All In (29 page)

Petraeus remembered visiting Fort Sill, Oklahoma, home base of Army artillery, and going for a run with a group of captains, all of whom were required to write five operations orders during their six-month Captain's Career Course. “All of those orders were the same as they would have been prior to our operations in Iraq,” he recalled later. “In other words, they were still large artillery operations, standard missions, massing of batteries and battalions—essentially the old Cold War missions. I asked, ‘Well, what did you do in Iraq or Afghanistan? You are all veterans of one or, in many cases, two tours downrange already. How much of your battalion actually shot [artillery] in Iraq?'”

Most of the captains responded that one battery, at most, was prepared to fire at the enemy. The rest of the battalion would be broken down performing convoy or base security, or security for a geographic area. In some cases entire artillery units were devoted to detainee operations. And yet, Petraeus noted, “not a single one of the operations orders addressed any of those tasks at all.” After Petraeus shared this with the field artillery center commander, the commander shut down the Career Course, using the seasoned captains to help overhaul the curriculum and restarting the course within two weeks. Petraeus also came to believe that mission rehearsal exercises at the Army's training centers required further refinement. There had been some change to the war games that troops participated in before deploying. Iraqi- or Afghan-American civilians role-played Iraqi or Afghan citizens and local officials during the mock battles, and U.S. soldiers simulated IED cells, host-nation troops, and suicide car bombers and local leaders with whom the exercise unit had to engage. But Petraeus wanted to see far more unpredictable scenarios driving the mock engagements. It was the same principle of surprise and emphasis on realistic training that Petraeus had sought as an operations officer in the 24th and 3rd infantry divisions, and as a battalion and brigade commander. The Army was still adjusting preparation for deployment activities to follow one of its most basic tenets: to train the way we will fight.

Petraeus sought as well to inculcate a culture of constant learning in the leaders who attended the courses in the centers and schools he oversaw. Speaking to a group of staff college students at Fort Leavenworth, Petraeus explained his philosophy.

 

Each of you is one part student and one part teacher, and in your year at Leavenworth, each of us . . . will be . . . part of what we call the “engine of change,” the combination of elements overseen by the Combined Arms Center are helping the U.S. Army respond to the challenges that face the United States. . . . Change, in fact, is critical. . . . A military is a living organism. Like all living organisms, the military obeys the fundamental law of nature—the law of survival of the fittest. Today, our militaries are confronted with the problem of how best to adapt to changes in the operational environment. At stake here is not simply the survival of our militaries but the security of our nations, which is, of course, what our militaries exist to protect. The requirement, therefore, is to adapt along with the threat to our nation. . . . So we must change the way we train our units and our leaders—you. Change is, indeed, hard, but it is also a must.

The Army, in short, had to be a learning organization. Petraeus's 2006
Counterinsurgency Field Manual
expressed it clearly: “The side that adapts the fastest tends to prevail.”

THAT CERTAINLY
remained the case in Afghanistan late in the winter of 2010–2011, as Senator Levin knew well. He pounded his gavel promptly at 9:31
A.M.
on March 16. He harked back to Obama's speech at West Point in December 2009 and noted that Obama had set July 2011 as the date “when U.S. troops would begin to come home.” And just last week, he said, Secretary Gates, on a trip to Afghanistan and NATO headquarters, had said that the United States would be “well positioned” in July to begin transferring authority to Afghan forces and drawing down American troops. But as Levin also noted, Gates had also told NATO defense ministers that “there is too much talk about leaving and not enough talk about getting the job done right.

“Both messages and the thread that unifies them are part and parcel, I believe, of General Petraeus's counterinsurgency strategy, which is so instrumental in turning the tide in Afghanistan,” Levin said. “The success of the mission depends on Afghan security forces holding the ground, which they are helping to clear of Taliban.” Levin was mindful of the cost, in blood and treasure, and wanted to start to bring U.S. forces home as soon as was feasible. He also took it upon himself to defend his president from anticipated Republican attempts to paint him as weak or unpatriotic for insisting that the drawdown of forces begin in July, especially in light of the surge and everything else Obama had been willing to invest in the war, including Petraeus's talents.

Throughout the hearing, Levin and the Democrats defended Obama's decision to announce that he would begin drawing down forces in July 2011 as necessary to force the Afghans to take their responsibilities seriously, and Republicans criticized it for undercutting U.S. efforts and emboldening the Taliban. Levin clearly supported the planned drawdown but hardly could be seen as opposed to the war effort, given the push for building up Afghan forces he had strenuously backed. To defend the planned drawdown, he quoted General Mattis, who'd replaced Petraeus as head of Central Command and who said that the transfer of authority to Afghan forces “‘undercuts the enemy's narrative when they say that we're there to occupy Afghanistan.'”

Senator McCain, the ranking Republican, underscored the political tension, saying that “we need to be exceedingly cautious about withdrawal of the U.S. forces this July. The wisest course of action in July may be to reinvest troops from more secured to less secured parts of Afghanistan, where additional forces could have a decisive impact. In short, we should not rush to failure. . . .”

After Levin and McCain staked out their positions, Undersecretary Flournoy read her prepared statement. It neatly summarized what the Obama administration had inherited in Afghanistan upon taking office in January 2009:

 

While our attention was turned away, al-Qaeda, the Taliban and associated extremist groups reconstituted their safe havens along the borderlands between Afghanistan and Pakistan. As a result of this inattention, we risked the return of a Taliban-led Afghanistan that would likely once again provide a safe haven for terrorists who could plan and execute attacks against the United States. When President Obama took office, he immediately undertook a thorough review of our strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan and reaffirmed our core goal: to disrupt, dismantle and eventually defeat al-Qaeda and to prevent its return to Afghanistan. In the course of that review, we found that the situation in Afghanistan was even worse than we'd thought and that the Taliban had seized the momentum on the ground.

Petraeus, a black plastic 101st Airborne Division coffee mug on the table in front of him, then read his opening statement; it was largely an update of the speech he had delivered in November at the Lisbon conference.

 

As a bottom line up front, it is ISAF's assessment that the momentum achieved by the Taliban in Afghanistan since 2005 has been arrested in much of the country and reversed in a number of important areas. However, while the security progress achieved over the past year is significant, it is also fragile and reversible. Moreover, it is clear that much difficult work lies ahead with our Afghan partners to solidify and expand our gains in the face of the expected Taliban spring offensive. Nonetheless, the hard-fought achievements in 2010 and early 2011 have enabled the joint Afghan-NATO transition board to recommend initiation this spring of transition to Afghan lead in several provinces. The achievements of the past year are also very important as I prepare to provide options and a recommendation to President Obama for commencement of the drawdown of the U.S. surge forces in July.

Petraeus described how ISAF forces, fighting alongside Afghan troops, had cleared the Taliban out of its birthplace around Kandahar, and how the Afghan forces were not only greater in size but better in quality. He lauded Lieutenant General Caldwell for leading the effort to train and equip Afghan forces, which he described as “a huge undertaking, and there is nothing easy about it.” He described the growth of the Afghan Local Police “a community watch with AK-47s,” an important addition to the overall campaign that he hoped would spread to seventy districts, each averaging three hundred ALP members. Twenty-seven of those districts, he noted, had been “validated for full operations.

“This program is so important that I have put a conventional U.S. infantry battalion under the operational control of our Special Operations Task Force in Afghanistan to augment our Special Forces and increase our ability to support the program's expansion,” he said, tacitly acknowledging that Flynn had been correct in his belief that conventional forces such as the Top Guns could indeed train Afghans to protect their own villages. The augmentation of the Special Operations Task Force with conventional forces—initially criticized by some—was proving to be an important addition to the Afghan Local Police initiative, enabling the Special Forces to create Afghan Local Police detachments much more rapidly and in many more provinces, a key to defending against Taliban infiltration at the village level. He would later augment the effort with a second conventional infantry battalion, this one from the 82nd Airborne Division.

In reviewing each component of his campaign plan, Petraeus might well have projected his Anaconda strategy slide on the hearing room wall. There were his six lines of operation—protecting the population, disrupting insurgent networks, building the Afghan armed forces, supporting legitimate governance, fostering sustainable development and neutralizing criminal patronage networks. Petraeus told the senators that reintegration of reconcilable insurgents at local levels also remained an important element of his plan, because “we recognize that we and our Afghan partners cannot just kill or capture our way out of an insurgency in Afghanistan.” In recent months, he said, seven hundred Taliban had officially reintegrated with the Afghan government, and another two thousand were in the process of reintegrating.

On the issue of civilian casualties, he pointed out that the recent UN study had concluded that civilian casualties caused by ISAF operations had decreased 20 percent in 2010. But he revealed that he had ordered “a review of our Tactical Directive on the use of force by all levels of our chain of command and with the aircrews of our attack helicopters,” due to the incidents in February that had left him apologizing to Karzai. However challenging his relationship with the Afghan president had been, he gave no hint of it during the hearing. At one point, he paraphrased a remark that Gates had made recently—that sometimes American leaders didn't listen well enough to Karzai. “What he says is understandable about civilian causalities,” Petraeus said. “We cannot harm the people that we are there to help protect. And we have to protect them from
all
civilian casualties, not just those at our hands or those of our Afghan partners, but those of the insurgents as well.”

The following week, Petraeus said, Karzai would announce which provinces would be turned over this year to Afghan forces as the transition process, scheduled to run through 2014, officially began. “The shifting of responsibility from ISAF to Afghan forces will be conducted at a pace determined by conditions on the ground,” Petraeus explained, “with assessments provided from the bottom up so that those at operational-command level in Afghanistan can plan the resulting battlefield geometry adjustments with our Afghan partners.” After Petraeus finished reading his opening statement, Levin began by asking whether he supported the beginning of troop reductions in July. Petraeus acknowledged that he was accepting of the plan.

“And why do you support the beginning of reductions this July?” Levin asked.

“If I could come back perhaps to your opening statement, Mr. Chairman, I think it is logical to talk both about getting the job done, as Secretary Gates did with his NATO counterparts, and beginning transition and ‘responsible'—to use President Obama's term—reductions in forces at a pace determined by conditions on the ground,” Petraeus said. “As my good friend and shipmate General Jim Mattis noted, it undercuts the narrative of the Taliban that we will be there forever, that we're determined to maintain a presence forever. And it does indeed, as I have told this committee before, send that message of urgency that President Obama sought to transmit on the first of December at West Point in 2009, when he also transmitted a message of enormous additional commitment in the form of thirty thousand additional U.S. forces, more funding for Afghan forces and additional civilians.”

McCain focused on the front-page story in that morning's
Washington Post,
saying that most Americans believed the Afghan war wasn't worth fighting. “Could you respond to that poll and maybe have a few words for the American people about this conflict?” McCain asked. “And you might mention the consequences of failure.”

“Up front, I can understand the frustration,” Petraeus responded, knowing this was an important moment to sustain support for the war among the American people, who ultimately paid the bills and contributed the soldiers.

 

We have been at this for ten years. We have spent an enormous amount of money. We have sustained very tough losses and difficult, life-changing wounds. I was at Walter Reed [Army Medical Center] yesterday seeing some of our troopers whose lives have been changed forever by their service in our country's uniform in a tough fight. But I think it is important to remember why we are there at such a time. It's important to remember that that is where 9/11 began. That's where the plan was made. That's where the initial training of the attackers took place before they went on to Germany and then to U.S. flight schools. That is where al-Qaeda had its most important sanctuary in the world, and it had it under the Taliban. At that time, of course, the Taliban controlled Kabul and the vast majority of the country. And, indeed, we do see al-Qaeda looking for sanctuaries all the time, frankly.