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  In subsequent days, Petraeus paid his first visit to the 101st Airborne and its commander, Major General John Campbell. Campbell not only led the 101st Airborne Division but also served as commander of ISAF’s Regional Command East, a region that encompassed fourteen provinces, seven million people and four hundred tribes across 46,000 square miles, an area roughly the size of Pennsylvania. Having graduated from West Point in 1979, five years after Petraeus, Campbell was the archetypal Army commander in the post-9/11 era. He had already commanded a combat brigade of the 82nd Airborne in Afghanistan—the same one Petraeus had commanded—and he had distinguished himself in Iraq as one of the individuals most responsible for implementing the Baghdad Security Plan during the surge in 2007. Barring a serious misstep, he was already considered a likely future four-star general: Ranger-qualified, with time in Special Forces, he had also taught military science at the University of California, Davis, and served as deputy director of regional operations at the Pentagon for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

  Petraeus arrived on a tough day for his old division. The 101st had lost two soldiers earlier in the day, Sergeant Shaun M. Mittler, of Austin, Texas, and Specialist Carlos J. Negron, of Fort Myers, Florida, in separate Taliban attacks. Two days earlier, Private First Class Anthony W. Simmons, of Tallahassee, had died in yet another attack. At least eight other U.S. service members had been killed in RC East since Petraeus took command, bringing the total number of dead in Afghanistan since late 2001 to 1,079. It was, Petraeus said, a “lick ’em tomorrow” day for the 101st Airborne.

  The reference was to a quote from Major General Ulysses S. Grant, one of Petraeus’s military heroes, that helped sustain him during his darkest hours in command in Iraq during the surge. In an interview, Petraeus recalled the Battle of Shiloh: In April 1862, after one of the bloodiest single days of fighting in the nation’s history, Grant repaired to a wooden cabin seeking shelter from the rain. Both sides had hunkered down for the night. Grant saw that surgeons were using the shelter as an operating room. Amputated arms and legs lay on the bloody floor. The cries of the wounded were all around him. He went back outside and took cover under a tree, chewing on an unlit cigar. His favorite subordinate commander, Major General William Tecumseh Sherman, found him there. “Well, Grant,” Sherman said. “We’ve had the devil’s own day, haven’t we?” “Yep,” Grant replied. “Lick ’em tomorrow, though.”

  “Needless to say, that’s the toughest part of command by far,” Petraeus told a friend that evening, referring to the 101st’s casualties in Afghanistan, “and it never gets easier.” Always in the back of his mind was the fact that his only son, who was leading an infantry platoon in Afghanistan in a unit attached to the 101st and engaged in intense combat, could become a casualty as well.

  During the visit, Campbell arranged a meeting via VTC between Petraeus and the division’s brigade commanders deployed in southern and eastern Afghanistan. As Campbell recalled, “Right away—that day—Petraeus was resolving and addressing issues we brought up. That’s just how he operates. I’d get a response back that night or the next day: Bam, he took care of it. That’s the power he brings to this effort,” Campbell said.

  Privately, many in Petraeus’s inner circle harbored concerns about whether the general, despite his lifelong emphasis on physical fitness, could keep up the pace. “He isn’t twenty-five anymore,” one of Petraeus’s mentors said. “He knows he has been given the challenge of his life—can he manage this with detachment and balance?” But there was no letting up. Petraeus’s jam-packed schedule, since the day he arrived in Kabul, most often featured twenty meetings, briefings, appearances and visits a day; it typically began at 5:30 A.M., when the general, pedaling his exercise bike, read his morning intelligence brief. His aide and his executive officer knew to fill each minute with something productive. There was no time to spare.

  By the tenth day of his command, Petraeus had met with Karzai for the seventh time on creating the Afghan Local Police. By then, Petraeus had helped his Afghan partners address the concerns that Karzai and other Afghan leaders had harbored, and ultimately Karzai assumed the role of championing the initiative and leading the Afghan debate (with Petraeus privately admiring how Karzai had initially represented the concerns of others as his own before guiding the push to final approval of a program Petraeus suspected Karzai had wanted for years). Karzai’s government announced the following day that it had approved creation of the local police. The deal came after the security ministers and Petraeus agreed to a proposal that would ensure the ALP would report to district police chiefs and be paid by Karzai’s Interior Ministry, thereby guaranteeing central control and reducing the risks of the elements being warlord militias. The agreement called for as many as ten thousand to be trained by U.S. Special Forces and Afghan National Police, many of whom would be focused in the south, where the insurgency was strongest. Petraeus publicly lauded the accomplishment and saw the development, achieved in less than two weeks, as one that could potentially affect the outcome of the war.

  The same morning, Petraeus had begun his stand-up by projecting a painting by Frederic Remington, The Stampede, on the wall of the briefing room, saying it was symbolic of the challenges they faced in Afghanistan. He had taken the idea from his mentor General Jack Galvin, who had used the painting when Petraeus was his aide in the 1980s. Petraeus had also used it as a tool during his command in Iraq. “I use this painting to convey what it is we do,” he told his staff officers, explaining the metaphor.

  I use this image to tell you that I am comfortable with semi-chaotic situations. The picture depicts an outrider galloping at full tilt over rough terrain at the height of a violent storm while steering a willful mount and guiding a sometimes frightened and unthinking herd of cattle to its destination. It represents getting the job done despite the challenges. The terrain is rocky, the wind is in their faces and it is raining sideways. Some of these cattle will get out ahead of us—that’s fine, we will catch up. Some cattle will fall behind and we will have to circle back and get them—that’s fine, we will bring them on. We must be comfortable with this environment of uncertainty, challenge, risk, danger and competing agendas. We need to accept it. But we need to do more than simply hang on to the saddle. We must master our mount and we must flourish in the apparent chaos. I am comfortable with this. It is a privilege to be part of the Kabul stampede—kick on.

  AFTER A MONTH in Afghanistan, Petraeus issued his updated Tactical Directive, a statement of war-fighting policy, to the 150,000 U.S. and NATO forces under his command. Stressing a “disciplined use of force,” the unclassified portions of the directive provided his guidance and intent for following the rules of battlefield engagement. In practical terms, the document governed the use of what Petraeus had called, during his confirmation hearing, “large, casualty-producing devices”—bombs, close air support, attack helicopters. The biggest single change in his update was stated unequivocally in its first paragraph: “Subordinate commanders are not authorized to further restrict this guidance without my approval.” His conclusion was that the problem lay not so much with McChrystal’s directive but with subordinate commanders who had added conditions that made it more difficult for U.S. and NATO forces to fight—in essence, restricting units beyond McChrystal’s intent.

  But Petraeus also sought greater clarity. Where the prior directive had instructed “leaders at all levels to scrutinize and limit the use of force like close air support against residential compounds and other locations likely to produce civilian casualties in accordance with this guidance,” Petraeus’s said: “Prior to the use of fires, the commander approving the strike must determine that no civilians are present. If unable to assess the risk of civilian presence, fires are prohibited.” The only exception: protecting the lives of ISAF or Afghan forces.

  Petraeus’s directive called to mind the observation by F. Scott Fitzgerald: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the abi
lity to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” The directive required commanders to do everything humanly possible both to protect Afghan civilians, which typically meant not firing, while also protecting those in uniform, which often meant firing full bore.

  To help alleviate that tension, Petraeus stated unequivocally in the new Tactical Directive that he wanted ISAF troops to partner with Afghan forces on “every operation.” “Partnering is how we operate,” the directive states. “Some civilian casualties result from a misunderstanding or ignorance of local customs and behaviors. No individuals are more attuned to the Afghan culture than our Afghan partners.”

  The key difference between the old and new directives, in Petraeus’s mind, was the provision that prohibited subordinate commanders from issuing more restrictive conditions, such as limiting the use of attack helicopters and close air support. “It was the application of the last Tactical Directive that created some of the mythology that we had restricted the dropping of bombs,” Petraeus said. As a matter of fact, Petraeus had no qualms about dropping bombs—albeit when and where appropriate. The number of bombs dropped in Iraq under Petraeus’s command increased dramatically during the surge in 2007, just as the tempo of Special Operations raids there had—and that tempo was increasing on his watch in Afghanistan as well. The Counterinsurgency Field Manual he produced in 2006 at Fort Leavenworth, between tours in Iraq, “doesn’t say that the best weapons don’t shoot,” he said. “It says sometimes the best weapons don’t shoot. Sometimes the best weapons do shoot.” Still, the new Tactical Directive was quite clear: “Every Afghan civilian death diminishes our cause. If we use excessive force or operate contrary to our counterinsurgency principles, tactical victories may prove to be strategic setbacks.”

  In any event, the bitter complaining by troops who felt their hands had been tied ceased after Petraeus issued his update.

  AT ISAF HEADQUARTERS on the morning of August 15, Petraeus and his staff geared up to begin doing press engagements again, after Petraeus, following the precedent he’d set in Iraq, had eschewed such activities in his first month in Afghanistan. NBC’s David Gregory, the first to arrive, called him “easily America’s most famous warrior” at the start of the broadcast and asked him during a lengthy interview whether he would ever run for president. “I am not a politician and I will never be, and I say that with absolute conviction,” Petraeus said, paraphrasing Sherman’s famous response to a similar question.

  “No way, nohow?” Gregory asked.

  “No way, nohow,” said Petraeus.

  Since arriving in Afghanistan, he had spoken again and again during his stand-ups about the need for skillful media interplay, mindful of what one of his heroes, T. E. Lawrence, said in 1920: “The printing press is the greatest weapon in the armory of the modern commander.”

  As he sat down with Gregory, Petraeus repeated a point he had made during a stand-up back in early July: “We’re making progress, and progress is winning.” His performance was measured. “I think it’s incumbent upon us to show greater progress . . . really just began this spring.”

  Petraeus said that he and General McChrystal had spent the past year and a half getting “the inputs” right. By the end of the month, when the final brigade from the 101st Airborne had arrived, the number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan would be three times what it had been at the beginning of 2009. Now the real fight could begin.

  CHAPTER 3

  TRUE BELIEVERS

  America’s involvement in Afghanistan since the fall of 2001 had been a colossal missed opportunity. The brilliant combination of U.S. Special Operations Forces, the Central Intelligence Agency, Afghan Northern Alliance fighters, and American airpower that toppled the Taliban in three months was squandered when the United States marched headlong into Iraq in early 2003. The war there diverted troops, airpower, technology, and focus from Afghanistan, where U.S. and NATO forces were far too few in number to stop an insurgency that had returned with a vengeance by 2006. The reemergence of al-Qaeda, the Taliban and other insurgent fighters was by no means inevitable, if America and its NATO allies had capitalized on the Taliban’s swift demise and brought enough soldiers to Afghanistan to protect the people and rebuild the nation, beginning at the village and provincial level. But that was never to be. By the time McChrystal’s predecessor, General David McKiernan, took command of the war in Afghanistan in the spring of 2008, the United States had only 33,000 military personnel in the country—and only about a third of them were fulfilling combat missions. Despite the success of counterinsurgency tactics in Iraq, where U.S. forces moved off large bases to live with the people, in Afghanistan most U.S. forces remained on heavily fortified bases and a limited number of outposts. Protecting the Afghan people, rooting out corruption and fostering competent government were not priorities they could execute.

  The “light footprint” mandated by then–Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld for the first five years of the war reflected Rumsfeld’s preference—critics would call it a prejudice—for speed, agility and precision instead of a heavy, massed force. The Powell Doctrine of overwhelming force was an outdated Cold War imperative that, in Rumsfeld’s mind, was no longer necessary in an age of proxy forces, smart bombs and armed drones that could find and kill the enemy without any troops at all. The stunning speed with which small numbers of Special Forces and CIA operatives, working in tandem with Afghan warlords, had dispatched the Taliban the first time around only served to confirm and validate Rumsfeld’s notions. Indeed, Rumsfeld imposed a “force cap” in Afghanistan in 2001 and 2002.

  His preference for a lighter force also contributed to the downward spiral in Iraq, where U.S. forces invaded with fewer troops than most generals, including Petraeus, thought advisable. While the invasion force easily toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime, the Bush administration did not have enough personnel to either secure the nation or contain the sectarian violence that brought the country to the brink of civil war in late 2006. In both wars, Petraeus was called on to command “surges” that finally addressed troop shortfalls and made progress possible.

  With Iraq on the brink of civil war in 2006, Afghanistan also increasingly faced a “perfect storm of political upheaval.” Effective and honest government was largely absent; Pakistan had emerged as a sanctuary for the Taliban, al-Qaeda and other insurgent groups, and Islamist fervor had enabled the Taliban to recruit villagers alienated by the corrupt central government in Kabul. By the time McChrystal took command of the war in the summer of 2009 and began implementing the tactics spelled out in Petraeus’s Counterinsurgency Field Manual, it was almost too late. The insurgency had spread to virtually every province in Afghanistan, with civilian fatalities, suicide bombings, attacks and assassinations all surging. McChrystal recognized that he lacked sufficient forces to root out the Taliban, secure the border with Pakistan and hold the villages that had been cleared.

  Though he also would not have all the forces he’d have liked, Petraeus wouldn’t have that problem to the same extent. When he replaced McChrystal in July, nearly all of the new surge forces were in country. They would work closely with Afghans at the district level and even the village level in the key districts identified in Rodriguez’s campaign plan.

  Petraeus issued counterinsurgency guidance to all the forces in Afghanistan in early August—the twenty-four commandments to accompany “King David’s Bible,” the Counterinsurgency Field Manual. The four-page document was not your run-of-the-mill memo from the commander. One had to wonder what Afghanistan might have looked like, eight years after September 11, 2001, had these tactics been carried out from the beginning.

  SECURE AND SERVE THE POPULATION. The decisive terrain is the human terrain. The people are the center of gravity. Only by providing them security and earning their trust and confidence can the Afghan government and ISAF prevail.

  LIVE WITH THE PEOPLE.
We can’t commute to the fight. Position joint bases and combat outposts as close to those we’re seeking to secure as feasible. Decide on locations with input from our partners and after consultation with local citizens and informed by intelligence and security assessments.

  PURSUE THE ENEMY RELENTLESSLY. Together with our Afghan partners, get your 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.

  WALK. Stop by, don’t drive by. Patrol on foot whenever possible and engage the population. Take off your sunglasses. Situational awareness can only be gained by interacting face-to-face, not separated by ballistic glass or Oakleys.

  BE FIRST WITH THE TRUTH. Beat the insurgents and malign actors to the headlines. Preempt rumors. Get accurate information to the chain of command, to Afghan leaders, to the people, and to the press as soon as possible. Integrity is critical to this fight. Avoid spinning, and don’t try to “dress up” an ugly situation. Acknowledge setbacks and failures, including civilian casualties, and then state how we’ll respond and what we’ve learned.

  LIVE OUR VALUES. Stay true to the values we hold dear. This is what distinguishes us from our enemies. We are engaged in a tough endeavor. It is often brutal, physically demanding, and frustrating. All of us experience moments of anger, but we must not give in to dark impulses or tolerate unacceptable actions by others.