All In

by Paula Broadwell

  “Coalition management is a hugely important function of a coalition commander,” Petraeus observed, noting that ISAF had the largest number of countries ever united in a theater of war. Iraq, by contrast, was “essentially a coalition dominated by one, with the 165,000 American troopers vastly outnumbering the coalition contribution, though the U.K. and other countries did, indeed, make important contributions. And keep in mind as well,” Petraeus noted, “that Afghanistan is vastly more dependent on what these coalition countries and the international organizations and the NGOs and other groups provide to them. Because unlike Iraq, which had a substantial revenue stream—$100 billion a year at the height of the oil prices—Afghanistan generates only about $1.8 billion. [Although they are] very proud of the steady increase in their revenue, Afghanistan is a country that is, nonetheless, dependent to a huge extent on donors.”

  Petraeus recognized that one requirement for keeping the coalition together was coming up with an overall transition concept and mechanism; developing these concepts, he believed, was one of his most important contributions. Many of these ideas, of course, he had learned in Haiti, Bosnia and Iraq, all of which required varying levels of both coalition warfare and multi-year transition road maps.

  It took true civil-military effort to corral the forty-nine contributing nations into staying the course to ensure that transition happened properly. In order to ensure that coalition members remained engaged and subscribed to a proper transition process, ISAF leadership would have to buy more time—an effort that happened in the fall of 2010 at the Lisbon conference. Petraeus noted, “We had an eye on the Lisbon summit which took place in November 2010 from the very beginning of my time. . . . Ambassador Sedwill and I in particular put a lot of effort into informing individual [contributing nations] about all the different [lines of effort] . . . laying out and refining transition concepts and then plans and assessments, and then also . . . encouraging the idea that the focus should be extended from that of July 2011 to that of the end of 2014, the date by which President Karzai publicly had said Afghan forces should be in the lead across the country for security tasks.” The national leaders at the Lisbon summit embraced this concept, and by September 2011, three provinces and four districts had successfully been transitioned.

  Transition meant a shift from ISAF-led military operations to Afghan National Security Forces–led operations and local security initiatives. The continued growth of the Afghan National Security Forces had, therefore, become a critical component of transition. Lieutenant General Caldwell had done a “very impressive” job, Petraeus thought, leading that endeavor and building a largely U.S.-led effort into what became the NATO Training Mission–Afghanistan. Petraeus had lived through the same industrial-strength effort in Iraq as he worked to stand up the security force training effort there, and he knew how daunting the task was; he sought, therefore, to give Caldwell the total support that many perceived he himself had not had in full while in Iraq. The effort was challenged by issues of Afghan desertion, illiteracy, inadequate infrastructure, insufficient numbers of trainers and cost sustainability—challenges similar to what Petraeus had seen in Iraq, though the challenges associated with some of these shortcomings were higher in Afghanistan. But those issues were being addressed, to varying degrees, and by the end of Petraeus’s tour, Afghan troop numbers had risen from approximately 191,000 in the fall of 2009 to 305,000 in the fall of 2011.

  At the end of the day, however, the numbers of ANSF were not yet enough to provide security for the entire country; Petraeus hoped the local police could be the putty between the locations ANSF did control. He felt, in fact, that one of the most important initiatives on his watch was gaining President Karzai’s approval for the Afghan Local Police program. It had been one of his key agenda items early on, even before he arrived in Kabul. Petraeus acknowledged that he may have had a catalytic effect of convincing the Afghans to embrace the concept, “but the fact is that Karzai honestly drove it.”

  Some analysts felt Petraeus put too much emphasis on the ALP, given that there were only 6,500 by the time he left; these skeptics also speculated about the risks of untethered, autonomous local defense initiatives that were not linked to the government but whose links to the Ministry of the Interior and U.S. partners were solid. The ALP elements, Petraeus firmly maintained, were vital to linking and expanding the security inkblots in order to ensure that the insurgents, especially those hiding in sanctuaries across the border, would meet with resistance. In remote areas—often border-crossing areas—where ANSF members might not have a presence, the perfect counterinsurgent, Petraeus thought, was a local who could detect and deter insurgent movement from the sanctuaries in Pakistan into Afghanistan. And the partnership with U.S. Special Forces and Afghan uniformed police meant that good links were maintained with ISAF and the Afghan Ministry of the Interior, especially as the latter paid the salaries for ALP members.

  Petraeus knew from his first days in Kabul that insurgent sanctuaries in Pakistan, especially those in the FATA and Balochistan, could conceivably doom the war effort. If anything, the U.S. relationship with Pakistan had deteriorated during his year in command, through no fault of his own. How America could be fighting a war against an insurgency that was allegedly supported by, to some unclear degree, Pakistan’s intelligence service, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, incensed many in Washington. The issue would undoubtedly follow Petraeus to his next assignment.

  As Petraeus left the war theater, some of his staff reflected on the comprehensive efforts related to the campaign. “What is significant,” shared Colonel Mike Meese, Petraeus’s ISAF deputy chief of staff, “is not any one of these activities—ALP, security, special operations, economic development, rule of law or the other lines of effort—but that Petraeus continuously pushed all of us to think broadly about how to get everything to work in warfare, which is ultimately a human endeavor, not just a video game.”

  In his year in Afghanistan, Petraeus reaffirmed what he’d first learned as a student of Vietnam and counterinsurgency and, soon after his academic days, in person in Central America: the importance of developing host-nation governance and rule-of-law capacity, at all levels, in order to achieve legitimacy in the eyes of the people and gain their support. The aforementioned challenges with Karzai, however, including the Kabul Bank scandal and reconciliation initiatives, were beyond Petraeus’s purview. Although he, and ISAF, remained involved on some levels, these were primarily civilian initiatives. But in spite of the civil-military campaign’s best intentions, including Brigadier General McMaster’s—and Karzai’s own—best efforts to counter corruption, Karzai’s government remained beset by corrupt elements. In this vein, Petraeus reaffirmed that the “establishment of rule of law is very difficult in the presence of criminal patronage networks and an illegal narcotics industry.” He maintained that the rule of law was essential to earning support of the people (as the Taliban can provide speedy justice if the government doesn’t). The ISAF and embassy teams had made strides in the past year, but there was significant work to be done to build capacity.

  As the war rages on, it remains difficult to make a conclusive judgment about the outcome. On the one hand, Petraeus succeeded in establishing the momentum Obama needed to begin the drawdown of U.S. forces from a position of reasonable strength. The president’s selection of Petraeus for the CIA position seemed to confirm that the administration believed Petraeus was someone who constantly produced “results.” On the other hand, the challenges of holding and building in areas where ISAF and ANSF efforts had cleared, especially in light of the drawdown surge, along with the challenges presented by Pakistan’s terror sanctuaries and a host-nation government of limited capacity, presented formidable hurdles for Petraeus’s comprehensive civil-military counterinsurgency strategy. Nothing would be easy for his successor there.

  His critics argued that Petraeus’s unwavering optimism had become a weakness, although he had l
ong rejected the term “optimist”; rather, he repeatedly asserted, he was a “realist,” and he went to great lengths to acknowledge the challenges of reality on the ground. He understood that Osama bin Laden’s demise in late May had added to a growing sentiment that the rationale for the effort in Afghanistan—to keep al-Qaeda from regrouping in the country—suddenly made less sense than it had previously, but he wouldn’t concede the argument. Petraeus believed that abandoning Afghanistan again would have disastrous consequences for America and for the region. It was vital that Afghanistan not once again be a sanctuary for al-Qaeda. He would never give up.

  PETRAEUS’S LEGACY to date extends across the Army and the entire U.S. military. He is credited with ushering in a new focus on counterinsurgency while in northern Iraq as a division commander, codifying it in the new COIN field manual and influencing the Army’s preparedness by adapting the institutional training programs constituting the “Road to War ” for leaders and units preparing to deploy. He became the face of the war in Iraq while he commanded the surge in 2007 and 2008 and oversaw a campaign that dramatically reduced the violence there, at a time when many senior leaders in America had lost credibility and the nation had come to see Iraq as mission impossible. He helped craft the campaign strategy for Afghanistan, and then, unexpectedly, executed it.

  Far beyond his influence on the institutions and commands in Iraq and Afghanistan, Petraeus also left an indelible mark on the next generation of military leaders as a role model of a soldier-scholar-statesman. American military strategist Bernard Brodie noted several decades ago that civilian think tanks and academics were doing more strategic thinking than were military officers. Petraeus sought a different path for himself and encouraged the same for many of his protégés. He advocated civilian graduate school for the benefits of getting out of one’s intellectual comfort zone. Creative thinking and the ability to wrestle with intellectual challenges are hugely important in counterinsurgency but also in any campaign’s design and execution, he felt; and equipping oneself with new analytical tools, civilian and academic experiences, and various networks had been invaluable for him and—he hoped—for those whom he’d mentored and led.

  One of those individuals, Colonel Bill Ostlund, a former platoon leader during Petraeus’s battalion command days who later served with him in Afghanistan, remembered being out in the woods at Fort Campbell on a battalion field exercise when Petraeus asked, “Bill, what does ‘senseless slaughter’ mean to you?” “It means nothing to me, sir; I’ve never heard that before,” then–2nd Lieutenant Ostlund, a former enlisted Ranger, replied. Petraeus responded, “It is the Battle of the Somme, where sixty thousand Brits were killed or wounded on the first day of battle. You not knowing that is an example of why you need a higher education to understand the larger concepts and reasons we train the way we do.” That led later to discussion, Ostlund shared, about a quality graduate education, which Ostlund ultimately pursued. “I used to explain,” Petraeus shared, “that officers should have sufficient knowledge of history that words or phrases like ‘the Somme’ mean something to them. The Somme was a tragic event in which part of a generation of young British men were ground into the mud because their senior leaders didn’t have the right big ideas.”

  For the rising generation of the military’s leaders, Petraeus not only encouraged the pursuit of intellectual development and a willingness to accept risk; he encouraged initiative and the pursuit of independent action. As Major Lujan’s endeavor to stand up an Afghan COIN Advisory and Assistance effort and his sojourns to military operational areas illustrated, many of these young leaders operated with great autonomy in high-risk environments. This generation also assumed diverse leadership roles as engineers, mediators, police, and jobs-placement and military mentors.

  They sometimes operated in the “gray area” of moral ambiguity, which forced junior leaders to balance the hard realities of complex situations—such as relatively restrictive rules of engagement, and the presence of innocents on the battlefield—with their need to accomplish the mission and protect their troopers. As in the case of Lieutenant Colonel Flynn’s decision to call in an air strike on a bomb-laden village, officers are often held accountable for recognizing the strategic implications of their tactical actions in a complex moral environment. In truth, their choices can have global repercussions. The leaders of what Petraeus termed the “New Greatest Generation” have shouldered tremendous responsibility since 9/11, bridging the tactical and strategic realms. They have demonstrated resilience and commitment and accrued years of wartime experience—in some cases with five years or more of deployments.

  Both the Army and the Marines had shown themselves, in some units at least, capable of effective counterinsurgency operations before Petraeus and Mattis teamed up to draft the new Counterinsurgency Field Manual in 2006. But counterinsurgency tactics in Iraq and Afghanistan before the surge in Iraq had been wildly uneven. Petraeus made comprehensive counterinsurgency concepts the primary focus of ground forces in both conflicts and insisted that best practices be followed by all units under his command. His critics in the Army thought the heavy focus on counterinsurgency was myopic in a world where combat action and high-tech missile readiness were equally important for the next war. What would happen, they asked, if the Army had to intervene in a war between North Korea and South Korea? Similarly, counterinsurgency tactics would accomplish little in a conflict with China in which firepower and maneuver would be far more essential.

  Petraeus never argued that counterinsurgency was the only way America should fight—only that it was the best way to pursue the wars at hand in Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, while he was commander at Fort Leavenworth, he advocated readiness for “full-spectrum” military operations as the prudent goal, and he oversaw development of a field manual that emphasized that concept. He always noted that counterinsurgency includes plenty of hard-edged combat—including conventional clearing operations, counterterrorist force raids and use of airpower. Petraeus would later reflect that he might have spent too much time early on in Afghanistan talking about the success of the night raids. As a result, both the media and the Karzai government focused on them. His approach more correctly was a comprehensive one that also included “stability operations”—activities to support establishment of local governance and rule-of-law capability, foster economic development, counter corruption and drug trafficking, train host-nation security forces and reintegrate reconcilable members of the insurgency. These efforts aimed to improve basic services for the people so that they would support the legitimate government rather than the insurgent alternative. A comprehensive approach, and comprehensive readiness, were most prudent.

  At his retirement ceremony, Petraeus reiterated this point, noting that “it will be imperative to maintain a force that not only capitalizes on the extraordinary experience and expertise resident in our ranks today but also maintains the versatility and flexibility that have been developed over the past decade in particular. I do believe . . . that we have relearned since 9/11 the timeless lesson that we don’t always get to fight the wars for which we are most prepared or most inclined. Given that reality, we will need to maintain the full-spectrum capability that we have developed over this last decade of conflict in Iraq, in Afghanistan and elsewhere.”

  MUCH LIKE AFGHANISTAN for him at the outset, the inner workings of the CIA will be somewhat unfamiliar terrain to Petraeus. With his passion for mastering new systems and developing teams and people, he is likely to be a quick learner. Although the mission and personalities at the CIA will be somewhat new for him, Petraeus’s leadership style there is unlikely to change.

  From Central America and Haiti to Kuwait and Bosnia, from Iraq to Afghanistan and throughout the Central Command area, Petraeus succeeded in convincing fractious elements to work together. But he could have his work cut out for him in the U.S. intelligence community, where cooperation has never been a natural instinct. Most immediately, he wil
l have to gauge how his approach is playing to members of the agency’s powerful Clandestine Service, which includes a surging Special Activities Division, the CIA’s paramilitary arm. Within his first month of assuming its directorship, in fact, CIA drones had killed two high-value al-Qaeda terrorist targets in Yemen: Anwar al-Awlaki, a Yemeni-American imam, and a Saudi-born American militant, Samir Khan, who produced an English-language al-Qaeda Web magazine. Several “high value” al-Qaeda leaders were killed in the rugged tribal areas of Pakistan as well.

  On the analytic side of the CIA, Petraeus will have to craft a constructive relationship with analysts in the Directorate of Intelligence who judged the war in Afghanistan a “stalemate” in an assessment issued as Petraeus was leaving Kabul (though, as Petraeus wryly noted, that judgment was an improvement over the CIA’s assessment of the situation in the summer of 2010). Obama had already told him that he expected him to represent the position of his analysts—but that he also welcomed Petraeus’s personal thoughts when they differ from the agency line.

  As the eighth of twenty directors who came to the CIA from a military background and the second serving out of uniform, he is the first CIA director to have commanded large-scale combat operations and overseen a theater full of war and conflict. If the personal informs the professional, he will be well schooled in employment of these national assets.

  PETRAEUS’S FORT MYER retirement ceremony, on August 31, 2011, marked the end of one career and the beginning of a new one. Petraeus had requested a joint military parade, not an Army-only procession, to symbolically mark his succession of joint commands in combat. A communion of friends and family—from West Point classmates and Screaming Eagle comrades to diplomatic partners and beyond—and generous remarks from his friend and colleague Admiral Mike Mullen brought Petraeus a sense of closure. As Mullen put it: