Standing on a wall, Petraeus started to speak through a bullhorn to the agitated crowd: “We understand your concerns and have been conveying them to Baghdad.” The crowd quieted down, and the angry faces turned toward him. Petraeus assured them that he would take their leaders inside to the provincial governor’s office to discuss the concerns further so that the governor—a retired general and Iraqi army hero in the Iran-Iraq War who had been put under house arrest by Saddam in the 1990s—could accurately convey the concerns to the Iraqi Governing Council in Baghdad. The crowd was pacified, but not for long. The violence came a week later. The same day, violence in Baghdad and Basra resulted in deaths due to riots that got out of control.
By late October, after a visit by an aide to deputy Defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Petraeus wrote that his visitor from Washington “said they should have put us in charge of the whole thing. I told him just send money and there’s no limit to what we can do.” Petraeus famously saw money as “ammunition” and prided himself on how much emergency response funds he and his brigade commanders spent fixing roads and schools and putting Iraqis to work—more than any other division. He constantly asked his troops, “What have you done for Iraqis today?” and, practicing the counterinsurgency tactics he would come to codify three years later, he told his soldiers that if they ever damaged an Iraqi’s property, they needed to offer immediate compensation, or show up the next day and fix what they had broken. His performance in Mosul became the subject of a case study in public policy and management at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, “The Accidental Statesman: General Petraeus and the City of Mosul, Iraq.” The study concludes: “Petraeus is given little guidance, is in an unfamiliar venue, sets ambitious goals and develops a strategy that finds considerable success.” In a detailed self-evaluation done as part of an Army War College study in 2004, Petraeus rated himself most highly as an “entrepreneur” for his nation-building efforts in Mosul, among categories that included vision, diplomacy and personal energy.
Petraeus returned from Iraq in early May, only to be told six weeks later to return to Iraq immediately to assess the state of Iraqi security forces. He quickly assembled a team from the 101st and spent several weeks in April and May flying around Iraq to conduct the assessment. After returning to the States and reporting out to Secretary Rumsfeld and the Central Command commander, he was told to change out of command early, move his family and get back to Iraq in early June to establish and command the effort to organize, train, equip and build the infrastructure for the new Iraqi security forces of the ministries of Interior and Defense. He would be promoted to lieutenant general in May 2004 and return to Iraq in June to take charge of creating the Iraqi military and police and their ministries and all institutions, virtually from scratch, a job he once described as “building the world’s largest aircraft, while in flight, while it’s being designed, and while it’s being shot at.”
None of the handful of Iraqi army battalions he inherited upon taking his new mission was operational. Several had mutinied to avoid fighting in Fallujah in the spring of 2004, after four security contractors working for an American firm called Blackwater had been killed in March, their bodies mutilated and hung from a bridge. In one of his first acts, he had to go to Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and tell him that the number of Iraqi security forces that the embassy team responsible for the police mission had been reporting had to be lowered, because seventy thousand of the troops that had been counted were actually untrained ministry security guards, not trained police. At the time he arrived, neither the Iraqi Ministry of Defense nor his own command, the Multi-National Security Transition Command–Iraq, even had a headquarters building. It was a true start-up, as the mission in Haiti had been, but everything about it was harder. Petraeus’s problems with bureaucracy only intensified. He would submit program requests and wait weeks for action. He was never entirely clear on what exactly was going on. President Bush had said Iraqi forces represented America’s ticket out of the country, and General John Abizaid, head of Central Command, promised Petraeus whatever support he needed. Yet the bureaucracy above him never produced all the staff or resources that Petraeus and his team identified as being vitally necessary.
It was staggering what he was being asked to do with less than 30 percent of the staff he needed at the outset. Petraeus reacted the only way he knew how—by putting his shoulder to the wheel and pushing forward as hard as he could, all day, every day. In his mind was his father’s admonition: “Results, boy!” The only time he went home during the entire fifteen-and-a-half-month tour was in the late spring of 2005, to attend Stephen’s graduation from high school—that after never going home during his first year in Iraq.
Petraeus’s experiences along the way occasionally bordered on the surreal: At one point, he encountered an Iraqi commander who was particularly adept at recruiting talented commanders. Petraeus asked him how he knew these men, and the Iraqi replied that they’d all been in prison together. It made sense to Petraeus: Saddam had imprisoned all the most capable people, because they represented the greatest threats to his regime. One of Petraeus’s worst moments came after he had flown to a desert base to address a newly formed Iraqi unit, only to find out later in the day that fifty of the new recruits had been ambushed after leaving the base to head home on leave, pulled out of their vehicles and shot in the backs of their heads.
December 2004 was a particularly bad month. Petraeus found himself working with his Iraqi counterparts to deal with high rates of desertion among Iraqi units and, with Fallujah and Anbar Province mostly lost to insurgents, the inadequate combat performance of the Iraqi forces. A number of key Iraqi senior leader partners were assassinated. The situation became so bad that Petraeus found solace in T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, his book about fighting alongside the Arabs during their uprising in World War I. Petraeus recalled how one scene in the book hit very close to home: One morning, Lawrence came out of his tent to find that everyone with whom he had been fighting was gone. They had vanished in the night. “He was an insurgent without a force,” Petraeus said, “without allies, and there were a couple of days where I felt like that as well.” But by the time Petraeus left in September 2005, his command and its Iraqi partners had fielded a large, well-equipped and increasingly capable force and created a considerable semblance of order from the early chaos. There were 211,000 soldiers in fifteen Iraqi army and police brigades, up 100,000 over the previous nine months. The ministries of Defense and Interior were functioning, as were basic and advanced training centers, police and military academies and even growing high-end Special Operations Forces. It hadn’t been pretty, but the progress had been real and substantial.
When Petraeus returned to the United States from Iraq for the second time, in September 2005, after a brief tour through Afghanistan to assess the same ongoing mission there, Army Chief of Staff General Peter Schoomaker named him commander of the Army’s Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth. Many thought Petraeus was being sidelined by Rumsfeld for his brash and headstrong behavior in Mosul and Baghdad, where he had clashed on occasion with General George Casey and others. But that was belied by his marching orders from Schoomaker: “Shake up the Army, Dave.” Petraeus used the vast responsibilities that he had to do just that: help to usher in the new counterinsurgency era. They’d put an insurgent in charge of the Army’s engine of change.
Undeterred by his clash with Tanzola, Lujan had arranged for one of his CAAT teammates to preside in early March over a two-day shura on counterinsurgency for junior officers of the 205th Afghan National Army Corps, which was conducted in Dari and Pashto. Lujan had come up with this idea after Petraeus, back in December, had challenged him to help “change the culture of the Afghan military.” By the second day, the Afghan officers had started to open up. The CAAT team was amazed what a difference it made to sit with them in a shura circle, without more senior officers around, and speak with them in Dari. �
��We agree, we need to be the ones engaging with the locals,” stated one Afghan officer in the shura. “But the coalition never lets us. They always want to be the ones leading, talking with locals. They have us pull security. How do we get them to let us do it?”
The CAAT team came away energized. “These were committed, engaged Afghans who were sharing really great lessons. And they wanted to do more, and thought the coalition was limiting them—not giving them enough information, not trusting them, not allowing them to engage with locals, not respecting their culture.” To Lujan, it all flew in the face of the standard narrative that Afghan soldiers were lazy and incompetent. “After a while you have to accept that we share some of the responsibility,” he said. One of the most interesting observations to emerge from the shura came when several officers observed how the Americans would drag them around on patrol until an IED was encountered, and then the Americans would say, “Put the Afghans in front—it’s their country.” To the Afghans, who already believed Americans were overly fearful and hid behind their technology, Lujan said, this was seen as blatant cowardice.
As the shura was wrapping up in Kandahar, Petraeus was in Kabul, formally apologizing to Karzai’s government for an errant air strike in RC East, in Kunar Province’s Pech Valley. Nine boys gathering firewood were killed when they were mistaken by the crews of attack helicopters for insurgents shooting from the same area. It was the third incident in three weeks in which Karzai’s government accused Petraeus’s forces of recklessly killing civilians. Petraeus considered the prevention of civilian casualties an enormous challenge in a war in which the enemy often sought refuge among the people or, worse, hid inside compounds that housed innocent people. The most important standard he insisted upon was positive identification before a strike, which had obviously not been adhered to in the attack that killed the boys. The tactical mistake had grave strategic implications. Karzai rejected his apology.
Defense secretary Robert Gates also offered his own apology when he arrived in Kabul on March 7. He had come in advance of a U.S. negotiating team that was to begin hammering out the shape of a U.S. military presence in Afghanistan after its current combat role was fully handed over to Afghan forces by the end of 2014. Karzai, who ultimately accepted Gates’s apology, favored a post-2014 “strategic partnership.” Gates said he thought the United States was “well positioned” to begin drawing down its troops in July, although he indicated that the reductions would be limited.
The next day, Gates flew to Kandahar for a visit to a village called Tabin, in the Arghandab River Valley. It would have been hard to imagine the scene six months earlier: the American secretary of Defense walking down a one-lane dirt road in lush terrain that the Taliban had controlled and ultimately laced with deadly homemade bombs. The children in the area would not go outside if insurgents were nearby. Lieutenant Colonel David Flynn and his converted artillerymen, the Top Guns, led the way through the region they had fought so hard to clear. “A year ago, even as recently as six months ago, I wouldn’t have driven a vehicle down that road, let alone walked down it,” said Major Tom Burrell, Flynn’s operations officer. With the spring fighting season approaching, villagers remained skeptical that this new reality was permanent. “You’re talking about people who have seen far worse for decades,” Burrell said, “and now we’re talking about a change that’s only months long.”
In Tabin, a village of about a thousand residents, Flynn explained that there were now ten “vetted and confirmed” members of the Afghan Local Police providing village security. They had been trained by Flynn’s troops using techniques first developed by Special Forces involved in the Village Stability Operations, the effort that laid the foundation for the ALP. Nine more villagers, all recommended by village elders and screened by U.S. forces, were being trained and vetted in order to join the detachment. The Tabin Local Police had received uniforms and weapons, and they were being paid slightly less than members of the National Police. Once the village force was in operation, it would be transferred to the Afghan Ministry of the Interior for ongoing oversight and administration, Flynn said. Gate’s team sent a follow-up e-mail: “One of the best visits . . . in 4 years.”
Back in Kabul, Petraeus sat down for an interview with the New York Times on the eve of his departure for testimony on Capitol Hill in Washington. He was beginning to see the six lines of operation come together for real effect, even though each new week seemed to bring new insurgent attacks and bombings, while ISAF’s advances were maddeningly incremental. The Times described the interview with Petraeus as “a preview of what is likely to be his argument next week when he testifies before Congress for the first time since he took over command of coalition forces in Afghanistan eight months ago.”
The Taliban’s momentum, Petraeus said, had been halted in much of Afghanistan and reversed in Helmand and Kandahar. Afghan forces were continuing to grow in number and capability. Special Operations had taken a number of key insurgent leaders off the battlefield. He acknowledged that efforts to persuade Taliban fighters to lay down their arms and become part of a reintegration program had been only modestly successful. He insisted that relations with Karzai were good, despite periodic evidence to the contrary. He said that ISAF forces would focus in the months ahead on a strategy called “defense in depth” to make it difficult for Taliban fighters to leave their redoubts in Pakistan and infiltrate back across the border into Afghanistan and make their way to Kabul. Only time would tell how that strategy would fare on the ground in Afghanistan—and the hearing rooms in Washington.
CHAPTER 8
WASHINGTON AND BACK
Petraeus flew into Washington under the media radar on Friday, March 11, and spent a quiet weekend reunited with his wife, Holly, and their daughter, Anne. Holly had moved from Tampa to a house on the base at Fort Myer, in Arlington, Virginia, overlooking the Potomac. Anne was home on spring break from graduate school. She was studying to become a dietitian and chided her father about his new slow-carb diet, but he would not be deterred. She wrote a popular blog about food and fitness that Petraeus had been following with great pride, pleased that she had gained nearly ten thousand followers.
Undetected by the press but shadowed by Petraeus’s security detail, father and daughter ran seven miles along the Potomac on Saturday morning. Petraeus had been slightly irked by various news reports that he was “worn out.” He was still running or riding a stationary bike nearly every day. After he’d run at Kabul’s 5,800-foot elevation, the run at sea level was nothing. The opportunity to run on a level path, along a clean river, was uplifting. He had been away from his family for more than seventy months since 9/11. He gave his team a day off, their first in more than eight months. Several of his close aides were able to see their families for the first time since their unexpected departures the previous June. His personal security guard, Mark Howell, returned home to Arkansas for just thirty-six hours. That afternoon, the Petraeus clan went to see Matthew McConaughey in The Lincoln Lawyer at a theater in downtown Washington. He and Holly loved to watch movies together. He could let go of the immense weight of the war he carried, for a moment.
On Monday morning, Petraeus attended his “murder board,” a practice session for his testimony before the Senate and House Armed Services committees. The term was a play on one used to describe the promotion board for noncommissioned officers. Candidates must memorize tactical and operational detail to pass. Petraeus used a Washington-based lobbying-and-communications firm headed by a retired Marine Corps major general who had been the staff director for the Senate Armed Services Committee to conduct the exercise. Petraeus performed well in congressional testimony in part because he conducted these practice sessions. They were at least two painful hours, without a break, to simulate the testimony, but they were beneficial. Lieutenant Colonel Tony DeMartino, Major Keith Benedict and Captain Alston Ramsay, members of his Commander’s Initiatives Group, participated with the corporate
simulators, asking questions “for elephants—” the big game four-star generals.
The intense session prepared Petraeus for any question, as well as a hostile audience, although neither he nor his inquisitors anticipated one this time. He expected there to be questions about the cost of the war and whether the nation could continue to make that kind of massive financial commitment, with Congress focused on the deficit and proposing huge budget cuts. Petraeus knew that he had to make a persuasive argument that members of Congress could convey to their constituents, many of whom were unaffected by the war and focused more on pocketbook issues than national security. He also expected questions about Afghan corruption, reintegration and reconciliation and the Afghan Local Police initiative, as well as various concerns that revolved around Pakistan. Petraeus would decide what information was essential to highlight while making sure he did not disclose anything that was classified. It was a complex calculus. After the practice session, members of the Commander’s Initiatives Group were quickly assigned to research areas in which Petraeus felt he needed more information.
Later that afternoon, Petraeus and Gates met with Obama at the White House to discuss progress in Afghanistan and Petraeus’s upcoming testimony. The meeting needed to appear on the president’s public schedule to show solidarity, but it was also a good opportunity to provide the president with an up-to-date assessment. Petraeus explained the progress coalition forces had made in recent months. There were no surprises about the war, since the three had spoken together in recent months on several occasions in secure video teleconferences. Petraeus also provided weekly updates on the war via teleconference for Gates, Mullen and Marine General James Mattis, head of Central Command, that were retransmitted to the White House and the secretary of State.
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