PETRAEUS’S SO-CALLED COINdinistas—counterinsurgency acolytes throughout the military establishment—were ready to report what they saw in Afghanistan, problems as well as successes, because they wanted him to know what he was getting himself into. Petraeus had learned from experience that he needed his followers to help him assess the situation, refine plans, establish measures and metrics they all understood and then execute the plan.
There were several overarching problems. The Afghan government was incredibly corrupt. Moreover, many Afghan military units couldn’t, or wouldn’t, fight. Some of the NATO allies weren’t much better. And some U.S. Army units were clearly better than others when it came to conducting counterinsurgency operations, which could be hard to grasp for a nineteen-year-old who had joined the Army for the thrill of full-on combat. The frank assessments started pouring in less than an hour after Obama announced that he had nominated Petraeus to replace McChrystal as commander of the war in Afghanistan. First came a two-sentence e-mail from Douglas Ollivant, a former Army officer with a Ph.D. in political science, now serving as the senior civilian adviser for the CAAT in the eastern command sector in Afghanistan. Ollivant had worked closely with Petraeus during the surge in Iraq, when he was a lieutenant colonel: “Let me know what I can do. I guess I work for you again.”
Petraeus responded: “Top 10 insights/recommendations welcome, Doug. Thx!” Ollivant’s ideas about locating troops among the people and pushing decision making down to the battalion level became important tenets in Petraeus’s campaign in Iraq. When Ollivant got to the city in the fall of 2006, he was charged with drawing up a plan for securing Baghdad. One of his bosses at the time was then–Brigadier General John F. Campbell, assistant division commander of the unit commanding the Baghdad area. Not only was Ollivant working for Petraeus again in Afghanistan, he was also once again working for Campbell, who was commander of both the 101st Airborne Division and the Regional Command East, which covered the eastern provinces and the mountainous border.
In Iraq, Petraeus had encouraged Ollivant, five ranks beneath him, to bypass the normal chain of command and communicate directly with him. “You’re a very bright guy, and these are exceptional times. We’re going to get one last shot at this, and we need to make it really count—and you’re the planner for the main effort,” Petraeus wrote to him in an e-mail as the Iraq surge was commencing, emphasizing the importance of the citizens of Baghdad—“the human terrain”—as the most important terrain. “We’re putting it all on the line and we need to be cognizant of that. It’s not business as usual, as I’m sure you know.”
Ollivant, like Petraeus, was a soldier-scholar. He had the intellect and analytical skills to develop a theoretical framework for combat strategy. The two men also shared a passion for the art of soldiering. Ollivant had argued in an article in 2006, written with 1st Lieutenant Eric D. Chewning, that a combat battalion had to master all the skills necessary to mount successful counterinsurgency operations. The essay won a competition Petraeus sponsored that year as he headed up the effort to produce a new Army/Marine Corps counterinsurgency manual at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Soon enough, both men were back in Iraq putting their ideas into practice during the surge.
The list of top ten insights Ollivant e-mailed Petraeus in 2010 amounted to a withering critique of what the commander would soon be inheriting in Afghanistan in the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). The ISAF Joint Command (IJC), an operational command headed by Army lieutenant general David M. Rodriguez that was charged with coordinating all operations involving U.S., NATO and Afghan troops, was, he asserted, “structurally dysfunctional,” lacking the means to coordinate its activities with civilians who report to the U.S. Embassy. This was not a reflection on Rodriguez, Ollivant said, and he recommended that Petraeus make Rodriguez his deputy for maneuver. He also said the IJC had designated too many “key terrain districts” in the eastern command sector and was likely to make progress in ten at best. “You taught me well—‘underpromise; overdeliver.’ We have violated that principle here.”
He recommended rethinking the military’s emphasis on Kandahar, in the south, and placing greater focus on the east. He also said he had “serious misgivings” about efforts to recruit and train the Afghan police, which he did not think would yield significant results by the announced drawdown in July 2011. “As I think you know well, the dirty secret on Iraq is that we never did really fix the police—we just made the Army good enough that no one noticed,” he wrote. “I maintain we would be much better off focusing on training the Afghan Army (we know how to train armies—we are one!) . . . The bottom line is that resources poured into the police effort (in general—exceptions abound) are not going to pay off by Summer 2011. If that date no longer carries meaning, then that changes things.”
He said a revised Tactical Directive from the commander was desperately needed, given the “palpable” sense of isolation troops feel from senior commanders.
Ollivant also noted the difficulties involved in asking young officers and their enlisted men to execute effective counterinsurgency operations, and he advocated pushing more support assets down to the company level, as he had in Iraq. Captains and lieutenants commanding these desolate outposts need human and technical intelligence assets, civil affairs support, even help running psychological operations. “There’s just too much to expect a 24-29-year-old with limited life experience to accomplish,” he wrote, explaining that they need assistance in partnering with Afghan units and help from more senior field-grade officers.
Finally, Ollivant told Petraeus that his forces needed to focus on improving the quality of local government, which ideally should mean the assignment of more foreign-service officers from the State Department to help knit local officials into the national government structure, with its provincial and district governors, which President Karzai controlled.
The place where effective government in Afghanistan happens, Ollivant explained in a subsequent e-mail to Petraeus, is at the district level, where power held locally by tribes, subtribes and clans can be merged with ministries and divisions of the national government. “It may be the closest thing to an overall decisive point that we have,” Ollivant wrote. When this melding of local and national happens and a Kabul-appointed governor meets a traditional council of elders, he added, “all relevant and legitimate interests can be at least acknowledged, if not always accommodated.”
Petraeus always found Ollivant’s input thought-provoking, though he disagreed with his conclusion that they had failed to fix the police in Iraq. Petraeus thought the Iraqi police had made significant strides—albeit after Ollivant had redeployed to the United States. But he did agree with Ollivant on a great deal, including that more foreign-service officers were needed to help translate military gains into better local governance. He had already advocated, in fact—together with Ambassador Karl Eikenberry in Kabul—for more diplomats and other civilian experts, but the State Department had yet to provide them in the full numbers needed. Although Eikenberry had expressed concern over the lack of civilian support for the tremendous military effort that would be expended to secure and rebuild villages, his superiors in Washington were slow to respond. “Sending additional combat brigades will require tens of billions of dollars annually for years to come, costs not detailed in DOD charts,” Eikenberry wrote in a cable several months later. “Yet an Embassy request this summer for a $2 billion increase in our budget for development and governance was analyzed and debated in great detail, only to be rejected.”
AS HE PREPARED to head to Afghanistan, Petraeus viewed the campaign in simple terms. The key to victory lay in protecting the indigenous population, not just in killing the enemy. That was the insight Petraeus stressed over and over. Killing the enemy was certainly part of his counterinsurgency doctrine—a key part. But he knew only too well that, without the support of the Afghan people, you could never kill your way out of an insurgency.
> Petraeus had repeatedly warned—at Central Command, in the press and behind closed doors in the various policy reviews over the previous two years—that he never thought the situation in Afghanistan could be “turned” as quickly as U.S. efforts were able to help turn Iraq. The conditions were different. But President Obama was firm on July 2011 as the date by which he would begin to draw down the American surge forces. Nobody expected to create a Western democracy overnight in Afghanistan, nor was the president asking Petraeus for that. But he wanted Petraeus to create the conditions for an end state that was tolerable: an Afghanistan that could secure and govern itself sufficiently to avoid once again becoming a safe haven for al-Qaeda. Petraeus had one year.
CHAPTER 2
RESULTS, BOY
Petraeus looked out the aircraft window and saw the barren, brown Hindu Kush Mountains, outside Kabul. He felt a twinge of anticipation for the imminent landing, even though it was a familiar view. He had traveled to Afghanistan nearly a dozen times as CENTCOM commander over the past two years, and he had been here once before that, on a special assessment mission for Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld in 2005. He knew the challenges below, having worked with General McChrystal on the plan to commit significant resources to the neglected and troubled theater. Those challenges were now his to master.
His plane landed in Kabul at dusk on July 2, 2010. The smell of burning garbage lingered in the air. The shadows were long as the sun set on a warm, dry evening. U.S. ambassador Karl Eikenberry, Ambassador Mark Sedwill, NATO’s senior civilian representative in Afghanistan, and Petraeus alighted together from a blue-and-white C-40 with UNITED STATES OF AMERICA emblazoned on the fuselage. Petraeus encouraged his civilian counterparts to exit the plane first. Accompanied by aides and security officers, they walked briskly to three Black Hawk helicopters, their rotors whirling, to take them to the headquarters of the International Security Assistance Force, a five-minute flight away.
Despite the six-hour-and-forty-five-minute flight from NATO headquarters in Brussels, Petraeus was all energy the next morning when he met with Rear Admiral Greg Smith, deputy chief of staff for communications. Smith, who had been one of Petraeus’s media gurus during the surge in Iraq, and then served with him at Central Command, recorded no fewer than seventeen directives from Petraeus in his small five-by-seven-inch notebook. “Just need to keep pushing out little stories, most won’t make the news, but they do add up,” said one of Smith’s notations. “Get with bureau chiefs, new sheriff in town,” said others. Petraeus was in an information war. Everything coming out of his mouth and the ISAF press office was likely to be “parsed” by the press, he concluded. It was critical to get the narrative correct, because that would be the key to buying time. The last note Petraeus emphasized to Smith: It would be essential to strive once again to be “first with the truth.”
An advance team from CENTCOM had arrived a few days earlier to outfit Petraeus’s quarters: a warren of Conex containers, four in all, that the troops called his “hooch.” The first eight-by-twenty-foot Conex included a stationary exercise bike, a flat-screen TV and three large printers; the next one housed his desk, with three computers and considerable communications equipment: secure and unsecure telephones, VTC capability, and all the other technology needed to keep up with events—and the ticking clocks—in Washington and Kabul and the capitals of up to forty-nine nations contributing to the NATO-directed coalition. The third was his bedroom, which consisted of a single bed, an old mattress, two small lockers and an attached bathroom with a tiny shower. And the fourth was home to his enlisted aide. It was a stark contrast to the villa in which he’d lived in Baghdad—rumored to have been Saddam’s mother’s—or the new quarters he and his wife had moved into in Tampa just one month earlier.
In his first “stand-up” briefing at 7:30 the following morning, Petraeus promised a review of the Tactical Directive, a document that provided detailed guidelines on the use of force in combat that had been issued exactly a year earlier—and had been strictly enforced—by his predecessor, the now-cashiered McChrystal. The document stressed the need to protect the Afghan people and called for limiting the use of close air support and artillery against residential compounds. “We must avoid the trap of winning tactical victories—but suffering strategic defeats—by causing civilian casualties or excessive damage and thus alienating the people,” it read.
This Tactical Directive had proved problematic. The Rolling Stone article that led to McChrystal’s downfall scorched the general and his aides, caricaturing them as testosterone-addled frat boys as they insulted Obama, Biden, Holbrooke, Eikenberry and even Karzai, with whom McChrystal reportedly got along famously. But the article’s lengthiest passage described McChrystal’s meeting with a group of soldiers at an outpost near Kandahar who believed that his Tactical Directive and severe restrictions on the use of airpower were tying their hands and getting them killed.
At ISAF headquarters in Kabul, looking out over forty staff officers seated before him at two horseshoe-shaped tables in the Situational Awareness Room, Petraeus said he understood the troopers’ message. “There is no question about our commitment to reducing civilian loss of life, which is a moral imperative I absolutely support,” he said, repeating the words he’d used during his Senate confirmation. “There is, however, concern in the ranks and in some of our nations about how we have applied the Tactical Directive, and they must be addressed.” Petraeus explained that he would rely on his operational commander, Lieutenant General David M. Rodriguez, to make recommendations. There was, Petraeus observed, “a clear moral imperative to make sure we are fully supporting our troopers in combat. This debate is not about changing the rules of engagement; it is about implementing the Tactical Directive in a way that gives soldiers in trouble the support they need while doing everything possible to protect the Afghan people.”
Petraeus would rely heavily on Rodriguez to oversee military operations. Rodriguez had spent more time in Afghanistan and knew the country better, down to the village level, than any other general in theater. Tall and rumpled, Rodriguez had first arrived in Afghanistan in 2007, as a division commander, just as the Taliban were reemerging as a potent insurgency. He then became Defense secretary Gates’s senior military assistant, until Gates sent him back to Afghanistan as McChrystal’s deputy in the summer of 2009. Part of that assignment involved standing up the new ISAF Joint Command to unify NATO, U.S. and Afghan forces. Rodriguez was also the principal architect of the operational-level campaign plan Petraeus was inheriting. Rodriguez and McChrystal had been classmates at West Point and remained close friends. McChrystal considered Rodriguez “the best combat leader I have ever known.”
Rodriguez identified ninety of four-hundred-plus districts in Afghanistan—population centers, markets, transportation nodes and agricultural centers—which would have to be controlled to turn back the Taliban. A principal focus was the capital region, around Kabul, home to one-fifth of the Afghan population and one of the safest places in Afghanistan, with the security zone expanding south and east against fierce Taliban resistance in some areas. The focus in northern Afghanistan was the Baghlan-Kunduz corridor, a densely populated region along two main commercial arteries. The western parts of the country remained relatively stable, and Herat, in Herat Province, to the far northwest, was a bustling city, largely free of violence, although there were periodic attacks. The Taliban strongholds were to the southwest, in Helmand Province, to the south, in Kandahar, and in the eastern provinces that lay on the routes from Pakistan’s rugged tribal areas to Kabul.
Helmand had been Rodriguez’s first thrust in March 2010. It was considered home to the illegal narcotics industry in fertile southern Afghanistan that fueled the Taliban insurgency. Now that central Helmand Province had largely been cleared, Petraeus would command the next thrust, focused on Kandahar and its surrounding districts, the birthplace of the Taliban movement. Once the Taliban had been ro
oted out there, Petraeus would turn his focus in late 2010 to the east and the mountainous terrain along the Pakistan border, the country’s most difficult terrain in both human and physical terms. There, an earlier strategy for holding desolate mountain valleys with a far-flung network of combat outposts had been largely abandoned. It had given way to more targeted operations aimed at shutting down insurgents’ “rat lines” across the border and establishing a layered defense against those insurgents who did manage to get through.
Petraeus had begun his remarks to the staff at ISAF headquarters with a laudatory reference to McChrystal. “I am delighted to be here, but I am not delighted to be here under the circumstances,” he said. “I admire what General McChrystal achieved in terms of input and output and will take much of his work forward.” But he knew that McChrystal’s Tactical Directive wasn’t the only issue that needed to be addressed, as he’d been hearing from people like Doug Ollivant even before he left Washington. One of his first acts as commander of the war in Afghanistan came that morning when he announced that checking e-mail or surfing the Web during the morning brief—a practice McChrystal not only tolerated but practiced himself on three laptops at a time—was unacceptable. With that, a clicking chorus of more than sixty closing laptops filled the room.
Comparisons between Petraeus and McChrystal were inevitable. Both men, lean if not slightly gaunt, were famously fit and ran religiously. Both were West Point graduates and prodigious readers. Both attracted loyal followings among ambitious young officers. Both were open to new ideas and popular with reporters. But lost on many in Washington was the reality—soon to be apparent to those on the ground in Afghanistan—that there was a new strategic force loosed in Kabul: Petraeus’s will.
All In Page 5