My Share of the Task

by General Stanley McChrystal

  I sympathized with the concern that emphasizing the role of foreign fighters could be a way to unintentionally sidestep the reality that Iraqis were, in large numbers, joining the insurgency motivated by earthly grievances, not religious jihad. Especially early in the war, we in TF 714 and much of the rest of the Coalition problematically used “AQI” as a catchall designation for any Sunni group that attacked Americans or the Iraqi government. In truth, more than fifty named insurgent groups fought at one time or another. These distinctions were important but also could be misleading. By numbers, AQI never constituted the majority of the insurgency. But AQI usurped the insurgency’s leadership and gave it direction and shape—often through sheer intimidation. So while in 2004 and 2005 an Iraqi fighting for a nominally nationalist group did not consider himself a card-carrying member of AQI, his group was fighting within Zarqawi’s strategic framework. The insurgent groups were like local gangs, while AQI—richer, crueler, and better linked across the country—was the mafia.

  No major MNF-I orders or initiatives flowed from that November meeting at Balad, but our discussions continued. Unfortunately, the thinking at our respective headquarters continued to diverge. Around the time we met with George Casey and his staff, a month before Tom D. and Tres stood up our JIATF to combat foreign influence in Iraq, MNF-I assigned its own Baghdad-based JIATF to target “former regime elements”—essentially old Saddam apparatchiks.

  “The fat, old, jowly Baathist generals holding meetings in hotel lobbies in Amman and Damascus are not controlling the insurgency,” John Christian lamented after the meeting, voicing our collective frustration. “They are not the instigators of violence.” Nor were they the levers to success, despite some of their aggrandizing claims to control the spigot of insurgent attacks.

  Although disappointed, I appreciated it was an antidote to groupthink for two major headquarters in the same theater to come up with such different assessments. And we could not fault Casey’s staff for eyeing us as a kind of special-interest group. TF 714’s global mission was almost entirely directed toward Al Qaeda and its close affiliates. So in Iraq we focused on AQI and its terrorist allies like Ansar al-Sunnah. That narrow lens could produce assessments that inflated Al Qaeda’s role. And because threat measurements guided resource allocation, TF 714 had an interest in portraying Al Qaeda as the central enemy. As TF 714’s growing credibility gave us greater sway in the war’s decisions, I knew we needed to maintain a culture of self-scrutiny and humility, lest we have it wrong. Our divergent outlooks also told me our integration and communication with MNF-I was too weak. This we could, and would, labor to fix. At the conclusion of the meeting, while I felt his staff had it wrong, I sensed General Casey remained unconvinced but open-minded.

  * * *

  Every Friday that I was in Iraq, I flew from Balad to Baghdad to meet with General Casey. Periodically, in addition to my operations officer, T.T. (or his replacement, Kurt Fuller), and Mike Flynn, I brought two members of TF 16. I wanted Casey to see the knowledge and commitment that defined the task force.

  Most of my travels around Iraq were at night. But flying over Baghdad every week for more than four years gave me a time-lapse-photography-like view of a city as it convulsed from the relative calm of 2004 to the dark days of 2006 and 2007 and settled back into a seething equilibrium in 2008. In January 2005, the streets we flew over were tagged with reminders of that pivotal juncture in Iraq. Colorful election posters and banners with flashy Arabic text hung alongside wanted posters for Zarqawi, with tip-line phone numbers running below his cold face staring out under a black kufi.

  Since taking over, George Casey’s two strategic priorities had been to build up Iraq’s security forces and to support the emergence of a legitimate government. According to this plan, midwifing a new Iraqi government required that Casey secure the three Iraqi votes scheduled that year: in January to elect an assembly to draft the permanent constitution, in October to ratify that constitution, and again in December to vote for the government that would serve under that constitution.

  We were increasingly focused on integrating our efforts with the larger MNF-I objectives. So in the lead-up to the January 30, 2005, election, we were doing everything we could to contain Al Qaeda’s plans to undermine them—which Zarqawi announced a week before the election. On January 23, Zarqawi released an audiotape calling democracy heresy. Eight years earlier, while the two were locked away together in Jordan’s Suwaqah Prison, Abu Mohammad al-Maqdisi, a leading ideologue of the jihadist movement, had mentored a younger Zarqawi. Maqdisi made his name in the 1990s, in part through an innovative treatise that argued democracy constituted not just a separate political process but a religion unto itself. For true believers, then, voting was a veritable act of heresy.

  Zarqawi now invoked this logic as religious top cover for what were surely more clear-eyed strategic concerns. His sectarian scheme relied on keeping Sunnis paranoid and fighting. This wasn’t hard: Whether or not Sunnis voted, the elections were going to entrench the majority Shia in power in Baghdad. But Zarqawi needed Sunnis fully disenfranchised—to make the specter of Shia domination more fearsome and to prevent insurgents from getting the idea that integrating into the political process might have its benefits. So, joined by other hard-line insurgent groups, Al Qaeda in Iraq prepared to unleash hell on the polling sites and the vulnerable queues of Iraqi voters. Its online warning that week was ominous—and essentially an admission that Zarqawi would target Sunnis. “Take care not to go near the centers of heresy and abomination . . . the election booths,” it threatened. “The martyrs’ wedding is at hand.”

  Violence on election day was far more muted than Zarqawi’s histrionics portended. Insurgents overran no election sites. But their threats were enough to keep many Sunnis home; others boycotted in genuine protest of the new government, which would freeze them into a minority role. Only 3,775 people voted in all of Anbar Province—2 percent of the population. Sunnis secured a mere 17 of the new National Assembly’s 275 seats.

  * * *

  Within the military, the elections had crystallized the increasing competition over resources, which had grown more acute that winter. The conventional forces understandably sought to employ intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) aircraft, like UAVs, to monitor polling sites in the days preceding the vote. We had asked for control of these assets in order to ramp up an offensive effort to preempt AQI’s attacks. We sought a balanced approach of using the ISR to pressure AQI’s network up until the day before the elections, then shifting them to monitor the voting areas.

  Although not the first occasion for passionate competition between special and conventional operations over select resources like ISR, the January elections foreshadowed an extended debate over the best use of what were always scarce, highly useful tools. For relatively new assets, like the Predator UAV, demand continued to soar as more units identified valid, innovative ways to employ them.

  The same applied to us. We first tended to use the vantage offered by ISR to observe ongoing operations, which was valuable but not game changing. But by 2004, we had integrated ISR into F3EA, learning to weave together information from detainees and human sources with expanding communications intelligence and then use aerial assets to build an understanding of a target’s behavior and potential links to the insurgency. This “target development” lay at the heart of the F3EA process and enabled vastly faster and more successful raids. So that our strike forces could be used each night, we employed part of our ISR each day to develop future targets and used another chunk to support ongoing raids. After asking our staff to analyze the likely impact of increasing our ISR assets, I briefed General Casey that if our ISR capacity were doubled, our output, or the number of enemy targets we could hit, would more than double: Since Big Ben we had organized and trained ourselves to get more out of every hour of ISR flight time. With consistent support from Generals Casey, Abizaid, and Brown, the I
SR available to TF 714 increased and my claim proved true.

  I knew, however, that much of the military resented our disproportionate piece of the ISR pie. While not apologetic for our share, I reminded our teams that we needed, day in and day out, to prove why we deserved these tools. I used the O&I one afternoon that winter to make the point.

  “Okay, so we’ve got twenty-four hours in the day,” I said, addressing a member of the operations staff. “What is the maximum amount of time the plane, as a piece of machinery, can be in the air? Forget the human component—let’s find out many hours it needs for maintenance and refueling.”

  “Yes, sir,” he answered, and told me how long it took to refuel and rekit one of the drones.

  “So out of the remaining hours, how many can we push the live video feed to our operations center?”

  The officer knew immediately and answered.

  “All right,” I said. “So my directive is simple. If it’s not flying and pushing the feed that many hours, every day, I need to know why.”

  This tone was becoming familiar to those in the force: As 2004 ground into 2005, I was leaning hard on TF 16 to ratchet up the number of raids we conducted. In the O&I and personal interactions with our force, I’d articulate the need to pressure AQI as much and as rapidly as possible, before it could expand its hold on the Iraqi people. Operators understood how sacred their lives were to us, but they also understood the importance of their role in a fight that would be won by slim margins.

  Our increasing operational tempo prompted me to send a more sober message to General Casey. Termed a Personal For, or P4, it was designed for point-to-point communications between senior officers, avoiding the normal route through staffs. I used these communiqués sparingly but did so when I felt it was important my message not be lost or delayed. As we increased the pace and precision of our targeting, we correspondingly captured more and higher-ranking members of Al Qaeda in Iraq. Yet our capacity to interrogate them lagged. In my message, I reemphasized my concern that we suffered from a shortage of trained interrogators. I told him flatly that I could not ethically send my force on dangerous raids to capture enemy leaders if we could not adequately question them. Without more interrogators, I wrote, TF 714’s ability to strike targets was limited.

  The interrogator shortage wasn’t George Casey’s fault or a problem he could solve, and I knew that. He was one step up the pipeline from me. The problem lay in the slowness of the government bureaucracy to adapt to the requirements of the war on terror, particularly in Iraq. Half a dozen corners of the military—from the Pentagon to the services to training centers—had a part in producing and fielding a professional interrogator, so following up on urgent manpower requests often felt like punching a cloud. On 9/11, our shortage was understandable. By 2005, it was indefensible. At wit’s end and desperate for a way to help Casey get us the needed personnel, I wanted my stark message to be ammunition he could use to press for more interrogators. In the years ahead our shortages decreased, but the situation was never close to good enough.

  * * *

  By spring, it appeared elections would do little to bring unity to Iraq—and were in fact energizing the causes of violence. It took until May for the new government to be seated, under Ibrahim al-Jafari, a Shiite. The Ministry of Defense went to a Sunni, but the Ministry of the Interior went to a Shiite believed to be a leader of the Badr Brigade, a revenge-minded militia linked to Iraq’s largest Islamist Shia party. Before long, the Ministry of the Interior—whose police and commando units, unlike the Iraqi army, functioned independently of the Coalition’s control—began expunging Sunnis from its roster and putting uniforms on Badr militiamen, who used their badges and guns against Sunnis and ex-Baathists. Surely to Zarqawi’s delight, the government’s sectarian direction confirmed Sunnis’ worst fears. He and his insurgents appeared an ever more necessary buffer.

  Throughout it all, General Casey was a disciplined, methodical thinker. His was not a mind that turned like a weather vane based on the last briefing he had received, only to turn back the other way. TF 714’s intelligence conclusions and reasoning suited his temperament, as our industrial grind gathered information from ground actions, detainees, documents, cyber operations, liaisons, our JIATFs, and other nations’ police and intelligence. Although never perfect, there was a special value to the volume of intelligence, as it fostered a more well-rounded view that a single source or a biased samples were less likely to corrupt.

  By May 2005, which alone saw more than sixty suicide bombings, Casey was increasingly convinced that the foreign-fighter flow was a strategic vulnerability. He had decided the Coalition needed to conduct major operations along Iraq’s western border, in an attempt to shut down the ratlines of foreign fighters. The biggest of those ran down the western Euphrates River valley, connecting Syria to Baghdad. Al Qaeda had rooted itself throughout the valley, setting up way stations and safe houses in rural desert compounds and riverside cities, from Al Qaim down through Rawa, Haditha, Hit, Ramadi, and Fallujah. I believed that as part of a larger MNF-I effort, our task force could play an effective role. The smaller size and greater agility of TF 16 enabled us to swiftly shift our focus to this contested waterway, pressuring parts of the enemy network conventional forces could not. I offered to Casey that our strike teams and the focus of our targeting apparatus shift to be part of the effort out west.

  But I worried our efforts would only be decisive if the Coalition went full tilt. “Conventional forces have got to do their part,” I told Casey. “We can only be part of the solution.”

  He agreed and said we would contribute to a significant effort to reinforce the conventional forces that, through no fault of their own, were hopelessly overstretched along Iraq’s western border. The Marines who owned much of the terrain were forced to rely on the Iraqi Department of Border Enforcement to manage the “forts” that dotted the border in Anbar and Najaf provinces. That spring, the Coalition was building new forts in these provinces, planning to have thirty-two installations facing Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Jordan. But many of the posts were deserted. A handful of chronically underequipped Iraqis—with little ability to check the flow of men, trucks, and cars—manned others. Many of the abandoned posts that pocked the desert border got most use from nomadic shepherds, who commandeered the buildings as temporary mangers for their sheep.

  Soon after meeting with Casey, I sent General Abizaid a message, explaining my decision to support this push out west. These operations will be riskier, I explained, because our teams will be a greater distance from our bases. Although I worded my message in terser military-speak, I knew my old friend would understand the stakes. Fewer conventional forces exist to act as quick reaction forces if operations go sour. I’m going to send us out there in greater numbers, and I think it is going to be very dangerous. I think it is going to be bloody. And so I am steeling everybody for greater casualties. Abizaid called me when he got the message. We skipped the usual joking back and forth that started most of our conversations. John thanked me for the forewarning and said he concurred with the decision.

  As we considered how to unseat Al Qaeda from the western Euphrates and dampen its ratlines, I became convinced that we would need more TF 714 forces in Iraq. To supplement what we then had—a Green squadron and smaller detachments of Rangers and SEALs—I decided to deploy a second squadron of Green to Iraq and bring some of our SEALs and aviation from Afghanistan. I did not make the decision lightly. In the year and a half since I’d taken command, I had already increased our forces, as well as expanded our liaisons across the region. We were nearing the highest deployment pace we could sustain. In a year, an individual TF 714 operator spent four months in combat, doing near-nightly operations; four months on the short tether of alert, on call the entire time; and four months recovering from or preparing for deployment, sometimes overseas if he was pulled out to serve as a liaison. By 2005, the men had been at this for fou
r straight years. That cadence was sustainable but couldn’t be taken for granted; now, for a number of months as we surged, our pace would become an unsustainable sprint. I knew that sprint was the only way we could help arrest the deteriorating situation in Iraq.

  In truth, our need to increase forces required no special insight. It was almost mathematical. The much more difficult—and far more crucial—challenge came after I made that calculation. Alongside the other leaders of TF 714, I needed to get the force to believe, as I did, that this push would be decisive—and thus worth the costs.

  I convened the top commanders of TF 714 and TF 16 in Iraq to explain why the surge was necessary. Kurt Fuller, a bulky, fox-sharp Oklahoman and the newly arrived TF 714 operations officer, was there, as were Mike Flynn, Jody Nacy, and the top leaders of TF 16, at that time led by Colonel John Christian. The meeting wasn’t easy. As I explained the campaign plan I proposed, the Green leaders sat with still faces. Only their eyes moved, alternating between me and the whiteboard where I wrote and drew a map of Iraq. Until this point, TF 714 had drawn up targeting decks, not maps: We executed missions; we did not wage campaigns.

  “Listen,” I said, turning from the whiteboard to the still faces. “The western Euphrates is damn near occupied. Look around. I don’t see anyone else who can do what we can do out there.” I told them about my conversations with General Casey, and I explained why I thought it would work.

  I sat down at the table and asked for their thoughts. They expressed sentiments held within the unit that were apparent over the next few months. Many felt other Coalition forces were not pulling their weight in Anbar and that the campaign would be increasingly conventional and therefore not our kind of fight. They had concerns this emergency setup—two squadrons forward and one back—would become permanent once the surge dislodged those squadrons from their traditional cycle, ultimately depleting the force. As I had to John Abizaid, they expressed concerns that in the further reaches of the desert, they were dangerously far from medevacs and quick reaction forces. They were professional but candid—as I needed them to be.