All In (37 page)

At 1:00
A.M.
on May 17, Dog Company's 1st Platoon and Headquarters Platoon moved to reinforce Petrone's 3rd Platoon. In the darkness, Mioduszewski spotted the enemy with his night-vision goggles and fired on them as the platoon leader called in air strikes. When the enemy approached to within fifty yards of the company's perimeter, Morrison left his primary position and maneuvered with his 90-mm recoilless rifle, firing at the insurgents at point-blank range.

As the company consolidated its position, Apache helicopters fired on an insurgent spotted near the area where the bombs had been dropped. The pilots soon realized that they were taking fire not from insurgents but from a Pakistani military base just over the border—the same base from which the insurgents had launched their attacks. After one helicopter was hit by small-arms fire, the other opened up on the Pakistani base. Insurgent fire then ceased for the rest of the day, allowing all of Churchill's units to clear their objectives and establish a unified company position.

As dusk approached on May 18, the insurgents attacked again. They had reestablished three positions on the mountain above the force and were firing with machine guns and small arms. Churchill ran to the company's easternmost gun position, directed automatic weapons and the 60-mm mortars to fire at all three insurgent positions, then ran back to his command post and called in air strikes and artillery. There was a lull, and Churchill reported to battalion headquarters. Minutes later, the insurgents attacked again, raining effective machine-gun and small-arms fire down on the eastern end of the company's perimeter. Churchill ran back to the east, assessed the situation, organized fires and returned to the command post. First Lieutenant Chase M. Derbin played a similar role, moving from cluster to cluster to direct machine-gun fire at the insurgents from the company's southernmost position. After the second attack was defeated, a sergeant in the Afghan Border Police fighting alongside the Americans saw insurgents running to the Pakistani military base on the Pakistan side of the border, dragging injured and dead comrades.

When Apaches arrived overhead, they saw two Mi-17 helicopters on the Pakistan side of the border, but the Pakistani aircraft turned south and headed down the border. The battle was over. Churchill's company had blocked Route Civic and disrupted insurgent operations in the gap between the Gayan and Spera districts. There were no further insurgent attacks during the company's final five weeks in Afghanistan.

As a result of the operation, the insurgents had lost their ability to affect the population, as well as the ability to move men, weapons and equipment across the border. The population had seen the enemy attack the Americans and their Afghan partners twice, and twice be defeated. Twenty-one insurgent fighters had been killed, with six wounded. Now Churchill worked with his partners in the Afghan military to move immediately into the villages and initiate security operations. Their message was simple, and powerful: We are here to protect you.

AMID THE NOISE
and hubbub of Café Milano, the best place at ISAF headquarters, in Kabul, for cappuccino and free WiFi, Brigadier General H. R. McMaster spoke with confidence. With Petraeus's strong support and help, he had assembled a small army of military and civilian go-getters, including top investigators from the FBI, the DEA, State and Treasury. But before they could begin fighting corruption, they had to understand the nature of the organizations they were up against. They soon realized that they were looking at organized crime—criminal networks fueled by international aid that often made even more money trafficking in Afghanistan's number-one export, opium. And those working with the insurgents could then purchase Afghanistan's top imports: weapons and fertilizer, for use in making roadside bombs. McMaster's team had to understand how these networks worked with one another internally, and how they worked externally with criminal syndicates in Pakistan and places like Dubai.

As ever, the Afghans understood their country far better than the Americans ever would, so working closely with trusted Afghans was the key. With Afghanistan invariably ranked as one of the world's most corrupt nations, McMaster and his cohorts also had to find a way to talk about and describe the problem without insulting their hosts. They finally constructed a narrative that everyone could buy into: Corruption in the country was the by-product of thirty years of conflict. Vast amounts of international assistance had flowed in without adequate oversight, and the government lacked strong institutions that might have been able to ensure transparency and accountability. Part of the problem stemmed from how the wars had been funded in the past—by dumping huge amounts of money on proxy forces, followed by various political settlements that empowered the warlords, whose corruption then solidified their strength and power. The Afghans—at least those working with McMaster—could see how corruption robbed the state of revenues, perpetuated dependence upon international aid, weakened institutions, undermined the legitimacy of the government and eroded international support.

The first key to Shafafiyat's progress had come through the counterinsurgency contracting guidance that McMaster had drafted and Petraeus had edited and then signed on September 8. Before that, the Americans were ostensibly letting contractors operate the way they did back home—hiring a prime contractor and letting him police all the subcontractors. It was too much work to do otherwise. But in Afghanistan, McMaster learned, you had to know who the subcontractors were, because some of them were skimming money and underwriting the Taliban. Petraeus said in the counterinsurgency manual that “money is ammunition,” and McMaster was finding that U.S. aid had—unintentionally, through inadequate contracting practices—been giving ammunition to the enemy. Now, in accordance with the contracting guidance, to win a contract, a contractor had to name all of his subs; and McMaster now had sufficient intelligence to figure out who the subs were—and to track them on the job. As Petraeus noted in the contracting guidance, “If money is ammunition, then we need to get it into the right hands.” Now, if strange things started happening to the money, there were real consequences: suspension and debarment, which meant no more lucrative contracts for three to four years. “If you want to make money with contracts, you better start policing your own end of the business, right?” McMaster said. “Because if you get debarred, you're not gonna have that business opportunity.”

When McMaster had started his work nearly a year earlier, more than a few eyebrows had been raised by those in Kabul's vast international mission: Why were Petraeus and the military focusing on corruption? Didn't Petraeus have enough to worry about on the battlefield? Petraeus and McMaster, however, had quickly recognized that if the so-called criminal patronage networks were not taken on, they would destroy the very Afghan governmental institutions to which ISAF and the international community were soon to begin transferring important tasks. The mission was not, therefore, optional; it was critical to the overall effort. So McMaster had launched his assessment, and made progress, recognizing over time that Petraeus's ability to achieve “unity of effort” among all the players—military and civilian, Afghan, American and international—allowed for the progress through his task force.

PETRAEUS AND RETIRED
general Jack Keane had sat chatting in Petraeus's office in Baghdad in the fall of 2008 when Petraeus's direct phone line rang. It was the senior military assistant to the secretary of Defense, Lieutenant General Pete Chiarelli. “The secretary wants to talk to you in thirty minutes; will you be available?” Petraeus said he would. “You know what that's going to be about, don't you, Dave?” Keane asked. Petraeus did; he suspected he was going to be offered command of U.S. Central Command, the Florida-based combatant command covering an area of responsibility of twenty countries across the broader Middle East, upon completion of his tour in Iraq.

He had had a few reservations as, after spending four of the previous five and a half years in Iraq, he thought a new landscape might be more intellectually stimulating. But he responded that command of Central Command would be an honor, and after a few months in the new position, he found it to be the best assignment he could have in the military. No one operated at the strategic political-military level better than Petraeus, and heading CENTCOM was the ultimate pol-mil job. His combat tours in Iraq had brought him in contact with officials from Turkey, Jordan and virtually all the Gulf states. Now he had a chance to utilize those relations and security networks.

As head of Central Command, he oversaw two wars that were under the command of subordinate four-star generals in Iraq and Afghanistan. Three-star generals representing each of the four services reported to him as component commanders. The Joint Special Operations Command, also under him for operations in the Central Command theater, was a key player across the region in the war on terror. The full scope of the responsibility, beyond overseeing and resourcing the two ground wars and regional counterterrorist operations, was enormous. He was involved in formulating the drawdown of forces from Iraq and the buildup in Afghanistan. He oversaw counterterrorist operations in Yemen and other locations. He was responsible for regional security, working to turn bilateral relations into multilateral ones that would collectively promote air and ballistic missile defense and shared early-warning systems. He worked on maritime freedom of navigation and counter-piracy operations. He gathered Arab perspectives on the Middle East peace process. And he paid special attention to what some experts on his team thought could be a fundamental strategic reordering of the region, given the confluence of Iran's apparent efforts to develop nuclear weapons, the potential of the Saudis and the Gulf allies to follow suit, and various ethnic, sectarian and tribal tensions, any of which could manifest as conflicts in short order.

The day after he took command, Petraeus was on his plane for Pakistan and Afghanistan. Shortly after that, he and his team headed to the Central Asian states. Among his first priorities, after assessing ongoing operations in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq, was development of the so-called Northern Distribution Network, the logistical arrangements to transport supplies and matériel into Afghanistan from the north instead of through Pakistan. The existing dependence on Pakistan as the primary supply route into landlocked Afghanistan was a strategic vulnerability. A considerable threat to the major supply routes existed in Pakistan, and at the time—shortly after the Russian intervention in Georgia—there seemed to be few alternatives. Cutting off supplies to the war theater would put the mission in jeopardy. When Petraeus and his team landed in Uzbekistan for high-level meetings, Petraeus's team's efforts and those of his U.S. Transportation Command counterparts and their staffs made great strides. Soon, new air, land and rail networks had been established to support logistical flow to Afghanistan, reducing the dependence on Pakistan and reducing the strategic vulnerability, just in time for the surge of forces to arrive in Afghanistan.

In January 2009, after meetings with key leaders in Central Asia, sessions with Pakistan's president and the army chief in Pakistan and a dinner with President Karzai in Afghanistan, Petraeus was beckoned back to Washington for a meeting on the day after the inauguration at the White House to launch a review of the policy for Iraq. “Don't head back to Tampa yet,” one National Security Council official told Petraeus after the meeting on Iraq. “We are going to begin the review on Afghanistan tomorrow.” Petraeus, having flown in that morning from Afghanistan, and the Obama team, having just celebrated the inauguration, were exhausted. But there was no time to waste as Bruce Riedel, a former CIA official now at the Brookings Institution, was selected to commence the sixty-day review.

Petraeus, according to Riedel, “was the unacknowledged third co-chair,” along with Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, who had been selected to be the special representative to the president and the secretary of State for Afghanistan and Pakistan. “Petraeus knew more than all other members of the team,” Riedel said in an interview, but he and Holbrooke also knew enough not to make Petraeus, whom Holbrooke called his “wingman,” the face of the policy, given the perception at the time that Petraeus was a “Bush guy.”

The Riedel review followed on the heels of a review that Petraeus had chartered using a CENTCOM assessment team of interagency players that looked at the key issues across Afghanistan and seven subregional problem sets. The effort was codirected by Brigadier General H. R. McMaster and three other senior officials—from Treasury, State and the CIA. Conceptualization of the five-month review began at Petraeus's behest even before he took command. It included one of the “most robust interagency teams in anyone's memory,” according to State Department codirector Dawn Liberi, with fifty core players and more than 150 subject-matter experts, working out of office spaces at the National Defense University, in Washington. The findings presented Petraeus with “a bird's-eye view through multiple lenses,” recalled Liberi, “in part because it brought in a political, policy and intel perspective, but also the views of NGOs, think tanks and academic personnel.”

Liberi was struck by Petraeus's guidance to look at the issues from an interagency perspective. He also recognized “the importance of bringing in voices that the military wouldn't ordinarily have . . . and bringing in an academic perspective that had intellectual rigor to it.” Liberi, a senior development expert who had served with Petraeus in Iraq and would subsequently serve in Afghanistan from 2009 to 2011, explained the significance of the assessment team and one of its key conclusions: that a comprehensive civil-military counterinsurgency approach was needed in many areas of the region, requiring varying numbers of U.S. troops on the ground, depending on the capabilities of the host nations.