At the end of their conversations, the emir would be taken back to detention until their next meeting. Slowly, somewhat impossibly, a respect built that would later pay off. Toward the end of their meeting early that December, the emir addressed Graeme.
“You know,” he said matter-of-factly, “you’re a force of occupation, and don’t try to tell me differently. That’s how we see it—and you’re not welcome.” He explained to Graeme in his deliberate way that his guidance from the Koran was that he must resist the force of occupation for years—for generations even—if it threatened the faith and his way of life. He paused, as Graeme continued to listen. “We’ve watched you for three and a half years. We’ve discussed this in Syria, in Saudi, in Jordan, and in Iraq. And we have come to the conclusion that you do not threaten our way of life. Al Qaeda does.”
It was a remarkable breakthrough—and opened up possibilities for what effect the emir might have if freed. So during the final days of December 2006, when news from Iraq was dominated by the bungled hanging of Saddam Hussein, the Coalition released Abu Wail from prison—FSEC’s first strategic release. They released him without conditions. We needed him to be a credible member of Ansar in order to stir their thinking and divert their direction. Requiring him to meet with a westerner or to spy for us would put that in jeopardy. Regardless, we worried suspicious comrades might well kill him.
* * *
“Annie, another Christmas apart,” I wrote to her by e-mail. I was to spend the day in Afghanistan with our force and then after dark fly in one of our aircraft to Balad, arriving after midnight. Christmas Day was spent seeing parts of my force in Iraq, while Annie, with Sam home from college, followed their tradition of Christmas Eve dinner in a local Chinese restaurant. This was the third Christmas in a row that I was gone, and while she wasn’t alone, it had to be lonely.
“We never really expected this kind of thing at this stage in our lives,” my e-mail continued, “but I still believe we are doing what is our duty—as a team—to the nation and to the people we serve with. You know the frustration I feel when I see the packed malls and overfed greed of so many Americans. But when I meet in small posts in harm’s way with young Americans who believe in their cause and their duty—and who desperately need to see leaders who reflect the values and dedication they want in the people they follow—it is pretty easy to stand the separations with the quiet confidence we are living up to all the values we were raised to uphold.”
My thoughts were as much for me as they were for her, but Annie always seemed to understand what I was trying to say. For me, it meant staying forward deployed. And as hard as it was for her, Annie wouldn’t have had it otherwise. It was fundamental to the kind of leader I believed I should be. Being apart so long was painful, and she worried. But she was proud of me, and that meant everything.
By the time I wrote to Annie and thousands of other soldiers sent e-mails home or called families who missed them, President Bush had decided on a new strategy in Iraq, following months of review stretching back to the spring. During Christmas and the final days of 2006, he weighed the heavy decision of how many troops he would “surge” to Iraq as part of this new way forward. He eventually decided to send five army brigades that would primarily focus on Baghdad, and two Marine battalions to reinforce Anbar. The war in Iraq was about to hit an even higher register.
* * *
On the cusp of this expansion in Iraq, pressing developments on a different continent demanded my attention—and drew me to Addis Ababa.
On Christmas Eve 2006, Ethiopian troops had invaded neighboring Somalia, then riven by a civil war. Six months earlier, in June, the Islamic Courts Union, an umbrella group of Sharia courts and Islamic militant groups, claimed control of Mogadishu and most of southern Somalia. One of the main militant groups of the ICU, Al Shabab, or “the youth,” had developed increasing ties with Al Qaeda, largely through its charismatic founder, Aden Hashi Ayrow. We believed Al Shabab was sheltering some of Al Qaeda’s senior operatives, including Abu Taha al-Sudani, leader of Al Qaeda in East Africa, as well as a number of those behind the 1998 embassy bombings.
Although the Ethiopian operation was not a huge surprise—they invaded to suppress an insurgency they thought threatened eastern Ethiopia—American policy was poorly postured for what looked like a potential opportunity. As the Islamist rebels were forced to flee the Ethiopian forces, Al Qaeda operatives, on the run, would be more vulnerable and perhaps come into view long enough for us to target them.
With a small number of intelligence-collection assets, and the periodic assistance of American aircraft and ships, U.S. forces targeted the Al Qaeda leaders we could pinpoint, and pressured the others. It was sensitive, difficult business due to our limited access into Somalia. Over the coming months, the United States expanded its capacity to both find and target Al Qaeda leaders in Somalia who had previously eluded us. As the United States relied on a good rapport with the Ethiopians, my team and I visited Addis Ababa repeatedly to do the slow, deliberate work of building a relationship with them. Most instructive for me, as my position increasingly required forging partnerships with other countries, was the Ethiopians’ frank skepticism toward U.S. intentions and reliability, echoed on my trips to Islamabad and Sanaa.
These trips, sometimes to Addis Ababa and back in a day, were typical of the final two years of my command. The constant movement around the region was often choreographed down to the minute. My command team—which evolved as original members were promoted to new jobs and replaced by men of equal talent—spent flights hunched over e-mails on their Toughbook laptops, talked through secure in-flight voice links and VTCs to headquarters on the ground, wore civilian clothing, and kept Ambien close at hand. From the look of our group as we’d gather preflight in the dark outside the SAR or stumble back in, exhausted, a few days later, our travels came to be known as the Pain Train.
* * *
Just after 9:00 P.M. eastern time on January 10, 2007, President Bush stood at a podium in the White House library and spoke frankly about the course of the war in Iraq. He admitted the many challenges the mission faced and announced a “new way forward.” Bush described the way in which troops would change how they operated, embracing counterinsurgency tenets. Most controversially, he announced that he would surge nearly thirty thousand troops, most of them to secure Baghdad. It was a courageous decision taken at a time when currents of opinion were flowing strongly in the other direction.
The physical impact of these troops on Baghdad, and all of Iraq, would become clear only in the months ahead. But by the time these troops began to arrive early that spring, Iraqis had experienced nearly four years of violence and uncertainty and were, by and large, exhausted.
For Sunnis, the future was fraught with danger. Fearing the disenfranchisement that came with Saddam’s fall, de-Baathification, and the emergence of an Iranian-influenced Shia-majority national government, many had joined an insurgency increasingly dominated by Zarqawi’s extremism. At first, they thought they could succeed—expel the Americans and reclaim rule of Iraq from the Shia. But after years of struggle, prospects for doing so looked bleak—and with the increasingly vicious onslaught by the Shia militias, the U.S.-led Coalition appeared less like an enemy and more like a necessary protection against the Shia death squads and a vital arbiter in the struggle for power in Iraq. The emerging Sunni awakening movements reflected this calculation, and America signaling its commitment with the surge reinforced it.
The size of the surge force was no more important than its quality. By late 2006, the U.S. forces were the best we had yet put on the field. The troops in, or returning to, theater were increasingly experienced and wise. They included commanders like Sean MacFarland and Mike Kershaw, whose brigade ultimately tamed the Baghdad suburb of Yusufiyah, the southern belt that had been an AQI sanctuary.
Against all of these positive intangibles, however, we as a nation and a
force were undeniably tired as well.
* * *
During his televised address to the nation in which he announced the “new way forward” in Iraq, Bush spoke provocatively about the threat posed to the Iraqi project by Iranian proxies. “Succeeding in Iraq also requires defending its territorial integrity and stabilizing the region in the face of extremist challenges,” he said. The Syrian and Iranian “regimes are allowing terrorists and insurgents to use their territory to move in and out of Iraq. Iran is providing material support for attacks on American troops. We will disrupt the attacks on our forces. We’ll interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria. And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq.”
For nearly three months, TF 714 had been targeting the Iranian proxies President Bush spoke of. The previous fall, General Casey had asked us to start targeting specific Shia extremists, particularly Iranian-backed “Special Groups.” At the time, as Robert Gates explained that winter, there were four vectors of violence in the country: attacks from the Sunni insurgency directed at the Coalition and Iraqi government; terroristic attacks by Al Qaeda against Shia and western targets; sectarian conflict between the Sunni and Shia; and Shia-on-Shia violence, largely nonideological power struggles in southern Iraq.
Shia organizations like Jaish al-Mahdi, or JAM, tiptoed along a line of opposition to MNF-I and made an uneasy truce with the status quo. Beneath the surface, however, were more sinister elements supported by Iran’s secretive Quds Force. These elements operated an aggressive, seemingly unconstrained network that funneled material, including the explosively formed projectile IEDs, known as EFPs, that were devastating Coalition forces. They also provided training and advice to Iraqi Special Groups.
After seeing how Green had responded after I made them own TF 16, I thought it would be a mistake to graft the Shia target set onto an existing task force, diluting its focus. So I decided to create a new task force: Task Force 17 (TF 17) would focus entirely on the Shia target set. As with many things, it was easier said than done. We now had double the mission but not twice the ISR, helicopters, or detention facilities. We’d beg or borrow what we could, but the new mission would inevitably put Task Forces 16 and 17 in competition over the same resources.
The sympathy and active support that hard-line, Iranian-backed Shia militias enjoyed from Iraqi officials at the highest levels meant our raids sent us wading into a murky world of politics. On January 11, 2007, the day after President Bush’s speech, TF 714 forces, acting on short notice, raided an Iranian facility in Irbil in northern Iraq, aiming to capture Mohammad Jafari, who we believed was guiding Quds Force activities in Iraq. Instead, our force detained five Iranians, later called “the Irbil Five,” judged to be members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). The men were interrogated and ultimately held for the next two and a half years, pawns in a determined diplomatic struggle with Iran. Nine days later, perhaps as revenge, one of the most notorious Shia Special Groups staged a perfidious, goading attack.
In the early evening of January 20 a line of eight SUVs with thickly tinted windows stopped at the outermost gate of the Provincial Joint Coordination Center in Karbala, Iraq. Iraqis and Americans manned the small outpost and lived alongside one another. At the outpost’s front gate, witnesses later said, some of the men inside the SUVs wore U.S. Army uniforms and flashed fake identification. They were allowed in, and the vehicles rumbled past a further series of gates. Once inside the inner courtyard of the camp, roughly a dozen militants bounded out. Some beelined it to the American soldiers’ quarters and began firing their weapons through the doors. Others set fire to the American Humvees. They killed one American in his room and gravely wounded three others. Within minutes, the attack was over and the assailants had sped away into the evening. No Iraqis on the base were harmed or, according to the Americans, showed any alarm, raising suspicions about their involvement. As the Humvees billowed jet smoke into the sky above the courtyard, the Americans came to the sickening realization: The attackers had captured four Americans.
Later that night, Iraqi policemen who had given chase after the convoy passed one of their checkpoints came upon five of the SUVs. They were parked, doors ajar, about 20 miles from Karbala, in the neighboring province of Babil. Inside, the four Americans were found handcuffed and shot, some point-blank in the chest, others in the limbs or head. Three were already dead, and the fourth, with a gunshot wound to the head, died as one of the Iraqi policeman attempted CPR. The attackers had stripped the men of identification. But in the dark, flashlights illuminated the name of one of the perished Americans: a young lieutenant, less than two years out of West Point, had in his final moments scrawled his name into the film of Iraqi dust covering the SUV he had been left to die in.
We couldn’t immediately identify who had directed or conducted the operation. I was determined we would find out.
| CHAPTER 15 |
The Long War
February 2007–June 2008
On February 10, 2007, General George Casey turned over command of MNF-I to General Dave Petraeus. Because I avoided public events in Iraq and Afghanistan while commanding TF 714, I didn’t attend the morning ceremony. But I flew down in time to say good-bye to General Casey before he left the country. We met after the ceremony in a guesthouse he was using before departing for the States. After two and a half years together in Iraq, a bond had been forged between us through countless difficult moments. Ever balanced and upbeat, Casey expressed his appreciation for all our force had done. I presented him with a small memento from TF 714.
It was important for me to communicate my appreciation for his stoicism and support of my team. We both knew that in the years ahead he’d receive less credit and more blame than he deserved, but that often went with the territory. He had been rock solid—the epitome of a professional throughout his time in command.
A month later, John Abizaid ended his tenure as commander of CENTCOM, having served for nearly four years at the post. A narrative arose of a fresh start after failed leadership. Some press and pundits picked up on the theme as grist for the media mill.
That was a simplistic binary to which I couldn’t subscribe. I tended not to personalize mistakes, as there were plenty to go around. I certainly had made my share. In hindsight, the strategy we’d all been executing was insufficient. John had long argued that the very presence of Americans in the country had instigated the violence, providing a nationalistic insurgency with a raison d’être. Based on my experience, this was hard to dispute. He felt that by limiting our footprint and accelerating our withdrawal, we could avoid producing antibodies. Similarly, George Casey’s strategy was to quickly raise the capacity of Iraqis to secure and govern their country. What few accurately anticipated was the devastating sectarianism that quickly contorted the conflict from a largely one-directional Sunni antigovernment fight to what became a brutal civil war. In the end, the surreal levels of violence that sectarianism produced were too much for the Iraqi government, which needed American force to subdue it.
Could things have been different? Of course. We learned and improved, but in February 2007, we had to navigate from where we were, not from where we wished we were.
Both John Abizaid and George Casey had guided the effort through difficult times, and both had given unfailing, critical support to TF 714. The incredibly lethal targeting machine that Dave Petraeus would soon have at his disposal would not have existed without their guidance. As I saw the often-simplistic criticism directed at them, I remembered what retired General Fred Franks, the one-legged general who led a corps in the first Gulf War, had once told me.
“Remember, no matter what you do during your service, or what you accomplish, your last interaction with the Army,” he said quietly, “will be one of rejection.”
For years I mistook Franks’s comment as one of bitterness. Over time I realized he was
admonishing me against looking for esteem in the wrong places. And he was reminding me whose respect was truly important.
* * *
That month also marked the end of Sean MacFarland’s tour commanding in Ramadi. I had returned regularly to the embattled city over the previous nine months, but during one visit I was struck by the feedback I received.
“Ethan,” I asked the SEAL squadron commander I knew so well, “how is it going now?”
“Sir,” he said passionately, “the change is eye-watering.”
I cocked my head. “In what way? Good or bad?”
“Eye-watering good, sir,” he said. Ethan outlined the changes he and his SEALs were seeing up close. “Colonel MacFarland and his guys are taking Ramadi back.”
The eye-watering changes there had come at a steep price. Five hundred of Sean’s troops were wounded and eighty-five of their comrades died in the fight to retake Ramadi.
As Sean and his troops left, having pried back the fingers of AQI’s grip on the population, TF 17 was about to execute a mission whose intelligence harvest would, in the right hands, drive a growing wedge between the Maliki government and the Shia extremists who influenced it.
My Share of the Task Page 38