The deal was a hard sell, Graham said, “when most people have written Afghanistan off as a hopeless endeavor, too corrupt to be saved. I don’t believe that. But to convince them, you’re going to have to step up your game.
“My biggest fear is that people will use lack of progress on governance and corruption as a reason to accelerate withdrawal. . . . There’s a growing frustration on the right,” but “we’re not going to walk off a cliff for Obama’s deal,” he continued, noting that “a lot of Republicans feel like it’s now his war.” But he reassured Karzai: “I don’t; I feel like it is our war.”
To Graham’s pleasant surprise, Karzai seemed to be more willing to embrace reform than at any of their past meetings. “You have to show the American people that you are dealing with corruption,” Graham told him, explaining how worrisome the status of the Kabul Bank failure was to decision makers. “In no uncertain terms, if you sweep this under the rug and it becomes a legal matter, it’s going to be very hard to sell. . . . We’re hanging by a thread. This unholy alliance I’ve been worried about for a couple of years is becoming real,” Graham said, referring to the union of some of his colleagues on the far right and the far left. “But I think we’re okay in the short term; we just need to show progress.” If there was not continued demonstrable progress, the senators told Karzai, then Karzai and Afghanistan would be the losers.
The senators emphasized the importance of a strategic partnership that would keep air bases with trainers, Special Forces elements and various support assets in the country past 2014. If not, they said, all the momentum from the surge would eventually be lost. They all saw progress from Petraeus’s utilization of the surge troops. But this latest announcement about reducing surge forces had reignited the old debate about America’s enduring commitment. Graham hoped the Afghans’ stubbornness at the bargaining table reflected a desire to get the best deal possible, and not a lack of commitment to an enduring partnership.
By late summer, progress in negotiating the strategic partnership declaration had foundered on Afghan demands that the document include binding deadlines for their assumption of authority for detaining insurgents and controlling night military raids—deadlines the American negotiators did not think should be part of the declaration. The Afghans also wanted the United States to provide their armed forces with F-16 fighter jets and Abrams tanks, which the Pentagon had no intention of doing.
Petraeus told reporters in an interview late on the Fourth of July that the focus of the war would shift east later in the year—not by putting many more boots on the ground but by sending more Special Forces, more intelligence capability, more helicopters, more reconnaissance, more drones, more airpower. He was pleased to have “the three amigos” (McCain, Lieberman and Graham) with him and the troopers for their third Fourth of July together in a war zone. But he also said it was “probably time to stop second-guessing the decision that only the president can make.” Petraeus said of the president, “Only he has the full range of considerations that he has to deal with. That decision has been made. . . . It is our job to get on with it and do the absolute best we can.”
Three days later, Petraeus made his final battlefield circulation, visiting the Currahee Brigade, the 506th Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division, at Forward Operating Base Sharana, in Paktika Province, more than a hundred miles south of Kabul on the Pakistan border. Petraeus had been commander of the 101st in 2004, when plans to reactivate the storied Currahee Brigade were first discussed. The unit was the final brigade deployed as part of Obama’s surge, and it would be leaving Afghanistan in early August. “I want you, above all, to have pride, quiet pride, in what it is that you have achieved,” Petraeus told several hundred soldiers gathered before him in battle fatigues. “You all have done a magnificent job over the course of the last year [in] very difficult terrain against a very difficult enemy—right up against the [Pakistan] border. You have truly distinguished yourself in that fight; you’ve made inroads, especially as you’ve come to the end of your tour.”
Still, the fighting and dying were not over. When the Pentagon announced ten fatalities for the week ending July 12, the total number of Americans killed in Afghanistan since October 2001 had reached 1,552. A staggering 12,593 had been wounded. The ten men killed that week had been attacked in six different provinces across Afghanistan. During their year in the Hindu Kush, the Currahees would lose eighteen soldiers.
Back in Kabul that evening, Colonel Jim Seaton of Petraeus’s Commander’s Initiatives Group forwarded a guest post from the Best Defense blog of Thomas E. Ricks, former Pentagon correspondent for the Washington Post, who had written two seminal books on the Iraq war: Fiasco and The Gamble. The blog post was written by an anonymous Army major who had spent four months in intensive Pashto language training as part of the Afghan Hands program—the baby of Joint Chiefs chairman Admiral Mullen, McChrystal and Petraeus while he was at CENTCOM and theater commander. Due to personnel shortages in the Army Corps of Engineers, the anonymous major had been transferred to a desk job. Three other Afghan Hands in the corps had reportedly received similar transfers. According to the major, Army bureaucrats apparently cared little about developing real language and cultural expertise in a counterinsurgency campaign. The officer wrote, “I just want someone to help me get the word out that maybe the CJCS is not aware of how his top priority is being run in the war zone.” The blog post ended with a note that “‘A.P. Hand’ is based in Kandahar, Afghanistan, at least until his boss reads this.”
“Let’s try to find him, Jim,” Petraeus told Seaton. “Our kind of guy, actually. Let me talk to him. And let Tom [Ricks] know I want to find him, talk to him and get him to the right billet. And get to the head of the Afghan Hands program. No recriminations. Let’s just fix it.” Petraeus had eleven days left in country. He was going to do as much as he could in each one.
EVEN THOUGH his year of service in Afghanistan was over, Major Fernando Lujan agreed to go back out on one more embed with Afghan forces, at the request of Marine lieutenant colonel Wade Priddy, another Afghan Hand on the Counterinsurgency Advisory and Assistance Team. Newly arrived on the CAAT, Priddy wanted to see how Lujan embedded with the Afghans, and Lujan wanted to go back to Zabul Province and spend time with two Afghan battalions, or kandaks. One of them was the unit Lujan had embedded with back in May, and he was curious to see whether any of the issues he had raised about its performance had been resolved. The other was the first Afghan battalion authorized to operate with complete independence from the Americans and NATO. Once they got out into Zabul’s parched, desolate, dangerous countryside, on the border with Pakistan between Paktika, to the northeast, and Kandahar, to the southwest, Lujan was disappointed to see that most of the same old problems still existed in the first kandak. The Afghans walked the same routes day after day. They were careless, unimpressive.
But after a day with the newly independent battalion, Lujan was glad he had agreed to extend his tour and lead this mission. These Afghans were exceptional—a validation of all he had worked for and believed in. An Afghan captain invited the American platoon to go along on a night ambush. Lujan remembered thinking, I can’t believe these guys are doing this. In the field, the Afghans moved stealthily, the Americans loudly, with their radios initially turned up too high. “The Afghans were more aware of their surroundings and more capable of connecting with the locals,” Lujan said. The Taliban never showed, and there was no one to ambush. But these Afghan soldiers were well trained and willing to fight.
Petraeus had made it clear that independent Afghan units should continue to receive the full array of combat support assistance from the Americans, including intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance help from drones and other technical means. Lujan tried to explain this to the commanders of this superb battalion, in hopes that they could communicate Petraeus’s intent to more Afghan units. Lujan’s fear was that the Afghan units would essentially be cut lo
ose—and left completely to their own devices. Still, to watch this multiethnic battalion operate with skill and esprit de corps was, for him, exhilarating.
Lujan finally left Afghanistan in early July and returned to the United States just after the Fourth. It was a jarring transition, but it felt good to be home. Then, three days later, his fiancée, a Harvard graduate who worked in international development, announced she was leaving him—she couldn’t handle the deployments. She realized, at some point, that Lujan had a mistress he was never going to give up: the war in Afghanistan. She handed him a list of all the bills he needed to pay. Welcome home. Then he found out that Major Stephen Hopkins, the Special Forces officer and Afghan Hand who—at Petraeus’s request—had replaced him on the CAAT, had abruptly quit. He accused Lujan of selling him a false bill of goods after arriving in Helmand and concluding that no one there really cared about Lujan’s quixotic mission to take the CAAT evaluation process into Afghan units. So Lujan headed home to Texas and hit rock bottom for a month. “I’ll know I’m fully adjusted when I don’t have the urge to jump back on a plane and go to Afghanistan,” he said.
But he was back in Washington by mid-August, ready to begin his fellowship at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). During his interview at the upstart think tank, known as COIN Central by the defense intelligentsia, Lujan told John Nagl and Nate Fick, the president and CEO of CNAS, that he thought COIN “would be a dirty word in a year.” Lujan just couldn’t help himself. That kind of honesty had rendered him “PNG’d”—persona non grata—back when he was teaching at West Point, and it had certainly destroyed his relationship with Tanzola. But Nagl and Fick didn’t judge; they welcomed Lujan to the fold. He may have thought COIN was passing from vogue, but he still believed in it. He knew that it had opened up a lot of “white space” in the toughest areas of Kandahar and Helmand provinces, where Afghans could now go about their daily lives without fear of the Taliban. And he believed in Afghan troops—at least the Afghan National Army. He’d had an inside look at more Afghan battalions than any other American officer over the past year—probably twenty battalions in all. “The Afghan army is just much better than it was,” Lujan said. “I was humbled by them—young lieutenants and NCOs who were full of fire, aggressive and wanting to do the right thing. This really gave me a lot of heart.”
WITH A WEEK in his new job, Defense secretary Leon E. Panetta was making news before he even arrived in Kabul, telling reporters that the United States had al-Qaeda “on the run” and was within striking distance of strategically defeating the terrorist organization. As Petraeus’s predecessor at the CIA, Panetta’s rhetorical flourish stood in contrast to Petraeus’s underpromise/overdeliver mantra. Once on the ground in Kabul on July 8, Panetta continued with the press in a similar vein, predicting that victory against al-Qaeda was “within reach.”
Petraeus had a close relationship with Panetta, whom he liked personally and considered a strong leader. Panetta had hosted Petraeus at the CIA for dinner a few weeks earlier and instructed the agency staff to help the general prepare for his confirmation hearing in every possible way. As head of Central Command, Petraeus had similarly sought to support Panetta in early 2009 as Panetta approached confirmation as CIA director. After that, the two would talk to each other on at least a monthly basis about various operations in the global war on terror in the Central Command region. They also cohosted every four to five months what they referred to as the “counterterrorist board of directors,” with the commander of the Special Operations Command, the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, the Treasury undersecretary for counterterrorism, the heads of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center and the DNI National Counterterrorism Center, the State Department’s assistant secretary for counterterrorism and representatives from other military commands as well as the National Security Council staff. It had been during one of the last such gatherings cohosted by Petraeus that General McChrystal called Petraeus to alert him to the Rolling Stone article that led to McChrystal’s resignation.
After arriving in Kabul, Panetta, together with Petraeus and Ambassador Eikenberry, had dinner with Karzai, with whom he’d had a good relationship as CIA director. He thought a new team in Kabul consisting of himself, incoming ambassador Ryan Crocker and Lieutenant General John Allen, Petraeus’s replacement, stood to improve relations with Karzai, who had never gotten along with Eikenberry. Petraeus did not take offense at Panetta’s remark, even though he prided himself on how hard he had worked to maintain a close working relationship with the Afghan president.
Petraeus remained a bit more circumspect than Panetta in characterizing progress against al-Qaeda and in Afghanistan. But he couldn’t help disclosing that for the first time since 2006, the number of insurgent attacks in Afghanistan had declined in June when compared with June a year earlier, even though there were eight thousand more coalition forces in the country than in 2010, which analysts had predicted would result in a 20 to 30 percent increase. He cautioned that it was too early to say the insurgency had been significantly weakened.
Petraeus cited the trend in declining insurgent attacks during his interview the following day with the New York Times, explaining that attacks were down from the previous year in May and June and heading the same way in July. This, he said, was the first real indicator since 2006 that the insurgents had been degraded, although he noted that their ability to assassinate Afghan leaders, plant roadside bombs, infiltrate Afghan units and cause mayhem across the country was still substantial. He outlined the campaign plan for the coming year: Consolidate gains in and around Kandahar and in central Helmand, push into Taliban redoubts in northern Helmand, then transfer some intelligence capabilities and combat support elements to the eastern provinces in the winter of 2012 to shut down infiltration routes, with an emphasis on restive Kunar and Nuristan provinces, along the border with Pakistan in the far northeast. U.S. forces could help disrupt insurgent activities, but the ultimate solution in many areas would be a local one. Undergirding it all would be an expansion of the Afghan Local Police across Afghanistan and the minting of an additional sixty thousand Afghan forces. “It is very hard, but it is doable,” he said.
Asked during an interview with NATO TV about increasing violence levels in the context of a counterinsurgency campaign intended to protect the Afghan people, Petraeus said that most of the night raids involved the capture of insurgent leaders with no shooting at all—and when the raids did involve shooting, he said, “they are quite precise in their effects.”
His assessment of the quality of Afghan forces was measured. “You have to acknowledge, I think, an unevenness among some of the forces,” he said, noting that the more than twelve thousand Afghan special operations forces were “really quite capable” and leading nearly a quarter of all night raids. They performed creditably and courageously, he said, in response to the recent attack on the Hotel Intercontinental. They now led all night raids in the Kabul area. Beyond that, he felt that many regular Army units were also developing impressively. The quality of the police ranged from very good to inadequate in some areas. But the conditions for transition had been set.
PETRAEUS WAS EFFUSIVE at Lieutenant General Rodriguez’s change-of-command ceremony on July 11. “General Rod is, in many respects,” Petraeus explained in his remarks, “the operational architect of the campaign plan that has guided the progress of the past year. But what he has done pales by comparison to the way in which he has done it. . . . He is always out there, meeting with ISAF troopers and Afghan counterparts, explaining our concepts, overseeing their execution, and keeping his finger on the pulse of every situation.”
Rodriguez chatted briefly with reporters before he left later in the day from Kabul’s military airport. “The violence has gone down where we’ve focused our efforts,” he said on the tarmac, his tour at an end. “You have to watch it very carefully, because the violence is now outside instead of inside the populated areas. It takes a
lot to really understand the nuances of what’s happening. But, look, these things go up and down, and we’re going to have to sustain that with our partners. Afghan forces are stepping up more and more. I’m confident the withdrawal will be all right now.”
WELL PAST MIDNIGHT on the night following Rodriguez’s departure, Petraeus wrote to Bob Gates, the now-retired secretary of Defense, thanking him for a formal letter Gates had written to him a few days earlier on official Pentagon stationery and for a more personal handwritten note several days later.
Dated June 27, 2011, Gates’s official letter read:
Dear General Petraeus,
Please accept my congratulations and my deepest appreciation as you retire after nearly four decades of military service. To call that service remarkable is an understatement.
The strength of the United States military throughout our history has been its resilience and adaptability in the face of new threats and challenges. You have stepped forward as the indispensible soldier/scholar of this era, transforming the U.S. Army, and the entire military approach to warfighting, from training to capabilities.
In the field, you have changed the course of two wars, an unprecedented accomplishment. I especially commend you for answering the call to serve as Commander, International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan after sacrificing, and achieving, so much over the long fight in Iraq. But I believe your greatest legacy will be as the leader, mentor, and role-model of one of the most battle-tested, adaptive, and innovative generations of military leaders the United States has ever known—a generation ready and able to defend the United States against whatever threats the future may hold.
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