by David Loyn
Preparing to return the year after the invasion, Mattis made the Small Wars Manual required reading for the marines, who also had rudimentary Arab language training. Mattis added “First, Do No Harm” to his mantra of “No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy” as a reminder of the need to protect the population. His chief of staff, Brigadier General Joe Dunford (later to command ISAF and finish his career as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), said the 2004 Mattis plan was to “establish a relationship with the people, establish an intelligence network, and begin to get after what are associated with counterinsurgency tasks.”
Marines wore soft hats and patrolled block by block to win back the people in the insurgent hotbed of Fallujah, growing mustaches to blend in. Mattis discussed the plan with Major General Stanley McChrystal, then commanding special operators across Iraq and Afghanistan. “Neither of us thought simply being in soft caps would win Fallujah,” wrote McChrystal. “But Mattis, early on, understood that perceptions were at least as important as any tactical gains.”19 Mattis wanted to continue the counterinsurgency plan after the bodies of four U.S. contractors captured in a convoy were hung from a bridge. To him, the Iraq war was “an extremely violent political campaign over ideas,” where counterinsurgency tactics would be more effective and sustainable than those of conventional war.20 But he was overruled. Not for the first time in the post-9/11 wars, the military judgment was second-guessed from Washington, as TV images of the burned bodies rattled politicians, and they ordered an all-out assault—only to order a humiliating halt when the human cost became clear, leaving the Sunni insurgents claiming victory. McChrystal called it “the worst day for the Coalition since the invasion.”21
In 2005, Colonel H. R. McMaster (later a lieutenant general and President Trump’s national security adviser) was seeking to avoid a repeat when retaking the town of Tal Afar—a battle billed as “the next Fallujah.” He arranged concentrated training sessions in Fort Carson, Colorado, with exercises that included soldiers sitting in mock houses, learning to recognize signs that showed whether the occupants were Shia or Sunni, and attempting to secure information, which they were given “only after they had sat down three or four times, accepted tea, and asked the right questions.”22
Afghanistan too saw counterinsurgency principles adopted before the 2006 manual, particularly under Lieutenant General David Barno. Many officers heading for the mountains of eastern Afghanistan read Lewis Sorley’s 1999 revisionist account of Vietnam, A Better War, which argued that even late in that war, counterinsurgency tactics introduced by General Creighton Abrams could have prevailed if politicians had understood what he was doing and given him more time.23 Old British warriors from the two colonial conflicts where counterinsurgency was regarded as successful, Malaya in the 1950s and the Dhofar rebellion in Oman in the 1970s, were consulted alongside Vietnam veterans.
Winning hearts and minds—the term popularized in Vietnam to describe the change in priorities needed to conduct counterinsurgency warfare—drew on an old British colonial phrase.24 Making the population the prize required troops to understand local context and perform functions different from conventional war fighting to persuade people that their government is better than that offered by insurgents. And it took patience sometimes to stand back and allow local solutions, rather than try to impose perfection—a principle the new Petraeus-Mattis doctrine explicitly derived from T. E. Lawrence: “Better the Arabs do it tolerably than you do it perfectly.”25
NO MORE POLISHED CRAP
“Dave, you and I can do this,” Mattis told Petraeus when he called him for support in turning their experiences into a new counterinsurgency doctrine. “But let’s keep it between our two commands. If we take this to the Pentagon, it’ll take forever. We need to move fast.”26 Mattis now headed the marine equivalent of Leavenworth at Quantico, Virginia.
They knew they would need to build alliances beyond the military to combat strong institutional opposition. To launch the process, 135 experts came to a meeting, drawn from a wide circle, including prominent human rights advocates who were skeptical of the U.S. military. As they gathered, the army historian and Petraeus’s West Point classmate Conrad Crane handed round bowls containing around one hundred small, highly polished green stones called coprolites. He explained that these pretty stones were actually fossilized dinosaur excrement.27 It was a graphic display designed to show that this time it would be different—the new doctrine would not be polished crap.
The new doctrine required a fundamental rethink of military priorities to make protection of the population, not destroying the enemy, the main mission of any campaign. Counterinsurgents needed to focus more on the water than the fish. And the Petraeus-Mattis COIN doctrine drew further lessons from Mao, who had outlined three phases of protracted insurgent warfare—defensive, stalemate, and counteroffensive. If they understood this, then soldiers were better able to counter different insurgent tactics in different locations in Afghanistan: major conventional attacks in one place, guerrilla strikes in another, and attacks on civilians in a third. The doctrine demanded flexibility and adaptability, since what worked this week “might not work next week,” and it warned troops against being lured into complacency by winning single battles—tactical success was easy with unchallenged mastery of the air, but it was not victory. Troops needed to accept more risk, get out on the ground, understand the value of nonlethal action, and promote political solutions. All military operations are part offense, part defense, and part stabilization. The way Petraeus saw it, the key to understanding COIN was that “the stability operation component is much more prominent than in conventional warfighting operations.”
Local civilian engagement did not come easily for modern soldiers trained and equipped to fight in a different way. Karl Eikenberry, the former lieutenant general, appointed as the U.S. ambassador to Kabul in 2009, used a memorably earthy phrase to describe the challenge: “The typical marine is hard-pressed to win the heart and mind of his mother-in-law; can he really be expected to do the same with an ethnocentric Pashtun tribal elder?”28
No one thought change would be easy. The illusory power of the full-spectrum dominance of the most sophisticated war machine in the world blinded it to the value of simple human contact. But change was essential if there was to be a way out of the quagmire both in Iraq and Afghanistan. General Bigeard’s deceptively simple idea that “you’ve got to have the people on your side if you want to win a war” was not rocket science, but as one of the modern exponents of counterinsurgency, John Nagl, put it, “if it were, western militaries would be better at it.”29
“WE COULDN’T KILL OR CAPTURE OUR WAY OUT OF AN INDUSTRIAL-STRENGTH INSURGENCY”30
The catalyst for the change that began to synchronize training on the ground, military doctrine, and political will on counterinsurgency was the success of the Democrats in the midterm election in November 2006. This was the worst year of the Iraq war so far in terms of U.S. casualties, and the loss of confidence in Rumsfeld inside the military establishment had come out into the open in the “Revolt of the Generals,” when six former commanders in the army and the marines said he must go. Chastened by the November drubbing at the polls, Bush moved to replace his contentious defense secretary with Gates on the day of the election results.
Not only had Rumsfeld opposed counterinsurgency, he had even bridled at the use of the word insurgent, believing it conferred political legitimacy on terrorists. He insisted that troops in the field talked of their enemy as AIF (anti-Iraq forces) or AAF (anti-Afghanistan forces). But even with Rumsfeld out of the way, the path to the acceptance of the new Petraeus-Mattis doctrine was not obvious. The generals who “revolted” were not a coordinated group. They were not pushing for counterinsurgency warfare; their beef was that if there had to be an invasion of Iraq, which some thought a bad mistake anyway, the initial invasion force was far too small.
There were other strong voices arguing against counterinsurgency. Ahead of the publication of the Pe
traeus-Mattis doctrine, there was a report by the Iraq Study Group, a group of grandees jointly chaired by former secretary of state James A. Baker III and former congressman Lee Hamilton. They recommended a more conventional path to withdrawal from Iraq—a surge of forces, but not to engage in counterinsurgency. Instead, their plan called for a surge to improve the capacity of Iraqi forces, for a quick handover and full withdrawal.
Shelving the Iraq Study Group report, President Bush came down instead on the side of the new counterinsurgency doctrine after a briefing by a group of outside experts who had war-gamed Iraq options. Prominent among them were the trusted bow-tied academic Eliot Cohen, ubiquitous and on the inside track of thinking about America’s new wars, and retired army chief of staff General John M. “Jack” Keane, a New Yorker with the build of a quarterback, who had worked his way up the army, beginning as a paratrooper in Vietnam, and was one of Petraeus’s mentors.
This group arrived in the Oval Office from a three-day exercise run by the American Enterprise Institute, involving experts including officers who had recently served in Iraq. Retired lieutenant general Dave Barno, who had trialed a version of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan as early as 2004, was part of the exercise. They proposed a new approach to “stop the bleeding” and halt the slide to what they saw as a “primitive civil war.”31 They argued that thirty thousand troops be sent to Iraq to conduct a full-scale counterinsurgency along the lines of the new doctrine. Bush agreed to the change of direction, but institutional resistance continued. Gates was turned down when he tried to write the need for training for nonconventional wars into the National Defense Strategy in 2007.
Promoted to full general with a fourth star, and appointed to command Operation Iraqi Freedom in February 2007, Petraeus needed to find ways to bypass these institutional obstacles to implement his newly minted counterinsurgency doctrine. Minding his back was the formidable figure of Jack Keane, well connected at all levels in the administration, and alongside a handpicked team of military officers with Ph.D.s, he took with him to Baghdad a group of maverick academics, some not even U.S. citizens.
The shift to counterinsurgency, and its first real tryout in Iraq, would make 2007 a landmark year. Events that year would shape Afghanistan’s destiny—four out of the next five commanders of ISAF in Afghanistan would serve in Iraq as Petraeus rolled out his counterinsurgency plan. Apart from Petraeus himself, Lieutenant General Stanley A. McChrystal was now in his fourth year commanding the Joint Special Operations Command TF-714, which ranged across Iraq and Afghanistan, and was based in Baghdad. John R. Allen was promoted to major general in January 2007, in his second year as deputy commander of the region, including the restive Al-Anbar Province, where the insurgency would be decisively turned round that year. And John F. Campbell, then a brigadier general, was deputy commanding general in Baghdad, which had the lion’s share of the surge troops, as insurgency doctrine and practice began to catch up with the wars actually being fought.
THE OTHER WAR
In June 2008, the month General David McKiernan replaced Dan McNeill in Kabul as the commander of ISAF, U.S. fatalities were higher in Afghanistan than Iraq for the first time. These were “the most dramatic years” of the war, according to Kai Eide, then head of the UN mission in Kabul, and Washington was beginning to notice. Until then, the relative priorities of the two theaters of war were clear and defined simply by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen—“In Iraq we do what we must, in Afghanistan we do what we can.” But by 2008, the success attributed to General David Petraeus in turning the tide on what he called “an industrial-strength insurgency” in Iraq led to modest troop withdrawals, allowing Afghanistan, “the other war,” to claim some share of the available oxygen in the corridors of power. McKiernan knew the system well enough to know it could focus on only one war at a time. He gave a downbeat assessment five months after his arrival that confirmed the growing view in Washington that things might get worse in Afghanistan before they got better. “I won’t say that things are all on the right track especially in the South and the East … in large parts of Afghanistan, we don’t see progress.”32
McKiernan avoided time in the Pentagon for almost all his military career, preferring to lead in the field. Unusually for someone who achieved the highest military rank, he is a quiet, reflective introvert, who likes to remind people “There’s no I in teamwork.” He did not go the West Point route but studied history at William & Mary in Virginia, one of America’s oldest colleges. When appointed as the commander in Afghanistan, he wanted to learn what he called the “non-military variables,” preparation lacking in the Iraq war. In 2003, commanding the armored assault into Iraq, he knew he did not “have a good appreciation of history, of religious variables, of ethnic fault lines, of economics.” Preparing for the Kabul command in 2008, he sought out two sociology professors who had been traveling to Afghanistan since the 1980s to brief him.
In contrast to the sizable group Petraeus took with him to Baghdad, McKiernan came to Kabul with just three people: two executive officers and a personal security guard. He trusted the system to provide, but found a dysfunctional operation. The number of soldiers in the ISAF headquarters had swollen to two thousand as more nations jostled to show they were alongside America, while not willing to expose their troops to danger beyond the walls of the HQ. McKiernan thought the work done by the headquarters staff was “largely irrelevant” because he could not issue commands that would be obeyed uniformly. “Each regional command had a different environment, different problems, different troops, and different national guidance.” His senior aides were of varying quality. His chief of staff, the most significant senior role, running operations and plans, was an Italian, who although competent enough, did not speak good English, so orders were delivered through an interpreter. His G-2, senior intelligence officer, was Turkish, and McKiernan despaired, “There are reasons why we don’t share all our intelligence with the Turks.” Any relevant headquarters staff work was largely accomplished through key staff officers from the so-called Five Eyes countries—U.S., UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand—who share the highest levels of intelligence.
There was nobody in the headquarters responsible for the media, public affairs, or strategic communications. When McKiernan queried this, a retired Greek general, who had never been in Afghanistan nor had any experience of media relations, was sent out. McKiernan put him straight on the next plane home, ruffling feathers across the alliance, and instead appointed Skip Davis, a competent American colonel.
National vulnerabilities were revealed even more strongly down the command chain, as McKiernan saw for himself, traveling often outside the artificial bubble of Kabul. The biggest command challenge was in the south, where British forces were dug into “Helmandshire,” with Dutch troops under very tight restrictions imposed by their government, protected by an Australian detachment, in neighboring Uruzgan. There were Romanian troops assisted by Americans in Zabul, and a Canadian force in Kandahar with the regional HQ. Four different national campaigns in just one highly volatile region, where McKiernan knew the Taliban were not similarly restricted by provincial boundaries or caveats.
In the months before McKiernan arrived, McNeill had failed to put the crucial southern headquarters under American command, winning instead a concession that its NATO command staff would do nine-month tours to improve continuity. No other armies were willing to do the yearlong tours then standard for U.S. troops—with many on longer fifteen-month tours. The problem with short tours was that it would take any new staff at least a month to settle in, and their effectiveness was reduced for at least a month as they wound down on leaving. Added to that, each nation rotated its troops in and out at a different time, and most took a two-week break in the middle of a six-month tour, further reducing the effectiveness of multinational regional command centers.
Even those few European nations whose troops were capable and willing to fight were faltering as the body bags came hom
e. In August, ten French soldiers were killed in a well-planned Taliban ambush in Sarobi, east of Kabul. Several hundred Taliban fighters stopped an armored convoy of one hundred French and Afghan troops and encircled their rear in a classic pincer move. Only intense close air strikes called in by U.S. special operators traveling with the convoy stopped the Taliban attack. The French were leading their first patrol after taking over from an Italian contingent. Italian troops preferred to pay locals for information and were not fastidious about who took the money—effectively paying the Taliban for a quiet life. French troops who wanted to operate differently and get out on the ground faced determined opposition from insurgents backed by locals who had lost a source of income. McKiernan had an uncomfortable meeting with the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, who flew straight to Afghanistan after the incident.
The incident was only the latest in a series of attacks testing the nerve of European troop-contributing nations—highlighting the gap between the peacekeeping operation they had signed up to support and the war they were actually fighting. The way McKiernan saw it, “many countries that contributed troops felt they were somehow ‘bamboozled’ by America to get into such kinetic fighting in parts of Afghanistan. That’s not what they really thought they were signing up for.”
