The Longest War

by Peter L. Bergen

  Al-Qaeda’s untrammeled violence and imposition of Taliban ideology on the Sunni population provoked a countrywide Sunni backlash against AQI that took the form of the “Awakening” militias. Many of those militias were put on Uncle Sam’s payroll in a program known as the “Sons of Iraq.” The combination of the Sunni militias’ on-the-ground intelligence about their onetime AQI allies and American firepower proved devastating to al-Qaeda’s Iraqi franchise. And so, between 2006 and 2008, AQI shrank from an insurgent organization that controlled territory larger than the size of New England to a rump terrorist group that would still remain a spoiler of Iraq’s fragile peace, but it was never likely to regain its iron grip on much of Sunni Iraq.

  The tribal revolt that spread from Anbar to many other provinces in Iraq was the most important development in the country since the 2003 invasion. In the summer of 2007, Lieutenant Colonel David Kilcullen, the fast-talking, erudite Australian anthropologist and infantry officer who was the senior counterinsurgency adviser to General David Petraeus, noted in a lengthy post on Small Wars Journal, the website that served as the internal bulletin board for the counterinsurgency community, that 85 percent of Iraqis claim some tribal affiliation. In his post, Kilcullen concluded that “the tribal revolt is not some remote riot on a reservation: it’s a major social movement that could significantly influence most Iraqis where they live.”

  Al-Qaeda not only drove the Sunni tribes into a quite unexpected alliance with the Americans; around the same time the terrorist organization made another error that was to anger its allies in other Sunni insurgent groups, such as the 1920s Brigade and Islamic Army of Iraq, by killing some of their leaders. This was a serious mistake because members of those groups also ended up on the American payroll in the Sons of Iraq program, which by the spring of 2009 had grown to around 100,000 men. Many of those men used to be shooting at Americans; now they were shooting at al-Qaeda. This was in itself a surge of spectacular proportions—when 100,000 men who used to be shooting at you start shooting at your enemies it effectively adds 200,000 to your overall numbers.

  In the spring of 2006, following al-Qaeda’s bombing of the Golden Mosque shrine at Samarra, it was obvious to senior Bush administration officials that Iraq was falling apart. National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley recalls that he kept a chart that showed incidents of violence per week, and this chart “since 2003, just goes up. And I say to my people, every time when they say, ‘Well, we’re making progress,’ in’04, ’05, ’06, and I would always say, ‘When I see this violence chart start to head down, I’ll believe we’re making progress.’”

  The Samarra bombing was the final straw for the Shia, who had generally not engaged in sectarian conflict despite repeated provocations by al-Qaeda and other Sunni terrorist groups. This policy was largely the result of the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, their most important spiritual leader, urging restraint on his flock. Hadley recalls: “The patience of the Shia finally gave out. Sistani had been holding them back from retaliating. But after the Samarra bombing, they lose confidence in the Iraqi forces. And Shia death squads start getting active.”

  By the early summer, Meghan O’Sullivan, a deputy national security advisor who had spent two years living in Iraq and who had the respect of the president, was able to communicate to him her mounting concern about the rising level of violence. Hadley recalls the conversation: “The president says, ‘How are your friends in Baghdad?’ She says, ‘They’re terrified, Mr. President. They’re more terrified than they’ve ever been. It’s impossible to live in that city.’ Well, this is from somebody the president knows, who knows Iraq, as much as any American can, has personal friends in Baghdad, and is committed to success. And she’s telling him, ‘Mr. President, this is a whole new game. And everybody’s terrified.’ That gets your attention.”

  In the face of the accelerating civil war, O’Sullivan and her deputy, Brett McGurk, concluded that lowering the American profile in Iraq was going to lose the war and so they started secretly exploring a “surge” strategy that would instead send more troops to Iraq. They were both so convinced that this was the right approach that they privately dubbed themselves the “surgios.”

  Throughout late 2006 an intense debate about not only a possible surge but also the overall U.S. military strategy in Iraq raged inside the halls of the Pentagon and the White House and in the conference rooms of Washington think tanks, a debate that was largely obscure to the American press and public. The debate pitted on one side the U.S. commander on the ground in Iraq, General George Casey, and his boss, CENTCOM commander General John Abizaid, as well as their overall boss Donald Rumsfeld, against an unlikely alliance that included the “surgios” at the National Security Council; Jack Keane, a retired four-star general who continued to wield considerable influence inside the Beltway; Fred Kagan, an historian based at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute; Stephen Biddle, a military strategist at the centrist Council on Foreign Relations; Eliot Cohen, an influential professor at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins; and even General Casey’s own deputy, Lieutenant General Raymond Odierno, who was quietly lobbying for more troops behind the back of his boss.

  Casey, Abizaid, and Rumsfeld were also supported by almost all of the senior leaders of the U.S. military who advocated lowering the profile of U.S. forces to put more of an Iraqi “face” on the occupation, on the theory that American soldiers were antibodies in the Arab world and that, in any event, Iraqis had to “take the training wheels off” and learn to drive their own bike themselves. This approach could be best summarized as standing down the American presence in the country, while simultaneously the United States helped to “stand up” the Iraqi security services that would increasingly take control of the country.

  In the early summer of 2006, O’Sullivan, who had served in Baghdad as an official in the Coalition Provisional Authority, found out that General Casey was recommending the withdrawal of two brigades from Iraq, as many as ten thousand soldiers. O’Sullivan, whose doctorate from Oxford was about the Sri Lankan civil war, found this strange: “Violence was going up, the situation was deteriorating, and we were going to pull two brigades out of Iraq. And I remember thinking, ‘What possible justification is there for this?’ There’s no strategic reason for this, unless you really believe that we are the cause of the violence.” O’Sullivan’s deputy, McGurk, who had lived in Baghdad in 2004 and returned there in May 2006, was shocked by the chaos in the city. There didn’t seem to be any real plan to stem the violence. “When you’d sit with Casey and the military at that time, there was zero new thinking. It was like, ‘We’re going to have a new Baghdad Security Plan.’ OK, well, what is the plan? And it was just the same old thing, over and over again,” recalls McGurk.

  During the summer of 2006, as the violence in Baghdad reached stratospheric levels, the Iraqi security services and the U.S. military jointly conducted two major offensives in the capital, Operation Together Forward I and II, to reclaim the city from the feuding Sunni and Shia militias. Both operations failed because the Iraqi army and police were incapable of holding neighborhoods once they had been cleared of insurgents.

  By now O’Sullivan was convinced that handing off responsibility to Iraq’s security services in the short term in much of the country was a pipe dream. “We would transfer responsibility to Iraqi police or the Iraqi army, and violence would go way up. And we would see this pattern, over and over again.” Not only were the Iraqi security services incapable of halting the sectarian strife, but they had also become infiltrated by Shia militias. General David Petraeus recalls that “the National Police, which in the beginning was a fairly tough outfit, had been hijacked by the militias.”

  McGurk recalls this being an especially bleak time for those who worked on Iraq. “I told friends at the White House at that time, ‘If we do not rapidly change our strategy to do something radically different, I can’t keep working on this issue.’ … So late August, we were buildin
g the case, or trying to be able to build the case for more force. But it couldn’t be discussed in polite company. Steve [Hadley] would say to us, ‘I don’t want to hear about a surge,’ and you still had Rumsfeld in place.” Whatever his initial misgivings about a surge, in late September Hadley instructed O’Sullivan and McGurk to start discreetly exploring all options in Iraq, telling them, “Do a top-to-bottom strategic review in a more formalized way, but quietly: close-hold.”

  That the United States could play a helpful role in the burgeoning Iraqi civil war if it employed a different strategy was first argued publicly and comprehensively by Stephen Biddle in a lucid essay early in 2006 in Foreign Affairs, the bible of the foreign policy establishment. Biddle, a Waspy, cerebral military strategist who taught at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, explained that the main problem in Iraq was not an anti-American insurgency but a “communal civil war.” Biddle pointed out that this called into question the main American strategy of the time, which was the “standing up” of the Iraqi security services, because “Iraq’s Sunnis perceive the ‘national’ army and police force as a Shiite-Kurdish militia on steroids”; in short, the main American strategy of the time was actually helping to fuel the civil war. In order to reverse that process Biddle advocated “a wider amnesty for former Baathists and insurgents” so as to reassure the Sunnis that the United States was an honest broker in the sectarian war. Biddle made this suggestion six months before the first of such deals was cut in Anbar province by the U.S. military.

  The recently retired four-star general Jack Keane, who had risen from commanding a platoon in Vietnam to Army vice chief of staff, was watching events unfold in Iraq with growing unease in 2006: “The strategy on the ground largely belonged to the U.S. military in Vietnam as it did in Iraq. And in both cases we had it wrong.” In September he went to see Rumsfeld at the Pentagon and told him that to reverse the downward spiral in Iraq he needed to deploy an additional five to eight brigades—up to forty thousand soldiers—or risk losing the war. Rumsfeld listened intently but Keane was not certain he had made any headway with him.

  In late October 2006, O’Sullivan and Hadley traveled to Iraq to assess the situation for themselves. O’Sullivan recalls a large gulf between the strategy being pursued by the Army leadership and what those further down the chain of command were finding on the ground: “We had a meeting with battalion and brigade commanders in Baghdad. We didn’t have any other senior people in the room. I asked every single one of them, ‘How do the Iraqis react to you when you and your guys come into their neighborhoods?’ And without exception they responded along the lines: ‘They welcome us and they are desperate for us to stay when it comes time for us to hand over to Iraqi Security Forces.’”

  This flew in the face of the prevailing American strategy in Iraq, while it simultaneously confirmed a classic counterinsurgency doctrine, which is that to win required putting more of an American face on the occupation by getting U.S. soldiers out of their vast bases and into Iraqi neighborhood outposts to “protect the population.” A good deal of the intellectual heavy lifting that had helped to inform this view had gone into the unglamorously named Counterinsurgency Field Manual 3–24, the Army and Marines new handbook on counterinsurgency, the work for which was directed by General David Petraeus in 2006 at the Army’s training center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

  John Nagl is a Rhodes Scholar with a doctorate from Oxford. In 2002 he published Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam. The title was taken from T. E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia, who had helped organize the insurgency known as the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire during World War I. Lawrence wrote of fighting insurgents that “making war on a rebellion is messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife.” A year after publishing his book, Nagl was in Iraq serving as a battalion commander in the troubled province of Anbar. Following his tour there, Nagl worked in the Pentagon as a military assistant to Rumsfeld’s top deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, where he became known as one of the most persistent proponents that the Army needed a new counterinsurgency doctrine. In November 2005, Petraeus gave a lunchtime speech at a counterinsurgency conference in Washington, D.C. Nagl recalls that Petraeus, his former history professor at West Point, “announced that he was going to write a counterinsurgency manual, and he announced that I was going to be the lead pen, which was the first time I’d heard of it!”

  After the conference Nagl and a couple of other officers who would also be recruited to help write the new manual repaired to the Front Page bar in downtown Washington and sketched out on a cocktail napkin the outlines of a new doctrine. Nagl assumed the role of managing editor of the manual and Petraeus recruited Conrad Crane, a military historian and a former West Point classmate, to be the lead writer. But there was no doubt who was in charge. Nagl recalls that Petraeus “was the driver, he was the vision, he was the copy editor, he read the whole thing twice, he turned around chapters in twenty-four hours with extensive edits and comments.”

  The writings of the French soldier-intellectual David Galula were quite influential on the group working on the manual. Galula had fought in Indochina and Algeria in the 1950s as an officer in the French army as it was attempting to stamp out nationalist insurgencies in France’s colonial possessions. Around a decade later Galula published Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice, which distilled the lessons of fighting and observing insurgencies in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Galula laid down a general principle that is recognized as the core of a successful counterinsurgency strategy: “The population becomes the objective for the counter-insurgent as it was for his enemy.” This meant that seizing territory became far less important than it was in a conventional war; ensuring that people felt secure enough so they were not forced to side with the insurgents and, eventually, even felt secure enough to provide intelligence about them, became the prize.

  Once a first draft of the counterinsurgency manual was completed, Petraeus and the lead writer, Crane, decided to convene a group of outside experts to critique it. Crane recalls, “We had a vetting conference to go over the doctrine, and I agreed with the general that we would do it, and I said, ‘Yeah, let’s bring in thirty smart people to talk about it’; he brought in a hundred and fifty. It was quite a three-ring circus out at Fort Leavenworth.” Over the course of two days officials from the CIA and State Department, and leading academics and journalists such as Eliot Cohen, James Fallows, and George Packer were instructed to give their critiques, which generated hundreds of pages of new ideas. Cochairing the conference was Sarah Sewall, the director of Harvard’s Carr Center on Human Rights Policy; that sent a significant signal about the content of the manual. Nagl says, “Sarah’s influence was incredibly important in encouraging the military to accept more risk in order to put the population at lesser risk,” as well as in helping to establish the importance of a legal regime that respected the rights of detainees.

  The Army and Marines published the final version of the Counterinsurgency Field Manual in December 2006. The Web version of the manual was downloaded 1.5 million times and the New York Times gave it a serious review, something of a first for a dense military tome that weighed in at some four hundred pages.

  The doctrines in the new manual permeated the subsequent actions of the U.S. military both in Iraq and Afghanistan. The following points from the manual summarize its central message: Unsuccessful practices: overemphasize killing and capturing the enemy rather than securing and engaging the populace; conduct large-scale operations as the norm and concentrate military forces in large bases for protection. Successful practices: focus on the population, its needs, and its security and provide amnesty and rehabilitation for those willing to support the new government. In a section titled “Paradoxes,” the manual made a number of recommendations that were hardly typical of prevailing U.S. military doctrine: “Sometimes doing nothing is the best reaction” and (drawing on T. E. Lawrence) “the host na
tion doing something tolerably is normally better than us doing it well.”

  These commonsense prescriptions would, in time, help to change the course of the Iraq War.

  By the fall of 2006 the American public had long tired of the war, and on November 4 it dealt the Republican Party what President Bush accurately termed a “thumping” in the congressional midterm elections, which brought Democratic majorities to both the House and the Senate. A day after that thumping Bush dumped his secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, who had become a lightning rod for all the dissatisfactions surrounding the Iraq War, and installed in his place the consummate Washington insider, former CIA director Robert Gates.

  A week later National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley convened a meeting on Iraq at the White House that included Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Rice and her counselor Philip Zelikow argued that the time to do much more in Iraq had come and gone and that the United States had other important strategic interests to attend to in the world in places like Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Bush’s point person on Iraq, Meghan O’Sullivan, and her deputy, Brett McGurk, argued for an alternative approach: “We need to try something radically different, because the consequences of not doing so are really catastrophic.”

  Hadley says Bush was becoming increasingly alarmed as he saw the reports of the rising American casualties in Iraq. “The president sees, every morning, the blue sheets, a Situation Room report indicating who was killed overnight. That gets his attention, and that helped convince him we needed a review.” In mid-November the president launched a formal review of the war.

  There were four approaches on the table: first, the “stay the course” option of continuing the strategy that was clearly failing; second, the State Department’s “targeted” approach, which was to focus on al-Qaeda in Iraq but not expand the American role further; third, the “double down” option, which was the surge; and fourth, “bet on Maliki,” the Iraqi prime minister who was telling Bush administration officials that he wanted to clamp down on the sectarian violence that elements of his own government were fueling, but that he did not have the forces to do it.