All In (32 page)

Flynn thought the threat of an attack on the mosque opening was low, and he didn't want security officers to flood the zone as they had for Secretary Gates's recent visit. This time, Flynn kept them behind the tree line so they were not visible from the road. When he picked up the reporters, he went “slick,” leaving his Kevlar body armor and helmet behind. Though out of sight, security was still substantial.

With the fighting season again upon Afghanistan, the Taliban had shown themselves to be a tough and adaptable enemy. The Top Guns in the Arghandab River Valley and the No Slack battalion in the mountains of Kunar made it clear that massing force against the Americans was a losing proposition. So the Taliban had turned to infiltration attacks on ISAF and Afghan forces, in addition to resuming its campaign of suicide attacks and assassinations.

On his way to see the governor of Kandahar Province several days later, Petraeus flew over Tarok Kolache so he could get a peek at the new mosque and progress on the houses. He had tracked developments there closely and had been heartened by the progress. However, the Taliban had pulled off a brazen attack that day in Kandahar, sending insurgents wearing suicide vests to attack a police and military training center, followed by an ambulance that the Afghans assumed was there to pick up casualties from the first attack. The ambulance was actually loaded with explosives that detonated inside the compound. The twin attack killed six Afghans and wounded twelve others. It was Kandahar's third eruption of violence in a week.

In his appearance with the governor in Kandahar, Petraeus addressed the recent burning of a Koran by a minister at a church in Florida, calling it an “inhumane action.” It had, in fact, been a catalyst for violence in Kandahar and several other cities in Afghanistan and left many Afghans badly shaken. Later, he stopped at Forward Operating Base Wilson to see Flynn and his boss, Colonel Arthur Kandarian, commander of the 101st's Strike Brigade, which had done much of the heavy fighting around Kandahar. Petraeus acknowledged that Kandarian's brigade had weathered a tough fight over the past year. Flynn arrived after Petraeus and joined him as Petraeus chatted with Kandarian and several other officers.

The Strike Brigade was in the final weeks of its deployment and understandably felt a sense of considerable accomplishment, albeit tempered by recollection of the human price paid along the way. Petraeus was there to pay tribute to the Strike Brigade's troopers and to speak to their leaders. They should, he told them, be very proud of what their troopers had accomplished. Several days later, Lieutenant General David M. Rodriguez, head of ISAF's Joint Command, informed Flynn that he would be awarded the Silver Star for courage and valor under fire in rallying his forces during the Battle of Bakersfield. Flynn and his unit had been down a tough road since their first operation with the paratroopers of the 82nd, establishing themselves as among the finest counterinsurgents Petraeus had ever seen. He told Flynn as much in private.

LESS THAN
a week later, Petraeus lifted off from the soccer field at ISAF headquarters in his Black Hawk to visit Vowell's No Slack battalion in the Kunar River Valley, several days after Vowell's troops had cleared Barawala Kalay and Sarowbay in Operation Strong Eagle III. He had last met with Vowell and his soldiers in August, following their opening victories in the mountains, Operations Strong Eagle I and II. Accompanied by Major General John Campbell and Colonel Andrew Poppas, commander of the 101st's Bastogne Brigade, Petraeus had come to pin on medals, present awards, receive an intelligence briefing and review lessons learned from the battlefield, all tasks he never tired of doing.

Following the removal of all U.S. forces from the northern part of the Pech Valley in February, Operation Strong Eagle III had been conceived to create “time and space” for the realignment of those forces elsewhere in the region. At the time of the withdrawal, Petraeus had said that “the math didn't add up,” meaning there simply weren't enough troops there to sustain U.S.-led population-centric counterinsurgency operations, as had been envisioned for the area years prior. Nor were they necessarily the answer in that area. In fact, he had come to agree with Lieutenant General David Rodriguez that the small outposts were not achieving what had been intended when they'd been emplaced years earlier. Consequently, they made the decision to consolidate forces elsewhere. Building forty bases over five years in an effort to extend the reach of the Kabul government in the rugged mountains of the east had cost more than dozens of Americans their lives. But the people who lived in this forbidding region had no interest in aligning with the Karzai regime, or with the Taliban, for that matter. “The failure in the Pech does not mean that counterinsurgency is a failed concept,” Petraeus disciple Ollivant said in Washington.
“But it shows that it certainly will fail—or be exponentially more difficult—when it is attempted against isolated peoples who have consciously opted out of the state system. Yes, these non-state spaces do leave room for terrorists to find sanctuary. But it's awfully hard to attack Manhattan from the Pech Valley.”

Petraeus sat between Campbell and Poppas for the intelligence briefing, conducted by the No Slack battalion's intelligence officer. The Taliban, he said, called Kunar the “Gateway to Afghanistan.” It was largely an unrestricted transit area from Pakistan, a rugged route for fighters and munitions. It also contained remote training areas for insurgents, some of whom had relocated their families there. The enemy typically moved at night. They sometimes even wore women's clothing for cover. This was the same area where Linda Norgrove, a British woman working for a USAID contractor to build roads and bridges and improve agriculture in the area, had been kidnapped in September by insurgents wearing Afghan army uniforms. She had been killed in early October by a grenade thrown by a member of a Navy SEAL team attempting to rescue her. Generally speaking, Afghans in this area were not particularly forthcoming. The intelligence officer noted that “significant activities”—typically attacks—had increased in the area from 77 in 2009 to 234 in 2011. The increase, he told Petraeus, was due, in part, to the past two mild winters. There had been no snow in the area until February, so insurgents had freedom of movement throughout much of the normally bitter winters. Beyond that, the insurgents had sought to expand their footholds in this forbidding area with few coalition and Afghan forces.

There were different groups of insurgents in the area, Petraeus noted, and competition among them that needed to be understood. He knew the Pakistan side of the border from his days at Central Command, and his focus since July had been on the southern and southwestern regions of Afghanistan. In recent months he had been focusing more on achieving “granular knowledge” of the east, and he pressed the commander about the way forward. “You know the enemy will return in months if you don't ultimately find a way to hold,” Petraeus said, offering that Afghan security solutions had to be the answer.

The discussion then turned to the recent operation. Vowell and his operations officer explained that they had established three communications centers to maintain adequate command and control of the battle. With temperatures dipping into the twenties at night, they had conducted fourteen complex air assaults with only four helicopters available: two UH-60 Black Hawks and two large CH-47 Chinooks. In the treacherous mountain terrain, there were few cleared areas where helicopters could safely land. All of the attack and maneuver operations had to be planned around available points of insertion. “We used historic sites, but we also had to clear several new areas,” he explained. “Sir, it was the most demanding operation we've ever done.”

Petraeus, who had commanded numerous huge air-assault operations in Iraq as commander of the 101st Airborne, asked Vowell question after question about the insertions, and how they had worked the synchronization of air support and communications. Then he shifted the focus from tactical to strategic. “Your task right now is to ‘disrupt,'” he told Vowell. “Once you've cleared this area, your task will have to become to ‘deny' the enemy his safe havens. They will use Kunar if it is wide-open. You must figure out how to hold by employing various local security solutions. That's the only way to deny the Taliban additional safe havens.” He also stressed the importance of their partnership with Afghans. “Ultimately, as you know, you'll have to shift your mission to work more with the Afghan National Police and the Afghan National Army. Use every tool you can use so that we can eventually hand off to ANSF. . . . The main effort in the larger campaign will eventually shift here to the east, but, perhaps sooner than that, we will have to begin the drawdown. We won't get more U.S. forces.”

The Afghans had already shown that they were capable of working with the Pakistanis on some parts of the border at the tactical and operational levels. Given the porous state of the border, the location of which was unclear in many areas, Pakistanis and Afghans in tribes straddling the border had grown up knowing one another. Campbell explained how he and other ISAF officials had worked directly with the “PakMil” on a plan for this area, an initiative Petraeus applauded, as a comprehensive border plan was one of the greatest challenges for ISAF commanders and their Afghan partners.

Beyond attempting to disrupt the ability of both the Taliban and al-Qaeda to reestablish themselves in the mountain passes and the border, Vowell's battalion was also involved with the creation of Afghan Local Police detachments, as well as a small “allegiance” program for individuals who wanted to lay down arms and reintegrate.

“The formula doesn't matter,” said Petraeus, explaining that the exact size and nature of the programs employed for convincing the insurgents to stop fighting was less important than the outcome, as long as the programs met certain redlines. “If the concept includes locals running acceptable governance mechanisms, and they are not engaged in violence or causing problems, that equals success,” assured Petraeus. “We have to see how Pech plays out; it is a test case.” Petraeus thought the challenge in Kunar was in determining the right mix of U.S. and Afghan forces, given the inevitable limitations on forces.

As he had noted in his conversation with Vowell, the goal was not only to
disrupt
the enemy, as Vowell's forces had done, but to
deny
them safe havens. He believed the ultimate solution would rest with Afghan Local Police detachments, partnered with small U.S. Special Forces elements and integrated with the growing Afghan army and police forces. The surge in Afghanistan would begin to recede in the months ahead, and Petraeus hoped the momentum Vowell and Flynn had helped create could be sustained by Afghan forces. He had seen it work before.

IN EARLY 2007,
President Bush had made Petraeus not just the commander but also the face of the war in Iraq. The new four-star was to command a last-ditch effort to salvage the administration's faltering effort in Iraq. A force of five additional combat brigades would “surge” into Baghdad and other parts of Iraq to quell the raging sectarian violence, protect the Iraqi people and arrest Iraq's slide into civil war—the exact counterinsurgency concept Petraeus had spent the previous fifteen months defining at Fort Leavenworth.

In advocating what came to be known as the surge, a coterie of colonels, generals, defense intellectuals and retired officers parted company with many in the Army and pinned their hopes on the counterinsurgency tactics that had fascinated Petraeus since he was a young officer. There were few other officials who believed that a surge could effect change, but Bush did. Approving the brigades, he tasked the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Peter Pace, to identify the forces and deploy them as rapidly as possible.

“Figure it out,” Pace, in turn, told the Pentagon operations team on December 24, 2006. Petraeus and the operational-level commander, Lieutenant General Raymond Odierno, and the respective division commanders would determine the employment of the forces in Iraq. Petraeus was adamant about the commitment of all five brigades from the outset. He couldn't be forced to ask for each brigade, month after month, as the serving commander in Iraq had proposed.

“The situation in Iraq is dire,” Petraeus told the Senate Armed Services Committee during his confirmation hearing on January 23, 2007. “The stakes are high. There are no easy choices. The way ahead will be very hard. Progress will require determination and difficult U.S. and Iraqi actions—especially the latter, as, ultimately, the outcome will be determined by the Iraqis. But hard is not hopeless.”

After the confirmation hearing, Petraeus went to see Bush in the Oval Office. Betting his presidency on the success of the surge, Bush described the commitment of additional forces as a “double down” strategy. Petraeus said it was more than that, according to a source briefed after the meeting. “This isn't double down, Mr. President. It's all in,” Petraeus stated. “And we need the whole U.S. government to go all in, not just the military.”

On February 11, 2007, the day after Petraeus took command in Baghdad, he went out on his first battlefield circulation. At the Dora Market, in the Rasheed District of south Baghdad, where death squads had dumped many bodies, Petraeus's escort said it was too dangerous to stop. No bodies were visible, but the walls of buildings bore blast marks and bullet holes, and the police station Petraeus's organization had built in his previous tour had been blown up by a car bomb. No one was on the streets, and the fear in the neighborhoods was palpable. Petraeus was stunned to see the damage to the area, one that he recalled from a previous tour as a vibrant upper-middle-class neighborhood. He found the same in Ghazaliyah, in northwestern Baghdad.

“Gonna be nothing easy about this,” Petraeus noted that afternoon in an e-mail to Michael O'Hanlon, of the Brookings Institution. Petraeus immediately energized the senior staff and commanders. But his will was sorely tested. “You have to be able to take bad news,” Petraeus would say later. “A day in Iraq during the surge was multiple items of bad news throughout the day. Some of these were just like a massive emotional blow.”