The Long War

by David Loyn

  The image of success in the face of adversity was formed in Iraq in 2003. It was Petraeus who was “prepared to act” in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul in contrast to “the civilian authority in Baghdad,” who were still “getting organized.” And when he later returned to Iraq after that first glittering tour, the Pentagon was said to be “rushing back one of its most highly regarded generals to help train and equip Iraqi security forces.” There were direct comparisons made with Grant in the Civil War. “There have been situations in our history where American generals were given tough problems to resolve, like Lincoln grabbing U.S. Grant in 1864 … If anybody can fix this, he can.”5 To some, he was “King David,” which he preferred to translate into Arabic—signing emails as “Malik D.”6

  His unplanned move to Kabul in 2010 was widely welcomed, with journalists only worrying how the rest of the world would cope without him. “If Iraq begins to fall apart, and Petraeus is busy in Kabul, who is going to step on?”7 The “architect of the Iraq war turnaround” was once again coming to help out his country at its hour of need, taking “hands-on leadership of a troubled war effort.”8 There was even a move to give him a fifth star. The last time the U.S. Army had five-star generals was for an elite group toward the end of World War II. A month into his time in Kabul, he began to do media, citing Lawrence’s maxim that “the printing press is the greatest weapon in the armory of the modern commander.” The first TV reporter in was David Gregory of NBC, who called him “easily America’s most famous warrior.”9

  After his Kabul command, his appointment to be director of the CIA was welcomed in the media. “Given Petraeus’s extensive experience in a decade of post-9/11 warfare, his new role at the helm of global covert operations is widely seen as a good fit.”10 The only dissenters believed he should have stayed in uniform as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: taking him out of direct control of the war was like “pulling Ulysses S. Grant away from Richmond to run the Pinkerton Agency.”11 But although a consummate insider, this astute player of the political game fostered an image among sympathetic analysts that he was a subversive, an insurgent,12 a quality he believed he shared with McChrystal, disrupting and reinventing the army like innovative managers of a corporation.

  These two principal military leaders of Obama’s Afghan war valued intellectual achievement along with an austere work ethic and rigorous physical fitness. Petraeus’s most treasured possession is his Ph.D., and his idea of perfect happiness was “an intellectual gathering in Aspen where you have a morning full of great discussion of weighty issues, a nice lunch, continuing the discussion. You do some work on your laptop back in a hotel room and then you get on a road bike and hammer up the hills of Aspen for two hours, and you come back and stretch out and do some strength work and you shower and go to a delightful dinner and have a glass of wine and talk weighty issues again.”

  Petraeus was not from a military family. His father, Sixtus, was a Dutch merchant seaman, stranded on the Eastern Seaboard of the U.S. at the outbreak of World War II. His mother, Miriam, was from an old Pilgrim family. He grew up a few miles from West Point and was a cadet there during the cultural convulsions of the Vietnam War, when the superintendent William A. Knowlton likened it to a “stockade surrounded by attacking Indians.”13 Knowlton was appointed in 1970 after his predecessor, Sam Koster, left, tainted by scandal around the massacre at My Lai. Knowlton had been involved in CORDS, the stabilization program that combined civil and military operations in Vietnam, but counterinsurgency was not central on the curriculum at West Point in the 1970s. Petraeus married the superintendent’s daughter, Holly, after meeting on a blind date.

  In his early years in the army, Petraeus found himself in demand in several influential staff roles, where he learned vital lessons about the relationship between political and military authority. As well as the time he spent with Major General Jack Galvin in the U.S. and Europe, he went to Washington for two years as ADC to the army chief of staff, General Carl Vuono. He told Vuono at the interview that he had been away from the infantry for a long time and would prefer to stay there. Vuono replied, “I wouldn’t want you if you really wanted the job. Report in three weeks.”14

  It was when he returned to the infantry in 1991 that Petraeus began to build the legend of a highly competitive leader. Commanding the 3rd Battalion, 187th Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne, the Rakkasans,15 he devised a fitness competition he called the “Iron Rakkasan” and challenged anyone in his command to beat his score. None did. Along with demands on physical fitness, he imposed strict discipline, including high-and-tight haircuts and a dress code that insisted on keeping the top button of combat jackets fastened, even in the field. To recover the combat readiness of a battalion just back from the 1991 Gulf War, he introduced small-unit training and live-fire exercises. At the end of his command, the battalion, now renamed the Iron Rakkasans, had more Ranger-qualified soldiers than any in the division, but it came at a price. A memo from a junior officer questioned if “the late hours and weekends away from home were really worth it.”16

  Two serious accidents that might have halted the career of a lesser mortal, being shot in the chest on a training accident during one of the live-fire exercises in 199117 and breaking his pelvis on a civilian parachute jump in 2000, could not halt his rise—the legend burnished by the tale that he did fifty push-ups to persuade doctors he was fit to leave the hospital after being shot. He later denied this, claiming, “I never stop at fifty.” Shrugging off treatment for prostate cancer in 2009, he did not take any time off work while undergoing more than forty radiation sessions. To test the suitability of a potential biographer, Paula Broadwell, twenty years his junior, and top of her class for athletics at West Point, he carried out a conversation while running from the Pentagon to the Washington Monument, upping the pace to a six-minute mile at the end. Her glowing account described “Petraeus’s will” as a “strategic force” of its own, that once “loosed in Kabul” would transform the war.18

  The announcement by President Obama that Petraeus was to succeed McChrystal was greeted with audible gasps by the headquarters staff watching the big screen in the situational awareness room in ISAF. McChrystal and Petraeus may have been aligned on the war plan, but their leadership styles were known to be very different. While McChrystal sat as one node in a network and encouraged a freewheeling exchange of ideas, particularly from junior officers, Petraeus was remoter, with focused direction from the top of a pyramid. On arrival in Kabul, he ordered there be no surfing the net or reading emails during the morning briefing. “With that, a clicking chorus of more than sixty closing laptops filled the room.”19 Petraeus’s will had arrived in Afghanistan.

  THE BIG M

  Petraeus deliberately cultivated a sense of mystique, a quality his mentor Major General Jack Galvin called “the Big M.” “Through your mythology, people create you.”20 To Petraeus, the “aura around a particular leader” was not about ego but about being set apart, the Big M also stood for the mask of command. It was important to Petraeus not to let the mask slip, encouraging belief that he would never give up. Petraeus would have liked a description Holbrooke used of him that he had a “near-mythic persona.”21 The word he used to define his campaigns, in both Iraq and Afghanistan, was relentless. The Big M, Galvin said, did not have to be Patton and his pistols, Grant and his cigars. It was about people wanting you to be bigger than you are. “You become part of a legend.”22 And then as a commander, “you try to make it look effortless.”

  The Big M had to do with the idea of mystique about an individual. In the case of Galvin, someone who was “a true soldier and scholar, and then ultimately statesman, of the highest order.” Those were the elements that made up his “Big M,” Petraeus said. “And I was also conscious of my Big M.” This mantle was confirmed during the surge in Iraq when Galvin, now long retired from the military, wrote him to say, “I hereby bequeath to you status as the Big M.” Early in his career, Galvin sent Petraeus a print of Stampede by
Frederic Remington. The image of the cowboy in control of himself and his horse, surrounded by plunging hooves and horns of panicked cattle in a thunderstorm, informed Petraeus’s career in command. “One of my aides called me the world’s most competitive human being, and that I thought was OK … I want the enemy to think that I’m the most competitive human being.”

  The Big M could overcome adversity, so ramping up the size of the challenge was part of the mystique. In both Afghanistan and Iraq, he said it was “all hard all the time.” Putting together what he needed in Afghanistan was like assembling “the pieces of a puzzle,” adding, “We didn’t get all the places even remotely in place until late 2010.” At his confirmation hearing for the Afghan command in the Senate Armed Services Committee, he repeated an image he liked to use, that the command role in the post-9/11 wars was like “building an advanced aircraft while it is in flight, while it is being designed, and while it is being shot at.” And in his case, he was moving into the pilot’s seat at no notice, after McChrystal’s hurried exit. He left with Senator John McCain’s endorsement of “one of our finest-ever military leaders” ringing round the chamber.

  In Iraq in 2007, there is no doubt that Petraeus changed the course of the war, turning it in the right direction for the first time since the chaos that followed the fall of Saddam. “Petraeus’s critical contribution in Iraq was one of leadership,” wrote military analyst Tom Ricks. “He got everyone on the same page. Until he arrived, there often seemed to be dozens of wars going on, with every brigade commander trying to figure out the strategic goals of a campaign.”23 It was his good fortune to arrive in both theaters of war, Iraq in 2007 and Afghanistan in 2010, just when counterinsurgency was the policy needed, and crucially for him, when there was a will in Washington to commit more resources to the task. In July 2010, when he arrived in Afghanistan, there were twice as many international troops in theater than when Dave McKiernan was replaced a year before.

  It is human nature that all military commanders see their time at the top as being a critical turning point—their focus so absolute on the moment that they could not see it any other way. Petraeus went further, comparing himself to great commanders of the past called on to save their nation in seemingly hopeless situations—Grant in the Civil War, Ridgway in Korea, and the British general William Slim in Burma in World War II.24 He was called on “to retrieve a very desperate situation in Iraq in 2007, and then indeed to halt the Taliban momentum and reverse it in Afghanistan in 2010/2011.” His commitment was total, not returning to the U.S. when his father died while he was commanding in Iraq.

  This stellar profile did not tell the full story. He had never been in combat until he commanded in Iraq in 2003, and some on his staff felt him too cautious—hesitant to commit troops in a dynamic and fast-moving invasion, and wanting to regroup at the first contact with the enemy.25 It was not until he reached Mosul that his formidable organizational skills came to the fore, and he negotiated with fractured local administrations to turn around a perilous situation and manage important elements for stabilization such as the wheat harvest. The conclusion to some close to him in this first field command was that he was a brilliant staff officer, who was now to face his toughest test.26

  STAMPEDE

  Petraeus took command in Kabul on July 4. In one of his first stand-ups, he put up a slide of the Remington Stampede image on the big screen in the SAR. “I use this image to tell you I am comfortable with semi-chaotic situations … But we need to do more than hang onto 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.”27 Unusually for a senior commander by 2010, nine years into the war, he had no previous active experience in Afghanistan and did not much like it. “The terrain is forbidding and the weather is very difficult. The winters in Afghanistan were a grinding experience … They will burn anything they can get their hands on to stay warm in the winter, including plastic and other waste, so there’s also a terribly noxious atmosphere. It’s grey, bone-chillingly cold, and wet … It’s a tough place for a military campaign.” He had first been there at the request of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in 2005, who asked him to do a survey of progress on his way back from Iraq. He gave a downbeat assessment, presciently telling Rumsfeld, “The bottom line is that, in my view, Afghanistan is going to be the longest campaign in a long war.”

  Petraeus was a great advocate of PowerPoint and used slides to harvest knowledge—at one point amassing one thousand slides on the situation in Iraq. His slide deck on Afghanistan in 2005 was titled “Afghanistan Does Not Equal Iraq.” He stressed the differences, including relatively developed infrastructure and an educated population in Iraq compared to Afghanistan, desert in Iraq against the mountainous terrain of northern and eastern Afghanistan, and, most importantly, that the leadership of the various Iraqi insurgencies were inside the country, while the Taliban leadership were in Pakistan. “Mullah Omar wouldn’t dream of coming into Afghanistan because he knew that if he did he was likely to end up being on the X.”

  He was clear that Afghanistan would not be “flipped” as Iraq had been. But like the queen in Hamlet, in stressing that Afghanistan does not equal Iraq, perhaps Petraeus did “protest too much.” Iraq informed his thinking, and when talking about Afghanistan, he often compared the two campaigns. Referring to tribal leaders in Afghanistan, he called them “sheikhs”—an Arab term used in Iraq and not Afghanistan.

  In Kabul, he used the same slide he had in Baghdad—called the Anaconda strategy—with the Afghan Taliban and Haqqani network replacing Iraqi Sunni groups at the center of a circle having the life squeezed out of them as if by a snake through twenty-five different lines of effort. He would sometimes say Iraq as a slip of the tongue when meaning Afghanistan28 and even made the comparison while talking to President Karzai. An aide advised him not to talk about Iraq so much and said, “It might be a mental exercise for you to try not thinking about Iraq at all.” Petraeus said, “I’m working on it.”29 It was not until the arrival of General John W. “Mick” Nicholson in 2016 that international forces in Kabul were led by a commander whose entire post-9/11 combat experience was Afghanistan. Too often, Afghanistan, the other war, under-resourced and misunderstood in Washington, was seen through the prism of Iraq.

  Petraeus’s Anaconda was designed to portray the whole war on one slide. “In the circle in the center, you have the extremist and insurgent group. In the circle around that, you have all the assets that they need—weapons, money, ideology, command and control, communications, sanctuary, explosives, explosives expertise, fighters, and so forth. Then around that you have all the possible actions that you can take in a comprehensive civil-military campaign to try to squeeze the life out of the insurgency by taking away from them all the different components that are necessary for them to continue to fight.”

  The twenty-five lines of effort pointing inward were grouped into seven clusters,30 including several tasks that were not “military” in the traditionally understood sense but were what Petraeus defined as core military tasks for counterinsurgency. The seven clusters were Information Operations; Politics; Intelligence; Services, such as education and justice; International, meaning Pakistan; Kinetic, including counterterrorist special operations as well as conventional operations; and Correction, to manage detainees without worsening the conflict.

  During the long debates over the surge for Afghanistan in 2009, he used the Anaconda slide often when commanding at CENTCOM to argue that more troops were needed for this full spectrum of operations. “This was originally constructed to explain to Congress what we later went into depth to explain with the Obama administration review, that counter-terrorism operations are necessary, but not sufficient.” He continued to use it in command in 2010, as if Obama had never amended and limited the scope of the operation in the December 2009 terms sheet.

  On arrival in Kabul, Petraeus immediately ordered a review of Mc
Chrystal’s tactical directive, leading to a resumption of night raids as well as a very substantial increase in air strikes, and was arguably the most significant decision he took in his year in command. While he often repeated the mantra “You can’t kill or capture your way out of an industrial-strength insurgency,” he was clear that offensive operations were an important part of the Anaconda squeeze bearing down on the Taliban, to reverse the momentum of the Taliban and other insurgent groups. “You do have to do lots of killing and capturing of the key irreconcilable leaders, and you have to do it every single night, with some 10 to 15 operations by special mission unit forces in order to increase the tempo of operations.”

  The surge of forces continued to rise to its peak of almost one hundred thousand U.S. troops in Afghanistan in the later months of 2010, when for the first time, more U.S. troops were in Afghanistan than Iraq. Gates was privately obsessed that it should not go above one hundred thousand, the number deployed by the Soviet Union at the peak of its intervention in the 1980s.31 With another forty-thousand-plus from allied and partner nations, there was an inevitable increase in the tempo of the war. In October 2010, U.S. forces released 1,043 missiles and bombs from the air, more than in any other month of the Afghan war since the initial invasion, and twice as many as October 2009 under McChrystal’s command. The trend continued; the following month, November 2010, recorded the second highest, with 866 weapons dropped from the air. (The average dropped per month between 2009 and 2012 was 375.)32

  Petraeus knew of the concerns about courageous restraint, amplified by letters to newspapers by the parents of soldiers in the field. In his confirmation hearing for the Afghan post at the Senate Armed Services Committee, he said he was “keenly aware” of the concerns raised by troops on the ground that they were taking unnecessary casualties because of restrictions designed to protect civilians. Not wanting to criticize McChrystal, he chose to explain the problem in terms of its application down the chain of command. “We have to be absolutely certain,” he told the senators, “that the implementation of the tactical directive and the rules of engagement are even throughout the force, that there are not leaders at certain levels that are perhaps making this more bureaucratic or more restrictive than necessary.”33