A Great Article: General Petraeus
The Sunday Times
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article4212055.e
ce
June 29, 2008
General David H Petraeus: The general's knowledge
Since the 'warrior scholar' David Petraeus led the American military surge
in Iraq last year, the body count has plummeted. Will he go down in history
as the man who won the war, or is it all too little too late?
Report by Charles M Sennott
General David H Petraeus, the commander of US forces in Iraq, looked
exhausted. A competitive miler who loves to challenge young field commanders
to five-mile running races and push-up contests (which he usually wins), he
appears fit as ever. But there are dark circles under his eyes. Leading this
war has begun to exact a visible toll.
"You are on the edge of having just enough sleep to sort of make it through
every day," he says, conceding that he has reconfigured his schedule to a
less gruelling pace than when he first led the "surge" of 30,000-plus
American troops into Iraq just over a year ago. "There is a point of no
reservoir."
It's a cool, grey day outside his office inside the former Republican Palace
of Saddam Hussein, in the heavily fortified green zone in Baghdad. On a
delicate tea table sits a folder bulging with field reports and "weekly
attack trends", as well as a series of charts tracking the body count in
Iraq. The office is in a corner of the palace he shares with Ryan Crocker,
the US ambassador to Iraq. Crocker arrived in Baghdad with Petraeus in
February 2007. Both came intending to undo a series of mistakes by the
generals and diplomats who preceded them and brought the war to the edge of
defeat. Petraeus brought a new playbook: a 240-page counterinsurgency manual
he wrote during 2005-6 and whose precepts he was determined to test.
The room does not reveal much about him. On one wall he has hung a painting
of the Marsh Arabs. A gift, he says. In one corner, his flak jacket and
helmet are draped on a wooden cross. On a reading stand I notice a Bible
full of Post-it notes. When I ask which passages they mark, he shifts the
topic of conversation.
On the fifth anniversary of the start of the war, the progress attributed to
the surge included a measurable drop in bombings, sectarian violence, Iraqi
civilian deaths and US combat deaths. Across all categories, the grim
metrics of war were down by more than 60% from the highs of 2004. But will
this improved security continue after the brigades are sent home this
summer? Has Petraeus helped the Iraqis turn a corner or has he merely
forestalled catastrophe?
He is disarmingly frank, but far from open. As much scholar as soldier, he
wrote his doctoral thesis at Princeton on lessons to learn from Vietnam. The
lessons he deduced differed sharply from those of the military brass nearest
to President Bush during the Iraq invasion. The administration's ideas
ranged from the former secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld's "fast and
light" military, which could strike surgically to neutralise a threat
without committing large numbers of personnel and material, to the Powell
doctrine, named after Colin Powell, which called for overwhelming fire power
and focusing on immediate, attainable objectives in popular, winnable wars.
Petraeus, in contrast, perceived that the post-9/11 world would afford no
such clarity of tactics and cut-and-dried goals, and that the guerrilla
warfare of Vietnam represented the kind of complex struggle for which the US
forces needed to prepare. Defeating terrorists, he contended, required a
fresh approach to counterinsurgency, the judicious application of "hard
power" (killing the enemy) and "soft power" (getting the lights back on),
far more than just the "shock and awe" of the initial US-led invasion that
began on March 19, 2003.
So now here he was, back in Iraq, with sometimes startling hubris,
attempting to prove that he knew better how not to repeat the mistakes of
the past. "If we are going to fight future wars, they're going to be very
similar to Iraq," he says, adding that this was why "we have to get it right
in Iraq". One of the mistakes of Vietnam, he knew, was a failure on the part
of the military to manage the message, and he is very focused on getting his
message out. He is an inveterate e-mailer, sometimes following up with
colleagues and reporters with exhaustive replies to even the smallest
questions. (During my visit he was reading Mr Lincoln's T-Mails: The Untold
Story of How Abraham Lincoln Used the Telegraph to Win the Civil War.)
"What we can note here and back up with statistical measures is that the
level of violence is significantly down," Petraeus tells me, using a spoon
to measure the broad themes in the set of charts stretched out on the tea
table.
The documents combine US and Iraqi data on military and civilian body counts
and weekly attack trends. Tracing the spoon along the downward trajectory of
the data, he adds: "These are Iraqi figures, which are higher than ones
we've used in the past. But this is what we are showing Congress."
The limited success of the surge was helped by several key factors,
including a ceasefire by the militias' loyal Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr
and a system of payoffs made to Sunni militias under a broad banner commonly
known as the "Awakening". Petraeus is cautious about any success and avoids
the language associated with the US military failures in Vietnam. He says:
"There's no light at the end of the tunnel." But he adds: "I believe these
successes can hold," giving the table's walnut veneer a rap. "It is going to
take a lot of support from the Iraqi government."
Petraeus knocks on wood or says "touch wood" three more times during the
interview. His staff confirm that he walks around looking for wood to knock.
And while you can hardly blame him for knocking on wood in Iraq, it is a
wary gesture for a man in charge of 160,000 troops fighting a war that has
already cost more than 4,000 American lives, an estimated 100,000 Iraqi
lives, and had rung up a bill for US taxpayers projected to be as high as $2
trillion. "Look here," he says, pulling out yet another chart. He seems
genuinely pleased. "We have stopped the big bombs inside the markets, and
civilian deaths are down - touch wood."
At 5ft 9in and 155lb, Petraeus, 55, is lean, and his upper torso is stiff
and slightly cantered forward, like a bird of prey buffeting a headwind. The
unusual posture comes in part from two injuries suffered during training
exercises. One was the shattering of his pelvis when his parachute
malfunctioned during a skydiving exercise in 2000. The other injury was a
bullet to his chest during a live-fire exercise in 1991, when an army
specialist tripped and accidentally squeezed off a stray round; it nearly
killed him. In a legend often told around Baghdad, Petraeus later promoted
his accidental assailant to Ranger School, the army's most prestigious and
gruelling physical and psychological challenge. Adding to the legend was
Petraeus's urgency to be released from the hospital after the near-fatal
injury. Long before doctors thought he was ready to even get out of bed, he
convinced physicians to remove tubes attached to his arms, allowing him to
drop down and perform 50 push-ups to prove he was fit for duty. He was
released shortly thereafter.
Petraeus runs as often as four times a week. If he is thwarted by the
demands of his schedule or some crisis, he will nip into the gym. For a man
known to schedule his days in efficient five-minute increments, there isn't
much slack for extra PT. Yet he recently did a 10-mile run in less than 64
minutes. Over the past two years, Petraeus's face, angular and intense, has
emerged as the face of the "long war", as the post-9/11 conflicts in
Afghanistan and Iraq are known at the Pentagon and the State Department. And
his image as a dedicated distance runner seems fitting for the challenges
ahead.
When he was appointed to take over in Iraq, the charges most frequently
levelled at him were that he was overly ambitious, too eager to please, a
control freak. He had run up against four-star generals and top members of
the Bush administration, and the idea that he was "not singing the same
tune" in Iraq, as one insider put it, eventually reached Rumsfeld. Petraeus
has been careful to keep his differences of opinion with Rumsfeld off the
radar, never discussing them publicly. But several high-ranking officers who
have worked alongside him or watched him rise say the differences were
significant. These sources add that when Petraeus was assigned to the army
colleges at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, in 2005, Rumsfeld was pleased to see
the ambitious three-star general, who was clearly not on the same page,
sidelined. But how Petraeus rewrote the counterinsurgency manual is a big
part of understanding perhaps his most enduring quality: an ability to
create change from within. Still, if things go badly in Iraq now, his will
not be the face of a patriot who outlasted Rumsfeld and helped the army get
past its contempt for the politicians and diplomats who botched
post-invasion Iraq.
"We did a lot of counterintelligence in Vietnam, but somewhere in the 1980s
we threw all those lessons away," Petraeus tells me. "We vowed never to get
embroiled like that again. But we did, and we needed to reassess those
lessons and remake them into a new doctrine. We are in the process of
transforming a team that has been coached to play football into a group of
people who also know how to play chess. They're still going to have to put
their helmets on, but they have to know chess as well."
To effect this transformation, he gathered around him a group of chess
players known around the green zone as the Brain Trust. Virtually all of the
officers are armed with PhDs. They are an unorthodox bunch to be running a
military campaign: Lieutenant Colonel David Kilcullen, an Australian
anthropologist who is an expert on Islamic extremism; Colonel Michael Meese,
a West Point economist with a Republican pedigree; Colonel H R McMaster, who
wrote the book Dereliction of Duty, about how generals failed to honestly
assess Vietnam for political leadership, and who previously commanded the
3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment in northwestern Iraq; and Petraeus's executive
officer, Colonel Peter Mansoor, who holds a doctorate in history from Ohio
State University and who expects to return from the field of combat to a
teaching chair there.
The team reflects Petraeus's intellectual confidence, his ability to
encourage competing points of view. Over meat loaf and mashed potatoes in
the green zone, the Brain Trust discusses French failures in Algeria and
quotes Lawrence of Arabia, Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh. They separate their
world into those who "get it" and those who don't. "It" is the complexity of
counterinsurgency that requires no fixed philosophies, but an
entrepreneurial spirit in which field commanders are trusted to find the
best way forward. But these men know all too well that even if a commander
"gets it", and even if the trend lines on every chart are in your favour,
when political initiative is lost, your counterinsurgency campaign is
doomed. The shadow of that doom chases them every day.
The first time I met Petraeus was about six months after the invasion, in
2003, in the desert wilderness near Mosul, where the ruins of the ancient
temples of Hatra lay amid a network of oil pipelines snaking across the
landscape. His headquarters overlooked ancient Nineveh.
"We want to be seen as an army of liberation, not of occupation," he said
then. "But there is a half-life on our role here; you wear out your welcome
at some point. It doesn't matter how helpful you are. We aren't here to
stay."
From April 2003 to early 2004, his 101st Airborne Division carried out what
was widely seen as the perfect mix of hard and soft power. They killed the
enemy, notably Saddam Hussein's two sons, in wild shoot-outs. But they also
poured resources and sweat into building schools and digging wells. Looking
back, one of the reasons Petraeus succeeded in Mosul after the initial
invasion was that he was given free rein. He had a dispensation from the
flawed de-Baathification law, which fatefully sought to exclude any
high-ranking officers from Saddam Hussein's army. Petraeus rightly saw that
as a mistake and ignored it.
It was joked that he had his own foreign relations with Turkey and Syria. He
was already living out of his future counterinsurgency playbook: "In the
absence of orders, determine what they should be and execute."
Petraeus's background does not suggest a man who would rewrite the rules.
His father was a Dutch ship captain named Sixtus Petraeus, who worked for a
power company in upstate New York after the second world war. David Petraeus
came of age in Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York, a pleasant town a few miles
north of West Point, which he dreamt of attending from boyhood. He entered
the academy in 1970 - a year that could be considered the single lowest time
in the US military's history.
At the academy, he was tagged with the nickname Peaches. Some say it was a
play on his unusual surname; others say it referred to his boyish face.
Halfway through, he began dating Holly Knowlton, the daughter of the academy
superintendent, General William A Knowlton, and then married her. He
graduated near the top of his class in 1974, then went to Ranger School,
where three separate awards for distinction are given to each class. He took
all three.
For the next 25 years he proceeded to serve staff and command assignments
under several four-star generals. Tours included peacekeeping missions in
Bosnia and Haiti. But there was something missing: active combat duty. He
got that chance in Operation Iraqi Freedom. As commander of the 101st AD,
dubbed the Screaming Eagles, Petraeus led 17,000 men and women across the
border from Kuwait into Iraq in March 2003. Dozens of Apache gunships
thundered into a pivotal battle at the Karbala Gap. In April the division
was assigned to Mosul.
Petraeus's second tour in Iraq came in 2004, to head the Multi-National
Security Transition Command - Iraq (MNSTC-I, or, as it is known in the
military, "Minsticky"). Here his command had significantly more mixed
results. For one year he led the effort to train 135,000 new Iraqi security
forces from the ground up in Baghdad. In this command, even Petraeus's
admirers say he had limited success, and, in some places, considerable
failure. Eventually the forces being trained morphed into sectarian militias
that carried out ethnic cleansing of rival areas of Baghdad. "Sectarian
violence took its toll on everything in Iraq, including the security
forces," Petraeus says.
Jerry Burke was the senior police adviser to the Baghdad police chief in
2004, and in 2005 served as a national security adviser to the Iraqi
Interior Ministry. He says Petraeus was responsible for "a failure of
oversight" and that he was "just a little too willing to go along" with what
Washington wanted to happen and the timetable they wanted. But Burke hastens
to add that he believes Petraeus learnt from the mistakes.
On November 14, 2006, during my second interview with the general, a
television was tuned to CNN. Donald Rumsfeld was fielding questions about
his resignation. The Republicans had just lost control of both houses of
Congress in the midterm elections, defeats chalked up to voter discontent.
Now Rumsfeld was out. Petraeus gave me a wan smile but refused to comment
for the record. Still, the back story between Petraeus and Rumsfeld's
Pentagon hung silently in the room.
In 2004, Petraeus was adamant that the resistance in Iraq was a classic
insurgency, at a time when Rumsfeld wouldn't hear the word. Petraeus
favoured a surge strategy along with his mentor, the retired four-star
general Jack Keane, who built the theoretical architecture of the surge.
This school of thought countered Rumsfeld's stealth approach. Astute
Pentagon insiders say Rumsfeld was growing fed up with Petraeus, a
three-star whose face was now appearing on magazines and whose bold ideas
were gaining followers. Some observers say Rumsfeld even edited Petraeus's
name out of memos and speeches in the White House.
Petraeus didn't have any objection to how the war began, just to what
happened after Baghdad fell. "Major combat operations went well," he said,
but "the failure to adequately plan for the transition was the problem."
As always, Petraeus steered the conversation to what he wanted to talk
about: his draft of a new counterinsurgency (Coin) manual. It was his
attempt to learn from the mistakes in Iraq and to codify the successes,
making the most of his time on his next assignment, sidelined to the staff
colleges at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas.
"Nobody has seized the post of Leavenworth and made it a centre of power and
an agent of change the way Petraeus did," said Colonel Conrad Crane,
director of the US Army Military History Institute, who helped him research
and write the counterinsurgency manual along with Marine Lieutenant General
James Mattis. The manual had not been rewritten in 20 years, but that alone
does not explain why Petraeus's revision represented a radical shift. The
new manual's lessons were grounded in historic examples and emphasise
balancing military might with ground-level smarts. The gist: it does no good
to take territory but lose the support of the people who live there.
Commanders must pursue not just military victory but "moral legitimacy". It
is a blueprint for a battle to win "hearts and minds", but as Petraeus is
quick - and uncharacteristically crude - to point out, it is also a document
that advocates "not shying away from the need to kill the enemy".
"The words 'kill' and 'capture' are on every page," he said. In the manual,
he describes counterinsurgency warfare as "war at the graduate level", where
a unit commander must be a kind of "strategic lieutenant", carefully
calibrating a balance between a soldier's killing power and the exercise of
restraint that can turn potential enemies into allies. Woven throughout the
document is the history of insurgency and counterinsurgency, from the French
struggle in Algeria in the 1950s and '60s to the 1993 US military disaster
in Somalia.
After Leavenworth, with Rumsfeld out of the picture, Petraeus was appointed
commander of US forces in Iraq. The surge, Crane confirmed, gave Petraeus
the opportunity to put his ideas into action. The first three months of the
surge had been the war's deadliest. Then came the al-Sadr ceasefire,
stipends for thousands of new Iraqi patrolmen, and relative stability. All
along, he had been drafting what he calls "white lines in the road", new
parameters for his field commanders. He showed me a draft with notes on the
side in his dense scrawl.
"Secure and serve the population. Live among the people. Promote
reconciliation. Walk."
"I love that last one for its simplicity," he says.
"Move mounted, work dismounted. Situational awareness can only be achieved
by operating face-to-face."
One battalion commander who seems to embody the leadership style that
Petraeus has sought to codify is Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Frank. Frank had
served in the 101st AD under Petraeus in the initial invasion in 2003.
Petraeus's staff had set me up with an embed with Frank's unit, the Black
Lions, in Rashid, which was one of the first units into the surge and the
district that Petraeus had first visited.
The Black Lions suffered 10 combat deaths and more than 100 wounded. All
summer they were up against the Shi'ite militia, the Mahdi Army, which had
morphed into a criminal enterprise. And they took the fight to Sunni
insurgent elements who proclaimed themselves "Al-Qaeda in Iraq". Caught
between the firefights was a population that was being displaced.
"The successes in Rashid are real. What they were able to do is get people
to stop shooting long enough to talk," explains Frank. But I spent enough
time in Rashid to hear doubts about whether those successes could last.
Sunni and Shi'ite leaders in Rashid had made it clear that if the US forces
were to leave, the district would collapse back into sectarian violence.
They said that the Iraqi military was not yet ready, or trusted enough, to
take control.
As tenuous as they are, improvements in security, Petraeus says, will allow
the US to draw down troop levels to close to the pre-surge number of 130,000
by the end of July. That will be done by not replacing brigades as they
finish their 12- to 15-month tours of duty. The security pressure will be
kept up in Baghdad neighbourhoods, he adds, by replacing US troops with more
than 100,000 Iraqi troops that have been retrained and more closely vetted
than in earlier training sessions, and a "pause" on any further troop
withdrawal. The perimeters of the large US military bases will be shrunk,
and experienced field commanders will be asked to stay on for the transition
from US to Iraqi troops.
Petraeus has always maintained that there is no military victory in Iraq,
only a political solution. It is what he told Congress before the surge
began, and he continues to maintain that for the surge to have lasting
impact, the Iraqi government will have to step up and lead.
In quiet moments, Petraeus's inner circle will dare to express confidence
that they are on the edge of succeeding in Iraq. One of them tells me: "I
truly believe there will be plaques in Baghdad someday saying 'Petraeus was
here'."
Outside the green zone, there is impatience with such lionisation. Barry
Posen, now the director of the security-studies programme at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), taught Petraeus in the
mid-1980s at Princeton University. Last year, Posen taught Petraeus's only
son, now a junior at MIT. Posen admires the general, but he believes
there will be no haloes bestowed on him for his accomplishments in Iraq.
"Did they put up plaques for General Creighton Abrams in Vietnam? He had
successes there, right?" asks Posen, referring to the commander who
implemented Nixon's policy of "Vietnamisation", which reduced US troops from
540,000 to fewer than 50,000. "If the overall enterprise is flawed and
doomed, as I believe it is, then Petraeus will be remembered as an effective
general who was handed a mission that came too late to have any effect in a
war that was already lost."
"He took over a situation where we were flat-out losing and transformed it
into a stalemate," says Andrew J Bacevich, a graduate of West Point and a
Vietnam war veteran. He is now professor of international relations at
Boston University. His son was killed in Iraq, and Petraeus wrote him a
letter thanking him for his son's service. Bacevich respects Petraeus's
abilities, but has grave doubts about what happens next. "I'd have to say he
is disingenuous about the amount of time it takes to fight a
counterinsurgency," Bacevich said in March. "We are talking about a decade.
And I think he knows there is not the political will to fight that long."
As Petraeus's executive officer, Colonel Mansoor, the Ohio State University
PhD, is more optimistic. He says that when historians step back they will
see Petraeus as a "warrior scholar" who "came in at a very critical time,
when the war was all but lost, and then by force of his energy, his will,
and his intellect, he turned it around". I ask Mansoor how history will
judge Petraeus if, in the end, the war is a failure. "He is going to come
out great!" he replies. "I can say that, because I am going to write the
history."
Petraeus can't know how he will be perceived in the future, but he is
certainly aware of how pivotal his role is now. Soon after he appeared
before Congress last September, I met him again in Washington, DC. He was
lined up to do a series of interviews with the nation's instant historians,
the big TV networks and newspapers at the National Press Building. As he sat
in a barber's chair, a woman dabbed make-up on him for his next TV
interview. It was the same week that MoveOn.org - a liberal fundraiser and
pressure group - had run its "General Petraeus or General Betray Us?" attack
ads.
Petraeus said he could handle the personal attacks; still, he'd taken heart
from a supportive e-mail from his home town that included If, the Rudyard
Kipling poem. Speaking with his characteristic intensity and irony (he
hadn't failed to notice that the poem was about the British struggle to
maintain its empire: "If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,/Or
walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;/If neither foes nor loving
friends can hurt you;/If all men count with you, but none too much;/If you
can fill the unforgiving minute/With sixty seconds' worth of distance run
-/Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,/And - which is more -
you'll be a Man, my son!"
With his eyes closed as the make-up artist dabbed away at his face, he tried
his best to recite the poem from memory.
And he very nearly did.
