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  Petraeus first publicly unveiled a PowerPoint slide depicting the Anaconda strategy in Iraq before the Senate Armed Services Committee in September 2007. He had been refining it ever since. The diagram, which Petraeus routinely showed to staff and visiting delegations in Afghanistan, depicts seven central thrusts simultaneously aimed at the enemy. Named after the giant snake that squeezes its prey to death, the Anaconda strategy for Iraq was designed to squeeze the life out of al-Qaeda in Iraq and Sunni insurgents, as well as the Shia militia extremists. In Afghanistan in the summer of 2010, it featured seven categories of activity: kinetic operations, politics, intelligence, detainee operations, information operations, international engagement and non-kinetics, by which Petraeus meant programs for jobs, education, rule of law and development. Only one of the seven—kinetic operations—involved predominantly military action. McMaster’s anticorruption task force was part of the “politics” thrust. Martins’s Rule of Law Field Force fell under the heading of “detainee operations.”

  “If it appears on the Anaconda slide, then it has been ramped up,” Petraeus would say during briefings, aiming a laser pointer at the Anaconda diagram. His seven categories were broken down into twenty-six tasks. The general might have been the only person on his staff capable of tracking them all at the same time amid the chaos of war.

  Petraeus’s reliance on “kinetics” for dealing with the “uncertainty, challenge, risk, danger and competing agendas” in Afghanistan came straight from Iraq, where he relentlessly attacked al-Qaeda and other extremists through night raids during the surge as his forces conducted large operations to clear AQ from safe havens. But, as in Afghanistan, Petraeus oversaw increases in clear-hold-and-build operations, as well as initiatives to negotiate with Sunni and Shia militants willing to lay down their arms and work with the Americans. Petraeus’s focus on “protecting the people” did not imply a reticence in the use of force; as he would put it, he was just against counterproductive use of force. Indeed, he had always been firm that his counterinsurgency tactics include ironfisted counterterrorist operations by counterterrorist forces. The counterinsurgency guidance he issued on August 1 made it clear that killing the enemy was very much part of the plan:

  PURSUE THE ENEMY RELENTLESSLY. Together with our Afghan partners, get our teeth into the insurgents and don’t let go. When the extremists fight, make them pay. Seek out and eliminate those who threaten the population. Don’t let them intimidate the innocent. Target the whole network, not just individuals.

  FIGHT HARD AND FIGHT WITH DISCIPLINE. Hunt the enemy aggressively, but use only the firepower needed to win a fight. We can’t win without fighting, but we also cannot kill or capture our way to victory. Moreover, if we kill civilians or damage their property in the course of our operations, we will create more enemies than our operations eliminate. That’s exactly what the Taliban want. Don’t fall into their trap. We must continue our efforts to reduce civilian casualties to an absolute minimum.

  Petraeus mentor General Jack Keane came away from a two-week visit in October with an appreciation of the Anaconda strategy—and its architect. “What you have in Petraeus is a guy who has an enormous capacity level,” Keane said. “And he has touched every aspect of this very quickly. He operates at the strategic level in terms of diplomacy, operates at the operational level to understand the entire framework of the war, and then he understands its tactical implications. He can do that back and forth. That’s rare in a general officer.”

  Ever since he had landed in Kabul, Petraeus had been focused on July 2011 as the start of the drawdown. He knew he needed as much time as possible to execute his counterinsurgency strategy and he knew the Afghans were concerned about that date. Quietly, imperceptibly, he and his diplomatic partners began working to support a growing NATO and White House initiative to shift the focus at an upcoming NATO conference on Afghanistan in Lisbon from the beginning of the drawdown in July 2011 to formal approval of a plan for handing over the mission of securing the country to Afghan forces by the end of 2014, effectively buying another three and a half years to succeed.

  There was no media blitz to promote the shift in focus to 2014, only quiet one-on-one conversations with ambassadors in Kabul and visiting defense ministers and heads of government. When they stopped in Kabul, each received a full-dress briefing from Petraeus and his diplomatic partner, Ambassador Mark Sedwill, NATO’s senior civilian representative, on what they would hear at Lisbon.

  Petraeus was pleased that he would be able to report progress at Lisbon. “But the overarching narrative that is important to stress,” he explained during his November 6 stand-up, “is that this progress is fragile and reversible. This progress has been the product of a lot of hard fighting, and it will take more hard fighting to solidify it. Not only should we physically be prepared for the spring, but we need to be rhetorically and emotionally ready as well. The Taliban will be back with reinforcements. We will need to be ready—it isn’t going to be an easy ride to 2014.”

  Petraeus knew that keeping the NATO coalition together meant giving members hope that there was an end in sight, and it meant putting time on the clock to achieve progress by moving the goalpost to 2014. Coalition management would dominate Petraeus’s portfolio throughout the fall of 2010.

  As the media in Washington began reporting in mid-November that the Obama administration was changing focus from the July 2011 drawdown to the transition to Afghan forces by the end of 2014, like-minded senators traveling to Afghanistan also emphasized the shift. “We’re not going anywhere,” Senator Joe Lieberman told the press in Kabul. “In fact, the better date to think about is the end of 2014.” Back in Washington a week before the Lisbon conference, Senator Lindsey Graham said that “2014 is the right date to talk about. That’s when Karzai suggests that Afghans will be in the lead, and I’m very pleased to hear President Obama talk about 2014.”

  But Karzai never made anything, including extending the American commitment to Afghanistan, easy. In late October, he admitted he’d been taking bags full of cash from an Iranian emissary. But that uproar paled in comparison with that triggered by an interview Karzai gave the Washington Post on the eve of the Lisbon summit in which he called for the United States to end night raids by Special Operations Forces and reduce its military footprint in Afghanistan. Petraeus was stunned.

  Privately, Petraeus said that Karzai’s statement put him in an untenable position. He immediately made his displeasure known at a meeting with Ashraf Ghani, the Afghan official in charge of planning the military transition to Afghan forces. He never quite threatened to resign, but he made it clear how serious the situation was. In fact, he found what Karzai had done hard to understand. “I had a good chat with Ashraf and various ministers,” Petraeus said in an e-mail to a colleague a day later. “I’ll see President Karzai tomorrow and remind him in detail what we’ve been doing in each and every area. . . . Will be a good session. Just need to stay even/logical/firm.” He struck a similar chord in a note he wrote to his mentor Keith Nightingale: “Spending an hour one-on-one with Pres K tomorrow, and we’ll be fine. We all have the same goals, it just takes time to get there—and we’ve been addressing each of his issues for a bit now, and I’ll remind him of that.” When Nightingale made a despairing reference to the July 2011 drawdown, Petraeus allayed his fears. “Fear not on July 2011,” he wrote, explaining the shift that had taken place. “In fact, as the Washington Post editorial page editor noted, the end of 2014 is the new 2011.”

  Despite the controversy over his remarks, Karzai promised Petraeus a united front, and he delivered in Lisbon. Once the conference began, Petraeus briefed NATO ministers on his plan for “Inteqal.” From the Dari word for “transition,” this was the classified plan to transfer power to Afghan forces in certain areas as early as the spring of 2011, with the final transition coming at the end of December 2014. President Obama used the conference to state publicly for the first time that he
expected U.S. forces would complete major combat operations in the country by the end of 2014. “We aligned our approach on the way forward in Afghanistan, particularly on a transition to full Afghan lead that will begin in early 2011 and will conclude in 2014,” Obama said at a wrap-up press conference.

  Obama was blunt when it came to Karzai’s recent criticism of night raids and the U.S. military presence. “If we’re putting in big resources, if we’re ponying up billions of dollars, if the expectation is that our troops are going to be there to help secure the countryside and ensure that President Karzai can continue to build and develop his country, then he’s got to also pay attention to our concerns as well. . . . He’s got to understand that I’ve got a bunch of young men and women from small towns and big cities all across America who are in a foreign country being shot at and having to traverse terrain filled with IEDs, and they need to protect themselves. And so if we’re setting things up where they’re just sitting ducks for the Taliban, that’s not an acceptable answer either.”

  Asked whether he thought the current military strategy was working and would enable him to withdraw a significant number of forces by July 2011, Obama said to the press that it was.

  You have fewer areas of Afghanistan under Taliban control. You have the Taliban on the defensive in a number of areas that were their strongholds. We have met or exceeded our targets in terms of recruitment of Afghan security forces. And our assessments are that the performance of Afghan security forces has improved significantly.

  So thanks to the hard work of people like Dave Petraeus and Mark Sedwill and others, and obviously the incredible sacrifices of the troops on the ground from the ISAF forces, we are in a better place now than we were a year ago. As a consequence, I’m confident that we are going to be able to execute our transition starting in July of next year.

  And General Petraeus is, in fact, in the process now of planning and mapping out where are those areas where we feel there’s enough security that we can begin thinning out troops in those areas, where are areas that need further reinforcements as certain areas get thinned out—so that we can continually consolidate the security gains and then backfill it with the effective civilian improvements that are going to be needed.

  So we have made progress. The key is to make sure that we don’t stand still but we keep accelerating that progress, that we build on it.

  Obama had embraced the shift in emphasis well before Lisbon, which seemed to indicate that he and Petraeus had reached a new level of trust in their relationship. Petraeus refused to talk about any aspect of his conversations with the president. For a man who enjoyed dealing with reporters and cultivated e-mail relationships with dozens of them, this was a do-not-enter zone. Obama was the second president for whom he had fought a war. It was no secret that he and Bush had become close personally. But Petraeus was sensitive to the fact that some Democrats saw him as Bush’s general. He wasn’t a politician and never would be, and he wanted it clear to all that he was as capable of serving a Democrat as he was of serving a Republican. That didn’t mean tailoring his advice to fit the president’s political agenda—the previous fall’s strategic debate over troop levels in Afghanistan had made that clear. But he believed in service—to the nation and to the president. Asked a few days after Lisbon how he had managed to move the president to focusing on December 2014 instead of July 2011, Petraeus wouldn’t take the bait. “I think, frankly,” he said, “that all the leaders came to see the logic of December 2014.”

  CHAPTER 6

  CLEAR, HOLD AND BUILD

  After fighting hard all summer and fall, Lieutenant Colonel David Flynn’s repurposed artillery battalion plunged headlong into village reconstruction. The fighting season had given way to a kind of winter hibernation when the Taliban receded to regroup for spring offensives. After six months in Afghanistan, Flynn knew the winter would give him a chance to consolidate his hold on the villages he had cleared in the Arghandab River Valley and expand the growing security bubble—or face a resurgent Taliban in several months. He was determined to rebuild the villages his forces had devastated, including Tarok Kolache, which had been largely abandoned but so heavily seeded with homemade bombs and explosives that Flynn’s only option had been to call in a B-1 bomber air strike. He lobbied for reconstruction assistance from his commanders, the local Provincial Reconstruction Team and anyone else who would listen, mindful that these villages could be held only with the support of villagers. The same troops that had clashed in early July with battle-hardened paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne had by now pushed deep into terrain the Taliban had held since 2007. Seven of Flynn’s soldiers had been killed in action, and eighty-three had been wounded, many catastrophically—the military’s term for multiple amputations. Two-thirds of the battlefield casualties had been caused by improvised explosive devices. Flynn figured that his men had seen more than two hundred IEDs in one area of operations alone, a two-by-six-kilometer area on the west side of the Arghandab River. That broke down to more than forty roadside bombs per square mile of terrain.

  TO THE EAST, in the mountains and valleys of Kunar Province, Lieutenant Colonel Vowell faced the same threat. On his way to visit C Company at Combat Outpost Penich one morning, his patrol tripped a large improvised explosive device. As Vowell scrambled out of his vehicle, he knew the roadside bomb had been detonated by a “command wire.” He helped his men out of the vehicle that had been hit and then ran into the open plowed field by the roadside. As he ran, he was looking for wire. He didn’t see it, but instinct told him to press across the field toward a grouping of mud homes. His radio operator and another soldier joined him. Instantly, a man shot up in the field about 300 yards away and started running. Vowell yelled at him to stop in Pashto and in English. But he kept running. The Americans chased him for forty minutes before losing him. They did find the command wire—all 500 yards of it—buried in the dirt all the way to the road.

  Vowell repeated the trip three days later, determined to make it to Penich. This time, he had his team dismount early and cross the fields with large copper rods plowing the dirt, hoping to pull up command wires and their IEDs. As they walked the mile and a half through the fields, Vowell had his vehicles pull up behind them. As the team was about to get back in the vehicles, they came under very heavy machine-gun and rocket-propelled-grenade fire. A dozen RPGs sailed around them, and a hail of bullets rained down on them.

  Sergeant Major Tony Perry, Vowell’s operations NCO, was hit in his right ankle by an RPG. After his men moved him to cover behind a building wall, Vowell started applying a tourniquet. A medic took over, allowing Vowell to take tactical command of the patrol. He watched his men perform with what he remembered thinking was incredible skill and valor. One talked Kiowa helicopter gunships onto enemy positions. Another directed bombing by two F-15s that arrived on station almost instantaneously. Vowell wanted to counterattack with the insurgents in the open. But with Perry in precarious condition, Vowell ordered his men to break contact. He started organizing a medevac landing zone. By the time the helicopter arrived to take Perry out, men from C Company had arrived as reinforcements. When the battle was over, Vowell and his men walked to the enemy’s ambush positions. He could not believe the dense piles of spent brass bullet casings all around them. He had chosen a tough line of work.

  SECRETARY OF DEFENSE Robert Gates landed at Bagram Air Base at noon on December 7. The Defense secretary’s traveling party immediately boarded helicopters and flew to Forward Operating Base Joyce, in Kunar Province, to visit Vowell’s battalion. Attacks on FOB Joyce had increased 200 percent over the past year. “Every single day in this valley, we are either dropping bombs or shooting Hellfire missiles, because this is a very, very kinetic fight,” said Major General John Campbell, commander of the 101st Airborne and Vowell’s boss, during a visit to Kunar. “Out here we’re fighting the Taliban and a few al-Qaeda, but probably the most dangerous enemy we face is the Ha
qqani network, because they have sanctuary in Pakistan. We should make no bones about that fact, because they go back and forth across the border at will.” It was a sobering visit.

  That night, Gates met privately with Petraeus, his partner now in two troubled wars. It had been a year since Obama committed to a troop surge in his address at West Point, and Petraeus had once again succeeded in creating a new momentum, including progress in Kandahar and Helmand, even if conditions on the ground at places like FOB Joyce remained violent and dangerous. Gates said progress in the war was exceeding his expectations. But he had difficult news to relay to Petraeus about the one job in the military in which Petraeus was interested—chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Forget about it, Gates said. It wasn’t happening. Petraeus’s mind whirled, even though, as he’d told a close friend, he’d had distinctly mixed feelings about the position. Nonetheless, being told it was out of the question stung.

  He wasn’t nearly ready to retire. But, according to a Pentagon official and one of Petraeus’s confidants, the jobs Gates mentioned—chief of staff of the Army or NATO’s supreme commander in Europe—while very important and prestigious, no longer held the allure they once had for Petraeus. He wanted to stay more directly engaged in the fight against al-Qaeda and the extremists who threatened the United States and its allies—the effort to which he had devoted virtually the entire past decade. As always, he was intrigued by the prospect of something new. What about the CIA? he asked. Petraeus knew how important the agency was in fighting terrorism and told Gates he thought he could contribute as its director. In fact, he had been thinking about it for some time. Gates was enthusiastic. He had served as the agency’s director after a long career with the agency. He thought Petraeus would be a superb choice to replace Leon Panetta, who likely would be a candidate to replace Gates as Defense secretary the following summer. While they had no sense of this at the time, their conversation would come to influence both the arc of the war in Afghanistan, which Petraeus would leave sooner than he wanted, and that of the ongoing war against al-Qaeda and other Islamist terror groups, which Petraeus wanted to help prosecute as director of the CIA. Gates took that option back to the White House and, according to one of Gates’s aides, relayed to Petraeus that the president had been intrigued by the idea. Petraeus never said anything about this to anyone on his team until after decisions were made months later; and though he and Gates periodically revisited the idea, Petraeus wouldn’t discuss it face-to-face with Obama until he returned to Washington for testimony in March.