All In (45 page)

He ended with a reference to his impending retirement, the event he dreaded as much as relinquishing command.

 

When I take off the uniform for the last time on 31 August 2011, I will recall with deep respect and enormous gratitude the extraordinary troopers with whom I have been privileged to serve in my 37 years in uniform. That is particularly true for those with whom I have served on deployments in the past decade in tough, important coalition missions. Among those in the front rank of such troopers will be each of you with whom I have had the honor of soldiering during the surge here in the Shadow of the Hindu Kush.

But the Taliban were determined to keep Kabul on edge as Petraeus prepared to depart. On the eve of his change of command, two gunmen broke into the Kabul home of Jan Mohammed Khan and killed the former governor of Uruzgan Province. Khan was a close adviser and political ally of President Karzai. The gunmen also killed Mohammed Hasham Watanwal, a member of Parliament from Uruzgan. A Taliban spokesman called Khan a “stooge of American invaders.” As Petraeus occasionally observed, it is the rare day in command that does not have bad news. His final day in command was no exception.

THE NIGHT BEFORE
his change of command, Petraeus was scheduled to attend a ramp ceremony on the military tarmac of the Kabul International Airport to honor soldiers who had been killed in action. Petraeus continued to work in his office until he was summoned to the memorial. This ramp ceremony was for seven fallen French soldiers killed in three separate incidents that week in Kapisa Province. Five of them had died in a suicide attack earlier in the week that also killed an Afghan civilian. It was the worst loss of life for French forces since August 2008, when ten soldiers were killed in a Taliban ambush east of Kabul. Seventy French soldiers had died in Afghanistan since the war began in 2001. Around four thousand French troops were serving in Afghanistan, most in Kapisa, and Petraeus was impressed with their counterinsurgency efforts and grateful for their contributions. He had met French president Nicolas Sarkozy earlier in the week and expressed his gratitude, especially given the ambivalence of French citizens over the war. He had strived to keep the coalition together, and paying his last respects to these French soldiers was, in his mind, a commander's responsibility in support of coalition cohesion.

Finally, as midnight approached, Hickman signaled that it was time to head to the ceremony. Petraeus walked with his team and Lieutenant General Allen to the ISAF compound soccer field to catch his helicopter to the airport. They lifted off to the
whup-whup-whup
of the rotors into the Kabul night. Petraeus sat looking out the window in silence as they flew.

There were more than two hundred French troopers in blue berets lined up to form a single-file man-made tunnel from the open-ended French cargo plane that would carry the fallen soldiers home. The night was dark, but rampside stadium lights and headlights from parked military vehicles shone on the entourage. Somber music began to play. Senior French officers then slowly marched from the aircraft down the long line of steely-faced troops, saluting slowly on every fifth step. French troops hoisted the French blue-white-and-red-draped coffins to their shoulders. They walked slowly, in a quiet cadence, with the bodies of their comrades on their shoulders, down the two-hundred-yard tunnel of soldiers and dignitaries and up the yawning rear ramp into the belly of the plane. A moderator gave remarks in French as the troops paid their respects. Many of the soldiers standing at attention on that dark, quiet night didn't know who the fallen troopers were or how they had died. Neither did Petraeus. Ramp ceremonies in Afghanistan were held anytime a soldier gave the ultimate sacrifice. An attempt was made to send the remains of the fallen home within twenty-four hours of their deaths. It was optional for troops to attend, but there was always a substantial turnout, even after midnight.

Petraeus, Allen, UN special representative Staffan de Mistura and the other leaders stood at attention as still as statues, close to the French cargo jet. Petraeus had attended too many of these in his years in the military; these young men were the same age as his son, Stephen, he thought to himself. The melancholy songs reminded him of his first real exposure to significant casualties after seventeen of his men from the 101st Airborne died in a tragic helicopter crash in Iraq. The emotion triggered had been so strong at times over the years that he would occasionally put his head down on his desk, but only when he thought his staff was not watching. Petraeus never let anyone see this side of him. He had learned to hide the heavy burdens of command during his first tour in Iraq in 2003. But on the night before his final day in command, at a 1:00
A.M.
ceremony for more of the war's dead, the mask felt heavy.

“At the end of the day, there is only one commander, and he is the one who feels the ultimate responsibility for committing these troops who made the ultimate sacrifice. We are all changed by this,” he later relayed to a friend. “You carry a sense of responsibility for those who never go home or whose lives are changed forever from catastrophic injuries. And there is an added feeling of guilt from departing the theater earlier than planned as well, of leaving your guys, your team while they are still in combat. A commander feels, understandably, this extraordinary weight of responsibility. It is impossible to understand it without having lived it. You cannot explain it to others. It doesn't get easier and you don't get hardened to it.”

THE DAY OF HIS
change of command, Petraeus awoke at 5:00
A.M.
He hadn't returned to his room after the ramp ceremony until 1:30
A.M.
, and he hadn't slept well. Petraeus had his personal security detachment meet him at 6:00
A.M.
for a final morning run. Three soldiers arrived to accompany the general on what would be his final laps around the ISAF and U.S. Embassy compound. Normally inquisitive and humorous when he ran, he was now serious and contemplative; despite the early hour, he wore sunglasses. He barely spoke. His focus, he later confessed, was basic: Get to the other end of the day.

After the run, Petraeus donned his camouflage battle fatigues and was driven to the palace, where he would receive an award from President Karzai. It was the highest Afghan award, the Medal of Ghazi Wazir Mohammad Akbar Khan. Karzai made the presentation in front of Afghanistan's National Security Team. Petraeus thanked Karzai, expressed his gratitude and said he had always thought of himself serving President Obama, the secretary general of NATO
and
Karzai, the head of the Afghan state. “I've always regarded myself as your soldier and your commander,” he said, pledging continued support once he became director of the Central Intelligence Agency. He departed as swiftly as he had come, heading back to ISAF headquarters. He attended the ceremony for the promotion of his successor, Lieutenant General Allen, to the rank of general and paused for a moment at a short reception in Destille Gardens, across from the headquarters, as the crowd of guests arrived. Then it was time for the change of command.

As the ceremony began, the sun poured down on the peach-colored building that had been first a military installation and then a military sports club but now served as the ISAF headquarters. With the building as the backdrop, Petraeus stood ramrod straight and saluted as the 1st Cavalry Division Band and the Afghan Army National Band played the national anthems of both Afghanistan and the United States. Spectators sat under blue tents. Ambassador Eikenberry began the ceremony, recalling Petraeus's comments to him from the previous year's Fourth of July celebration at the embassy: “Civil-military cooperation is not optional.” Then he presented the State Department's Secretary's Distinguished Service Award to Petraeus on behalf of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The ambassador was followed on the podium by Admiral Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Wolf Langheld, Petraeus's NATO boss, and the Afghan minister of Defense, all of whom praised Petraeus for his effort and his sacrifice. Petraeus then formally handed the colors of command of ISAF and U.S. Forces–Afghanistan to his close friend and colleague General Allen, a fourth star now on Allen's collars. Petraeus delivered his address at a wooden podium, his battle fatigues decorated with two additional medals he had just been awarded, the Defense Distinguished Service Medal and the NATO Meritorious Service Medal.

After encapsulating the year, he closed simply:

 

For the better part of the last decade, I have been deployed in Bosnia, Iraq, the greater Central Command region and, now, Afghanistan. Culminating that time by serving with you this past year here has been an extraordinary honor. At countless dusty outposts and operating bases across Afghanistan, on innumerable patrols through marketplaces and bazaars, I have had the opportunity to see you in action. Each of you has demonstrated extraordinary professionalism. In crushing heat and in numbing cold—from the deserts of southern Afghanistan to the peaks of the Hindu Kush—you have shown initiative, determination, innovativeness and courage. You have been diplomats as well as warriors, statesmen as well as soldiers. Your performance has been, in a word, awesome.

In a poem published a few years ago, a British trooper who was deployed here in Afghanistan captured eloquently the emotions of those who serve and those who sacrifice. He wrote:

And what is asked for the service we give?

No high praise or riches if we should live,

Just silence from friends, our name on a wall,

If this time around, it is I that fall.

To the families, friends and countrymen of those who fell
this time around
—and to
all
those who have served and sacrificed here—you have my deepest respect and my eternal gratitude. The coalition and Afghanistan can never thank you enough for all that you have given as we have carried on with this enormously difficult, hugely important endeavor.

Petraeus clearly was moved, but he kept the mask in place.

Less than an hour later, after shaking hundreds of hands in a long receiving line, he walked briskly to the soccer field and jumped into his seat in the back of his helicopter. Accompanied by Colonel Hickman and a cadre of his closest aides, Petraeus watched the ISAF compound shrink in size as the Black Hawk lifted off to fly him over to Kabul International Airport, where he would begin the next phase of his journey home.

Once inside the Gulfstream V, he kept himself occupied, distracted and engaged. He had wanted to hand General Allen a neatly wrapped package, a war that had taken a decisive turn for America and for the people of Afghanistan, but he knew that, despite the hard-fought progress, that wasn't yet the case. He had done all he could for the war effort, Petraeus believed, trying to put various thoughts behind him and compartmentalize his feelings. He felt Allen was prepared to carry that baton. He answered numerous e-mails, read through letters given to him at the ceremony and conversed for much of the four-hour flight to Turkey.

Petraeus had grown accustomed to the intensity of combat command, to the adrenaline of always needing to be “on,” to the fatigue he fought off after fast-paced eighteen-hour days, one after another. “The feeling of leaving combat command is like being in a car and slamming on the power brakes, pulling the emergency brake and deploying a drogue chute all at once,” he later explained, trying to provide an appropriate metaphor for the feeling a wartime commander has when it all comes to an end. “It's hard on the system—be it vehicle or man—to slow down.” And Petraeus really didn't want to slow down, at least not yet.

CHAPTER 13

STILL ALL IN

A
fter he relinquished the final command of his career to General Allen at ISAF headquarters, Petraeus flew from Kabul to Europe for a tour through several ISAF-contributing national capitals: Ankara, Berlin, Paris and London. He did not think of it as any kind of victory lap. In private, he was still processing his command and setting aside his regrets about departing before the end of this fighting season. Thankfully, the schedule was tightly packed, and there was barely time to think about it as his team jetted through four coalition countries en route back to Washington. He had helped to prevent a rush to the exits over the past year, and he wanted to express his gratitude to some of the key members of the alliance.

The stay in London was longer than the others. This would be his final opportunity in uniform to say thanks to the partner who had contributed the most in Iraq, Afghanistan and the greater CENTCOM area. In addition to the usual calls at Number 10 Downing Street with the prime minister and at the Defence and Foreign ministries, he had time for dinner with colleagues with whom he'd been through some tough times. On the second night, Ambassador Mark Sedwill, the talented British diplomat who had departed Kabul in April after serving with Petraeus as the NATO senior civilian representative in Kabul, hosted a private dinner and roundtable discussion for him with diplomatic and military officials in London. Sedwill and Petraeus had teamed up to corral the coalition into a cohesive team the prior year. Moving the endgame to 2014 was perhaps the most significant accomplishment of the past year, and Sedwill had played a key role in that effort. With Sedwill now serving as the U.K.'s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Petraeus would no doubt be seeing him again in his new position at the CIA. Officials from the British foreign ministry and intelligence services joined the dinner as well; their focus was on the future. They all knew the significance of Petraeus's next post, and they were eager to begin thinking about how they could all work together with him in that role.

On his last night, Petraeus attended an intimate dinner with a half-dozen old friends, the British “Band of Brothers” with whom he'd served in Iraq, most of whom had also served in Afghanistan or at a minimum were presently dealing with the war from the Ministry of Defence. His former deputy from Afghanistan was there among them—a great officer whose son had lost his legs to an IED in Helmand Province. The dinner was hosted in the quarters of the senior U.K. military officer, General Sir David Richards, who lived within the grounds of Kensington Palace. The evening was a time for reminiscing about some of their shared memories, but it left Petraeus wistful about relinquishing command and leaving this brotherhood behind.

Petraeus had volunteered to remain in Kabul through the end of the fighting season in the fall, although he later acknowledged that the president had been wise to ask him to be in place as CIA director in time for the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, particularly when an explicit threat emerged in the days prior to the anniversary. He had convinced himself that he was more of a surge guy than a drawdown guy anyway, and he'd set up Allen to take the reins for the rest of the fighting season. Beyond that, Petraeus had never wavered in his desire to “stay in the fight” by moving to the CIA. He had been approached with lucrative book deals and equally remunerative consulting positions, but they held no appeal, especially when compared with running the CIA. He wanted to continue to serve his country and felt very privileged to have been provided such an opportunity.

The trip through Europe had been productive with members of the alliance and for Petraeus personally. He'd shown the flag and expressed appreciation. He had had a few brief moments to reflect and walk down memory lane with old battlefield friends who reassured him that his military career had made a difference. And he'd made a point to take a little time for himself, which included his favorite way to reflect—running through Hyde Park, getting up to twelve miles with some of his team the final morning he was there.

As he left his final command behind and began the transition to a new chapter in life, Petraeus lamented his unfamiliarity with Afghanistan when he'd first arrived in Kabul. He noted that he had lacked the fingertip feel he'd developed for Iraq after two and a half years on the ground there prior to taking command of the surge in 2007. “[Afghanistan] was a heck of a fast ride, and in truth, there was a lack of preparation,” he said. “Don't get me wrong: I'd made numerous visits, led the civ-mil conferences, participated in the policy reviews, and conducted innumerable video teleconferences and intelligence ‘deep dives.' But that's very different from being the commander of the theater of Afghanistan, learning about it village by village, valley by valley, developing the kind of granular understanding that is needed even at the strategic level.”

Looking back, he reckoned that while he'd gained a handle on the south pretty quickly, it had taken him “a good six months or more,” in particular, to develop a coherent vision for eastern Afghanistan's twelve provinces, each with its own government and cast of tribal leaders, warlords and enemy commanders. His ultimate plan involved a greater focus on confronting the insurgents while seeking to build local and national Afghan forces and governance. Too many combat units, he had found at the outset, were focused solely on partnering with Afghan forces and helping the local Afghan government—and insufficiently focused on countering the Taliban.

Overall, Petraeus felt that the military campaign, while facing innumerable challenges, was moving in the right direction. He had enormous confidence in the new civil-military team of General Allen, U.S. ambassador Ryan Crocker, and NATO senior civilian representative Ambassador Simon Gass, another British diplomat who had impressed Petraeus. Across Afghanistan, enemy-initiated attacks from January to August were down 3 percent compared with 2010, although ISAF had
expected
a 17 to 30 percent increase, given the increase in troop strength—25,000 ISAF forces and 60,000 ANSF troop and police forces.
In fact, enemy-initiated attacks for the period June–August 2011 were 17 percent lower than in the same period in 2010, and in seventeen of the previous twenty-two weeks (through September 2011) they were lower than in the same week in 2010.
The command had not seen this sustained year-on-year level of decrease since the insurgency had begun to intensify in 2007. The trend ultimately would continue through September and into the fall, though sensational attacks would continue as well.

A concern Petraeus shared with others in the command, given the faster-than-originally-anticipated drawdown, was the inability to hold and build in the important areas that the surge of military forces had successfully cleared. Even while commencing the scheduled drawdown of troops, Petraeus maintained hope and confidence that the Allen-Crocker-Gass team would maintain the momentum of the previous year. Overall, the progress that the troopers had achieved in key areas had set the conditions for further progress across the Afghan theater, especially as Afghan forces continued to grow.

The west and north were relatively pacified and on the way to transition, although they would experience periodic attacks and require continued attention. The gamut of Anaconda strategy activities was under way in those areas, albeit with relatively low levels of ISAF and Afghan forces. The latter needed to be built up as local police, governance, reintegration and rule-of-law initiatives were also pursued. These efforts continued to be enabled by focused conventional force-clearance operations, targeted special operations, and reintegration, which had made a dent in the insurgent ranks in the northwest, in particular.

The campaign plan for the east that Petraeus had inherited from McChrystal and with considerable modification bequeathed to General Allen was now redesigned to try to cut off the insurgents' infiltration routes through the mountains from Pakistan. The east had not been the main effort for the surge of forces in the past year, and the security situation remained tenuous, as Vowell's and Fivecoat's tours had shown.
Attacks continued to increase in the east, up 17 percent for the period June–August 2011, compared with the same period the previous year. The east's importance could not be overstated, given the buffer it provides for Kabul. “Keep in mind that Kabul is vastly more important . . . than Baghdad was in Iraq,” Petraeus observed. “In Baghdad, there were three car bombs per day on average in the second month I was the commander there, but the country still survived. If that happened in Kabul, or even if there was one car bomb per day, you'd lose the nongovernmental organizations, the international organizations, embassies and other elements, all of which support Afghanistan to a much greater degree than was the case in Iraq.” Petraeus considered Kabul the key security inkblot or oil spot in the counterinsurgency lexicon: “You can't have a high level of violence [in Kabul] and have the country overall survive. So we put a lot of effort into determining how to move forward in the east; it probably took us a good six or more months, in fact, to develop a coherent plan for that.”

Part of that plan, across the theater, included ensuring that there was a proper focus on defeating the insurgency. “In some cases, the mission statements when I took over read, ‘Our mission is to partner with Afghan forces and connect GIRoA to the people,' ” Petraeus recalled. He continued:

 

Yet in some areas, there was an insurgency raging and there was no mention of either defeating, disrupting or denying the insurgents and the insurgency in that area—whatever was appropriate—although [security] was the prerequisite for progress in any of the other areas. Security was essential to enable progress in governance, local economic revival, provision of basic services, and construction of schools, health clinics, roads and all the other infrastructure. There needed to be a sharpened focus on the insurgency and the vital importance of achieving a sufficient level of security so that you could then focus on connecting GIRoA to the people. If there was a sufficiently “good GIRoA” then it
should
be enabled [by security] to be connected to the people.

In the southwest and south, Petraeus had seen the Marines and British forces solidify gains in Helmand Province and the U.S. soldiers and Canadian forces make noteworthy gains clearing the Taliban from its birthplace around Kandahar. According to the Afghan Mission Network, “attacks during the period June–August 2011 were 40 percent lower than the same period in 2010,” and “some districts in the Central Helmand Valley saw reductions in violence of nearly 80 percent.” In the same period in RC South (principally Kandahar Province), “enemy-initiated attacks reported during the period June–August 2011 were 10 percent lower than the same period last year.” Flynn's area in the Arghandab had been virtually pacified. Pundits argued that the selective lethal application of force used there would turn the local population against the coalition and that the rebuilding strategy, disparaged by some as shortsighted, would not survive transfer to the next U.S. unit. To the contrary, Flynn's replacement later reported, Flynn's security gains enabled the reconstruction of Tarok Kolache and other villages as well as other economic and developmental infrastructure, such as canals and roads. Decreased violence and evidence of popular support—including an increase in local-resident tips about IEDs, a functioning district center, the consistent attendance by village maliks at district
shuras,
and the turnover, by the fall, of six U.S. Army strongpoints to ANSF—seemed to indicate that the surge in that area had been effective. But even there Petraeus had not declared victory. As he turned command over to Allen, violence was, to be sure, increasing across Afghanistan, as it did every summer. Counter to all predictions, however, the increase was at lower rather than higher levels compared with the previous year.

Civilian casualties, numbers of attacks and troop casualties had been critical concerns all year. Petraeus kept track of those many times on a given day. ISAF-caused civilian fatalities were down, although overall civilian casualties were up. Coalition-force casualties, which included battlefield injuries and deaths, were significant, but overall, ISAF trooper deaths in Petraeus's final months were down from the previous year. Such metrics were a challenge to compare, but the increase in forces over that time normally would have meant an increase in deaths, not a decrease.

As long as total numbers of incidents were almost where they had been the previous year and overall civilian fatalities were up—even though an overwhelming majority were caused by insurgents and not ISAF—it was difficult for analysts to conclude that the security environment on the whole was significantly improved. The Taliban had advanced their own special operations strategy, powered not by drones and missiles and night raids but by infiltrators into Afghan army units, control over cell-phone-tower use, continued use of suicide bombers, targeted assassinations and spectacular attacks—all of which drew greater media attention and psychological weight over attacks against troops in the field. Petraeus wished he had been able to quell more of that. But to argue that violence and use of such tactics was a sign that ISAF and Afghan forces had failed was to miss the point that progress and violence can coexist in a war zone. If analysts had made that mistake in March 1945, they would have argued that the Allies were on the verge of losing World War II.

There were other lessons to be learned in this theater, including the challenges and virtues of coalition warfare. The greatest challenge, of course, was the high maintenance required to keep the members marching together and, Petraeus frankly reflected, staying in the formation. The national caveats and the variance in levels of training, capability and readiness required a nuanced understanding of partner capabilities. The innumerable visits by national leaders required an extraordinary amount of time in key-leader engagements. Petraeus had had several visits each week from visiting coalition delegations, sometimes several a day. Even so, he enjoyed the intellectual stimulation and the opportunity to help diplomatic partners expand the coalition. By the end of his tour, forty-nine international partners and Afghanistan were contributing forces to the mission, and other countries contributed substantial financial resources.