Major Fernando Lujan believed fervently in the potential of Afghan forces. To take the CAAT concept inside the Afghan military, Lujan had embedded deep inside the 205th Afghan National Army Corps. He wore an Afghan uniform, grew a beard and fought for two weeks at a time with Afghan units. He spoke to soldiers in Dari, and upon his return to headquarters he briefed the corps’s commanding general in Dari. He discovered that Afghan culture was most welcoming to foreigners who took the time to learn Dari or Pashto. At one point he was so impressed with the bravery of Afghan soldiers—their calm in battle and their acceptance of death, which he attributed to their Islamic faith—that he considered converting to Islam. He loved his work: “I’ll do [this] in the Army for as long as they’ll let me, . . . then I’ll get out and do it as a civilian or some other type of governmental actor until I’m too old to walk patrols,” he said. “Counterinsurgency is that kind of fight—too fluid and dynamic to draw old lessons from. To develop real insight, you have to stay connected to conflict in a very real, very direct way.”
Petraeus had heartily embraced the Counterinsurgency Advisory and Assistance Team initiative a little over a month earlier. The CAAT was Petraeus’s kind of organization, driven by big ideas from the battlefield, and Colonel Joe Felter, himself a Stanford Ph.D., had been Petraeus’s student in West Point’s Department of Social Sciences. Petraeus savored the opportunity to laud a subordinate. “The truth is, you have actually exceeded what I thought were lofty ambitions for the CAAT,” Petraeus said to begin a brief ceremony marking Felter’s departure.
But Felter’s replacement, a spit-and-polish Marine colonel named Rob Tanzola, had a different vision for the CAAT. While Felter was known by those who worked for him as somebody who allowed subordinates considerable latitude, Tanzola seemed to want to exert enormous control over the CAAT’s members, and he seemed to loathe what he saw as the team’s cowboy ways. One of his first orders to the Afghan Hands in the CAAT was to shave their beards—something the Hands thought was an important signal to gain rapport with their Afghan counterparts. Whatever the CAAT’s members thought of him—and there were those who defended his crackdown as long overdue—the disruption that accompanied his arrival exemplified the downside to the U.S. military’s penchant for one-year or shorter rotations.
Doug Ollivant, the former lieutenant colonel who had helped plan the surge in Baghdad, was one of the first to go. Tanzola tried to fire Ollivant after he sent an expletive-laced e-mail to a few CAAT hands in Kabul who had ventured into his territory in eastern Afghanistan and, in Ollivant’s mind, gotten into areas that were his purview. Ollivant felt blindsided by Tanzola’s attitude and mobilized his network of supporters to e-mail Major General Campbell, the commander of the eastern sector, and Lieutenant General David Rodriguez, the deputy ISAF commander, on his behalf. Petraeus offered to help Ollivant find a job, but by then relations had become too strained for Ollivant to stay.
Tanzola began shifting the CAAT’s focus from tactical conditions on the ground to the strategic situation in the region, based on a mistaken impression that this was what Petraeus wanted. After Tanzola spent a month following this course, Petraeus finally met with him and other CAAT members, telling them to stay focused on tactics. “‘I’ve got plenty of strategic thinkers running around ISAF,’” one of those present quoted the general as saying. Tanzola shifted back to a tactical focus but continued his hierarchical approach, and his insistence on higher standards for report writing and information collection remained in full force. He had developed a priority list, topped by an initiative to help conventional forces assume responsibility for Village Stability Operations (VSO) and the development of Afghan Local Police detachments, both of which started as Special Forces missions. Lujan’s plans for taking the CAAT process inside the Afghan military weren’t on Tanzola’s list. Tanzola didn’t believe Afghans were ever going to be part of the CAAT team, so why bother? In an effort to enforce the chain of command, Tanzola prohibited Lujan from coming to CAAT headquarters in Kabul and directed him to stop interacting with incoming members of the Afghan Hands program, who weren’t being assigned to CAAT, as Lujan had hoped.
Lujan worried about what he called “HUGE” gaps on the Afghan side that would badly undermine the campaign when ISAF placed more weight on the ANSF during transition. “Some of these gaps we don’t even fully understand yet,” Lujan relayed to colleagues. “The Afghan-CAAT effort is uniquely poised to gain clarity on these issues and develop innovative solutions.” Lujan later voiced his concerns to Tanzola in e-mails that verged on irreverence. Tanzola stopped responding to Lujan’s e-mails. Soon after, Tanzola split up the team and dispersed the members across different regional commands.
AS LUJAN STRUGGLED to find his way with Tanzola, the first story on Petraeus’s future appeared in the press, in the Times of London. The paper reported what was widely assumed when Petraeus took command in July—that he would leave Afghanistan by the end of 2011. Speculation about his next assignment would soon become something of a distraction for him, which was the last thing he needed.
In late February, at a Sunday afternoon Afghan National Security Council meeting, Afghan officials inquired about reports that as many as fifty civilians, many of them women and children, had been killed in ISAF air strikes in the remote mountains of Kunar Province, on the Pakistan border. Petraeus later noted that U.S. officials reported that some of the civilians who had allegedly been injured were children with burned hands and feet, not shrapnel injuries, as would be associated with air strikes. There had been reports from that region that children had at times been disciplined by having their hands or feet dipped in boiling water, but Petraeus did not make any explicit link between these reports and the incident in question. Two days later, the Washington Post reported that Petraeus had shocked Karzai and his aides by suggesting that “Afghans caught up in a coalition attack in northeastern Afghanistan might have burned their own children to exaggerate claims of civilian casualties, according to two participants at the meeting.” The Post said that neither Petraeus’s exact language nor his precise message was known. Petraeus meant nothing of the sort, but leaking inaccurate statements for political gain was common. “So be it,” he said several months later in an interview. “Welcome to the neighborhood. It’s not my first rodeo. When we have made mistakes, the policy has been to acknowledge them, to explain the facts, to apologize when that is warranted, and obviously not only to take corrective action, but in some cases judicial or non-judicial action.”
Petraeus’s point man in the Palace Information Coordination Center, Navy captain Ed Zellem, offered to show the videos of the strikes to Afghan NSC staff and even to bring in a trained pilot to explain the video feed and answer questions to convincingly demonstrate that the officials had been duped by locals trying to cause problems for the government and ISAF. But the Afghan officials demurred.
The war was growing increasingly savage and violent for ordinary Afghans. The annual report on civilian casualties in Afghanistan in 2010, released a few days later by the United Nations and the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, found that 2,777 civilians had been killed, a 15 percent increase over 2009. Seventy-five percent of those deaths were attributed to the Taliban and other “anti-government elements.” Homemade bombs, improvised explosive devices and suicide attacks were responsible for most deaths, though the most alarming trend was the insurgents’ increased use of assassination as a weapon against Afghan government officials and others who cooperated with the Americans. Half of those assassinations had taken place in southern Afghanistan, where the surge of U.S. and NATO forces left the Taliban with few other options for prevailing at the village and provincial levels. “The social and psychological effects and violations of human rights associated with assassinations are more devastating than a body count would suggest,” the report found. “An individual deciding to join a district shura, to campaign for a particular candidate, to take a job with a d
evelopment organization, or to speak freely about a new Taliban commander in the area, often knows that their decision may have life or death consequences.”
The report also noted that deaths and injuries attributed to Afghan and international forces declined. The emphasis by both McChrystal and Petraeus on reducing civilian casualties from air strikes clearly had an impact. The number of women and children killed in air strikes by international forces declined 62 percent and 72 percent, respectively, compared with 2009. Even with Petraeus’s reliance on night raids by Special Operations Forces as an important tactic for targeting mid- and upper-level Taliban commanders, civilian casualties associated with the raids fell, the report found. The report also said that clearance operations from July through November in the districts surrounding Kandahar, including the Arghandab River Valley, where Flynn’s Top Guns operated, had not produced a “spike” in civilian casualties, “although they resulted in large-scale property damage.”
“GUIDONS, GUIDONS. This is Eagle 6. The 101st Airborne Division’s next Rendezvous with Destiny is North to Baghdad. Op-Ord Desert Eagle 2 is now in effect. Godspeed. Air Assault. Out,” then–Major General David Petraeus, the 101st’s commanding general, told his troopers over a field radio the night before they went to war. It was late March 2003. The Screaming Eagles were poised to push across the Kuwaiti border and drive to the Iraqi capital—and beyond.
Six days into the great assault, with U.S. forces stopped dead in their tracks by a blinding dust storm, Petraeus posed his prescient, tell-me-how-this-ends question and answered it with another: “Eight years and eight divisions?” It was a reference to an answer given by the Army chief of staff in the early 1950s when asked by President Eisenhower what it would take to reinforce flagging French forces encircled at Dien Bien Phu, in Vietnam. In Iraq and Afghanistan, it would take nearly as much, and last longer.
In the first combat command of his career, Petraeus led the Screaming Eagles in the fight to Baghdad, supporting the 3rd Infantry Division’s bold thrust into Baghdad with deep attacks by the 101st’s Apache attack helicopters and conducting major operations on the way to liberate Najaf, then Karbala and, finally, Hillah. Captain Fivecoat would never forget the Battle of Najaf. There were Petraeus, Lieutenant General Scott Wallace, the corps commander, and one of the division’s colonels standing on the hoods of Humvees with binoculars, watching “the combined arms attack into Najaf—it looked like something straight out of WWII.” Petraeus believed that a commander should seek to be at the “point of decision,” where he could best understand what his unit was engaged in, which was often where the fighting was heaviest. In his journal, Fivecoat wrote that Petraeus “habitually wanted to walk forward to watch the action unfold.”
While some of his subordinates found him initially overly cautious for not immediately ordering a ground attack into Najaf, Petraeus maneuvered his forces deliberately and skillfully, seeking to understand what he was facing and carefully orchestrating how best to respond. He wasn’t casualty averse, he explained, just averse to stupid casualties. Launching light infantry into a city of more than half a million shouldn’t commence, he ordered, until all the “enablers”—tanks, artillery, attack helicopters, close air support, air medevac and so on—were positioned to support those on the ground when, inevitably, they ran into dug-in enemies. His approach seemed to work: The 101st accomplished its missions. The fight to Baghdad and subsequent operations to clear Mosul had resulted in relatively light casualties, considering the fighting; by the end of May, three soldiers had been killed and eighty-four wounded in action, including many amputees. The losses awakened Petraeus to the most significant burden of command.
Petraeus mentioned to a friend in an e-mail that it was like a blow to the sternum to receive reports of casualties. He was more guarded with his family. But his face could not fully mask the emotion from his aide Major David Fivecoat, who made a note in his journal that spring: “MG Petraeus was shaken after visiting the injured.” Petraeus candidly revealed himself a bit in a letter to West Point classmates that June: “I used to wonder why old men got choked up talking about their comrades; I now know why.” But like many of his peers, he knew that the commander’s role was to be resolute and offer strength to others. He was learning how to keep the mask of command firmly in place.
Just as the 101st was getting a grip on southern Baghdad, Petraeus received orders to leapfrog, by air assault, five hundred kilometers north to Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul, near the borders with Syria and Turkey. It was here that Petraeus received his greatest acclaim, demonstrating his flair for counterinsurgency, including every task from pursuing—and killing—Saddam’s two sons to performing various components of nation building, and even conducting what some saw as his own foreign policy as he cut a deal with Syria to ensure adequate fuel imports into the city and another deal with a Turkish company for electricity. He cited his experience in Bosnia as having enabled him to quickly gain his bearings. By early May, two weeks after his arrival, Nineveh Province, of which Mosul was the capital, had a provincial council and governor after Petraeus organized elections, which were actually “caucus selections” that he orchestrated to establish a provincial council with representatives of all segments of Nineveh Province so that the 101st had Iraqi partners.
As Petraeus’s units, having largely pacified the area, moved into nation building, the Pentagon authorized members of the 101st to sew the division’s eagle insignia on the right shoulders of their uniforms, indicating that they had fought with the unit in combat. They already wore the insignia on their left shoulder, representing their unit of duty. “I must say I am extraordinarily proud now to wear the Screaming Eagle patch on both shoulders,” Petraeus wrote to his family. “It almost brings tears to my eyes.”
Soon he was acting as the viceroy of northern Iraq, cajoling tribal sheikhs (“none has ever had a short conversation in his life, and all want a piece of me right now,” he told a colleague), opening schools, negotiating business deals, pleading with his bureaucratic overlords in Baghdad and Washington for help. On May 6, he signed a resolution opening the border crossing with Syria in northwestern Iraq. It began: “Whereas, the Commander of Coalition Forces for Northwest Iraq recognizes an emergency need for the resumption of ‘legal trade’ in Northwestern Iraq with Syria and Turkey. . . .”
Petraeus’s frustration with the Bush administration’s Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad was a common refrain with all the division commanders. He found the decision by the CPA and senior Pentagon officials to disband the Iraqi armed forces and purge Saddam Hussein’s Baath party to the level it did as particularly misguided, since many mid-level bureaucrats and Western-educated academics at the university in Mosul had been party members. Without them, getting the city back up on its feet became endlessly more complicated. The effect of the overall de-Baathification program, Petraeus relayed, “was that tens of thousands of former party members were unemployed, without any salary, without any retirement, without any benefits, and therefore, to a large degree, without any incentive to support the new Iraq.”
“Had some [American] leaders from Baghdad up here yesterday,” Petraeus wrote to a friend on June 5. “Told them we sometimes wonder whether the most important objective to the folks above us/in Washington is winning the peace or getting the paperwork right. The bureaucracy is killing us. We were trusted to fire million dollar munitions out the kazoo (during the fight to Baghdad), but now have to account for even small purchases/contracts, with documents scanned in to be sent digitally to higher headquarters. We could win this thing if they’d just give us money (or get the folks here who are supposed to help—very slow in arriving). And I told them that in no uncertain terms.”
Before Paul Bremer, the head of the CPA, visited Mosul in late June, Petraeus wondered whether he would be willing to listen or whether he would be in a “directive mode.” Petraeus found the hubris emanating from Baghdad very frustrati
ng and thought it must have been similar to that present in Vietnam when Robert McNamara was Defense secretary. But his conversation with Bremer was a good one. It would later spur Bremer to get authority to provide captured Iraqi funds to division commanders for the conduct of emergency reconstruction initiatives. And a subsequent conversation would gain Petraeus the authority to support Iraq-run reconciliation initiatives.
Nevertheless, Petraeus’s frustration surfaced in a later e-mail to an associate:
You had to give people hope and, again, you have to have incentives for people to support the new Iraq, not to oppose it. And, if you don’t provide those incentives, then don’t be surprised if you have an insurgency in the morning. . . . Did [the military] need to be dissolved without any announcement about what its future was? We went five long weeks without that announcement and it wasn’t addressed until some of us talked to some individuals in Baghdad and said, “You know, your policy is killing our troopers.” That was a pretty stark statement. . . . Week after week the demonstrations were turning into near riots.
Two weeks prior to the Coalition Provision Authority’s announcement that there would be stipends for former military members, Petraeus attempted to quell a fifteen-thousand-man demonstration, some of them holding weapons, outside the Nineveh Provincial Governorate Building, where the governor’s office was located and where the provincial council met. It was, he later observed, “the worst nightmare of any commander—a [large, angry] crowd.”
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