There were other tensions, too. In early May 2010, Petraeus had been quoted in a story by the Associated Press as saying that Faisal Shahzad, who had attempted to detonate a bomb in New York’s Times Square, was a “lone wolf.” The AP’s story made it appear as though he were contradicting statements by others in the Obama administration that Shahzad had been trained by the Pakistani Taliban. He had been misquoted, and the AP later put out a corrected version quoting him as saying that Shahzad was a lone wolf who was inspired by militants in Pakistan but didn’t necessarily have contact with them. But the damage was done. Petraeus asked his spokesman, Colonel Erik Gunhus, to draft a short press release to correct the misimpression and directed Gunhus to inform the White House. But Gunhus was told by the White House not to issue the release and to let the matter blow over. It came up a few days later, when Petraeus and his staff were on a plane together. The general joined Gunhus and other officers in the rear cabin and had a rare glass of wine during the flight. “As the plane roared to its next destination,” Woodward later wrote, “Gunhus noted that the White House still had a tendency to leave Petraeus twisting in the wind. ‘They knock you down every chance they get,’ Gunhus said. ‘They’re fucking with the wrong guy,’ Petraeus responded.”
There were eight people on the plane with Petraeus that day. One of them was Woodward’s source. Petraeus later expressed his displeasure to all of them for betraying his confidence. He later surmised, with disappointment, that it was a field-grade officer on the trip who had been a loyal adviser for nearly five years. But Petraeus knew that he was ultimately responsible for making the intemperate remark, even if he assumed he was making it in private. When the comment turned up in Woodward’s book, Petraeus—known for his accessibility and skillful press relations—felt himself pulling back. As he counseled subordinates in subsequent talks on leadership, someone is always watching. As had long ago become clear to him, very little was private in his life anymore. The scrutiny was enormous, and Petraeus tightened the mask of command further.
A long line of critics, including Woodward, had also remarked on Petraeus’s “endless campaign of self-promotion.” This has been a common refrain of those inside the military who viewed Petraeus with suspicion, or envy. He had become a target of such criticism earlier in his career because of his repeated assignments as an aide to powerful four-star generals—Galvin, Vuono and, from 1997 to 1999, General Hugh Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs. What few acknowledged was that four-star generals hired aides for their ability, not their political skills. Even detractors generally conceded that Petraeus’s ability was off the charts.
Meanwhile, Petraeus’s relationship with the president, beginning with the West Point trip, had markedly changed by the fall of 2010. The infighting between Obama’s generals and his White House aides the previous fall, Petraeus thought, had been overtaken by events. Three months into his own command in Afghanistan, Petraeus was confident that Obama would not have picked him to replace McChrystal if he hadn’t trusted him. It was inconceivable to Petraeus that Obama would pick someone regarded as an “outsider” to take charge of the most important national security initiative of his presidency. “If you’re going to fire one guy, you better get another guy in there in whom people have confidence,” Petraeus later said to a confidant. Though he’d have less direct contact with Obama than he did with Bush during the Iraq War, Petraeus had access and was now Obama’s guy.
By September 2010, there were already indications coming out of the Obama White House that there had been a “mind meld” between the president and his most famous general. Petraeus thought he and his staff had been as loyal to the White House as was possible. He and his team had made a lot of sacrifices to assume command of the war on a moment’s notice. He felt a deep sense of disappointment when he was told that there were some on the White House staff who doubted his loyalty to Obama. The battle with the rest of the White House would have to remain just under the surface.
PETRAEUS NOW COMMANDED the surge he, McChrystal, Mullen and Gates had argued for the previous fall. While he counseled caution in his morning stand-ups at ISAF headquarters and told the dozens of officers gathered for the morning briefing that progress would be slow in coming, his own approach was anything but cautious. He found ways to augment units with civilian intelligence personnel that would not count against formal troop ceilings. He “amped up” Special Operations night raids aimed at Taliban leaders, pushed hard to create Afghan Local Police across the country and carefully monitored conventional forces as they moved into the “hold and build” phases of counterinsurgency after their hard summer of fighting.
But Petraeus found Afghanistan, in some ways, more complex than Iraq, though the levels of violence were certainly far less. “Afghanistan is so dynamic at the moment that it is actually very difficult to track everything going on—and it is almost impossible to track if you are looking in from the outside,” he observed to a friend at the time. “The fact is that in Iraq we had more forces, a smaller population to secure, and easier terrain than we are faced with in Afghanistan. Afghanistan has many more challenges than Iraq, although there is not the colossal level of violence that we faced in Iraq. Even in Iraq, it took us months to see progress, prove progress and then solidify the progress. What does this tell us about Afghanistan? Progress will take time.”
Afghanistan was also a rural insurgency, as opposed to the urban insurgency in Iraq, and many inside the Beltway did not understand that the operation required a different approach. The decentralized nature of the government and the disconnect between officials in Kabul and people in the rural areas—more than 75 percent of the population—made every effort more challenging. Though Petraeus pushed for troops to implement all lines of effort—security, governance and development—security was obviously the first priority. It was difficult to build roads, repair mosques, open medical clinics and schools and foster economic development in areas still filled with Taliban, or where the villagers favored the insurgents over either the occupying force or corrupt, inept government officials.
In counterinsurgency doctrine, governance and development follow security gains, but troops should be setting the conditions for those activities within the concept of an increased security presence. Petraeus pursued progress on all fronts: attacking top- and midlevel Taliban commanders with Special Forces, cleaning out Taliban safe havens with conventional forces, developing the Afghan military and police, working with civilian partners to build the capability of the Afghan government, reconciling with Taliban elements tired of fighting and supporting Afghan initiatives to reintegrate those willing to switch sides. “All of this will accumulate over time,” he told his staff. “Over time, imperceptibly, we will see improvement—but it will be like watching grass grow.”
He’d honed this ability to attack multiple fronts most notably during his first assignment in a chaotic foreign capital, Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
WHEN HE LEFT THE 101st Airborne in mid-1994, after a year as the division’s operations officer, Petraeus requested to spend his War College year as a fellow at Georgetown University. Shortly after he began the fellowship, the Clinton administration precipitated a showdown with General Raoul Cédras, the military strongman in Haiti, and forced his departure, deploying 20,000 U.S. troops to oversee the reinstallation of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the elected president who had been overthrown by the military junta. Over the course of the fall and winter, the United States planned to reduce its contribution and build up forces from other countries to enable handing off the mission to a UN force of 6,000 military and more than 300 civilians.
Petraeus, not coincidentally, picked Haiti as his research topic at Georgetown, looking to get involved helping the National Security Council staff in this diplomatic and military initiative. He soon accompanied deputy secretary of State Strobe Talbott to a five-hour White House deputies meeting on the situation in Haiti, which he found very stimulating. When he bumped in
to a colonel he’d known on Vuono’s staff who was looking for a few good officers to help set up and run the new UN task force, Petraeus jumped at the chance. He had, in fact, sought the fellowship in part to be able to deploy if the opportunity arose. When the UN force commander relieved his operations chief, Petraeus was selected for that critical position.
He landed in Port-au-Prince in February, sixty days before the UN was scheduled to take over, and he helped build the task force from scratch. There was no headquarters. There were no procedures. Petraeus had very little help and slept most nights of his four-month deployment on a cot stored behind the projector screen in a briefing room. When he finally heard he’d been given a permanent headquarters for the task force, he visited the facility and found it lacking. “For starters, there was no roof and there was no floor, also no communications, furniture or electricity,” he later observed drily. Fortunately, he had just finished running a combat division ten times larger than the UN task force. His growing team had the operations center up and running by the time the UN assumed the mission.
Though he didn’t know it at the time, setting up the task force, planning and directing operations, helping to train Haitian police and overseeing improvements to the Haitian judicial and prison systems served as a primer for a similar challenge he would face on his second tour in Iraq, when he had to create a new command to recruit, train, equip, advise and build infrastructure for the Iraqi military and police.
In Haiti, sleeping on his cot, running in the morning with Motorola radios in both hands, Petraeus immediately impressed his bosses and colleagues with his capacity for work and his ability to move back and forth between international diplomacy, security operations, nation building and infrastructure repairs. In mid-February, one week after arriving, he briefed Aristide, Deputy Secretary Talbott and other senior officials from the Clinton administration on the UN force’s structure. Ten days later, after updating Aristide on conditions across the country, he jumped in his Toyota 4Runner and drove out to Port-au-Prince’s main prison, where inmates were rioting and burning everything in sight. Petraeus and a group of military police galvanized the Haitian guards and regained control of the facility. Digging into the situation later, he discovered that many of the prisoners were still being detained after serving their full terms. He thought of them as “the people who time forgot.” He and his team set out to help the Haitians regain control and improve conditions in the jail.
Petraeus realized that the task force’s soldiers would need clear rules of engagement about intervening in Haitian-on-Haitian violence, remembering an earlier episode when U.S. forces—lacking such rules—stood by and watched as a riot erupted and Haitians killed each other. A document Petraeus wrote setting forth the rules of engagement, dated March 31, 1995, foreshadows the counterinsurgency guidance he would issue shortly after his arrival in Kabul. The list of nine bullet points began: “1. Treat all persons with dignity and respect.”
While there was no insurgency in Haiti, there might well have been. Criminals robbed, terrorized and killed their countrymen. To respond, Petraeus recommended to the force commander that units base their troops out among the remote villages, which was a significant change to the previous U.S. practice of deploying conventional forces only in the country’s two biggest cities.
In peacekeeping, as in counterinsurgency, Petraeus saw the people as the center of gravity. He worked closely with civilian aid groups, attempted to build up the Haitian police, staged raids to arrest fugitive leaders of paramilitary groups and started committing U.S. funds for desperately needed capital improvement projects. He also helped organize the voter registration process, a pillar of nation building. After he was told in a briefing that the process was ready to begin in five days, he visited a warehouse where registration supplies were being assembled and found “sheer chaos.” He went to the U.S. helicopter battalion and asked if he could clear out its hangar so that the team could spread the election materials out on the floor. It was raining hard every afternoon during that season, and there was no other place to do it. The pilots moved their birds. Petraeus and the team helped move and organize the materials and then supported their movement to sites throughout Haiti. Registration was completed on schedule.
“Haiti was a great civil-military experience, a wonderful learning experience in terms of what nation building is all about, especially in a country that was one of the three poorest in the world at that time,” Petraeus later reflected. He also noted that serving in an international coalition was an invaluable experience. The largest international coalition (in terms of countries) ever assembled awaited him in Kabul. “It’s very easy in these kinds of missions, where the U.S. is so dominant, just to dominate, and yet that isn’t the right course,” he observed. “It’s about keeping everybody with you. It’s about making sure that the Nepalese battalion is as satisfied as the United States contingent.”
His Haiti experience would prepare him well for many aspects of Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet while the country resembled a war zone, it hadn’t counted as a combat tour. He would have to wait eight more years for a combat patch on his right shoulder.
His next assignment awaited upon his return to the United States in June 1995: command of the 1st Brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Only the best and the brightest—those officers with the potential to make general—became combat brigade commanders in the Army. Petraeus would be replacing another star, Colonel John Abizaid. He couldn’t take command soon enough.
While both men shared superb reputations and similar beliefs about the Army’s need to prevail in low-intensity conflicts and counterinsurgencies, their styles were strikingly different. Abizaid was loose and more laid-back. Petraeus was intense, competitive and highly structured. While Abizaid was happy to relax over a beer with his men after a maneuver, Petraeus wanted to conduct an after-action review—and then challenge everyone to a run—and then have a beer.
As an outsider who had never served in the 82nd before, Petraeus faced jealousy from some of his peers there—and elsewhere in the Army—who had served in combat in Panama or the Gulf with the division.
Petraeus’s battalion commanders were aware of his intense competitive streak and his preference for a “systems approach.” But at Bragg, Petraeus demonstrated that he’d learned to build a team rather than compete with the team. Five of his six infantry battalion commanders would become general officers, one would earn two stars (currently commanding the 82nd Airborne Division), two of them would become three-star generals, and another would earn four stars. All would serve in Iraq with Petraeus.
Commanding the “Devil Brigade,” Petraeus’s command and leadership style flowered, according to Lieutenant Colonel Kevin Petit, one of the brigade’s company commanders at the time. He remembers Petraeus’s first meeting with all field-grade officers. “He held it in the chapel in Fort Bragg,” said Petit, who now refers to Petraeus as “Doc” in honor of his Ph.D. “Doc, I learned, never misses an opportunity to layer messages, both verbal and nonverbal. He proceeded to give his command philosophy, what was important to him. He began to question us tactically: ‘What is the maximum effective range of the machine gun?’ ‘What are the three types of defensive wire?’ It was a message that this was a level he wanted us to study. It is the paradox of rank that platoon leaders talk strategy and colonels and generals talk squads/platoons. So he established that this was the level at which we were expected to be experts.”
Petraeus also established a new convention for training at the time. He felt live-fire exercises were too scripted. “I want to tell you about what I call Walk and Shoot University,” Petraeus told his brigade’s officers. “Army troopers do not have the skills we need to manage unscripted scenarios employing live fires, much less on a real-world deployment.” The typical exercise that employed mortars and artillery, as well as attack helicopters and close air support, was highly prescribe
d and was of limited training value.
Petraeus set out to change that. As Petit recalled, “We cleared into the impact area lanes in which we would walk and call live fire on objectives around us and in front of us, a huge departure from the very static, linear training we had done previously,” recalled Petit. “We responded in part because we broke rules to do it and we felt we were ‘special’ and clearly training with realism that no one else had to date.” Petraeus had actually gotten the required waivers, but no unit had done so in such an aggressive manner before.
Petraeus’s focus on tactical expertise to outthink the enemy surfaced again in brigade command. The Joint Readiness Training Center, the Army’s light-infantry training grounds, which Keane had done so much to develop, included a scenario not unlike the urban warfare Petraeus would later see in Iraq—with civilian role players, suicide bombers and IEDs.
In the scenario, when Petraeus’s units came upon the enemy, the so-called opposing force, on the outskirts of the city, they were unprepared and asleep. The town’s defenses were not complete, and some of the enemy were still installing wire and pickets and barriers. The opposing force, Petraeus correctly deduced, had made a timeline of their own, based upon an 0500 attack, which Petraeus’s brigade had published. “Sir, you had me fooled right up to the moment I was crossing the wire into the objective,” Petit recalled. Petraeus looked at him and replied, “We defined the rules, then when the enemy defined their rules, we just changed ours.” Petit found it unprecedented that he would pull one over on the enemy—and his own troops—to create favorable conditions for the team to win. “You and the Devils continue to do better than I’ve ever seen it done,” e-mailed Brigadier General John Vines, the 82nd’s assistant division commander for operations in March 1997.
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