My Share of the Task

by General Stanley McChrystal

  Sean explained he would not have his forces live concentrated in a large forward operating base, but he would nest them among the people in smaller combat outposts (COPs) spaced throughout the city. He spoke of the importance of standing up a police force drawn from local men. Keen to resuscitate a tribal uprising—undone six months earlier by dissension and a meticulous AQI assassination program—Sean knew he needed to provide American backing and protection to tribal leaders willing to band together against Al Qaeda.

  “So this is going to take some time,” he said. He estimated around nine months.

  “Sean, if it takes you that long, we’ve got a real problem,” I said. “You’ve got to get on that horse and ride.”

  He did just that.

  The full story of how Sean and his Iraqi partners turned Ramadi is theirs to tell. But on every idea Sean shared with me before arriving, he drove hard, and his team made them work. Like all counterinsurgency, it was slow, difficult, and deadly work.

  Perhaps most important, Sean understood the indispensability of fielding a local police force that could target Al Qaeda, and the need for a strong Iraqi partner to lead the aggressive recruitment effort. The man Sean quickly identified as that partner—Sheikh Abdul Sattar Abu Risha—seemingly came out of central casting for a desert chieftain, with a thin face and falconlike eyes. Although he belonged to the powerful Albu Risha tribe of the Dulaim confederation, in the normal pecking order he was a third-tier sheikh. But Ramadi was not normal—most of the local government and higher-ranking tribal leaders had fled the violence.

  As was the case so often, Sattar was motivated by a number of frustrations. As he realized AQI was his real enemy, not the Americans, whom he reimagined as his guests, pride motivated him to fight Al Qaeda. But so too did baser motives: He sat atop a number of lucrative criminal enterprises in Ramadi that were threatened by AQI incursions.

  In any case, he was the partner Sean needed, and on September 9, Sheikh Abdul Sattar formally announced that the “Awakening” was officially under way. Eight days later, on behalf of twenty-five of Anbar’s thirty-one tribes, Sattar wrote to Nouri al-Maliki requesting money to fund and arm his tribal coalition to fight Al Qaeda. Maliki had agreed (perhaps because Ramadi was uniformly Sunni and so he was confident armed locals could target only AQI and not Shiites) and the Ramadi police recruits soon went on the Iraqi government payroll.

  As the sheikh’s movement was gaining momentum, our task force commander for Anbar, Commander Ethan,* came to see Sean.

  In command of a TF 714 SEAL squadron after gutsy, distinguished tours in Afghanistan, Ethan was on the vanguard of a growing trend within our force to be better linked to the battlespace owners, and worked to incorporate—and sometimes subordinate—his targeting teams to the conventional commanders. Bald, with a thick beard that gave him a slightly messianic look well suited to his passionate approach to leadership, Ethan came to Ramadi keen to see the city holistically, beyond his aperture of direction-action raids.

  “Sir, what’s your center of gravity?” Ethan asked Sean MacFarland in his polite but direct manner.

  “Well, it’s actually Sheikh Sattar,” Sean replied.

  “Right. We’ve got to keep that guy alive.”

  At Ethan’s suggestion, the brigade took an American M1 Abrams tank and parked it in front of Sheikh Sattar’s house. In addition to the protection offered by its menacing barrel, the tank itself came to be a set piece in the larger drama of Ramadi—and a bellwether for changing Sunni sentiment. At first, Sheikh Sattar did not like having an American tank in front of his house, and at his request, the Americans replaced it with an Iraqi one. When the Iraqi tank unit eventually left Ramadi, however, an American tank again sat in front of his house. By this time, however, Sattar and his American partners had become more credible, and the people around Ramadi now saw the American tank as evidence of the sheikh’s clout over the Americans. As the tribes turned, a liability was now a token of power.

  The task force’s experience across Iraq increasingly resembled what was occurring in Ramadi—which was the first all-of-military counterinsurgency fight in the war. There, conventional and special operations coordinated, and it was a case study in the application of surgical strikes in support of the first two stages of what became known as the “clear-hold-build” process of counterinsurgency. Evolving from our first role of targeting Former Regime Elements, then AQI senior leaders, TF 714 was now heavily partnered with conventional forces and other government agencies. Our network enabled us to see and understand the broader situation rapidly, and our intentionally decentralized culture allowed us to act rapidly.

  * * *

  What Ethan and Sean had done with the tank in Ramadi, General Casey looked to do from his strategic perch: nurture and marshal the promising but fragile reconciliation movements. Casey understood that the dynamics needed to change. Simply grinding harder against the dual Sunni and Shia threats would not suffice. To this end, he found a deft weapon in my old friend Graeme Lamb, who arrived to Iraq the same week Sheikh Sattar announced the Awakening was under way in Ramadi.

  Almost immediately upon Graeme’s arrival to be his deputy commanding general, Casey asked him to pursue strategic reconciliation—the process to bring opposition groups, even those currently fighting, toward a durable political solution. Graeme would help marshal “the Awakening,” which was not in its early stages nearly as monolithic nor as Damascene as the name conveyed. In the beginning, the Sunnis did not gather in a caucus and declare a national position.

  General Casey’s direction to Graeme was not surprising to me. Although not much noticed in writings about this period, George Casey had been beating the drum to do counterinsurgency, often called COIN, and do it well. At the end of 2005, he had created the “COIN Academy” in Taji, to root out the conventional mindset and jittery tactics that sowed enmity in the people and inflamed insurgencies. Sean MacFarland’s soldiers cited its teachers’ precepts during the early stages of their immersive approach to Ramadi.

  Shortly after meeting with Casey in September, Graeme came to visit me at Balad. I met him on the tarmac, and although he entered Iraq at its bleakest moment yet and had been handed a hard assignment, he appeared fresh and upbeat as he decamped the helo. After a two-year hiatus from Iraq, he was freed of the peculiar guilt that gnaws at a soldier like Lamb who, when stuck in garrison, can come to feel like a charlatan as wars are fought without him. After a bear hug, we walked across the pavement toward TF 714’s big brown hangar.

  Lamb, a Scot, was a rare soldier and comrade. His default pose, with forearms folded across his chest, erect stance, dark eyes, and latent tenacity gave him the air of a nineteenth-century bare-knuckle boxer. Despite his protestations otherwise, Graeme read deeply, but with a sort of utilitarian drive, finding and then rereading a few books—Hart’s biography of William Tecumseh Sherman, Junger’s Storm of Steel, and Rousseau’s The Social Contract—turning their heavily dog-eared pages into handbooks for fighting and leading and living. He plumbed the past for guidance, and it gave him a stoic appreciation for history’s hard truths. Where the American military could produce soldiers who lapsed into earnest, jargon-filled bullet points, Lamb could offer profanity-laced parables. His explanations had academic nuance but were tinged by his Scottish brogue and often infused with a Churchillian vocabulary—we’ll give it the ol’ . . . His delivery contributed to his mystique, as did a certain darkness. In a way few others did, especially Americans newer to these nasty small wars, Graeme, a veteran not only of Basra but also of Afghanistan and the Troubles in Northern Ireland, conveyed an intimate appreciation for Hobbes’s view of man.

  As we entered our hangar and walked past tables and screens, Graeme said hello to the many familiar faces. Since he had finished commanding in Basra in December 2003, the British special forces had become full-fledged and highly valued members of Task Force 16. In addition to their w
ork down south, they had been invaluable in suppressing the Baghdad car-bomb networks since mid-2005, when we emptied much of our forces out of central Iraq to fight up in Al Qaim. Without the Brits keeping the insurgent cells in Baghdad under pressure, we feared the insurgents would simply relocate away from our push on the Euphrates, and the effort would do nothing more than move mercury on a table. As a former troop and squadron commander in the SAS and, later, commander of all British special forces, “Lambo” was a beloved member of their tribe. From his emeritus perch, he had remained a close observer of our task force.

  Inside the SAR, we chatted for a bit and got down to business. Graeme explained the concept for establishing a cell that would pursue strategic reconciliation. Put simply, Graeme proposed talking to the most violent of our enemies to see if we could nudge their thinking.

  In parsing the different “types” of enemy we faced, Graeme spoke of these groups existing along a spectrum from “reconcilables” to “irreconcilables.” While the extremist edges of both the Sunni and Shia combatants might fall into the latter category, most of both branches fell into the former. In between sat the government of Iraq—or those actors and groups either assisting the new Iraqi project or at least not actively resisting it. Certain groups—namely, the jihadist wing of the Sunni insurgency and the Iranian proxies on the Shia end—could not be reconciled to the Coalition project. But the rest might be persuaded, through threats or enticements, to move toward the political center. While others might have spoken with this nuance before, Graeme’s language of reconcilables and irreconcilables soon permeated the rest of the Coalition. His terms helped us conceptualize—and visualize, in what we called the Squeeze Chart—how these groups might be split or how they might be redirected. He was fond of reminding skeptics that Clausewitz hadn’t finished the sentence when he argued war was “not an independent phenomenon, but the continuation of politics by different means.” “And to politics it must return,” Graeme added.

  Even so, Graeme remained an advocate for relentless targeting. As the Coalition targeted insurgents ever more effectively, they would either back into a corner and fight to the death, or they would come toward daylight. Graeme’s reconciliation program would be the latter choice, a choice made more appealing if they feared the alternative. Graeme proposed finding the groups just shy of the most extreme poles on the spectrum and convincing them that even if they didn’t want to align with the American or Iraqi government, it was in their interest not to be allied with the irreconcilables. The key would be to feel for the fissures between the groups, and rip.

  Linking our targeting efforts with Graeme’s strategic engagement—which operated under a few names but eventually took the name Force Strategic Engagement Cell, or FSEC—would further redefine the “precision” we aspired to achieve with our targeting. In this context, precision did not just mean killing or capturing targeted individuals and leaving the houses or civilians around them unharmed. Rather, these precise actions would need to bring about desirable second- and third-order effects by moving certain groups’ thinking or behavior in the right direction.

  While it sounded logical, what Lamb proposed would be extremely controversial, especially within TF 714. Many of the hard-line leaders Graeme would propose releasing were those whom my men had spent years of their lives trying to capture, losing limbs and friends in the process. Graeme’s program meant setting them free in the hope that, once convinced, they could be more useful on the outside by altering the calculus of their former comrades in a way that benefited us. It was a tough case to make, and without my support and that of those under me, his project would be stillborn.

  I agreed on the spot to lend members of TF 714 so that he could staff the cell. I did so in part because I knew and trusted Graeme. I also felt Graeme’s concept was a necessary tack. By that fall of 2006, I felt the dynamics needed to change were we to succeed. Simply getting enemies talking could be a start.

  Graeme’s military career, from experiences as a soldier three decades earlier, had uniquely equipped him for the task at hand. Graeme’s first assignment as a young officer was to patrol the streets of West Belfast in 1973, during the height of the Troubles. During one of his later numerous tours in Northern Ireland, Graeme had to grit his teeth beneath his tam-o’-shanter and watch as men convicted in court of killing his mates sauntered by as free men, with sinister smiles as they pointed at him, their hands in the shapes of pistols, and snapped their thumbs down like hammers. The experiences armed Graeme with a longer view of how these wars are fought and how they end. Martin McGuinness, a convicted leader of the Irish Republican Army, had been notorious on the Belfast streets Graeme patrolled. Now, Graeme would remind his American counterparts, McGuinness had just finished a stint as Northern Ireland’s deputy minister of education.

  Graeme talked with a soldierly respect and even a certain sympathy when he described the need to understand our enemies’ beliefs and logic. And yet his tone could easily pivot from generous to menacing.

  “We can offer them a way out, we can show them daylight, yeah,” he said, “but if they don’t take it, we’ll put ’em in the fucking grave.”

  * * *

  With the war’s tectonics seemingly seized up, the domestic debate back in the United States grew in intensity. On Tuesday, November 7, during the midterm elections, the Democrats retook a majority in Congress. The vote was widely seen as a verdict on the Iraq war and the Bush administration’s handling of it.

  The day after the election, President Bush appeared in the East Room and announced that he and Secretary Rumsfeld had “agreed that the timing is right for new leadership at the Pentagon.” The president announced he would nominate Dr. Robert Gates for the vacant post. At the time, Gates was serving as president of Texas A&M, but he had been a career CIA man. By that month, many Americans judged the war to be dangerously close to failure. More Iraqi civilians died in October than in any other month of the war. One hundred seven Americans died, and nearly eight hundred were wounded. Upwards of one hundred thousand Iraqis were fleeing every month, mostly from the secular, educated, and moderate classes that had the means to get out. Confidence in Nouri al-Maliki’s ability to lift the country out of sectarian killing was perhaps at its all-time low. And yet the nascent Sunni Awakening was growing.

  The Pentagon and White House discussed competing courses of action. A continuation of the current strategy was an option, and reportedly some called for a rapid withdrawal of U.S. forces. Others argued for scaling up troop levels. But would additional forces, along with the Awakening, be enough to make a difference?

  As the administration debated and American support slid, Sunni insurgents did their best to keep the sectarian violence roiling. On Thanksgiving, Sunni insurgents exploded five car bombs into a dense crowd in Sadr City, while dropping shells into the Shiite slum and assaulting the Ministry of Health. All told, the day saw 202 Iraqis killed and another 250 wounded. It was the deadliest single attack of the war. Tragically, it would not hold that record for long.

  * * *

  “Sir,” I told Casey that fall, “we’re going to beat Al Qaeda. The leadership is cracking right now. We can feel it. I can’t prove it, but I can feel it.” Some of our assessment may have been wishful thinking—code for How many of these guys do we need to kill before they break? But there were also metrics behind my optimism—persistent targeting of AQI’s leadership, for example, had pushed younger, less experienced leaders into key positions. Adding to my confidence were a series of swift raids by TF 16 that had delivered a prime opportunity to divide—and potentially cripple—the Sunni insurgency.

  Toward the end of November, I sat and listened to M.S.—whose relentlessness and poise had been fundamental to the final stages of the Zarqawi hunt six months earlier—as she spoke in front of the whiteboard in a small room Task Force 16 used in the back of the bunker at Balad. In a series of raids that month, Task Force 16 had captur
ed most of Ansar al-Sunnah’s leadership, including at least ten of the organization’s topmost leaders—three national-level administrators, a founder of the group, and seven geographic emirs from Al Qaim to Baqubah to Tikrit. Pointing to a diagram of the enemy’s network, M.S. described each capture and the cumulatively crippling impact to the organization.

  To be convinced to reconcile, an enemy organization normally has to think it’s losing—or at least be convinced it cannot win. Decapitating the leadership of the organization, as we had just done, went a long way toward doing that. Graeme soon made these leaders, now in our custody, a focus of his efforts. Among other things, Graeme sought to slip a wedge into the fissure between Ansar al-Sunnah (AAS) and AQI.

  After offering sanctuary to Zarqawi and other Al Qaeda operatives who fled the American bombing runs in Afghanistan, AAS had adopted many of AQI’s tactics during the insurgency, including beheadings and wanton killing of civilians. Closest to home, two years earlier AAS had dispatched the Saudi suicide bomber into the mess-hall tent in Mosul. For years, Al Qaeda in Iraq had sought to formally bring Ansar al-Sunnah under its control. But, leery of Zarqawi, the group’s Kurdish leaders had reported through back channels to Al Qaeda’s leaders that Zarqawi—impious and power hungry—was not the man in propaganda reels, and that they had made a terrible choice staking their fortunes on him. Despite these persistent tensions, rumors had surfaced again that fall of a potential merger between the two groups.

  Graeme initially focused his time on a detainee, the religious emir of Ansar al-Sunnah, a man named Abu Wail. Every ten to fourteen days, Graeme had Abu Wail brought out of detention to talk with him. Graeme made sure the emir was allowed to change out of his orange jumpsuit, cleanse himself, and put on Iraqi robes. The guards would bring the emir into the room, unshackle him, and leave him alone with Graeme, who would be preparing tea to serve to the emir. As the door closed, a primal electricity would fill the small room, or even the larger Maude House salon where they met. In any other moment or place, the two men sitting there, separated by a table and two small glass cups of hot golden tea, would have attempted to kill each other. It was this mutual recognition—that Graeme had spent most of his life hunting men like Abu Wail and that, given half a chance, the emir would saw Graeme’s Scottish head off—that allowed them to have a conversation. Hard recognized hard. These were conversations that no United Nations technocrats or State Department diplomats, no matter how skillfully schooled, could have had.