The Savior Generals: How Five Great Commanders Saved Wars That Were Lost—From Ancient Greece to Iraq (39 page)

That violence from both Shiite and Sunni militias waned was testament to Petraeus’s political skills, which were enhanced by the inspired diplomacy of the American ambassador, Ryan Crocker. Early on, Crocker had grasped that security rested on assuring the more influential but less numerous Sunnis that they would not be oppressed by the new Shiite-led government; on convincing the Shiites that democracy gave them predominant power but not the right to do to the Sunnis what Saddam had done to themselves; and on convincing the Kurds that semiautonomy would be as prosperous for them as independence would be suicidal. Crocker and Petraeus developed a good partnership, and the former
soon earned the reputation as the premier U.S. ambassador and diplomat at large in the State Department. Under the Petraeus-Crocker team, gone were the baleful days of the infighting between Paul Bremer and his military counterparts. The importance of Crocker was highlighted by the lack of any comparable diplomatic figure in Afghanistan, where for the next few years, from 2009 to 2011, American diplomacy would be at odds with its own military, estranged from the Karzai government, and unable to enlist the full support of neighboring Pakistan.
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Petraeus surrounded himself with gifted subordinates and colleagues who invested in his success. General Raymond Odierno had been unfairly tarred early in the war by the press as an unimaginative bullet-headed hard charger of the old school as commander of 4th Infantry Division. Petraeus thought otherwise, realizing that the caricature was not only unfair, but perhaps even valuable in bringing Odierno’s military bona fides on board to present counterinsurgency as a no-nonsense way of defeating the enemy. Odierno stayed on as Petraeus’s senior ground commander in Baghdad. He proved a master of counterinsurgency and provided continuity as Petraeus’s eventual successor. To some observers, Odierno was one of the key reasons for the success of the surge. In any case, he took the fight to the terrorists as never before and let others label his ferocity as part of counterinsurgency.
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One key to regaining public support was curbing American casualties, especially losses to improvised explosive devices. Such mayhem was especially demoralizing given its random nature, and the fact that Iraqi insurgents otherwise were usually beaten badly in any firefight they engaged in with the U.S. military. Despite spending $10 billion to stop the roadside bombs, the Pentagon’s technological experts could scarcely keep up with the insurgents’ ability to fabricate ever larger and more sophisticated explosives. Petraeus saw that the solution ultimately lay with the Iraqis. He had to get his men outside the compounds, embed them within Iraqi communities, and develop human intelligence to break up the bombing teams and develop communities to the point where the explosions were seen by Iraqis as counterproductive. Stop the IEDs, and for the most part the war was sustainable, as the insurgents increasingly avoided firefights with U.S. troops. As a stopgap measure, Petraeus insisted on receiving thousands of MRAP heavy vehicles, designed especially to curb the effects of IEDs. While such trucks were clumsy and hard to maneuver, in the short term their greater armor and superior design certainly saved lives.

Important to this teamwork was the image of David Petraeus as everyman. He gave credit to others. To the media he insisted that he was neither a Bush advocate nor a reformer sent to undo the mistakes of the past—“I am not an optimist or a pessimist,” he would declare, “I am a realist.” His uniform was almost indistinguishable from his enlisted men’s; his habit was to visit almost every outpost of the sprawling American occupation. Within a matter of months, in early 2007, the character of Petraeus became as important as his tactical insight. Petraeus had accrued moral capital, in the way that the name of Themistocles or Belisarius was synonymous with competence, Sherman’s honor was unquestioned, and Ridgway’s integrity was legendary.
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David Petraeus turned over his by then relatively quiet command on September 16, 2008, to the gifted General Raymond Odierno, and then returned from Iraq to widespread adulation. Just two weeks later, on October 31, 2008, Petraeus assumed command of CENTCOM in Tampa, Florida, the most prestigious and important regional theater of operations in the post-9/11 military—directing counterterrorism operations in some twenty countries as well as overseeing the combat theaters in Afghanistan and Iraq.

There had been no major terrorist attack since September 11, 2001. Iraq was relatively quiet. The fighting in Afghanistan still remained off the front page. In theory, Petraeus could enjoy a well-earned, relatively quiet administrative post as he oversaw operations from Florida that were largely successful—at least in part because of doctrines he had promoted and used with demonstrable results in Iraq. Given that he was the most popular American general in a generation, Petraeus could no doubt expect to be offered either the chairmanship of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the supreme command of NATO, the usual capstones for such a singular career.

The public certainly felt an enormous sense of gratitude to Petraeus for turning Iraq around. He immediately became almost as respected as Dwight Eisenhower following World War II, or perhaps more than Colin Powell during the early 1990s.
Time
magazine had judged Petraeus one of the one hundred most influential people of 2007. Several newspapers and magazines followed suit throughout 2007 and 2008, along with various awards and honors. As Petraeus left Bagdad in late summer 2008,
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates praised him by asserting that “history would regard Petraeus as one of the nation’s great battle captains.” By January 2010, David Petraeus was consistently cited in polls as one of the most widely revered men of his generation in the United States. In early 2011, a guest
Wall Street Journal
opinion editorial advised that Petraeus should be promoted to five-star general, an honor not bestowed since Omar Bradley had been made General of the Army in 1950. Senator Lindsey Graham likewise raised the issue of a Petraeus fifth star and thought there might be bipartisan congressional support for it.

An April 2011 poll ranked Petraeus as the most popular of all potential Republican presidential candidates for the upcoming 2012 election—even though he had emphatically earlier denied, in Shermanesque fashion, to Washington reporter David Gregory any intention of running for president: “No way, no how.” His Gallup poll favorable-to-unfavorable ratings were an unheard-of 61 percent to 7 percent. By the end of Barack Obama’s first two years in office, Republicans yearned to see Petraeus join the presidential race—if somewhat unsure exactly what Petraeus’s politics were. In any case, in comparison with all the great twentieth-century American generals, perhaps only Dwight Eisenhower matched Petraeus’s political savvy and understanding of the press and uncanny ability to seem liberal to Democrats and conservative to Republicans.
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Yet within months, the mass adulation of Petraeus began to fade—in a way reminiscent of William Tecumseh Sherman’s retreat into the shadows following the end of the Civil War and his adamant disavowal of any political aspirations. The Republican primary fight returned to normalcy as political veterans vied for the nomination and Petraeus reiterated his uninterest in running for political office—and made it known for most of 2012 that he was also not interested in the Republican vice presidential nomination. Petraeus himself sometimes stepped into political controversy as the new CENTCOM commander. For example, in March 2010, he told the Senate Armed Services Committee that “a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel” was hampering U.S. efforts throughout the region—a common sentiment often voiced by former U.S. generals who usually dealt far more frequently with Arab militaries and heard their constant criticisms of pro-Israel U.S. Middle East policy.

As CENTCOM commander, Petraeus was directly in charge of turning around Afghanistan as well—a theater that seemed to have suddenly gotten worse in 2009 even as Iraq had continued to quiet. If America had
supposedly “taken its eye off the ball” by launching a war in Iraq, would the quiet in Baghdad not mean that the U.S. military could have its eye on the ball on a single front in Afghanistan, and thus a similar quiet should likewise follow there? Petraeus was in some sense already in the awkward position of not fully basking in the calm he had produced in Iraq, while inheriting the chaos of a war he heretofore had had nothing to do with. No matter—the public expected another successful surge. Petraeus no doubt would again become the savior general of Afghanistan who did what others could not.

Originally President Barack Obama had campaigned on the quieter Afghanistan as the “good” war that was a logical and direct retaliation for 9/11—and one that had far more United Nations and NATO support. But now it was becoming far more unsettled than George Bush’s “bad” theater in Iraq that Petraeus had once saved and that Vice President Joe Biden was proudly proclaiming might “be one of the great achievements of [the Obama] administration.” Indeed, in the Obama administration’s first eighteen months, more Americans died in the upsurge in violence in Afghanistan than had been lost during the entire first eight years of the war. It was almost as if Petraeus’s old work in Iraq was claimed by others, while the old mess of others was now his own new responsibility. In addition, promising as a candidate to fix Afghanistan did not necessarily mean that as president Barack Obama wished to risk recommitting to Afghanistan in the manner in which the surge had once salvaged Iraq—given that it was unclear whether the two theaters were all that similar.
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In June 2010, senior Afghanistan ground commander General Stanley A. McChrystal was abruptly relieved of command by President Obama for indiscreet remarks to a
Rolling Stone
magazine journalist about the Obama administration’s allegedly inept conduct of the war. With two supreme commanders gone in just a year and a half from Afghanistan—General McKiernan had been relieved just months earlier—President Obama needed continuity and stability. So he asked the national hero Petraeus to step down from his CENTCOM post and take over active command of the ground war in Afghanistan. Quite unexpectedly, Petraeus was appointed commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan on June 23, 2010, and was directing operations by July 4. Petraeus, in characteristic confidence, reflected on the appointment by comparing himself to the savior generals Grant, Ridgway, and Slim, who in World War II had saved the allied effort in Burma: “I’ve had a certain affinity
for leaders who have been given seemingly lost or at least very difficult causes.”
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Yet new command soon proved a thankless job. For all the challenges posed by Iraq, it was Afghanistan that had always posed much more challenging problems for long-term stability and the creation of constitutional government. The terrain was far more difficult, with towering peaks and snow. The country was landlocked, without ports of access. Neighboring Pakistan, a volatile nuclear power, was at best an unreliable ally that was nonetheless essential to American resupply. The country’s borders with Iran, Pakistan, and the former Soviet republics likewise afforded sanctuary and free passage to insurgents of various sorts. Afghanistan was impoverished, without the oil that boosted Iraq’s economy. Illiteracy and tribalism, as well as a thriving drug trade, made counterin-surgency a far different proposition than in more literate Iraq. There were more NATO allies in Afghanistan than in Iraq, but they operated under far more restrictions, nation by nation, on the rules of engagement. As a rough index of their comparative levels of security, during the first full month that Petraeus took over in Afghanistan (July 2010), there were eighty-eight coalition deaths, compared to only four fatalities in Iraq.

At first, Petraeus sought to apply the same sort of “inputs” that had saved Iraq, requesting a surge of forces, replicating his counterinsurgency and civilian reconstruction teams, and urging that his old counterinsurgency partner, General Mattis, replace him as CENTCOM commander. But again, it soon became clear that a popular President Obama, who inherited a deteriorating situation in Afghanistan from the Bush administration, did not quite feel the same urgency to take enormous risks to save the ten-year-long war effort in Afghanistan as had a desperate and unpopular George Bush in the case of Iraq in 2006. If most of the old Bush conservative base had supported escalation in Iraq, the new Obama liberal core did not especially favor a similar effort in Afghanistan. Nonetheless, a surge was ordered; but quite unlike the escalation in Iraq, its psychological effects were somewhat nullified by Obama’s announcement of firm dates for unilateral withdrawals of U.S. troops.

The lack of clear success of the Afghan surge between 2010 and 2012 now began to raise questions about the circumstances of its model, the 2007 Iraqi surge: If more troops and a change in tactics in Afghanistan were not turning the war around, had such developments really ever worked in Iraq? In other words, when the surge did not immediately save Afghanistan—despite undeniable successes in Helmand and Kandahar
Provinces—it strengthened revisionist arguments that the Anbar Awakening and general disgust with al-Qaeda, not the surge, had secured Iraq. And thus without a commensurate “Afghan Awakening,” sending more troops and protecting the population would have little effect.

In any case, by 2011, the American public, after a decade of support, had lost most of its zeal for war, and the public concern over a surge in Afghanistan was not what it had been earlier in Iraq. President Obama had not met with his commanders in Afghanistan until months after taking office, and the administration seemed more concerned with leaving the country than with defeating the Taliban and leaving behind a stable government.

The Taliban had also learned a great deal over the decade, especially about American tactics in Iraq. It was proving a canny enemy who saw that IEDs were the best way to maim Americans and demoralize the public in the sparsely settled terrain of Afghanistan. U.S. helicopter and fighter sorties were employed far more frequently than in mostly urban Iraq—and far more often hit civilian targets, forcing Petraeus to apologize for collateral damage. Targeted drone assassinations of suspected terrorists in Pakistan were a favored tactic of the new administration, and their sometimes wayward strikes made counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan all the more difficult—especially against a wily enemy that knew the propaganda value of collateral damage. Pakistan proved a far more effective sanctuary for terrorists than had Iran or Syria in the case of Iraq; Pashtun tribesmen considered both sides of the border their ancestral home. In Iraq, the United States had removed a mostly secular dictatorship without religious support; but in Afghanistan, U.S. forces had toppled an Islamic theocracy. The latter fact made it more difficult to isolate Islamic fundamentalists from the general population.