All In (27 page)

“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 frustrating 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.”

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.”