All In (38 page)

Interagency elements would also play key roles in counterterrorism efforts. Drawing on models he had employed in Bosnia and Iraq, Petraeus built an interagency counterterrorism working group to address problems that required international, interagency cooperation, including creation of a cell to track terrorist financing, a regional initiative to choke the flow of foreign fighters, and efforts to interdict the flow of weapons and materials sought by regional countries for illicit reasons. A major concern for the entire intelligence community was the growing problem presented by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, in particular the facilitation and training locations in Yemen. The response would not be large numbers of boots on the ground, but a counterterrorism strike program powered by quality intelligence, Predator drones armed with lethal Hellfire missiles, and lightning-fast Special Operations raids like the one that would kill Osama bin Laden. It was an example of what seemed to be becoming the U.S. grand counterterrorism strategy: “whack a mole.”

The key to whacking moles, in whatever country, Petraeus felt, was engaging with the country leader and seeking agreement on cooperative efforts, ideally with the host nation conducting the operations, and with the United States providing security assistance, training, intelligence and other help. The other key was, as he put it, “whacking all the moles in the region simultaneously” so that operations didn't just displace the terrorists from one sanctuary to another. Less than two months into his command, Petraeus and his team made a trip to Yemen to meet with President Ali Abdullah Saleh, but little was accomplished other than posturing. The next fall, Petraeus returned again after Admiral William McRaven, the head of the JSOC at the time, and John Brennan, assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, had also visited. The threat was now more apparent, Saleh had seen Central Command deliver on past promises, and the tone was much different. Soon the U.S. security force assistance effort had grown from $60 million in the first year to $150 million the next year. The robustness of the assistance package was supported by the mutually defined priorities of all the component commanders serving under Central Command. Conventional, Special Forces and Special Mission units all played important parts, together with intelligence and diplomatic elements.

The meeting opened the gates for improved interagency cooperation and operations against al-Qaeda leaders who found sanctuary there. Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the intelligence community believed, had grown beyond a national or regional threat and now posed a serious extremist threat to Europe and the United States. The increasing importance of American-born Anwar al-Awlaki, who'd emerged as a very charismatic extremist figure in cyberspace, confirmed that the assessment of the threat in Yemen was well founded. Al-Awlaki would be killed in a CIA drone strike in late September 2011, shortly after Petraeus took over as CIA director.

At Central Command, Petraeus would constantly tell members of his team, “Your job is to identify significant trends and good ideas and bring them to my attention.” Petraeus's political adviser, Ambassador Mike Gfoeller, an Arabist with decades of experience, remembers Petraeus telling him that he had “complete freedom to think about and investigate anything that you might think is important, as long as you keep me informed periodically. . . . You report to me and shouldn't worry about anyone else; don't tolerate any attempts to circumscribe what you are doing for me.” Petraeus moved to empower his associates to think more openly about problem solving.

One of the greatest challenges Petraeus would face at CENTCOM was Pakistan. The reviews in 2009 all concluded that Pakistan had to remain a priority. Petraeus would labor with other U.S. officials, including Ambassador Holbrooke, to support Pakistan's military with security force assistance initiatives. Gaining approval for these assessments meant closed-door congressional sessions together with Holbrooke to support the Kerry-Lugar-Berman bill, among other initiatives. Petraeus felt these efforts had, relatively speaking, helped to improve relations with Pakistan, especially military cooperation programs, by the spring of 2009.

Pakistan's General Kayani, Petraeus believed, had skillfully guided the military, national and political leadership, as well as the Pakistani religious community, to recognize the imperative of operations in the Swat Valley. This was where Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan—the Pakistani version of the Taliban—had taken over in the spring of 2009. When Pakistani forces launched operations, the decision was made in Washington to assist. “They'd run low on artillery ammunition, we'd find some, and we'd fly it into the country,” Petraeus recalled. “We substantially augmented our Special Forces on the ground from probably a couple of dozen to well over a hundred.”

U.S. Special Forces were there to provide foreign internal defense assistance, especially helping rebuild the Pakistani special operations forces, which had sustained significant losses while employed as light infantry in heavy fighting in prior years. U.S. forces helped to arm and train Pakistani forces and to build training facilities and other infrastructure for them. Improved cooperation, however, was not guaranteed. That was why Petraeus, from the moment he moved from Central Command to commander in Afghanistan, focused on Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan.

IN WASHINGTON,
Doug Ollivant tried to explain why RC East had just pulled out of the nearby Pech Valley, in Kunar Province, near the Pakistan border
.
He was beginning a new career as a writer and think-tank analyst and, he hoped, a government contractor specializing in data applications. In an op-ed for the
Washington Post,
Ollivant argued that there were actually three wars in Afghanistan. The first was against al-Qaeda and related terrorist groups. The second, fought on behalf of the Karzai government, was against the Taliban. And the third pitted the country's “urban modernizers” against its “rural, tribal, anti-modern peoples” who live in the forbidding mountain villages.

When the U.S. military had seized on population-centric counterinsurgency operations as the appropriate strategy in 2006, it built forty bases in the Pech, Korengal and Waygal valleys of Kunar Province, only to realize three or four years later that this move was not well founded. The people in these villages, by and large, didn't want to be part of modern Afghanistan, and attempts by American soldiers to win their hearts and minds had the perverse effect, in many instances, of driving them closer to the terrorists, who also frequented these border environs. “The Pech will not be ignored,” Ollivant wrote in justification of the withdrawal of American forces from the Pech.
“The U.S. military will continue to hunt down terrorists there and in a host of other valleys. What it will not do is attempt to remain in these remote regions, attempt to alter the way of life of their people or attempt to extend the reach of Kabul into places where it is decidedly unwelcome. That is an exercise in futility, a lesson the troops withdrawing from the Pech have paid in blood to learn.”

Petraeus found the piece sensible and thought it accurately described what he and RC East commander Major General Campbell had sought to do in redirecting troops to key districts, although Petraeus still thought it was essential, over the long haul, to deny even rugged areas like those in Kunar to the enemy as sanctuaries. But occupying them, as commanders had tried to do from 2006 to 2010, wasn't the right approach. Rather, Afghan troops, working with Afghan Local Police at the village level, should work with the tribes on denying the enemy sanctuary, with help from drones and Special Operations Forces and occasional large-scale air-assault operations like those conducted by Vowell and Churchill.

The downside of this light footprint in the eastern provinces was apparent on May 25, when the Taliban took control of a government center in the hotly contested Do Ab District of Nuristan Province, which borders Kunar to the north. Taliban fighters overran the facility after attacking a lightly armed Afghan police contingent with mortars and rocket-propelled grenades. They held it for hours before ISAF responded with a hundred helicopter-borne U.S. and Afghan troops to dislodge the insurgents.

Petraeus was agitated about ISAF's slow response when he met privately two days later with Lieutenant General Rodriguez, head of ISAF's Joint Command and deputy commander of U.S. forces. If there was anyone who knew the nuances of the Afghan battlefields, it was Rodriguez, the principal architect of the operational portion of the war plan Petraeus had inherited from McChrystal. The two couldn't have been more dissimilar. Rodriguez had been selected for promotion to four-star general but had not been selected as Petraeus's replacement. This was not because he didn't understand the war but rather because he had not gained Secretary Gates's confidence in his ability to operate at the highest of strategic levels in Washington and other coalition capitals. A truly exceptional soldier, Rodriguez was also given to a certain awkwardness at times, and that reportedly gave Gates and others pause. But Rodriguez had achieved Petraeus's respect and a depth of devotion from those he commanded. No one had served in Afghanistan longer in recent years—a total of forty months over the past four and a half years. Nonetheless, while Gates, Petraeus and others thought highly of Rodriguez, they agreed that Lieutenant General John Allen, Petraeus's former deputy at Central Command, was the better choice for Petraeus's successor, feeling he had a certain strategic touch, gravitas and experience at high levels that Rodriguez lacked.

Petraeus brought up the attack on the Do Ab district center in Nuristan with a touch of irritation. Why had it taken so long to get a quick-reaction force on the scene? Rodriguez had initially wanted to give Afghan forces a chance to execute the mission. But Petraeus made clear his view that ISAF simply couldn't afford the delay that had allowed the Taliban to hold a district government center. He repeated the point during his stand-up briefing the following morning, and he was still aggressively preaching the gospel of rapid response at that afternoon's weekly security
shura
with ISAF and Afghan officials. He sugarcoated his disappointment with profuse praise for Afghanistan's deputy interior minister, who had flown to Do Ab during the battle to get a firsthand read of the situation, but he was clear that responses needed to be swifter.

The next morning, Petraeus again repeated the point during his stand-up briefing, when the results from an investigation by Rodriguez's ISAF Joint Command were reported: We needed to commit earlier. Today, another issue bothered him—an allegation that morning by officials in the Afghan Ministry of the Interior that civilians had been killed by ISAF forces in Do Ab. “What's the status with that?” he asked out loud, in a concerned tone, but to no one in particular. Petraeus's Afghan-American interpreter and adviser, Abdullah, piped up, “Sir, I called the MOI last night,” referring to the Ministry of the Interior. “There was no news of any civilian casualties.” Petraeus turned around in his chair to face Abdullah and asked him to relay a message to the deputy interior minister. “The deputy MOI needs to understand how exercised I am when he publicly claims there were civilian casualties before there has been an investigation. This is a big concern to me. And such behavior makes a commander want to withdraw his pledge to not let a district center fall. Tell them we are partners all the way through this, or not. The choice is theirs.”

But the Do Ab attack, for all its complexity and ambiguity, immediately became a footnote in the war, eclipsed in an hour or two by news of another dramatic attack in the north, this one in Taloqan, capital of Takhar Province, in far northern Afghanistan, on the border with Tajikistan, where a suicide bomber dressed as an Afghan policeman had attended a security
shura
and detonated a bomb that killed Lieutenant General Mohammed Daud Daud, the police commander for all of northern Afghanistan, and wounded Major General Markus Kneip, a German general heading NATO's northern command. Daud was much beloved in northern Afghanistan for his exploits fighting the Taliban. The attack that left him dead was the latest of a number in which the attacker had dressed in an Afghan uniform. Taloqan had been in turmoil for more than a week following a demonstration by thousands of Afghans on May 18. They attacked a police station and a NATO base to protest a night raid by U.S. and Afghan forces that had killed four people, including two women who had pointed weapons at the forces when asked to surrender.

Compared with the number of civilians killed by Taliban suicide bombings and buried IEDs, the ISAF nights raids were, for the most part, surgical strikes that harmed few civilians. But many Afghans hated the operations. Petraeus remained a staunch proponent of night raids as a key element of his counterinsurgency strategy, despite their unpopularity, because he knew how devastating they had been at eliminating mid- and upper-level Taliban commanders. Afghanistan's security leaders agreed with him.

During Petraeus's tenure, the effectiveness of night raids run by the Joint Special Operations Command increased in terms of Taliban leaders captured, while shots fired and civilian casualties decreased. Increasingly, steadily improving Afghan special forces were in the lead. There were some twelve thousand Afghan special operations forces trained and equipped by Lieutenant General John Caldwell's and Brigadier General Scott Miller's trainers, and they were growing in capacity and capability with each passing week, though no one could predict when the Afghans would have enough helicopters and intelligence capabilities to mount their own night raids. “We all agree that we cannot achieve our mutual objectives without night raids,” Petraeus said at one stand-up, echoing an assessment he had provided to President Karzai. “However, we also all agree that we cannot achieve our mutual objectives if we don't change how we conduct night raids—we have to Afghanize them further.”