by David Loyn
In his new Tactical Directive, Petraeus took this head-on, with the specific order that “subordinate commanders are not authorized to further restrict this guidance without my approval.” Those around him were clear that the gloves were off.34 While Afghan civilians remained the center of gravity of the campaign and ISAF troops should “redouble … efforts to reduce the loss of civilian life,” Petraeus removed the effective ban on the use of artillery and airpower, as well as night raids. He secured support for the change from General Jim Mattis, now commanding at CENTCOM, the two architects of modern counterinsurgency agreeing that the doctrine should not tie the hands of tactical commanders who needed to have the capacity to call in support. “We were hobbling ourselves militarily,” wrote Mattis, “losing the confidence of our troops in the process.”35
It was one of the ironies of the change of command that it was McChrystal, whose career until 2009 was defined by special operations, who would lead a counterinsurgency fight, while the godfather of counterinsurgency Petraeus significantly increased counterterrorism operations. Petraeus was a “CT wolf in a CI sheep’s clothing,” wrote David Ignatius in The Washington Post. Far from the doctrinal demand to protect the civilian population as the first priority, “the real action has been ‘enemy-centric.’”36 Petraeus insisted that there was no change. McChrystal’s test, judging whether a military action would recruit more insurgents than it removed, was not ignored. Troops in his command needed to constantly ask themselves, “Will this operation take more bad guys off the street than it creates by its conduct?” If the answer in the complex calculus of counterinsurgency was negative, “then you sit under a tree until the thought of the proposed operation passes.”
He continued the command model that McKiernan had blocked but McChrystal had adopted, putting Petraeus in strategic authority, “up” and “out,” while tactical decisions, “down” and “in,” were taken by a three-star underneath him. It suited Petraeus’s management style to sit at the apex of the pyramid, with the next layer down staffed by people who were “quietly efficient,” according to Holbrooke, “unlike McChrystal’s group of cocky and contemptuous cowboys, who thought they were a high priesthood of shadow warriors saving our nation from itself.”37
The surge of forces allowed Petraeus to employ not only more airpower, he was employing more of everything—more coordination with the civilian side, more intelligence, better management of information, better justice, and anticorruption efforts, aiming to build momentum to leave no space for the Taliban. The tempo of the Afghan campaign was at its highest in late 2010: all the Anaconda arrows pointing inward to squeeze the life out of the insurgency. In counterinsurgency guidance issued at the same time as the new tactical directive in August, he outlined twenty-four separate areas for attention. These included the instruction to “Live among the people. We can’t commute to the fight.” This became possible to do for the first time, as troops from the U.S. and their allies and partners poured into the country on the front side of the bell curve. Troops were told to walk, take off their sunglasses, work with international and Afghan troops, fight the information war, be first with the truth, help Afghans build governance, confront impunity, identify corrupt officials, use money as ammunition, and win the battle of wits. And finally, troops were ordered to “exercise initiative. In the absence of guidance or orders, figure out what the orders should have been and execute them aggressively.” It was an ambitious list.
THE BLEEDING ULCER
There was no doubt of the kinetic nature of the conflict for those fighting in the heat of the Afghan summer in the south, where temperatures rise to 120 degrees. The year 2010 was the bloodiest for U.S. casualties in Afghanistan, with 496 dead, and Petraeus took command in Kabul at the height of fighting that took the lives of 60 Americans in June and 65 in July. Most were in battles for the south. The planned sweep across from Marjah in Helmand eastward toward Kandahar, Operation Moshtarak, that began in February, was bogged down in a landscape laced with IEDs—the campaign called a “bleeding ulcer” by McChrystal. Petraeus knew he could not stop, although the initial momentum had gone.
Kandahar Province was in a very desperate situation as the surge in Afghanistan materialized. The capital, Kandahar, was seriously threatened, and we had a huge base nearby that was getting hit on a regular basis. The enemy was closing in on the city from a number of different directions, from Uruzgan Province to the north, from Helmand Province to the west, and from two of Kandahar’s districts, Zhari and Panjwayi, to the south—two districts which were very important historically, as the districts where Mullah Omar grew up and then where he built the Taliban movement in the beginning.
The Taliban had returned to the dense latticework of orchards and pomegranate fields, divided by irrigation canals on either side of the river, taken at such cost by the Canadian and American force in Operation Medusa in 2006 and where McChrystal had patrolled with Sergeant Arroyo’s platoon after they had taken casualties. Parts of the area were virtually unhabitable through multiple improvised explosive devices, with a booby trap in every house, and U.S. forces took a radical decision to destroy thousands of buildings, using bulldozers, high explosives, missiles, and even airpower, now more available under the new Petraeus tactical directive.38 The operation saved many American lives and limbs, and even though the consequence was that villages in three districts were literally wiped off the map, local officials did not object. Some reporters inevitably reached for the bleak oxymoron from Vietnam, that they had to “destroy villages in order to save them,” but independent international and Afghan observers agreed that civilian casualties did not rise significantly, despite the huge increase in the use of airpower and artillery. A group of elders in Zhari District were quoted in the UN annual survey of Afghan civilian casualties saying there were “very, very few civilian casualties. We cannot even give an estimate.”39 U.S. infantry then went into an intensive six-month program to pay compensation and arrange reconstruction. This was the decisive moment in reclaiming Arghandab. The commander in the south at the time, Major General Nick Carter, visited again three years later as the deputy commander of ISAF. The district governor installed after the operation in 2011 was still in place, and he saw families picnicking on a Friday on land once full of IEDs.
ARMING THE MILITIAS
As so often during the long war, support by villagers for international troops was conditional on them being able to provide security. Knowing they would be leaving before long, U.S. troops did deals with local power brokers who were not necessarily connected to the central government. In Kandahar, this meant working with “General” Abdul Raziq Achakzai, a militia leader, who had effective control of the Spin Boldak border post, Afghanistan’s southern gateway to Pakistan. There was a simple calculation: “Raziq can beat the Taliban,” said U.S. Special Forces lieutenant colonel James Hayes. Raziq was appointed to head the Kandahar police, although U.S. forces knew he was a player in the opium trade, and had a ruthless reputation for not taking prisoners. “The first priority is to beat the Taliban,” said Hayes. “Once this is done, we can shift our attention to these illicit actors.”40
And there was now active promotion of the Afghan Local Police (ALP), drawing on an Afghan tradition of Arbakai, local militias. If villages could be supported to stand up and protect themselves against the Taliban, then the war would be easier to win. The U.S. tried to stand up local militias on several occasions after 2001, in various iterations, Local Defense Initiative, Auxiliary Police, Public Protection Police, and now the Afghan Local Police. None succeeded in making Afghanistan a safer place. The several attempts might have been an alert that this was a hard thing to do. To Petraeus, the new Afghan Local Police initiative was “arguably the most critical element in our effort to help Afghanistan develop the capacity to help itself.”41 He saw it as essential to provide security as the surge forces drew down.
The creation of local paramilitary forces where necessary was in his counterinsurgency manual, altho
ugh there was a caution. “If militias are outside the HN [host nation] government’s control, they can often be obstacles to ending an insurgency.”42 American willingness to work with informal armed groups, militias, was not shared across the NATO alliance, nor inside the Afghan government itself. They were not the minutemen of American Revolutionary legend but often predatory gangs, infiltrated or easily turned by the Taliban. Human Rights Watch found that the local police were “a government-backed militia that has raped, killed, and robbed.”43 While every Afghan rural home had a weapon, after forty years of uninterrupted warlordism, Afghanistan had seen enough of informal militias. A senior official in the Afghan Ministry of the Interior, Major General Esmatullah Dawlatzai, said the local police were “made for the warlords. They were given uniforms and salaries, but they were the same people, committing the same crimes, with more power.”44
The hold of warlords on local security nine years into the war was a consequence of the support given to the Northern Alliance forces who had assisted in removing the Taliban from power in 2001. It became clearer every year that acknowledging the legitimacy of these forces rather than marginalizing them at the start was the founding cause of so many of the problems that followed.
The failure to provide alternative security meant that in many places where militias had not been a problem in the past, particularly in the northeast, there was now widespread lawlessness, with armed gangs competing for influence. In 2010, when the Afghan Local Police program was set up, national police reform remained at best a work in progress. Elsewhere, the Afghan security sector was now genuinely improving: the new Afghan National Army was “quickly getting bigger and slowly getting better,”45 and its Special Forces in particular were able to operate independently and effectively. These more competent Afghan military forces needed police they could trust, not the ill-disciplined ALP.
FLATTENING THE BELL CURVE
Sparring with the Obama administration over the scale and length of the Afghan commitment continued. The White House wanted withdrawal on a timetable, the generals wanted it determined by conditions on the ground. Petraeus said, “When you’re in a contest of wills,” a clear timetable for withdrawal “shows the enemy that we’re not necessarily wholeheartedly into this.” But the speed of drawdown was not agreed, and he was aiming to flatten the bell curve into a low hill with a gradual decline on the far side.
Petraeus had one success in moving the end date of transition to 2014—far later than many in the Obama administration, particularly the vice president, wanted. It was two years beyond the 2012 presidential election, which was Obama’s ideal end date for boots on the ground in Afghanistan. The date 2014 was never mentioned in U.S. newspapers or mentioned in Senate hearings, but Petraeus successfully lobbied behind the scenes, until it became inevitable, while still needing to keep the surge troops on the ground for as long as possible ahead of 2014.
Mention of 2014 began to be openly discussed toward the end of 2009, even before the Obama announcement that anticipated a far steeper withdrawal. When the UK chief of defence staff, Air Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, was interviewed in Helmand in November 2009, he said UK forces would “not be ready to leave” before 2014. Stirrup had flown combat missions in the early 1970s in the Dhofar campaign in Oman—one counterinsurgency the UK counted as a success.46
Petraeus did not mention 2014 in the Senate Armed Services Committee when he was CENTCOM commander in June 2010—nor when he returned for his hurriedly arranged confirmation hearing for the Kabul post two weeks later. At the time, he was merely pushing the bell curve to the right, without stretching it as late as 2014, ensuring that 2011 was only the start of withdrawal. “It is important to note the president’s reminder in recent days that July 2011 will mark the beginning of a process, not the date when the US heads for the exits and turns out the lights.”47 He confirmed in answer to a deliberately helpful question from Senator John McCain that the drawdown date of July 2011 was a political decision; no one in the military was calling for it.
This was just the kind of answer that Obama’s staff felt was boxing in the president, reducing his options. When Doug Lute visited Kabul in the fall of 2010 to review progress, he saw a map that had stretched the number of key terrain districts from seventy-two to ninety-six, against the terms sheet issued by the White House at the time of the West Point speech in December. Lute had been opposed to the surge in the first place. Afghanistan, in his view, was “not a good candidate for counterinsurgency.” He had wanted to go more slowly the year before, using the marine deployment to Helmand as a pilot. “Let’s see how the Marines do in a clear/hold/build/transfer model in Helmand then base numbers going forward on the efficacy of that model.”48 A year later, when he saw Petraeus stretching the terms of the surge—and just six months before the drawdown was due to start—his report to Obama was not favorable. The increase from seventy-two to ninety-six key terrain districts demonstrated that the military had not abided by the terms of the surge, and that “sealed the fate of the surge.” The only tool available was to take a tough line on troop numbers. Lute said it was “an awkward, imprecise, not very rational way to do this but limiting the troops was the approach used to constrain the counterinsurgency campaign.” The White House was reclaiming the bell curve.
“LEADERS ARE LIKE A VESSEL”
The argument over whether troops left on the timetable or as allowed by conditions on the ground ran on throughout the Obama administration. Delivering continued commitment from NATO involved deft work behind the scenes by Petraeus. Realizing there was a pressing need for more NATO military trainers, Major General Nick Carter, commanding ISAF forces in southern Afghanistan, watched as Petraeus invited influential journalists from troop-contributing nations to visit Kabul ahead of the NATO military committee’s visit in the autumn, “so that they arrived, having read about the requirement, with the ground manured for a positive decision.”
Media were now front and center of the ISAF operation. Information had a separate line of effort on the slide, which was new since Anaconda first appeared in Iraq. Carter asked Petraeus who he was using for strategic communications, and Petraeus said, “Don’t underestimate how much an individual makes this stuff happen for himself. We don’t have highly trained staff. People think we have these people, but invariably it’s the commander who makes things happen.”
President Karzai nearly sabotaged the careful preparations for a key summit in Lisbon to decide NATO troop levels. In an interview for The Washington Post, he demanded a big reduction in foreign troops, the opposite of what Petraeus was working so hard for, and sentimentally referred to the days when there was American aid, but no troops. “The Afghans remember with very fond memories, with a lot of love and affection, all the roads and dams that you built in the 1950s and ’60s.” His main complaint was the increase in night raids under Petraeus. “Terrible. Terrible. A serious cause of the Afghan people’s disenchantment with NATO … Bursting into homes at night, arresting Afghans, this isn’t the business of any foreign troops.”49
Petraeus was furious, and this was one of three occasions during his command when he threatened to resign unless Karzai apologized. He went to see Ashraf Ghani, then managing the transition to full Afghan military control. He said, “I want you to listen very, very carefully, Ashraf. Your President has put me in an untenable position that means that I cannot remain here. He either clarifies what it is that he said to The Washington Post … or I head back to Washington and I tell the President that we cannot succeed with him as a partner … If he chooses to go down that road it is his absolute right, but he should know that he will do it without me and I’ll be on the next plane to Washington and I intend to take the policy with me.” There were similar occasions in Iraq, where for Petraeus, a highly disciplined individual with a strong sense of right and wrong, the president of the country where he was serving crossed a line. And he was not without emotion or self-doubt when he took this stand. “This was very, very difficult and you kn
ow you go to bed on a night like that and you’re not doing a heck of lot of sleeping because this is a pretty big deal. You’ve said you’re going to quit basically on that country.”
Karzai backed down and clarified that he wanted U.S. troops to stay. But he found Petraeus difficult to deal with, unwilling to include him in decision-making in the same way McChrystal had, and slow to accept responsibility for civilian casualties. “Petraeus went back to the old ways,” Karzai said. “He would deny that there were casualties.”50 It did not help that Petraeus described Karzai’s government as a “criminal syndicate” in Bob Woodward’s book on the first year of the new administration, Obama’s Wars, which came out two months after Petraeus arrived in Kabul.
The Afghan government believed Petraeus had taken a chilly decision to change the ability of U.S. troops to call in air strikes because of concern by U.S. troops over the rules on courageous restraint. “General Petraeus had to make up his mind to prevent civilian casualties or prevent American casualties,” said Karzai’s chief of staff, Umer Daudzai. “So he had to make a choice … and naturally civilian casualties went up.”
There was a mutual lack of understanding between the cerebral ambitious general and the power-broking tribal chief in the Arg. In one curious incident, Petraeus appeared to suggest in an Afghan National Security Council meeting that people had burned their own children to make it look as if they had been hurt in an air strike. Karzai was startled. Daudzai said, “His explanation did not make sense. It was rather more harming the situation than helping.”51 The comments followed an incident where more than fifty people were killed by an air strike in Kunar province in the east. The governor of the province said they were civilians; U.S. officials said they were Taliban.52 Explaining the reference, the ISAF spokesperson, Admiral Gregory J. Smith, said there were accounts of Afghans disciplining their children by putting their hands in boiling water, and Petraeus was referring to this. It was an unsettling incident.
