many of them," he began.
"I don't want to be another burden. I hate armchair know-it-alls who believe they have a better idea than those who are actually doing it. That's not me. Newt Gingrich thought we should talk, and I think that's probably why you asked me to come in."
Rumsfeld nodded.
"I don't want to waste your time. Everybody is working so hard and sacrificing so much to get it done and do what is right. I'm here as a member of the teamóthe Defense Policy Board, which I take very seriously." He explained that he had attended many staff briefings, made trips to Iraq, and been involved in the assessments in 2004 and 2005.
"We're edging toward strategic failure," Keane said. "And I want to discuss some things to minimize and reduce that risk." It was a stark assessment, and he tried to soften it. "Strategic failure in the sense that the government is fractured and if it does fracture it'll lead to civil war." In 2003 and 2004, the U.S. military strategy was offensive. "Its principal purpose was to kill and capture insurgents. And we backed into that strategy, as you know, in the spring and summer of '03"óthe months after the invasion.
Rumsfeld was taking notes.
"We were a conventional army. The preeminent land force in the world. Well trained for big wars but ill prepared for counterinsurgencies. And the commanders initially started off executing what they know, which was using conventional tactics against an unconventional enemyÖ. We also had no unifying strategy, no campaign plan, all through '03 and most of '04." This was the period when the junior three-star officer in the Army, Ricardo Sanchez, was the Iraq commander.
Then a campaign plan was developed and approved in 2004 and 2005, Keane said. "It has multiple lines of operationósecurity, governance, training the Iraqi security forces, economic recovery, infrastructure and information operations. But it is really a defensive strategy, and it's also a short-war strategy."
"What do you meanóshort-war strategy?" Rumsfeld asked.
It was designed for us to get out as soon as possible, Keane said. "It relies heavily on establishing an effective government and franchising the Sunnis, isolating the insurgents and bringing them intoÖthe political process. It makes sense. I believed it at the time."
The military approach focused on turning security over to the Iraqi security forces as quickly as possible, Keane said.
"The other part is to protect ourselves in the processóthe force protection of our own troops." Another part was to eliminate al Qaeda sanctuaries. "Despite these efforts and despite capturing Saddam and killing his two sons, and despite holding three elections, and despite writing a constitution and installing a permanent government and despite the improvement in the Iraqi security forces and also killing Zarqawi, the fact is, the harsh reality is, the level of violence has increased every year in the contested areas.
"Security and stability are worse. It threatens the survival of the government and the success of our mission. And what's wrong? What's wrong is our strategy. We never adopted a strategy to defeat the insurgency."
What do you mean? Rumsfeld asked.
"Well, we don't have a mission to defeat the insurgency. If we did, we should be protecting the population. And the fact that we're not protecting the population has exposed it to al Qaeda, to the Sunni insurgents and the Shia militia that take advantage of it. And that's why we have the bloodbath we have today." He said the Iraqis were not yet capable of handling security. "That's the problem," he said. "We put our money on that horse." And the horse had come up lame.
"That was Casey and Abizaid's strategy," Rumsfeld said.
"I understand that, Mr. Secretary," Keane said. "But I think your influence over this strategy was there." He reminded Rumsfeld that he disagreed with what he called the secretary's "minimalist ideology"óthe desire to avoid creating an artificial dependence by doing everything for the Iraqis. Rumsfeld always had believed that the model from Bosnia-Kosovo in the 1990s was wrong, bloated by far too many people from U.S. agencies doing too many things that local governments should do for themselves. Reasonable logic, Keane said, but not in a situation with
"somebody contesting you and conducting armed violence against you."
Rumsfeld kept putting it off on Abizaid and Casey.
But you influenced the environment with your strong views, Keane replied. You allowed this to happen. The effort to advise the Iraqi security forces needs to be beefed up considerably, he added. The U.S. forces doing the training of Iraqis are often National Guard and Reserve officers who don't have operational experience and on occasion are advising more experienced Iraqis. Some of it was embarrassing. "This needs to be the number one personnel management policy in the United States Army," Keane said.
"It is," Rumsfeld replied. "These guys have got it, and they're fixing it."
"No," Keane said gently. "I have too much anecdotal evidence to the contrary. The advisory program is far less than what it really needs to be, and we have to put a major emphasis on it."
Keane didn't think he was telling Rumsfeld anything he didn't know deep down. He offered some possible solutions.
The options on the table, as he saw them, included immediate withdrawal, gradual withdrawal, or staying where they were and increasing the number of advisers and trying to better the Iraqi security forces. "All those options leave the enemy with the initiative, leave the enemy with its momentum," Keane said. "And they will continue to exploit the vulnerabilities and push this government. It will fracture the government, force it to disintegrate and we have the potential of truly leading to a civil war, where you don't have to debate whether it is or not. It'd be obvious to everybody. There is no option remaining to us at this point other than to do what should be obvious to all of us nowówhat we never did. And that is get security for the peopleÖ. It has become so obvious to me that security has become the necessary precondition for political progress, for economic development, and even for social progress in this country that's so fractured."
Keane saw that Rumsfeld didn't agree, but the secretary wasn't in his usual combative mode.
What was needed, Keane said, was an "escalation of forces to gain se
curity." It would mean many more brigadesótens of thousands more troops.
At this, Rumsfeld's face sank. It was exactly what the man who had conceived of a small, agile force did not want.
"How do we attain victory?" Keane asked. "You cannot defeat the insurgents by destroying their forces, in other words by focusing on killing and capturing. The fact is they will be re-created." There was an almost limitless supply of discontented and angry young men in Iraq. While killing insurgents had a value, Keane said, killing alone was not an acceptable strategy. "Victory is attained by the permanent isolation of the insurgent from the population," he said.
"You have to protect the population to get that kind of isolation. The bitter lesson learned: The insurgents, Sunni insurgents, control the population in the contested areas.
"We would concentrate our forces in an area to run out the insurgents, we would place static forces to control the population once that's done, and protect them and support [them]. And prevent the insurgents from coming back in to terrorize and intimidate and also to assassinate." We must live "with and among the people" 24/7, Keane said, "not returning to forward operating bases each night, as we have in the past. We're much too isolated from the people. We have to control the population in terms of movementsócensus, ID cards. Eventually we need to set up local elections and test leaders. And we have to drive out the remnants of the insurgents."
Keane cited a model from 2005. "You remember Tall Afar, for example, H. R. McMaster?"
"Yeah, yeah, I do," Rumsfeld said.
"Let me take you back to that," Keane said. It was a city of 250,000 people. The operation was carried out in three phasesódrive the insurgents out, set up static patrol bases in the town, and win trust from the people so they'd help prevent insurgents from coming back in. Colonel McMaster then held local elections to empower the local officials and brought in economic recovery. He stabilized that city in about six to eight months, which is pretty remarkable, Keane said. "Anybody that's looked at it knows how remarkable it is."
Reading from notes he had jotted on yellow legal pages, Keane asked, "What else can we do? First of all, we have to decide if we want to win. And are we really serious about it? That's a major decision. And you have to recognize that the current strategyóif we don't change it, we will lose and we will fail.
"If we want to win, then we have to match our policies and our resources with our rhetoric." Then, aiming squarely at General Casey, Keane said, "We have to put somebody in charge who knows what he's doing. We have to demand victory from him and hold him and the other generals accountable. And tell them they are not coming home until they achieve it."
Also, he said, we must put the entire weight of the U.S. government behind this effort. "Recognize the limitations of good, conventional war commanders. Some do not make good counterinsurgency leadersólack of intellectual flexibility, agility in dealing with a high degree of uncertainty." Conventional warfare leans heavily on satellites and upscale signals intelligence to help determine where the enemy is, he continued.
"In counterinsurgency or irregular warfare, you really don't know where the enemy is." In conventional warfare, the enemy has to move equipment, supplies and men, thus flagging his intentions. "Here, you can't see any of it. So every single day, you're dealing with a very high degree of uncertainty. And in my view, not everybody can deal with that if you are trained to deal" with conventional fighting. What a commander naturally does is to try to control uncertainties and develop measurements to assess performance. "But we were not doing it in the context of what the enemy was really doing to us," Keane said. He recommended that Rumsfeld assemble some people to examine the strategy, using the accelerating violence as a rationale for an outside study.
"This is a good time to make a change with Casey and Abizaid," Keane told Rumsfeld. Both generals already had been extended. "You put in a new strategy, in fairness to that strategy, we should put a new team in to execute it and not rely on the old team. It's much too much for them to make a dramatic change and reject their politics from the past. I don't believe you have to make a major announcement of the change, in the sense that you can give the generals a soft landing." It was an unwritten, and normally unspoken, military rule: Protect the generals.
As Rumsfeld listened, Keane pressed on with his notes. "Stop the ramp-down planning now," he said. Casey had put this in motion despite the rising level of violence. It was confusing everyone about U.S. intentions and commitment.
How willing would troops on the ground be to risk their lives, knowing that withdrawal was imminent? "Stop pressuring to accelerate the training of Iraqis, and stop pressuring to accelerate the transition to Iraqis. Stop the plans to move to four mega-bases." Casey's plan was eventually to move entirely out of Baghdad. Defeating insurgencies required decentralization just like the insurgents, Keane said, and Casey was going to make everything more centralized to reduce casualties. Reducing casualties was essential, but not at the expense of the mission, he said.
Number eight, Keane saidóhe had listed his pointsódouble the size of the planned Iraqi security force to 600,000
army and police.
Rumsfeld clearly didn't like that one, but he remained silent.
"We need to generate more U.S. forces," Keane said again, without suggesting how many more. "We need enough to secure Baghdad." More forces could be found many ways. "We don't have to do 12-and seven-month tours for the Army and Marine Corps, respectively. We can go to longer tours for each. We can go to indefinite tours. We have fought more of our wars based on indefinite tours."
Going back to his time as Army vice chief, Keane recalled, "I'm the one that recommended to you the one-year tour, if you remember, and then you asked me to go over and talk to the president about it a couple of days later. So I obviously believed in the value of a rotation.
"But this goes back to my original premise about 'Do we want to win, and how serious are we?' And if we are, then it's going to be at some sacrifice." Operations Together Forward I and II had failed miserably, Keane reminded the secretary, and primarily because there were not enough troops to protect the population.
"What we do right now is, we have forward operating bases. Big bases, highly protected, very Americanized inside."
The largest bases had gyms for working out and movie theater complexes like those found in U.S. shopping malls.
"And so, we go outside those bases on patrol. Patrols are overwhelmingly vehicle-borne patrols," which only invited the stepped-up IED attacks. "We call them presence patrols. They have very little value. They do not pick up much intelligence, and we're more targets than anything else."
As an alternative, Keane said, "We would move into a neighborhood and occupy some empty buildings that are not being used. Or, in some cases, we may take over some building that the Iraqis are using or living in, and we would work out a payment for them to do it." It had been done before. The soldiers would eat there, sleep there and patrol there. They would do foot patrols, and the IEDs don't work as well against such patrols, Keane said. "The advantage that that patrol has is its contact with the people, day in and day out. Talking to merchants, talking to citizens. And eventually, what happens is the people see that we're staying, not leaving. Trust begins to build up, and this is an important issue."
The soldiers and the Iraqis become mutually dependent. "And that takes a few weeks to happen, but it will happen because then they start to clue them on who the enemy is, and if there's a threat to them in the area, then they'll start reporting the threat. And we have evidence that that's what's happened in Tall Afar over and over againÖ. We know this can work in terms of the people becoming, really, an intelligence vehicle for us."
Keane said, "We have to fix the strategic and operational intelligence." Not enough people were working on Iraq.
"The Central Intelligence Agency, reported to me from a reliable source, has 38 analysts that work exclusively on Iraq. We have more working on China than we have on Iraq, and yet
Iraq is of emergency proportions and is a major threat in terms of our national security if we lose it."
Rumsfeld made some pejorative comments about the CIA, to which Keane agreed.
The Joint Chiefs' intelligence directorate, called J-2, and the Defense Intelligence Agency have 61 people who work Iraq exclusively, Keane said. They are supposed to have 156. So they're sitting below 50 percent strength in the entire Pentagon on Iraq intelligence.
"We are not mapping the networks," Keane said. "What I mean by that is, in the theater, in Iraq, we don't have enough analysts to actually try to determine the insurgent and al Qaeda network. What is it, and how do you map it?
This is like detailed homicide work, detective work, putting the mosaic together." That entails tedious reading and sifting of interrogation reports, tactical operations, signals intercepts, other human intelligence reports, he said, along with captured documents.
The War Within Page 14