All In (35 page)

Despite all that Brigadier General Martins and his team had done to help build a functioning judicial system, the Afghan Ministry of Justice officials who were running the prison sometimes seemed incapable of hanging on to their prisoners. While it was hard to see the escape of 476 Taliban insurgents, on one level, as anything other than a major setback, Martins could also point to the fact that all of the escapees had had their biometric data—eye scans, fingerprints and facial images—entered into a giant database. Petraeus had supported the ambitious biometric data program in Iraq, both for Iraqi detainees and Iraqi employees, during the surge in 2007. The program had proven so successful that he encouraged Martins and his boss to do the same in Afghanistan, where biometric data from 1.5 million Afghans existed in a database at the time of the Sarposa jailbreak. But that info would be useful only if the escapees were killed or detained again in the future.

THE NIGHT
of the Sarposa escapes, Gates called Petraeus and told him to be ready to return to Washington on short notice for a likely announcement of his selection to be the next director of the CIA. Late the next night, Obama called Petraeus and formally offered him the job. With the news spreading all over Washington, Team Petraeus geared up for another trip. They departed from Kabul on April 27 for an eight-hour flight to Ramstein Air Base, in Germany. Petraeus went for a run while the plane refueled, then flew for another eight hours to Andrews Air Force Base, outside Washington. The mood was light. Petraeus and his spokesman, Erik O. Gunhus, monitored speculation about Petraeus's nomination, whether he was qualified to run the CIA, and whether he would further militarize the agency.

Petraeus landed at Andrews at 6:25
P.M.
and spent the night at his Fort Myer home. The next morning, he went running and then spent some time working from classified computers in his little office at the Fort Myer quarters. That afternoon, he appeared alongside the president, Gates, Panetta and his replacement as commander in Afghanistan, Lieutenant General John Allen, in the East Room of the White House. After naming Panetta to succeed Gates, Obama said:

 

I'm also very pleased that Leon's work at the CIA will be carried on by one of our leading strategic thinkers and one of the finest military officers of our time, General David Petraeus. This is the second time in a year that I've asked General Petraeus to take on a demanding assignment. And I know this one carries a special sacrifice for him and his wife, Holly. After nearly forty years in uniform, including leading American and coalition forces in some of the most challenging military missions since 9/11, David Petraeus will retire from the Army that he loves to become the next CIA director, effective early September, pending Senate confirmation. As a lifelong consumer of intelligence, he knows that intelligence must be timely, accurate and acted upon quickly. He understands that staying a step ahead of nimble adversaries requires sharing and coordinating information, including with my director of national intelligence, Jim Clapper. And even as he and the CIA confront a full range of threats, David's extraordinary knowledge of the Middle East and Afghanistan uniquely positions him to lead the agency in its effort to defeat al-Qaeda. In short, just as General Petraeus changed the way that our military fights and wins wars in the 21st century, I have no doubt that Director Petraeus will guide our intelligence professionals as they continue to adapt and innovate in an ever-changing world.

Petraeus took Holly and his mother-in-law, Peggy Knowlton, out to dinner that night. And he ran again on Friday morning before taking off at nine o'clock
.
from Andrews to return to Kabul. By the end of the trip, he had spent more time in the air than on the ground.

As Petraeus flew back to the war, Flynn's Top Guns were touching down at Fort Campbell. The most emotional moment for Flynn came on the tarmac as he led his soldiers to Hangar 3 for the homecoming and he saw the line of wounded warriors waiting to greet them: Lugo, Macari, Bixler, Gatson, Kent, Malin, Bryant, Brown, Kuehl, Stinnett, Siler and the others, in wheelchairs or standing on prosthetics with canes, their family members by their sides. They were exceedingly proud to be there with the rest of the battalion to celebrate its homecoming. Flynn had to struggle to fight back tears. As they were all falling into formation outside the hangar, the wounded soldiers were made to stand off to the side. Flynn asked the homecoming organizers if they could walk in with the rest. When he was told that they would have to fall into the back of the formation, Flynn exploded. “Bullshit,” he said. “They are going to walk in right up front with me!” The wounded men lined up next to Flynn at the front of the formation and led the Top Guns back into the hangar.

That night, Flynn set up a dinner with all of the wounded at a local restaurant in town. An older woman with her husband told Flynn, with tears in her eyes, that the first round of drinks was on her. They were quite a spectacle: a long table filled with legless young men in wheelchairs. Flynn finished the night with a short speech in their honor. He told all of them that he was committed to them for life.

CHAPTER 10

TRANSITION

P
etraeus sat in the small common room off his bedroom reading e-mails later than usual on Sunday, May 1, the night after his return from Washington. He had stayed up in anticipation of what he knew was about to happen—and had told no one about. He left his quarters in ISAF headquarters' “Florence Village” compound in workout shorts and a T-shirt fifteen minutes before midnight and walked in the darkness to the Joint Special Operations Command's Situational Awareness Room that supported ISAF headquarters. He was the only person on the compound who knew the full details of the impending operation: Navy SEALs were about to raid a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where the Central Intelligence Agency was reasonably confident they would find Osama bin Laden.

Though Petraeus had gotten wind of the developments of the hunt for bin Laden when he'd been in Washington in March, he hadn't taken it overly seriously. That changed when he was in Washington on April 28, after meetings at the White House to discuss his next job. The Central Command commander, Marine general James Mattis, had called Petraeus with an alert, and shortly after, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff called Petraeus to provide additional details. Vice Admiral William H. McRaven, commander of the JSOC, briefed him in Kabul two days later, upon his return, with the concept, timeline and planning for various contingencies, some of which could have significant consequences for ISAF and U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

The stakes were enormous. Petraeus, however, didn't get excited about many operations; he strove to keep a steady demeanor. He had geared up for big military operations in the past, only to have them canceled due to weather delays or some other last-minute glitch. To be sure, some operations—like the killing of Saddam's sons, Uday and Qusay, by the 101st Airborne and Special Operations Forces, in the summer of 2003—had been executed roughly as scheduled. But the Abbottabad raid had already been postponed twenty-four hours due to weather. Petraeus flashed back to his airborne days, sitting in the aircraft, hesitating to get too psyched up before conditions for a drop were confirmed at the drop zone. He'd learned to keep his emotions at bay.

As he walked through the night, he thought of the importance of the operation, and he calculated the second- and third-order effects of the raid. He had flown over Abbottabad the week prior with the Pakistani army's chief of staff, General Ashfaq Kayani, and a year earlier he had spoken at the military academy a mile or so from the compound. He could picture the city. He also thought of the 1979 Iran Hostage Rescue Mission that had been aborted in the Iranian desert before ever getting to Tehran, much less to the U.S. Embassy there. Petraeus understood, in great detail, why the nation's nascent special operations community had failed in 1979, particularly in the intelligence and aviation arenas, just as he now knew how the JSOC had flourished in the most lethal sense to become a key force in Afghanistan—and in the broader war on global extremism. But would the Special Operations Forces be good enough on this night? If they failed, as they had in Iran more than thirty years ago, what would it mean for U.S.-Pakistani relations? And if they succeeded in capturing or killing the al-Qaeda leader, the casus belli that had brought Petraeus and hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers to Afghanistan, what would that mean for the war?

Petraeus knocked on the unmarked secure, vaulted door to JSOC's Situational Awareness Room and surprised the night shift. He'd dropped by many times before, but never unexpectedly so late at night. He asked everyone to leave but the senior officer in the room, a colonel who was the liaison officer between Joint Special Operations Command and Petraeus. After the room had been cleared, Petraeus asked the colonel, “Do you know what's going on?” The colonel told him he was monitoring nine operations ongoing in Afghanistan that night and that there were a few others “on deck.” Petraeus sat down at a computer terminal, logged in to a Special Ops “chat room,” and waited for midnight Kabul time, when the helicopters were to arrive at the bin Laden compound. It was only when the helicopters carrying Navy SEALs were on the ground at the objective in Pakistan that Petraeus told the colonel that an operation was under way to target bin Laden.

The Situational Awareness Room was filled with large computer screens for streaming video of ongoing operations and flashing SIGACTS—significant actions—alerts. But they were focused on the normal operations inside Afghanistan. To maintain situational awareness on the bin Laden raid, Petraeus used a special online “chat room” that connected him to individuals in the operations center in eastern Afghanistan that was overseeing the mission. There was no radio or video feed available for him, but Petraeus, making occasional phone calls and using the secure online chat, was able to track the mission, since he'd be the one to commit some of ISAF's U.S. assets if any of various contingencies arose. Some of the Special Operations Forces under his control were on alert, even though the mission was not “operationally controlled” by the military.

The Title 50 authority for this operation, which allows the U.S. government to conduct covert action or “deniable” missions, dictated that the operational chain of command went from the president to the CIA director to the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command to the Special Operations Forces element conducting the raid, meaning that Petraeus and the Pentagon were effectively out of the chain of command. For the raid, members of Navy SEAL Team 6 and other JSOC elements had been placed under the agency. Still, Petraeus was read into the raid, because various contingencies—none of them good—could have required soldiers under his operational control to serve as a rapid-reaction force. It was amazing for him to closely follow the operation as commandos stormed the highly secure compound in Abbottabad and opened fire on four occupants until they found “Geronimo,” bin Laden's code name, on the third floor of the building in which bin Laden had apparently spent years. After forty minutes inside, the message finally came: “Geronimo EKIA.” Bin Laden had been killed by a shot each to his chest and to his head above the left eye.

Petraeus clenched his fist and reflected on all that had transpired since the hunt for bin Laden had begun. There were no high fives; rather than celebrate, Petraeus and the colonel focused on what came next—the extraction of the body and the exfiltration of the SEAL team—and the possible implications of various contingencies for the forces in Afghanistan. The operation was not unlike those the colonel monitored from his post each night. There were, in fact, now thirteen Special Operations raids under way that night in Afghanistan, executed by the same highly trained troops, based on precise intelligence and employing stealth tactics. Several that night were judged to be “more demanding” in various respects than the operation in Pakistan, but none had even remotely the same strategic significance—though the operations that night resulted in the capture of five important Taliban leaders. With all that activity, the colonel quickly tuned back to monitoring the operations in country, while Petraeus continued to monitor the events in Abbottabad and allowed the other JSOC personnel back into the room.

The raid team had reported killing “Geronimo,” but JSOC commander Admiral McRaven wanted to confirm bin Laden's identity further, in part through DNA tests. While bin Laden's body was flown out of Pakistan to an aircraft carrier, hair and other samples were expedited for verification. After the fastest DNA test run in the history of Bagram Air Base, McRaven and all the other observers in Afghanistan and Washington breathed a sigh of relief. There was a very high probability, McRaven said later that morning, that they'd killed “number one.”

Petraeus remained in the windowless room in Kabul for a few hours more, monitoring the continuing operation and tuning in to open-source news in Pakistan to try to gauge what the reactions would be as night turned to day. Given the eight-and-a-half-hour time difference between Washington and Kabul, it was nearing time for the president to deliver the extraordinary news to the American public, planned for approximately ten o'clock on a Sunday night. The president's announcement, however, was delayed an hour. Petraeus and his team gathered to hear it, delaying—for only the second time in his command—his regularly scheduled morning stand-up briefing and directing all stations within the ISAF Command to turn on their televisions to observe the president's announcement from Washington.

“Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation against [a] compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan,” Mr. Obama said. “A small team of Americans carried out the operation with extraordinary courage and capability. No Americans were harmed. They took care to avoid civilian casualties. After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.”

Following a moment of excitement for those at ISAF headquarters, Petraeus quickly returned to the business at hand. Bin Laden's death would not immediately change the dynamic on the ground, he suspected. But the global implications could be enormous, affecting U.S.-Pakistani relations, the future of al-Qaeda and, ultimately, the coalition's will to fight in Afghanistan, now that the iconic terrorist leader who had plotted the 9/11 attacks in camps along the Afghan-Pakistan border was dead. Still, Petraeus remained cautious. He wasn't sure it was the end of an era, just an important inflection point in America's longest war; and it wasn't clear that the effects in Afghanistan would be that significant, in the near term, at least.

TWO DAYS BEFORE
the bin Laden raid, the Defense Department released a document it had produced for Congress, “Report on Progress Toward Security and Stability in Afghanistan and United States Plan for Sustaining the Afghanistan National Security Forces.” It confirmed Petraeus's most recent testimony on Capitol Hill. The U.S. troop surge had arrested the Taliban's momentum and wrested safe havens in Kandahar and Helmand from its control. Governance and economic development, however, were lagging behind these tenuous security gains. “Overall, the progress across Afghanistan remains fragile and reversible, but the momentum generated over the last six months has established the necessary conditions for the commencement of the transition of security responsibilities to Afghan forces in seven areas this summer.” The Afghan Local Police had expanded from eight districts in September to thirty-four in March and were helping put “unprecedented pressure on the insurgency.”
The Afghan military was growing in capability as well. According to a Defense Department report, by the spring of 2011, 95 percent of all ISAF military operations were being conducted in partnership with Afghan forces. Afghans, in fact, had provided 60 percent of overall force strength during Operation Hamkari, in Kandahar Province in September 2011. By contrast, the Afghans' force contribution to Operation Moshtarak, in Helmand Province in March 2010, had been only 30 percent.

An Afghan public opinion poll showed the Taliban were less popular than ever, with 75 percent of Afghans surveyed saying that it would be bad for the country if the Taliban returned to power. The report also referenced “indicators” that ISAF attacks were “steadily eroding insurgent morale.” And yet the insurgents continued to fight at undiminished levels and continued killing Americans at a steady rate. More Americans had been killed (122) and wounded (1,178) during the first four months of 2011 than during the same period a year earlier. While the report noted that community council elections had actually been held in March in Marjah, in Helmand Province, the scene of heavy fighting by the Marines in March 2010, security incidents had increased in both Helmand and Kandahar. “The Taliban's momentum has been halted and much of their tactical infrastructure and popular support removed,” the report concluded, “although hard fighting is expected through the spring, summer and fall of 2011.” Progress was tough to judge.

The Taliban announced the start of their spring campaign the very next day. In a prepared statement, the Taliban said they would target NATO troops as well as contractors, Afghan and foreign, who were assisting them and the Afghan government. The Taliban said they would take special pains to avoid harming Afghan civilians, warning them to stay away from troop convoys and military installations.

Forecasting that the nexus of the war would eventually shift from the orchards around Kandahar, now cleared, to the forbidding mountains in eastern Afghanistan, which were still teeming with insurgents, Petraeus went to visit Major Jim Gant, “Lawrence of Afghanistan,” in eastern Kunar Province, on the Pakistan border. Petraeus considered Kunar perhaps the most difficult province for which to develop a strategy for moving forward, given the low density of NATO and Afghan forces, the difficult terrain, the porous border with Pakistan's tribal areas, a myriad of local government challenges and a number of tribes—Malik Noorafzhal's was the exception—who rejected outsiders. For two years Petraeus had been looking forward to meeting Gant again, ever since he'd recommended Gant's monograph,
One Tribe at a Time
, as required reading throughout the U.S. military and helped change Gant's orders from Iraq to Afghanistan. Gant first met Petraeus in Iraq after he had been awarded the Silver Star. Gant had spent the year since running Village Stability Operations in Mangwal.

After Petraeus's helicopter touched down, Gant briefed him on conditions in Mangwal and walked him to Malik Noorafzhal's home, where the two had lunch and spent several hours deep in conversation. Though some in the Special Forces community thought Gant took too much credit for initiatives and a philosophy that had already been embraced by many key leaders in the community, Petraeus thought Gant's monograph had laid the basic groundwork for the whole Village Stability Operations program—and, by extension, the Afghan Local Police. Petraeus knew that while Gant might not have been the first to develop the concept, he had been the first and most effective in describing the concept and writing about it. The ALP were establishing the patches of security that would make up the patchwork quilt of a pacified Afghanistan, assuming they could be stitched together as part of a campaign involving both conventional troops and special forces—which would increasingly be Afghan.