All In (9 page)

The second big idea was worth emphasizing after nine years of war: “We are,” Petraeus said, “here to win.” That, in Petraeus's mind, was why Obama had picked him. “The president didn't send me here to make a hasty retreat,” he said. Petraeus was resolute with the president, though he hadn't made any demands when he agreed to accept the job. But the unspoken understanding was that the president would support him.

The third idea fell right in line with that affirmation. “We need to communicate that we have an enduring commitment here, but the nature of this enduring commitment will change over time as we transition authority to the Afghans,” he explained. He was careful to point out that nuanced language was critical. “We are not transferring; we are transitioning. This supports the concept that we are not ‘pulling out' but we are ‘thinning out.'” He would repeat the three big ideas to his staff and on battlefield circulations.

Questions about metrics and progress had been raised for months in Kabul, Brussels and Washington. Petraeus's answer was to emphasize, again, that “winning is making progress. Clearly we are making progress. Obviously, within this, there are successes and failures, which you have to reconcile and then address in a nuanced way. For example, violence is going up, and that is not good, but it is due in part to our increased tempo of operations and the conduct of operations in an enemy stronghold. We are also making a lot of inputs into many areas, and these are important because they will enable the outputs that we are ultimately focused on. Therefore, when engaging on the subject of ‘Are we winning?' think clearly about what you are saying and the clarity that you must achieve.”

Petraeus also wanted to communicate that idea of winning to his Afghan partners, some of whom had grown weary of NATO after years of war, death and destruction. Beyond conveying that message, Petraeus also issued his first apology to Afghan forces that day, after a NATO helicopter gunship mistook an Afghan National Army patrol in the Andar District of Ghazni Province for insurgents and unleashed a barrage of missiles, killing five and wounding two. Petraeus offered his personal condolences to the families of the dead troops. It would become a common refrain, even as Petraeus's disciplined approach brought down the number of civilians mistakenly killed by U.S. and NATO forces. His apology was accompanied in that day's headlines with Britain's announcement that one thousand British troops would turn over the Sangin District, in Helmand Province, where they had sustained heavy casualties, to U.S. forces. The
Independent
in London said British forces had been engaged in “the fiercest fighting the British Army has seen since the Second World War.”

Petraeus made his first battlefield circulation the next day, visiting Canadian brigadier general Jon Vance, NATO commander in Kandahar, at a recently constructed checkpoint designed to help keep the Taliban from moving in and out of the city. His battlefield circulation to visit Canadians in the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar was designed to send a message: The alliance will not be deterred. Beyond the symbolism, he saw with his own eyes that the heavily fortified checkpoint, manned round the clock, would have a deterrent effect on insurgents, as long as the searches were conducted thoroughly and respectfully. As always, he felt it important for a commander to capture the ground truth at times by seeing it for himself.

Petraeus had worked hard while at Central Command to continue to engage the Canadians, who had announced earlier that year the end of their mission in Afghanistan to be in the summer 2011. As challenging as the coalition politics of the then–forty-seven nations were, Petraeus considered the coalition to be hugely important and wanted support from all the coalition-contributing countries for as long as he could keep it.
Though “coalition maintenance” took considerable time, Petraeus subscribed to Churchill's observation that the only thing worse than allies was not having any.

In subsequent days, Petraeus paid his first visit to the 101st Airborne and its commander, Major General John Campbell. Campbell not only led the 101st Airborne Division but also served as commander of ISAF's Regional Command East, a region that encompassed fourteen provinces, seven million people and four hundred tribes across 46,000 square miles, an area roughly the size of Pennsylvania. Having graduated from West Point in 1979, five years after Petraeus, Campbell was the archetypal Army commander in the post-9/11 era. He had already commanded a combat brigade of the 82nd Airborne in Afghanistan—the same one Petraeus had commanded—and he had distinguished himself in Iraq as one of the individuals most responsible for implementing the Baghdad Security Plan during the surge in 2007. Barring a serious misstep, he was already considered a likely future four-star general: Ranger-qualified, with time in Special Forces, he had also taught military science at the University of California, Davis, and served as deputy director of regional operations at the Pentagon for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Petraeus arrived on a tough day for his old division. The 101st had lost two soldiers earlier in the day, Sergeant Shaun M. Mittler, of Austin, Texas, and Specialist Carlos J. Negron, of Fort Myers, Florida, in separate Taliban attacks. Two days earlier, Private First Class Anthony W. Simmons, of Tallahassee, had died in yet another attack. At least eight other U.S. service members had been killed in RC East since Petraeus took command, bringing the total number of dead in Afghanistan since late 2001 to 1,079.
It was, Petraeus said, a “lick 'em tomorrow” day for the 101st Airborne.

The reference was to a quote from Major General Ulysses S. Grant, one of Petraeus's military heroes, that helped sustain him during his darkest hours in command in Iraq during the surge. In an interview, Petraeus recalled the Battle of Shiloh: In April 1862, after one of the bloodiest single days of fighting in the nation's history, Grant repaired to a wooden cabin seeking shelter from the rain. Both sides had hunkered down for the night. Grant saw that surgeons were using the shelter as an operating room. Amputated arms and legs lay on the bloody floor. The cries of the wounded were all around him. He went back outside and took cover under a tree, chewing on an unlit cigar. His favorite subordinate commander, Major General William Tecumseh Sherman, found him there. “Well, Grant,” Sherman said. “We've had the devil's own day, haven't we?” “Yep,” Grant replied. “Lick 'em tomorrow, though.”

“Needless to say, that's the toughest part of command by far,” Petraeus told a friend that evening, referring to the 101st's casualties in Afghanistan, “and it never gets easier.” Always in the back of his mind was the fact that his only son, who was leading an infantry platoon in Afghanistan in a unit attached to the 101st and engaged in intense combat, could become a casualty as well.

During the visit, Campbell arranged a meeting via VTC between Petraeus and the division's brigade commanders deployed in southern and eastern Afghanistan. As Campbell recalled, “Right away—that day—Petraeus was resolving and addressing issues we brought up. That's just how he operates. I'd get a response back that night or the next day:
Bam,
he took care of it. That's the power he brings to this effort,” Campbell said.

Privately, many in Petraeus's inner circle harbored concerns about whether the general, despite his lifelong emphasis on physical fitness, could keep up the pace. “He isn't twenty-five anymore,” one of Petraeus's mentors said. “He knows he has been given the challenge of his life—can he manage this with detachment and balance?” But there was no letting up. Petraeus's jam-packed schedule, since the day he arrived in Kabul, most often featured twenty meetings, briefings, appearances and visits a day; it typically began at 5:30
A.M.,
when the general, pedaling his exercise bike, read his morning intelligence brief. His aide and his executive officer knew to fill each minute with something productive. There was no time to spare.

By the tenth day of his command, Petraeus had met with Karzai for the seventh time on creating the Afghan Local Police. By then, Petraeus had helped his Afghan partners address the concerns that Karzai and other Afghan leaders had harbored, and ultimately Karzai assumed the role of championing the initiative and leading the Afghan debate (with Petraeus privately admiring how Karzai had initially represented the concerns of others as his own before guiding the push to final approval of a program Petraeus suspected Karzai had wanted for years).
Karzai's government announced the following day that it had approved creation of the local police. The deal came after the security ministers and Petraeus agreed to a proposal that would ensure the ALP would report to district police chiefs and be paid by Karzai's Interior Ministry, thereby guaranteeing central control and reducing the risks of the elements being warlord militias. The agreement called for as many as ten thousand to be trained by U.S. Special Forces and Afghan National Police, many of whom would be focused in the south, where the insurgency was strongest. Petraeus publicly lauded the accomplishment and saw the development, achieved in less than two weeks, as one that could potentially affect the outcome of the war.

The same morning, Petraeus had begun his stand-up by projecting a painting by Frederic Remington,
The
Stampede,
on the wall of the briefing room, saying it was symbolic of the challenges they faced in Afghanistan. He had taken the idea from his mentor General Jack Galvin, who had used the painting when Petraeus was his aide in the 1980s. Petraeus had also used it as a tool during his command in Iraq. “I use this painting to convey what it is we do,” he told his staff officers, explaining the metaphor.

 

I use this image to tell you that I am comfortable with semi-chaotic situations. The picture depicts an outrider galloping at full tilt over rough terrain at the height of a violent storm while steering a willful mount and guiding a sometimes frightened and unthinking herd of cattle to its destination. It represents getting the job done despite the challenges. The terrain is rocky, the wind is in their faces and it is raining sideways. Some of these cattle will get out ahead of us—that's fine, we will catch up. Some cattle will fall behind and we will have to circle back and get them—that's fine, we will bring them on. We must be comfortable with this environment of uncertainty, challenge, risk, danger and competing agendas. We need to accept it. But we need to do more than simply hang on to 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.

AFTER A MONTH
in Afghanistan, Petraeus issued his updated Tactical Directive, a statement of war-fighting policy, to the 150,000 U.S. and NATO forces under his command. Stressing a “disciplined use of force,” the unclassified portions of the directive provided his guidance and intent for following the rules of battlefield engagement. In practical terms, the document governed the use of what Petraeus had called, during his confirmation hearing, “large, casualty-producing devices”—bombs, close air support, attack helicopters. The biggest single change in his update was stated unequivocally in its first paragraph: “Subordinate commanders are not authorized to further restrict this guidance without my approval.” His conclusion was that the problem lay not so much with McChrystal's directive but with subordinate commanders who had added conditions that made it more difficult for U.S. and NATO forces to fight—in essence, restricting units beyond McChrystal's intent.

But Petraeus also sought greater clarity. Where the prior directive had instructed “leaders at all levels to scrutinize and limit the use of force like close air support against residential compounds and other locations likely to produce civilian casualties in accordance with this guidance,” Petraeus's said: “Prior to the use of fires, the commander approving the strike must determine that no civilians are present. If unable to assess the risk of civilian presence, fires are prohibited.” The only exception: protecting the lives of ISAF or Afghan forces.

Petraeus's directive called to mind the observation by F. Scott Fitzgerald: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” The directive required commanders to do everything humanly possible both to protect Afghan civilians, which typically meant not firing, while also protecting those in uniform, which often meant firing full bore.

To help alleviate that tension, Petraeus stated unequivocally in the new Tactical Directive that he wanted ISAF troops to partner with Afghan forces on “every operation.” “Partnering is how we operate,” the directive states. “Some civilian casualties result from a misunderstanding or ignorance of local customs and behaviors. No individuals are more attuned to the Afghan culture than our Afghan partners.”

The key difference between the old and new directives, in Petraeus's mind, was the provision that prohibited subordinate commanders from issuing more restrictive conditions, such as limiting the use of attack helicopters and close air support. “It was the
application
of the last Tactical Directive that created some of the mythology that we had restricted the dropping of bombs,” Petraeus said. As a matter of fact, Petraeus had no qualms about dropping bombs—albeit when and where appropriate.
The number of bombs dropped in Iraq under Petraeus's command increased dramatically during the surge in 2007, just as the tempo of Special Operations raids there had—and that tempo was increasing on his watch in Afghanistan as well. The
Counterinsurgency Field Manual
he produced in 2006 at Fort Leavenworth, between tours in Iraq, “doesn't say that the best weapons don't shoot,” he said.
“It says
sometimes
the best weapons don't shoot. Sometimes the best weapons do shoot.” Still, the new Tactical Directive was quite clear: “
Every Afghan civilian death diminishes our cause.
If we use excessive force or operate contrary to our counterinsurgency principles, tactical victories may prove to be strategic setbacks.”