All In

by Paula Broadwell

  The White House issued a two-sentence summary of the meeting that night, emphasizing the issues most important to the president:

  The President, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and General David Petraeus met today to discuss our ongoing efforts in Afghanistan, including the effectiveness of the military surge, the growth of the Afghan National Security Forces, and President Karzai’s expected March 21 announcement on beginning transition to Afghan security lead. They also discussed the plan to begin the reduction of U.S. forces this July, and the path to completing the transition to full Afghan responsibility for security by the end of 2014.

  While Washington was filled with rumors about Petraeus’s next assignment, no mention was made of it in this statement from the White House. Nor was there any discussion of it at the meeting between Petraeus and Obama. Petraeus knew he was not in the running to be named chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff following his command in Afghanistan, as Gates had made clear to him in December when they discussed the matter in Kabul and Petraeus first floated the idea that he become CIA director. Gates had reported that Obama had been intrigued by the idea, and Petraeus looked forward to discussing it directly with the president. He was encouraged by Obama’s interest, and he realized that this trip to Washington was his chance to validate the tough decisions Obama had made in late 2009, since the surge had succeeded in clearing key Taliban strongholds in Kandahar and Helmand provinces.

  Some reporters and military officers who had seen Petraeus in action over the past eight months continued to speculate that he was worn out, and that perhaps the president would surmise that a break was in order. This irritated Petraeus to no end. The summer and fall campaign had without a doubt taken a toll. There had been a steep learning curve his first few months in theater, and he would often yawn his way through meetings, chew on Atomic Fireballs and drink coffee nonstop, even into the evenings, but by winter the campaign was showing signs of progress, and the pace of insurgent fighting slowed in its cyclical winter pattern. Petraeus felt energized by spring.

  The following morning, the clicking of camera shutters sounded when Petraeus took his seat before the Senate Armed Services Committee in the Dirksen Senate Office Building. Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Michèle Flournoy sat next to him at the witness table, facing the horseshoe-shaped dais of senators. Members of Petraeus’s military team wore their Class A uniforms, neatly pressed. They had awoken that morning to a headline on the front page of the Washington Post that read, “Afghan War Isn’t Worth Fighting, Most in U.S. Say.” A poll by the Post and ABC News had found that nearly two-thirds of Americans thought the war was no longer worth fighting, “the highest proportion yet opposed to the conflict.” The newspaper said Petraeus was expected to face “tough questioning” on the war. Yet, aside from two protestors who had made it into the room, there was a relaxed feeling. Petraeus was well prepared, and the senators were relatively deferential to a commander who had appeared before them numerous times in the previous six years. Taking his seat at the witness table always took Petraeus back to Iraq and all the passions the war had unleashed as violence exploded in 2004 and grew steadily straight into the surge at the beginning of 2007.

  A MONTH AFTER he arrived at the Army’s Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth in the fall of 2005, Petraeus set out to create a new field manual on counterinsurgency. He would launch this ambitious effort by hosting an inclusive workshop at Fort Leavenworth, the Army’s schoolhouse, in February 2006. He considered creation of a new doctrinal manual for commanders and troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan to be a critical need.

  The situation in Iraq, the U.S. military’s main effort, had spiraled downward, with the country beset by extreme sectarian violence that many thought would lead to civil war between Shiites and Sunnis. Petraeus thought he had a chance at Fort Leavenworth to help the military provide doctrinal concepts to address the problem. There had already been speculation that he might be the next overall commander in Iraq, and the chief of staff had told him that he was just being given an opportunity to “take a knee” for a while before deploying again. That made it all the more imperative to identify and codify best practices in counterinsurgency.

  The manual, developed jointly with the Marine Corps, would be published on an unprecedented timeline. Petraeus commissioned Dr. Conrad Crane, his West Point classmate and director of the U.S. Army Military History Institute, to lead the effort, helped by Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl, Rhodes Scholar, West Point Department of Social Sciences alum and author of a notable book on counterinsurgency. Within a month of taking command, Petraeus e-mailed the manual as it existed at the time to several intellectuals, including Eliot Cohen, whom he’d known since Petraeus’s days teaching at West Point, and members of the “LICimites,” the low-intensity-conflict acolytes of the 1980s, some of whom he’d met in Central America in 1987. He sought feedback on its content—another example of his crowdsource approach to decision making.

  The day before Christmas, Petraeus brought his boss, General William Wallace, up to speed on his plans for the conference that would kick off the effort, noting that he planned to invite “a broad mix of approximately sixty influential practitioners, academicians, journalists and others,” including the full spectrum of typically liberal skeptics, to participate in a quest for “infotopia.” He was also planning to invite fifteen foreign liaison officers at Leavenworth to participate, along with additional representatives from the United Kingdom and Australia. Tentatively, the Carr Center at Harvard University was going to cosponsor the workshop, contingent upon approval by the Army’s General Counsel.

  The manual spelled out the focus for all U.S. counterinsurgency operations: Protect the people from violence, harassment or intimidation by insurgents. Killing the enemy and disrupting insurgent networks remained critical areas of emphasis. But the most important area—the center of gravity—was protecting the people. This led to better intelligence from them. It enhanced prospects for effective local governance. And it made it difficult for insurgents to operate. It was published in late 2006, the fastest doctrinal endeavor in anyone’s memory.

  The manual was lauded inside and outside the military, but it also energized military skeptics, who said bad strategy in Afghanistan and Iraq could not be fixed with sound tactics. Petraeus welcomed the constructive criticism, and a spirited debate ensued among defense intellectuals. The skeptics’ concerns were perhaps best symbolized by Ralph Peters, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and novelist whom Petraeus had long respected but who had become a font of criticism of the wars. “It’s appallingly bad—a prescription for defeat,” he wrote. “We’re not at war with ideologies, but with religious convictions and ethnic identities. Those are profoundly different matters. We’re not in Malaya in 1959. We don’t have to like it, but our core enemies are waging religious warfare, and they’re not susceptible to friendly persuasion.”

  Petraeus realized the political sensitivity of the manual, personally editing the opening chapter thirty to forty times. “Let me assure you that there is no reluctance to kill religious extremists (or Saddamists or any others) who want to kill us,” Petraeus responded to Peters in an e-mail.

  “The 101st Airborne, e.g., remains proud to have killed [Saddam Hussein’s sons] Uday and Qusay—and to have done it in a way that took them out without blowing up the rest of the neighborhood. Nor did we shrink from taking out Ansar al-Sunnah’s number three, or from killing or capturing a host of other extremists, insurgents, or Saddamists. Our objective, though, was always to try to take more bad guys off the streets than we created by the way we conducted our operations. That’s not politically correct; it’s the way to win—when complemented by a host of other activities, of course, many of them nonmilitary in nature. . . . One can, to be sure, defeat an insurrection or insurgency by killing lots of people. The Romans did it long ago, and people like Saddam and Assad have done it more recently; however, that’s obviously not a
n approach that is available to us.”

  The 419-page manual was not only published by the Army but also made into a trade version that was favorably reviewed. That version included an introduction by Sarah Sewall, director of the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard, that began, “This counterinsurgency field manual challenges much of what is holy about the American way of war. It demands significant change and sacrifice to fight today’s enemies honorably. It is therefore both important and controversial. Those who fail to see the manual as radical probably don’t understand it, or at least understand what it’s up against.”

  Beyond the manual, Petraeus focused his efforts during his fifteen-month tour at Fort Leavenworth on advancing the concepts of full-spectrum operations and preparedness of leaders and units for deployment. A significant part of the latter was overhauling the military’s “road to deployment”—a systematic road map that charted the training activities that a brigade combat team, a division headquarters and corps headquarters went through during the approximately twelve months of preparation for deployment. Up until 2006, Petraeus had discovered, deploying units were still going through an outdated “Military Operations in Urban Terrain” (MOUT) seminar as their first step down that road. The MOUT training did not reflect the combat and stabilization operations in which troops had been engaged in recent years. The deploying units needed guidance, training and rehearsals for counterinsurgency operations, he believed. The training needed to include an understanding of the cultural nuances of the area to which the unit was to deploy, the concept that protecting the people was the overarching objective and a recognition that soft-power governance and development efforts had to complement military clearing operations. Few, if any, had demonstrated this better than Petraeus in Mosul in 2003.

  Petraeus remembered visiting Fort Sill, Oklahoma, home base of Army artillery, and going for a run with a group of captains, all of whom were required to write five operations orders during their six-month Captain’s Career Course. “All of those orders were the same as they would have been prior to our operations in Iraq,” he recalled later. “In other words, they were still large artillery operations, standard missions, massing of batteries and battalions—essentially the old Cold War missions. I asked, ‘Well, what did you do in Iraq or Afghanistan? You are all veterans of one or, in many cases, two tours downrange already. How much of your battalion actually shot [artillery] in Iraq?’”

  Most of the captains responded that one battery, at most, was prepared to fire at the enemy. The rest of the battalion would be broken down performing convoy or base security, or security for a geographic area. In some cases entire artillery units were devoted to detainee operations. And yet, Petraeus noted, “not a single one of the operations orders addressed any of those tasks at all.” After Petraeus shared this with the field artillery center commander, the commander shut down the Career Course, using the seasoned captains to help overhaul the curriculum and restarting the course within two weeks. Petraeus also came to believe that mission rehearsal exercises at the Army’s training centers required further refinement. There had been some change to the war games that troops participated in before deploying. Iraqi- or Afghan-American civilians role-played Iraqi or Afghan citizens and local officials during the mock battles, and U.S. soldiers simulated IED cells, host-nation troops, and suicide car bombers and local leaders with whom the exercise unit had to engage. But Petraeus wanted to see far more unpredictable scenarios driving the mock engagements. It was the same principle of surprise and emphasis on realistic training that Petraeus had sought as an operations officer in the 24th and 3rd infantry divisions, and as a battalion and brigade commander. The Army was still adjusting preparation for deployment activities to follow one of its most basic tenets: to train the way we will fight.

  Petraeus sought as well to inculcate a culture of constant learning in the leaders who attended the courses in the centers and schools he oversaw. Speaking to a group of staff college students at Fort Leavenworth, Petraeus explained his philosophy.

  Each of you is one part student and one part teacher, and in your year at Leavenworth, each of us . . . will be . . . part of what we call the “engine of change,” the combination of elements overseen by the Combined Arms Center are helping the U.S. Army respond to the challenges that face the United States. . . . Change, in fact, is critical. . . . A military is a living organism. Like all living organisms, the military obeys the fundamental law of nature—the law of survival of the fittest. Today, our militaries are confronted with the problem of how best to adapt to changes in the operational environment. At stake here is not simply the survival of our militaries but the security of our nations, which is, of course, what our militaries exist to protect. The requirement, therefore, is to adapt along with the threat to our nation. . . . So we must change the way we train our units and our leaders—you. Change is, indeed, hard, but it is also a must.

  The Army, in short, had to be a learning organization. Petraeus’s 2006 Counterinsurgency Field Manual expressed it clearly: “The side that adapts the fastest tends to prevail.”

  THAT CERTAINLY remained the case in Afghanistan late in the winter of 2010–2011, as Senator Levin knew well. He pounded his gavel promptly at 9:31 A.M. on March 16. He harked back to Obama’s speech at West Point in December 2009 and noted that Obama had set July 2011 as the date “when U.S. troops would begin to come home.” And just last week, he said, Secretary Gates, on a trip to Afghanistan and NATO headquarters, had said that the United States would be “well positioned” in July to begin transferring authority to Afghan forces and drawing down American troops. But as Levin also noted, Gates had also told NATO defense ministers that “there is too much talk about leaving and not enough talk about getting the job done right.

  “Both messages and the thread that unifies them are part and parcel, I believe, of General Petraeus’s counterinsurgency strategy, which is so instrumental in turning the tide in Afghanistan,” Levin said. “The success of the mission depends on Afghan security forces holding the ground, which they are helping to clear of Taliban.” Levin was mindful of the cost, in blood and treasure, and wanted to start to bring U.S. forces home as soon as was feasible. He also took it upon himself to defend his president from anticipated Republican attempts to paint him as weak or unpatriotic for insisting that the drawdown of forces begin in July, especially in light of the surge and everything else Obama had been willing to invest in the war, including Petraeus’s talents.

  Throughout the hearing, Levin and the Democrats defended Obama’s decision to announce that he would begin drawing down forces in July 2011 as necessary to force the Afghans to take their responsibilities seriously, and Republicans criticized it for undercutting U.S. efforts and emboldening the Taliban. Levin clearly supported the planned drawdown but hardly could be seen as opposed to the war effort, given the push for building up Afghan forces he had strenuously backed. To defend the planned drawdown, he quoted General Mattis, who’d replaced Petraeus as head of Central Command and who said that the transfer of authority to Afghan forces “‘undercuts the enemy’s narrative when they say that we’re there to occupy Afghanistan.’”

  Senator McCain, the ranking Republican, underscored the political tension, saying that “we need to be exceedingly cautious about withdrawal of the U.S. forces this July. The wisest course of action in July may be to reinvest troops from more secured to less secured parts of Afghanistan, where additional forces could have a decisive impact. In short, we should not rush to failure. . . .”

  After Levin and McCain staked out their positions, Undersecretary Flournoy read her prepared statement. It neatly summarized what the Obama administration had inherited in Afghanistan upon taking office in January 2009:

  While our attention was turned away, al-Qaeda, the Taliban and associated extremist groups reconstituted their safe havens along the borderlands between Afghanistan and Pakistan. As a result of this inattention, we risked t
he return of a Taliban-led Afghanistan that would likely once again provide a safe haven for terrorists who could plan and execute attacks against the United States. When President Obama took office, he immediately undertook a thorough review of our strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan and reaffirmed our core goal: to disrupt, dismantle and eventually defeat al-Qaeda and to prevent its return to Afghanistan. In the course of that review, we found that the situation in Afghanistan was even worse than we’d thought and that the Taliban had seized the momentum on the ground.

  Petraeus, a black plastic 101st Airborne Division coffee mug on the table in front of him, then read his opening statement; it was largely an update of the speech he had delivered in November at the Lisbon conference.

  As a bottom line up front, it is ISAF’s assessment that the momentum achieved by the Taliban in Afghanistan since 2005 has been arrested in much of the country and reversed in a number of important areas. However, while the security progress achieved over the past year is significant, it is also fragile and reversible. Moreover, it is clear that much difficult work lies ahead with our Afghan partners to solidify and expand our gains in the face of the expected Taliban spring offensive. Nonetheless, the hard-fought achievements in 2010 and early 2011 have enabled the joint Afghan-NATO transition board to recommend initiation this spring of transition to Afghan lead in several provinces. The achievements of the past year are also very important as I prepare to provide options and a recommendation to President Obama for commencement of the drawdown of the U.S. surge forces in July.