All In Page 7
At the embassy’s Fourth of July celebration on July 3, the day before he officially took command, Petraeus sought to set the right tone as he made remarks to the assembled employees and Afghan guests. “Cooperation is not optional,” he stated firmly. “Civilian and military, Afghan and international, we are part of one team with one mission. . . . And I know that you all share the unshakable commitment to teamwork that Ambassador Eikenberry and I share. This is a tough mission. There is nothing easy about it. But working together, we can achieve progress, and we can achieve our mutual objectives.” Petraeus’s first meeting with Karzai took place that afternoon at the Presidential Palace. Eikenberry and Ambassador Sedwill attended, as did a number of key Afghan ministers. It did not go particularly well.
Petraeus’s top priority was winning Karzai’s approval for what was considered a critical program for creating village police forces across the country, with U.S. Special Forces training an initial cadre of ten thousand who would be paid about $120 a month. The Afghan Local Police (ALP), as these village policemen would come to be called, were seen as playing a potentially critical role in keeping the Taliban from coming back to villages that had been cleared by U.S., NATO and Afghan troops—and could thus be decisive in the long term. What was most important about the Afghan Local Police, as the last line of indigenous defense, was that these units would exist at the village level. The members of the Afghan National Security Forces who made up the first lines of defense consisted of two separate forces, the Afghan National Army (ANA) and the Afghan National Police (ANP). The army was the larger of the two, having grown from 97,000 in November 2009, when the “train and equip” mission first became a NATO command under Lieutenant General William Caldwell, to more than 144,000 by October 2010. Caldwell’s goal was to build the Afghan army to 164,000 by the fall of 2011. In most operations, the Afghan National Army fought side by side with U.S. and NATO forces. The Afghan National Police, which patrolled more at the district and provincial level, numbered about 114,000. Caldwell hoped an additional 20,000 police could be recruited, trained and equipped in the coming year. The Afghan National Police focused on keeping the peace and fighting crime. Unlike the Afghan Local Police, who would focus on village defense and early warning, the Afghan National Police had the power to arrest and detain insurgents and criminal suspects.
The growth of the ALP, the ANA and the ANP would greatly improve what Petraeus thought of as “COIN math”: the ratio of counterinsurgents to population. To achieve the numbers recommended in his field manual, he had to alter the coalition ratio of 1 counterinsurgent to 90 Afghans to the 1:20 the manual prescribed. But recruiting, training and equipping the Afghan National Army and the Afghan National Police could happen only so quickly, especially given a literacy rate for recruits of only 14 percent and a desertion-and-casualty rate for Army recruits of about 25 percent per year.
Training Afghan Local Police detachments furthered relationships that Special Forces A-Teams had been building in villages by living among the people, learning their ways, helping with basic needs like medical care and clean water and eventually winning their trust. These efforts were officially known as Village Stability Operations, a top-priority program begun by U.S. Special Operations commanders in 2009 under McChrystal in areas where there were no other coalition or Afghan forces. The idea was to support military operations conducted by conventional forces by establishing Special Forces teams in areas the insurgents might occupy after being cleared from more populated areas. Special Forces would train and equip local villagers to provide for their own defense, and those secured areas would, ideally, grow toward other cleared areas in the theater and form a chain-link fence of security. The goal had been to expand to twenty-five villages. But if Karzai could be persuaded to support the Afghan Local Police program, Special Forces could accelerate their focus from Village Stability Operations to building and mentoring these new village police detachments. Petraeus, meanwhile, was simultaneously working on initiatives to take insurgents off the battlefield through such efforts as the Afghanistan Peace and Reintegration Program as well as through targeted raids conducted by Special Operations elements.
The cumulative effect of all the factors in the complex equation, Petraeus hoped, would result in fewer insurgents and more friendly forces. And the Afghan Local Police held considerable promise. Petraeus had been led by some Afghan security officials to believe that Karzai was fully supportive. But the meeting with Karzai at the Presidential Palace quickly degenerated when the Afghan leader began voicing his concern that the local police forces could quickly become out-of-control militias.
So began Petraeus’s courtship of Karzai, with whom he would meet no fewer than thirty times in July. The initial discussion was officially termed a “forthright” airing of issues and concerns on both sides. Petraeus, however, had come with clear rules of engagement, developed in Iraq, for dealing with heads of state. They did not include public criticism. As he had done for the most part with Iraq’s Prime Minister Maliki, Petraeus planned to take Karzai’s commitments at face value, repeat them publicly as praise and, having done so, work to make them happen through Karzai’s government. As he had with Maliki, Petraeus repeatedly noted that Karzai was the leader of a sovereign nation. He remained sensitive to Karzai’s resentment of foreign troops in his country. “You literally do have to walk a mile in his shoes pretty often, and have a degree of understanding,” Petraeus noted. “I’m not saying you necessarily have to empathize fully, but you do have to understand. Again, keep in mind that most issues here are not black or white; they are varying shades of gray.”
The security initiatives, however, could be solidified only if various components of the rule of law could be improved. Before Petraeus had even arrived in Kabul, he and Eikenberry had devised a civil-military structure to direct and oversee creation of a functioning justice system in Afghanistan. Afghanistan needed judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, courtrooms, jails and administrative staffs to help address corruption and lawlessness in the countryside. Despite nine years of war and effort, the United States had never taken on this gargantuan task, which Petraeus, from his command in Iraq, knew was essential if progress was to be made. Districts without judges were among the mostly hotly contested by the insurgents, who filled the void with their own brand of ruthless Islamist justice. This area was, Petraeus often noted, one in which the Taliban could compete with the government.
The overall “rule of law” effort was to be headed by a diplomat of ambassadorial rank, Hans Klemm, and overseen on the military side by Vice Admiral Bob Harward, assisted by an Army brigadier general who was going to lead a command titled “Rule of Law Field Force–Afghanistan.” Petraeus knew precisely who he wanted to handle this latter assignment: Brigadier General Mark S. Martins, one of the Army’s top lawyers and a man whose credentials, intellect and force of personality rivaled Petraeus’s own. While Petraeus and many of those in his inner circle were new to Afghanistan, Martins had already been there a year, serving first as interim commander and then deputy commander of Joint Task Force 4-35, a group McChrystal had created in the fall of 2009 to oversee U.S. detainee operations after realizing that Afghanistan’s prison system had become an out-of-control breeding ground for the insurgency. Not only did Taliban leaders plot attacks from inside the Afghan prison walls, but the prisons, with their lack of due process, helped create future insurgents.
Petraeus first met Martins in 1991, when Petraeus was a battalion commander in the 101st Airborne Division and Martins was one of the division’s military attorneys. Drawn to each other by mutual intensity—Martins was in Petraeus’s class as a runner—Petraeus considered Martins a “once-in-a-generation” officer, and Martins looked up to Petraeus as a mentor. Martins had been Petraeus’s top lawyer and legal adviser during the surge in Iraq, when they worked to establish legal “green zones” there to enable secure administration of justice. Building on his work in rule-of-law issues, Martin
s would work to establish “green zones”—secure areas for law and justice in Afghanistan—beginning with the Chel Zeena Criminal Investigative Center, adjacent to Kandahar’s largest detention facility, Sarposa prison.
Petraeus formally assumed command at NATO headquarters on the Fourth of July. “As each of you knows well, we are engaged in a tough fight,” he said during a ceremony at NATO headquarters. “After years of war, we have arrived at a critical moment. . . . We are engaged in a contest of wills. Our enemies are doing all that they can to undermine the confidence of the Afghan people. . . . In answer, we must demonstrate to the people and to the Taliban that Afghan and ISAF forces are here to safeguard the Afghan people, and that we are in this to win. That is our clear objective.”
The following morning, during his stand-up briefing at ISAF headquarters, Petraeus hammered away at the most important counterinsurgency principle of all, protecting the people. “The big idea today, which applies at every level of this command, is the importance of engagement with the local population ranking alongside the importance of our kinetic activity,” he said. “All commanders at every level are to be prepared to brief me on their interaction with the locals, the impact this is having, and how you will further develop local relations with key players and the mass of the local population.” He repeated that cooperation was not an option; he talked about an “enduring commitment” to success in Afghanistan, and he again stated, “We are here to win.” But this time, he explained what that meant. “Winning in COIN is not planting the flag at the top of the hill,” he said. “Winning is making progress.”
Later that afternoon, Petraeus took his message to his local partners, speaking in highly personal terms at a ceremony honoring noncommissioned officers in the Afghan National Army. “Your leadership matters to your troopers and the people of Afghanistan,” he told the attendees. “When I think of the value of senior noncommissioned officers, in fact, I often recall a bit of guidance my Dutch sea captain father shared with me when I was young: ‘It’s results, boy, results.’ And every commanding officer knows that getting results is what senior NCOs do best. . . . You get results.” In the margin of his speech, Petraeus scrawled: “As this conference stresses, leadership is best provided by example,” a point he made to the Afghan senior NCOs as well.
Petraeus believed his presence at a conference of Afghan NCOs could help develop leaders who might determine whether their units succeeded or failed on the battlefield. Petraeus’s instinct as a commander was to seek to be at a point where he could best understand what his unit was engaged in. In conventional military operations, this location, the “point of decision,” was typically where the fighting was heaviest. But in the kind of irregular warfare he faced, Petraeus thought the point of decision was less obvious. It might be in negotiations over an “awakening moment,” as he learned in 2007 while engaging with local Iraqi tribal leaders willing to stand up to al-Qaeda in order to establish security in their communities, or at a field command post where all of the information from a highly distributed operation comes together, or even on Capitol Hill, when explaining the situation in a particular mission.
At this moment, addressing this group of Afghan sergeants major was important to ultimate organizational success. In the U.S. military, the NCO corps was regarded as the “backbone” of the Army, and Petraeus felt these Afghans could play that role here as well. He believed in motivating them by example and behaved as though the amount of energy and commitment he personally poured into that event—and every moment—was a critical factor in the war.
“You have to believe in what you’re doing, in what you’re arguing for, especially when you’re in a position where your decisions involve people giving their lives for a cause and for the country,” Petraeus later shared.
The morning stand-up was a venue Petraeus used not just to receive various updates but also to communicate his priorities and decentralize his network, although some saw in it Petraeus’s penchant for micromanagement. Petraeus entered the briefing room at 7:29 A.M. on July 5, his third full day in Afghanistan, nodding to those he knew. “In the spirit of General McChrystal, I will flatten the network as far as possible, then go one level lower,” he noted at one point in the session. He was trying to teach. The message was apt as he spoke to a disparate audience during the secure video teleconference. It included officers at all the subordinate and regional commands in Afghanistan, and also representatives at the U.S. Embassy, numerous Afghan element locations, various NATO headquarters, CENTCOM headquarters in Tampa, the Joint Staff in the Pentagon and a handful of other locations.
That morning, Petraeus had three big ideas to share. The first was that the military couldn’t fight and win this war alone; civilian counterparts, Afghans as well as international, were critical. Civil-military tensions ran high at the tactical level, where civilians who headed Provincial Reconstruction Teams held the same rank as the military task-force commander in an area of operations, such as Lieutenant Colonel David G. Fivecoat, who had served as Petraeus’s aide in Bosnia and during the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and was now in Paktika Province, in eastern Afghanistan, commanding Petraeus’s old battalion in the 101st Airborne Division. Petraeus wanted the big ideas to filter down to that level, so while the brief progressed each morning, Petraeus’s ISAF deputy chief of staff, Colonel Mike Meese, distilled the brief into succinct notes that were then posted on the secure internet and distributed down to battalion level. Commanders like Fivecoat could have a daily dose of their overall commander’s intent to ensure they understood the campaign priorities and theater trends as they carried out tactical operations. Echoing his message throughout the chain of command was vital, Petraeus believed.
The second big idea was worth emphasizing after nine years of war: “We are,” Petraeus said, “here to win.” That, in Petraeus’s mind, was why Obama had picked him. “The president didn’t send me here to make a hasty retreat,” he said. Petraeus was resolute with the president, though he hadn’t made any demands when he agreed to accept the job. But the unspoken understanding was that the president would support him.
The third idea fell right in line with that affirmation. “We need to communicate that we have an enduring commitment here, but the nature of this enduring commitment will change over time as we transition authority to the Afghans,” he explained. He was careful to point out that nuanced language was critical. “We are not transferring; we are transitioning. This supports the concept that we are not ‘pulling out’ but we are ‘thinning out.’” He would repeat the three big ideas to his staff and on battlefield circulations.
Questions about metrics and progress had been raised for months in Kabul, Brussels and Washington. Petraeus’s answer was to emphasize, again, that “winning is making progress. Clearly we are making progress. Obviously, within this, there are successes and failures, which you have to reconcile and then address in a nuanced way. For example, violence is going up, and that is not good, but it is due in part to our increased tempo of operations and the conduct of operations in an enemy stronghold. We are also making a lot of inputs into many areas, and these are important because they will enable the outputs that we are ultimately focused on. Therefore, when engaging on the subject of ‘Are we winning?’ think clearly about what you are saying and the clarity that you must achieve.”
Petraeus also wanted to communicate that idea of winning to his Afghan partners, some of whom had grown weary of NATO after years of war, death and destruction. Beyond conveying that message, Petraeus also issued his first apology to Afghan forces that day, after a NATO helicopter gunship mistook an Afghan National Army patrol in the Andar District of Ghazni Province for insurgents and unleashed a barrage of missiles, killing five and wounding two. Petraeus offered his personal condolences to the families of the dead troops. It would become a common refrain, even as Petraeus’s disciplined approach brought down the number of civilians mistakenly killed by U.S. and NATO forces.
His apology was accompanied in that day’s headlines with Britain’s announcement that one thousand British troops would turn over the Sangin District, in Helmand Province, where they had sustained heavy casualties, to U.S. forces. The Independent in London said British forces had been engaged in “the fiercest fighting the British Army has seen since the Second World War.”
Petraeus made his first battlefield circulation the next day, visiting Canadian brigadier general Jon Vance, NATO commander in Kandahar, at a recently constructed checkpoint designed to help keep the Taliban from moving in and out of the city. His battlefield circulation to visit Canadians in the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar was designed to send a message: The alliance will not be deterred. Beyond the symbolism, he saw with his own eyes that the heavily fortified checkpoint, manned round the clock, would have a deterrent effect on insurgents, as long as the searches were conducted thoroughly and respectfully. As always, he felt it important for a commander to capture the ground truth at times by seeing it for himself.
Petraeus had worked hard while at Central Command to continue to engage the Canadians, who had announced earlier that year the end of their mission in Afghanistan to be in the summer 2011. As challenging as the coalition politics of the then–forty-seven nations were, Petraeus considered the coalition to be hugely important and wanted support from all the coalition-contributing countries for as long as he could keep it. Though “coalition maintenance” took considerable time, Petraeus subscribed to Churchill’s observation that the only thing worse than allies was not having any.