All In (39 page)

During his morning five-mile run the next day at ISAF headquarters, he said to some newcomers running with him, “Welcome to the roller-coaster ride of combat command,” referring to the latest civilian casualty accusations and the tragic attack that had killed General Daud and wounded the RC North commander, General Kneip. “You never get truly hardened to the losses and bad news,” he observed. “You just have to be extremely resilient, all the time. Stay even.” He ran for several minutes in silence, then added, “Buckle your seat belt and get ready for the ride.”

There were more sudden dips to come. NATO confirmed that an air strike in the Now Zad District of Helmand Province, fifty miles north of Lashkar Gah, the provincial capital, had killed nine innocent civilians on May 28. Afghan officials put the toll at fourteen, saying seven boys, five girls and two women had been killed in their sleep. The air strike, according to NATO, had taken place after a band of five insurgents attacked a coalition foot patrol, seriously wounding a U.S. Marine before seeking refuge in a compound occupied by the sleeping women and children. Pinned down by the insurgents and unable to call in a medevac helicopter for their wounded comrade, the Marines called for the air strike.

No matter how hard Petraeus tried, civilian casualties bedeviled his command. Just two weeks earlier, he had issued new guidance “concerning civilian casualties.” The one-page document said that “no issue highlights more [than civilian casualties] the need to balance tactical aggressiveness with tactical patience—both of which are critical to achieving our objectives.” Petraeus said that “we are now at a pivotal moment in our work here” and urged all leaders to review not only this latest guidance but also his counterinsurgency guidance, the Tactical Driving Directive that prohibited reckless vehicle use, and a document called “Standard Operating Procedure 373: The Guidance for Escalation of Force,” that emphasized the need to balance risks with prudence while keeping in mind the criticality of reducing civilian casualties. “Through hard work and many sacrifices, we and our Afghan partners have achieved considerable momentum across Afghanistan,” Petraeus wrote. “Building on that momentum will demand exceptional skill, bravery, and above all, judgment from every trooper involved in the campaign as we seek to protect the Afghan people.” Teaching what General McChrystal had termed “courageous restraint” remained a challenging proposition in counterinsurgency.

As the summer approached, there was growing apprehension across the country that naturally raised questions about the transition from ISAF to Afghan forces that was about to take place in Mazar-i-Sharif, where General Daud had been based. Although the Marines defended their position—insurgents had used a civilian compound as cover—Karzai was furious. Petraeus was frustrated, too, at the morning stand-up. He insisted that if there was too much fog and friction, troops should pull back, not press on. Few tactical objectives were worth the civilian casualties. Karzai insisted on May 31 that the U.S.-led international coalition cease all air strikes aimed at Afghan homes.

Like night raids, air strikes had surged on Petraeus's watch. Air strikes had peaked at 1,043 in October. While they had declined to several hundred a month during the first four months of 2011, they remained 80 percent higher than the previous year, when McChrystal had clamped down hard on airpower, precisely to limit civilian casualties. Karzai had no legal power to restrict international forces in his country, which were there under a NATO mandate. But that did not stop him from essentially calling the foreign troops an occupying force. “History,” he said, was a witness to “how Afghanistan deals with occupiers.”

His rhetoric roiled Washington at a time when President Obama was deciding how rapidly to draw down U.S. forces and U.S. officials were negotiating a strategic partnership after the full transition of security responsibility to Afghan forces in 2014. His eruptions were making Petraeus's job harder and harder, creating operational obstacles on the ground in Afghanistan and even more nettlesome political ones back in Washington, particularly with those on Capitol Hill.

LUJAN, WRAPPING UP
his embeds with Afghan troops in Helmand Province, prepared for an off-site meeting of the Counterinsurgency Advisory and Assistance Team that was scheduled to begin in Kabul in early June. He would soon be heading back to Washington for a year's fellowship at the Center for a New American Security and language training in Pashto. Then, he figured, it would be back to Afghanistan for another year working for the CAAT. But after that, he wasn't sure where his career was heading—the National Security Council staff or early retirement because of his history of irreverence. Despite his difficulties with Tanzola and what he took as a personal failure to institutionalize the Afghan-CAAT, he told Petraeus in an e-mail that the past year had been his most rewarding in the Army. “Come see me when you're back in Kabul,” Petraeus replied.

When the CAAT convened at ISAF headquarters the next day, Petraeus addressed the group and talked about its unique contribution. “Your work is about quality, not quantity,” he said. “In you, we have found people capable of independent action. You are willing and empowered to take prudent risks and are real subject-matter experts who benefit from repeat tours here. We've incorporated, in the campaign plan, a strategic line of effort called ‘Understanding the Environment,' and you've worked hard to support our progress in it, from the squad to brigade level, with coalition forces and Afghans. Let your guys grow a beard. Let them accept risk.” He singled out Roger Carstens, the CAAT's senior counterinsurgency adviser, and Lujan, for praise. “Make this an intellectual stone soup organization—keep adding good people one at a time and stir.

“Now I want you to think about preparing for the period beyond 2014, about Afghan-COIN Advisory and Assistance initiatives,” he added. This had, for the most part, been Lujan's brainchild. Lujan had thought that, after his row with Tanzola, it was dead. Petraeus indicated that it was not, before going around the room and asking for lessons learned from key CAAT leaders, including the French and Italian representatives.

“Partnership in everything is critical,” said one colonel.

Petraeus agreed and said that it was particularly important to partner with the Afghan security forces, especially when it came to organizing the Afghan Local Police. Lujan added that getting Afghans to partner with one another was also important. The Afghan armed forces, he said, considered the Afghan National Police “hopelessly corrupt.”

“Write something on it for me, please,” Petraeus responded. Then, addressing everyone in the room, including Army historians there to gather lessons learned for the military's training colleges, he challenged them. “Think back to when you were a lieutenant. What is relevant at that level? Everyone wants to write a
Foreign Affairs
article or op-eds for the
Washington Post
, but the incoming leaders want to read about what they will and should do at their levels. My son, a lieutenant, didn't care about his old man's great published works. He wants small-unit vignettes.”

Lujan later told Petraeus that he had done everything possible to get Major Stephen Hopkins, an Army Green Beret with six previous Afghan tours, to replace him at CAAT, to no avail. Lujan and Hopkins had been in communication over the past nine months, and Hopkins had spent a year learning Dari. But rather than continue Lujan's work embedding with Afghan forces, Hopkins was now slated to be a liaison officer to the interagency intelligence community. Petraeus later told his executive officer, Colonel Bill Hickman, to make sure Hopkins was assigned to replace Lujan. “I'm firm on this,” Petraeus said. He also told Lujan to give the December memo to Tanzola's replacement “on the QT” and say that Petraeus had directed him to do so.

The next few weeks would be dominated by preparation for the trip back to Washington for his confirmation hearing and President Obama's discussions of and decision on the numbers and pace of the U.S. drawdown. Only Petraeus and two others at ISAF headquarters, as well as Rodriguez and two trusted planners at the IJC headquarters, knew what Petraeus intended to recommend to Obama when he returned to Washington in just over a week. He even decided against telling Hickman, his executive officer, or members of the Commander's Initiatives Group staff, much less other staffers, anything about troop numbers or timetables, to avoid leaks. He remembered how the White House had felt boxed in during its Afghan policy review in the fall of 2009 by Mullen's testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee and McChrystal's speech in London. He was adamant about preventing leaks that might create such a situation once again. Outside ISAF, Petraeus would tell only General Mattis at CENTCOM, Admiral Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and Defense secretary Gates what he intended to provide to President Obama.

Petraeus was reminded of how little time he had left in Afghanistan when Gates arrived for what became an emotional final visit—his twelfth—to Afghanistan as Defense secretary. Gates met with Petraeus and Ambassador Eikenberry in Kabul and suggested that the war might be at a turning point following bin Laden's death if U.S. officials could make progress in their fledgling talks with the Taliban. With some in the White House speaking publicly in favor of a bigger drawdown of forces than the Pentagon favored, Gates expressed concern about pulling troops out of the country too quickly. He also appeared at a news conference with Karzai, who remained highly agitated over the Helmand air strike and the continued reliance on night raids by ISAF forces. “We cannot take this anymore.” Petraeus apologized again to Karzai for the recent deaths of civilians in Helmand and explained how the air strike had gone awry, noting that a young Marine had died as his comrades fought to bring in a medevac helicopter during a firefight.

After appearing with Karzai in Kabul, Gates boarded a helicopter for a series of visits with troops. His first stop was Forward Operating Base Walton, outside Kandahar. On June 6, the anniversary of the D-Day invasion of 1944, Gates flew to Forward Operating Base Sharana, in Paktika Province, to say farewell to the 101st Airborne's Currahee Brigade, the last of the Screaming Eagles in Afghanistan. The Currahee mission on D-Day had been to jump into Normandy on the high ground near Utah Beach to secure the causeways, link up with the beach infantry and then move south to take Carentan. The Currahees jumped in prior to the landing of the invasion force on the beaches of Normandy, and 184 paratroopers were killed in the subsequent fighting. All of their names were read during a memorial ceremony, along with those of seventeen Currahees who had been killed over the past nine months in Afghanistan. Gates, dressed in a starched blue button-down oxford dress shirt and standing in the bright sun, took questions from soldiers. One asked what effect he felt bin Laden's death would have on the war. Gates replied:

 

I think that it's too early to tell what the impact of bin Laden's death is on the situation here in Afghanistan. I think we'll have a better idea of that by the end of the year. . . . If I were Taliban, I would often be asking what did al-Qaeda ever do for me except get me kicked out of Afghanistan? So my hope is that, if we can keep the military pressure on through the remainder of this year, keep what we've captured from these guys in the south, keep disrupting them as you are up here and they see that they are not going to win, that that then creates the opportunity for a political reconciliation in the future, because one of the redlines for both the Afghan government and the coalition is that the Taliban have to renounce any connection or support for al-Qaeda. . . . We are still on track and, frankly, making a lot of progress in breaking the momentum of the Taliban, denying them control of populated areas, degrading their capabilities, enhancing the capabilities of the Afghan National Security Forces and going after al-Qaeda. I think we've made tremendous strides in all of those areas in the last fifteen to eighteen months, but my view is we've got to keep the pressure on. We're not quite there yet.

Gates struggled to maintain his composure as he said his good-byes. “I really did want to come out here and thank you one last time for your service and your sacrifice,” he told the soldiers, his voice catching with emotion.

 

Probably more than anybody except the president himself, I'm responsible for you being here. I'm the guy who signed the deployment orders that sent you here. That has weighed on me every day that I've had this job for four and a half years. So I've taken it as my personal responsibility to make sure that you had what you need to accomplish your mission, to come home safe, and if you get hurt, be medevacked as quickly as possible and get the best possible care. I think about all of you every moment of every day. I feel your hardship and your sacrifice and your burden more than you can possibly imagine, and that of your families as well. I think you're the best America has to offer. My admiration and affection for you is without limit, and each and every one of you will be in my prayers every day for the rest of my life. Thank you.

He left Kabul the following day after remarks before officers at ISAF headquarters. Gates thanked Rodriguez, his former military assistant, for building the ISAF Joint Command and said he believed the coalition force was close to delivering a “decisive blow” to the Taliban. Then he headed for Brussels for a meeting of NATO defense ministers. Petraeus would soon join him there, but in the meantime, in Kabul, the stream of guests from Washington continued.

No sooner had Gates departed than a congressional delegation—U.S. representatives Doug Lamborn of Colorado, Richard Nugent of Florida, Austin Scott of Georgia and Rob Woodall of Georgia, all Republicans, and William Keating, a Massachusetts Democrat—arrived in Kabul. Petraeus gave them an executive briefing that began with a description of what he called “Getting the Inputs Right”—a description of the effort since early 2009 to get the strategy right, deploy the forces and civilians needed, build the organizations required and get the right people into key positions. He walked them through a cast of characters that included Eikenberry, Rodriguez, Caldwell and even Afghan Hands, a nod to the likes of Fernando Lujan. He talked about the new initiatives he'd pushed since he arrived, including McMaster's Task Force Shafafiyat, enhanced intelligence fusion efforts, reintegration, the Afghan Local Police and Martins's Rule of Law Field Force. The briefing also included a diagram of his Anaconda strategy, with its clouds and arrows and circles—all connoting pressure points squeezing the Taliban, the Haqqani network and other insurgent groups. Petraeus explained to the congressmen the progress achieved by clear-and-hold operations in the south, and how there were now forty-one Afghan Local Police detachments operating in villages, with another thirty-six coming online. He showed them a ninety-day summary of raids by Special Forces—1,843 operations, 509 insurgent leaders killed or captured, 2,573 insurgents captured. And he explained a reintegration process through which 1,737 Taliban members had renounced their arms and decided to support the government.