All In (33 page)

As U.S. forces poured into Baghdad, the insurgents counterattacked, using more and more ruthless tactics and bigger, deadlier bombs. Attacks on U.S. forces throughout Iraq ultimately reached 220 per day. “In truth, the sectarian genie may be tough to put back in the bottle,” Petraeus wrote to O'Hanlon on March 1. “I was taken back by the situation in Baghdad; however, we must do all we can, as the alternative would be grim, as you clearly recognize.” U.S. combat deaths increased from 70 in February and 71 in March to 96 in April, ultimately topping out at 120 in May.

It was “just one blow after another,” Petraeus later observed.

 

If it wasn't a bomb in the cafeteria of the Iraqi Parliament, it was the remaining minaret of the Samarra Mosque complex being blown up or a major market leveled in Baghdad or an explosion on Mutanabbi Street, the intellectual heart of Baghdad. In my second month of command, there were three car bombs per day on average in Baghdad alone, just staggering. We would fly to the green zone from Camp Victory, and . . . if you didn't see a plume of smoke from a car bomb or an oil pipeline that was blown up or some other attack, it was a great day. But there weren't many great days.

Joe Biden, then a Democratic senator from Delaware, pronounced the surge doomed in April. In June, what little political backing existed for the surge all but disappeared. Even Senator Dick Lugar, a Republican, said it was time to end the surge. Petraeus later recalled:

 

We were getting hammered. And Iraqi civilians were getting hammered, we were taking really tough casualties and it was not uncommon to lose five, six troopers in a single attack in a single location, with other attacks similar to that in a day. One hundred and twenty troopers were killed in the month of May 2007 alone. And so we'd have these really tough days. You wanted to go out and just fly around and look out the window and see that there were kids playing soccer and road construction ongoing and a bridge being completed. There were all these canaries in the mine shaft out there that we would revisit to remind myself that this was doable, because it was excruciatingly difficult.

He had faith in the new strategy—conventional U.S. and Iraqi forces clearing areas of insurgents and then holding them by moving into the neighborhoods; reconciliation with elements of the Sunni insurgents and Shia militia who were willing to lay down their weapons; targeted special operations raids to capture or kill key insurgent and militia leaders; support for governance and economic development to build on security gains; support for the development of Iraqi forces and institutions; and so on. It all would eventually work, he believed, but he couldn't pinpoint when the results would become tangible.

A few long months into the surge, Petraeus wondered when the violence would start to ebb. He was keenly aware that it was a race against time, with U.S. public support eroding and congressional hearings scheduled for September. There were 156,000 U.S. forces on the ground and more on the way, yet enemy attacks were increasing and casualties were escalating. Even surge believers began to wonder when, and if, things would improve. “When do we think this baby's gonna turn?” Petraeus remembered asking the operational commander, Lieutenant General Odierno, after one morning stand-up.

Attacks on U.S. forces increased at least in part because the soldiers moved off their big, fortified bases and established small outposts in neighborhoods, seventy-seven of them in Baghdad alone. Living among the people exposed the troops to attacks by suicide bombers, militiamen and insurgents. But this action was one of the strategy's most important components, and Petraeus and Odierno pushed to accelerate it. U.S. and Iraqi troops started walking the streets, befriending store owners, fixing clogged sewers, repairing pockmarked schools. Soon they started receiving tips about insurgent hideouts. The intelligence they would gain became a key factor in the success of their operations as well as in the night raids overseen by Special Operations Forces, commanded at the time by Lieutenant General McChrystal.

“They displayed incredible resilience and courage,” Petraeus said of the conventional surge forces. “They demonstrated enormous initiative. I think [those qualities] are a strength of our country in general—innovativeness, determination, sheer courage at various times as well as in really difficult positions and conditions. And steadfastness in the face of just really horrific losses and casualties.”

Petraeus put a huge premium on initiative at the small-unit level:

 

That's exactly the kind of attitude that you're seeking to foster, the kind of culture that you're seeking to establish in an organization that's conducting a counterinsurgency campaign as difficult as what we were doing in Iraq. I gave captains my e-mail address and said if there's ever something that's so vexing that you just want to throw your hands in the air, don't do that. Send me an e-mail. If you really care that much, then you gotta have the guts to do it, because you're talking about life-and-death issues and you have an awesome responsibility to your troopers. So don't ever hesitate to do that if it's reached that point.

Finally, attacks and U.S. combat losses started to drop precipitously in July. Surge skeptics and revisionists argued that the improvement came not from anything the surge troops were doing but because ethnic cleansing had run its course, but Petraeus and Odierno differed. The key for them was living with the people. Meanwhile, Petraeus was busy beginning the process of putting 103,000 Sunnis and Shiites, former insurgents or militia, on the U.S. payroll. Petraeus's decision to reconcile with former Sunni insurgents and later with Shiites was one of the riskier parts of his strategy. He did not initially tell the Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite, that he planned to put many opponents of his regime on the American payroll, though he forged cooperation as early as he could, and ultimately there was partnership on the approach. Nor did he clear the move with Bush. He just did it, informing Washington but not asking permission.

Petraeus agrees that signing neighborhood truces with Sunni and Shia militants helped reduce violence. But ultimately violence came down, he said, for a variety of different reasons: broad reconciliation with the Sunni and Shia group leaders, targeted night raids on al-Qaeda and Shia militia leaders, major clearance operations in insurgent strongholds, and Maliki directing action against the fighters of anti-American Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. “I think August is going pretty well,” Petraeus wrote to O'Hanlon on August 12. “We've continued to make substantial progress against al Qaeda in Iraq and do have them on the run. Looks like sectarian deaths, IEDs, and attacks are all trending down—and the latter two may be approaching statistical significance.”

By the time Petraeus went back to Capitol Hill to brief Congress on the surge in September 2007, he had ample metrics to show that the surge was, in fact, succeeding. As he would do later in describing the gains in Afghanistan, he called the gains in Iraq fragile and reversible. For this reason, the full-page “General Betray Us” ad placed by MoveOn.org in the
New York Times
on the day of his Senate testimony seemed particularly unfair in its assertion that Petraeus wasn't being honest with the facts. Petraeus never minimized the difficulties in Iraq, even after conditions improved. “There are endless, innumerable problems that just cause one to want to explode in frustration,” he wrote to O'Hanlon on October 28. “And attacks do continue—including a possible kidnapping, yesterday, of sheiks who came to see the prime minister about reconciliation.” On November 28, he wrote to O'Hanlon: “You won't hear us talk about turning corners, [reaching] culminating points, [achieving] success, or any of that. In fact, I have repeatedly said that we won't know that we turned a corner until 6 months after we did so; moreover, I have said repeatedly as well that there will be plenty of tough days and tough weeks in the months ahead.”

In March 2008 came a climactic series of battles when Prime Minister Maliki made a courageous, if somewhat impulsive, decision to confront the Shia militia in Basra, in southern Iraq, and then in the Baghdad suburb of Sadr City, among other locations. The subsequent fighting was some of the most intense of the war, but U.S. and U.K. forces backed up the Iraqis in the south, while Americans in Baghdad massed assets to take on the militia groups in pitched fighting in the city.

The U.S. forces and Iraqi offensives were relentless, taking control of one area after another, steadily building Iraqi forces in quantity and quality, and supporting the slow but continuing development of local, provincial and national governance and economic development, including important initiatives overseen by then–Colonel Mark Martins in the rule-of-law arena and numerous efforts to enable the development of political consensus and legislation on which further progress hinged. The comprehensive civil-military COIN campaign proved itself.

By the time he left Iraq in mid-September 2008, after more than nineteen months in command, Petraeus and his surge forces and Iraqi partners had clearly regained the initiative across the country. Given the conditions they had inherited in early 2007, that was a historic accomplishment. The surge had been violent and bloody. U.S. combat losses totaled 1,124 soldiers killed, with 7,710 wounded. But the surge proved to be Petraeus's finest hour as a field general. As he said in his final letter to his troops, on September 15, 2008, “your great work, sacrifice, courage, and skill have helped reverse a downward spiral toward civil war and wrest the initiative from the enemies of the new Iraq.”

IN MID-APRIL 2011,
the enemies of the new Afghanistan seemed to be everywhere. As Major General John Campbell prepared to lift off from the RC East command headquarters at Bagram Air Base, east of Kabul, for a day's battlefield circulation. He thought of these battlefield circulations as critical parts of his job, not social events. Commanding Afghanistan's eastern sector on yearly rotations was a challenge for anyone, given the vast and difficult terrain, the diversity of tribes and the depth of knowledge necessary to tell good guys from bad guys in dozens of villages. But by this point, approaching the end of his tour, Campbell had started demonstrating real mastery. Petraeus noticed how skillful Campbell had become and valued his counsel. Then urgent word arrived: There had been a suicide attack by a man wearing an Afghan army uniform at Forward Operating Base Gamberi, in Laghman Province, to the east. Several members of the 101st Sustainment Brigade—the “Lifeliners”—had been killed in the attack, along with Afghan soldiers and possibly others. Unfortunately, such attacks had become commonplace, but it didn't make them any easier for a commander at any level in the chain of command, including a division commander, to stomach. Campbell was in immediate contact with the commander on the ground; he'd allow that commander the opportunity to conduct consequence management; then, he decided, he'd go to the scene to view it for himself.

While he continued to monitor the developments via radio at the scene of the suicide attack at Gamberi, Campbell continued his battlefield circulation on the cloudy and dreary day. He next touched down at the headquarters of the 2nd Battalion of the 506th Infantry Regiment, home to Task Force White Currahee. Lieutenant Colonel Don Hill greeted him, walked him to a briefing room and described the unit's largest air assault during the deployment, Operation Overlord, which was still under way in the nearby Naka District. Naka was the last insurgent stronghold in the region, the place where enemy soldiers slept, planned, recovered and staged their attacks. They had been expecting an attack by the Americans. But when it came, the rapid insertion of 350 U.S. soldiers and their Afghan partners left the insurgents nowhere to go and little to do but attack the Americans' blocking positions, to little effect. As Hill briefed Campbell, U.S. soldiers occupied the final insurgent stronghold in the region.

The climactic air assault was the logical culmination of operations emanating from Combat Outpost Zerok, about twelve miles from the Pakistan border. As recently as that summer, it had been under near-constant attack by the insurgents with small arms and mortars. The base had nearly fallen to the insurgents in 2009 and was considered one of the most dangerous places in Afghanistan. When Lara Logan and a team from
60 Minutes
embedded at Zerok the previous August, a month after Petraeus assumed command, they had found themselves in a fierce rocket attack in their first hour at the base. Two soldiers were wounded.

At first, the Currahees' chances for success in the region seemed remote. As in the Korengal and Pech valleys, to the north in Kunar Province, where the ultimate decision would be to withdraw forces from the most remote areas, the area was difficult to clear of insurgents with force levels that were relatively light compared with those in the south, around Kandahar. But Echo Company had made strong gains since its arrival in August 2010. Zerok hadn't been shelled since the previous summer, in part, according to Major Mark Houston, the battalion operations officer, because of a shift in tactics that included relentless foot patrols in the mountains. By patrolling at night, the Currahees had taken away the insurgents' vantage points and disrupted their freedom of movement to the extent that engagements had virtually ceased. As U.S. forces were gradually drawn down, this coverage would be assumed by Afghan forces, border police or, in some areas, the Afghan Local Police.

By April, villagers in this part of Paktika Province enjoyed greater freedom of movement. A new hotel had opened in the local bazaar, in part to accommodate the increased flow of travelers coming into the larger villages to buy and sell goods and larger numbers of elders returning to represent their villages in district
shuras.
Two hundred fifty elders had attended a
shura
the month prior, Hill noted, helping to mediate land and timber disputes. In an area where the Taliban's shadow government had resolved disputes in the past, now elders—and by extension the Afghan government—had begun to reassert their authority.