All In (6 page)

CHAPTER 2

RESULTS, BOY

P
etraeus looked out the aircraft window and saw the barren, brown Hindu Kush Mountains, outside Kabul. He felt a twinge of anticipation for the imminent landing, even though it was a familiar view. He had traveled to Afghanistan nearly a dozen times as CENTCOM commander over the past two years, and he had been here once before that, on a special assessment mission for Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld in 2005. He knew the challenges below, having worked with General McChrystal on the plan to commit significant resources to the neglected and troubled theater. Those challenges were now his to master.

His plane landed in Kabul at dusk on July 2, 2010. The smell of burning garbage lingered in the air. The shadows were long as the sun set on a warm, dry evening. U.S. ambassador Karl Eikenberry, Ambassador Mark Sedwill, NATO's senior civilian representative in Afghanistan, and Petraeus alighted together from a blue-and-white C-40 with
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
emblazoned on the fuselage. Petraeus encouraged his civilian counterparts to exit the plane first. Accompanied by aides and security officers, they walked briskly to three Black Hawk helicopters, their rotors whirling, to take them to the headquarters of the International Security Assistance Force, a five-minute flight away.

Despite the six-hour-and-forty-five-minute flight from NATO headquarters in Brussels, Petraeus was all energy the next morning when he met with Rear Admiral Greg Smith, deputy chief of staff for communications. Smith, who had been one of Petraeus's media gurus during the surge in Iraq, and then served with him at Central Command, recorded no fewer than seventeen directives from Petraeus in his small five-by-seven-inch notebook. “Just need to keep pushing out little stories, most won't make the news, but they do add up,” said one of Smith's notations. “Get with bureau chiefs, new sheriff in town,” said others. Petraeus was in an information war. Everything coming out of his mouth and the ISAF press office was likely to be “parsed” by the press, he concluded. It was critical to get the narrative correct, because that would be the key to buying time. The last note Petraeus emphasized to Smith: It would be essential to strive once again to be “first with the truth.”

An advance team from CENTCOM had arrived a few days earlier to outfit Petraeus's quarters: a warren of Conex containers, four in all, that the troops called his “hooch.” The first eight-by-twenty-foot Conex included a stationary exercise bike, a flat-screen TV and three large printers; the next one housed his desk, with three computers and considerable communications equipment: secure and unsecure telephones, VTC capability, and all the other technology needed to keep up with events—and the ticking clocks—in Washington and Kabul and the capitals of up to forty-nine nations contributing to the NATO-directed coalition. The third was his bedroom, which consisted of a single bed, an old mattress, two small lockers and an attached bathroom with a tiny shower. And the fourth was home to his enlisted aide. It was a stark contrast to the villa in which he'd lived in Baghdad—rumored to have been Saddam's mother's—or the new quarters he and his wife had moved into in Tampa just one month earlier.

In his first “stand-up” briefing at 7:30 the following morning, Petraeus promised a review of the Tactical Directive, a document that provided detailed guidelines on the use of force in combat that had been issued exactly a year earlier—and had been strictly enforced—by his predecessor, the now-cashiered McChrystal. The document stressed the need to protect the Afghan people and called for limiting the use of close air support and artillery against residential compounds. “We must avoid the trap of winning tactical victories—but suffering strategic defeats—by causing civilian casualties or excessive damage and thus alienating the people,” it read.

This Tactical Directive had proved problematic. The
Rolling Stone
article that led to McChrystal's downfall scorched the general and his aides, caricaturing them as testosterone-addled frat boys as they insulted Obama, Biden, Holbrooke, Eikenberry and even Karzai, with whom McChrystal reportedly got along famously. But the article's lengthiest passage described McChrystal's meeting with a group of soldiers at an outpost near Kandahar who believed that his Tactical Directive and severe restrictions on the use of airpower were tying their hands and getting them killed.

At ISAF headquarters in Kabul, looking out over forty staff officers seated before him at two horseshoe-shaped tables in the Situational Awareness Room, Petraeus said he understood the troopers' message. “There is no question about our commitment to reducing civilian loss of life, which is a moral imperative I absolutely support,” he said, repeating the words he'd used during his Senate confirmation. “There is, however, concern in the ranks and in some of our nations about how we have applied the Tactical Directive, and they must be addressed.” Petraeus explained that he would rely on his operational commander, Lieutenant General David M. Rodriguez, to make recommendations. There was, Petraeus observed, “a clear moral imperative to make sure we are fully supporting our troopers in combat. This debate is not about changing the rules of engagement; it is about implementing the Tactical Directive in a way that gives soldiers in trouble the support they need while doing everything possible to protect the Afghan people.”

Petraeus would rely heavily on Rodriguez to oversee military operations. Rodriguez had spent more time in Afghanistan and knew the country better, down to the village level, than any other general in theater. Tall and rumpled, Rodriguez had first arrived in Afghanistan in 2007, as a division commander, just as the Taliban were reemerging as a potent insurgency. He then became Defense secretary Gates's senior military assistant, until Gates sent him back to Afghanistan as McChrystal's deputy in the summer of 2009. Part of that assignment involved standing up the new ISAF Joint Command to unify NATO, U.S. and Afghan forces. Rodriguez was also the principal architect of the operational-level campaign plan Petraeus was inheriting. Rodriguez and McChrystal had been classmates at West Point and remained close friends. McChrystal considered Rodriguez “the best combat leader I have ever known.”

Rodriguez identified ninety of four-hundred-plus districts in Afghanistan—population centers, markets, transportation nodes and agricultural centers—which would have to be controlled to turn back the Taliban. A principal focus was the capital region, around Kabul, home to one-fifth of the Afghan population and one of the safest places in Afghanistan, with the security zone expanding south and east against fierce Taliban resistance in some areas. The focus in northern Afghanistan was the Baghlan-Kunduz corridor, a densely populated region along two main commercial arteries. The western parts of the country remained relatively stable, and Herat, in Herat Province, to the far northwest, was a bustling city, largely free of violence, although there were periodic attacks. The Taliban strongholds were to the southwest, in Helmand Province, to the south, in Kandahar, and in the eastern provinces that lay on the routes from Pakistan's rugged tribal areas to Kabul.

Helmand had been Rodriguez's first thrust in March 2010. It was considered home to the illegal narcotics industry in fertile southern Afghanistan that fueled the Taliban insurgency. Now that central Helmand Province had largely been cleared, Petraeus would command the next thrust, focused on Kandahar and its surrounding districts, the birthplace of the Taliban movement. Once the Taliban had been rooted out there, Petraeus would turn his focus in late 2010 to the east and the mountainous terrain along the Pakistan border, the country's most difficult terrain in both human and physical terms. There, an earlier strategy for holding desolate mountain valleys with a far-flung network of combat outposts had been largely abandoned. It had given way to more targeted operations aimed at shutting down insurgents' “rat lines” across the border and establishing a layered defense against those insurgents who did manage to get through.

Petraeus had begun his remarks to the staff at ISAF headquarters with a laudatory reference to McChrystal. “I am delighted to be here, but I am not delighted to be here under the circumstances,” he said. “I admire what General McChrystal achieved in terms of input and output and will take much of his work forward.” But he knew that McChrystal's Tactical Directive wasn't the only issue that needed to be addressed, as he'd been hearing from people like Doug Ollivant even before he left Washington. One of his first acts as commander of the war in Afghanistan came that morning when he announced that checking e-mail or surfing the Web during the morning brief—a practice McChrystal not only tolerated but practiced himself on three laptops at a time—was unacceptable.
With that, a clicking chorus of more than sixty closing laptops filled the room.

Comparisons between Petraeus and McChrystal were inevitable. Both men, lean if not slightly gaunt, were famously fit and ran religiously. Both were West Point graduates and prodigious readers. Both attracted loyal followings among ambitious young officers. Both were open to new ideas and popular with reporters. But lost on many in Washington was the reality—soon to be apparent to those on the ground in Afghanistan—that there was a new strategic force loosed in Kabul: Petraeus's will.

“RESULTS, BOY!”
his father used to say. He was not interested in excuses. The preternaturally gifted young David Petraeus delivered. Whether it was by winning the newspaper boy delivery contest as an adolescent, scoring the winning goal in a critical high school soccer game, or becoming the head of the ecumenical religious youth groups in Cornwall, New York, just seven miles from West Point, Petraeus displayed his drive early. The “no-excuses” attitude Sixtus Petraeus displayed with his son came from his own experience as an officer on a Dutch ship and then as the captain of a U.S. Merchant Marine ship in World War II. Sixtus allowed little room for error in the younger Petraeus's performance in school, in sports, or at home, in part because of these high standards. A desire to please his father would, in great part, shape Petraeus's desire to excel. His father was an austere perfectionist who would do anything for his son but who dispensed his affection in the form of “gruff love,” as Petraeus describes it. Still, he respected his father and relished hearing stories of his time in the military.

Petraeus's father had been at sea with a Dutch ship when Germany invaded Holland in May of 1940. According to Petraeus's only sibling, his older sister, Carol, their father's ship had just arrived in New York City when he received the news that the Netherlands had been overrun. There was no way he could return to Holland. He found himself and his crew welcomed in New York at a soldiers-and-sailors event in a local auditorium in the Seamen's Church Institute. One of the event coordinators he met was the petite and pretty Miriam Howell, a librarian who had attended Oberlin College, in Ohio. Sixtus and Miriam were married in April 1941 in the Ocean Avenue Congregational Church, in Brooklyn, New York. Soon after, Sixtus and most of his shipmates signed on with the U.S. Merchant Marine, and ultimately he became a U.S. citizen.

Born near Rotterdam, Sixtus and his family were originally from the Friesland area, in the northern part of Holland. This area was distinct from the country's eleven other provinces, with its own dialect, its dense agricultural production and its heavy presence of windmills. “I'm not Dutch; I'm Friesian,” Sixtus would sternly tell his new friends in the community, in his thick accent.

On his mother's side, David Petraeus was English. Miriam Howell's great-great-great-grandfather was a lord of Westbury Manor, where his son, Miriam's great-great-grandfather Edward Howell, was born in 1584. Edward Howell's family emigrated to New England as part of the “Great Migration” of the English Puritans, landing in Lynn, Massachusetts, in the 1630s.

After gaining his citizenship, Sixtus quickly found a new home. The U.S. Merchant Marine was desperate for experienced sailors. It was losing sailors faster than they could be generated. With his experience and English skills, Sixtus was promoted in the subsequent years and quickly rose in rank, eventually becoming a captain in 1945. He was one of a corps of decorated Merchant Mariners whom the Russians would later recognize with a medal of achievement—in part for having survived a convoy to Murmansk, an extremely dangerous mission in which numerous ships typically were sunk by German U-boats operating from Norwegian fjords. 

After the war, Sixtus and Miriam moved to Cornwall-on-Hudson, a “Norman Rockwell community” along the Hudson River with a little white church and steeple on the village's Main Street. The two were active in their church, paid cash for everything they bought, including their house, and kept a low profile in local politics.

Sixtus's career at sea meant that he and Miriam, a town librarian, wouldn't have children until later. Carol was born in 1947, David in 1952. Their simple life in Cornwall consisted of few faraway adventures but plenty of East Coast ski trips (Sixtus remained a member of a downhill ski club into his seventies), camping trips in local state parks, and trips to historical sites in New England—visiting Concord and Walden Pond and beyond and reading excerpts from history books and relevant literature along the way. The Petraeuses' backyard had ropes for climbing, a pull-up bar, a baseball backstop, a basketball hoop and various sports equipment; there were always soccer balls and baseball bats lying around. The simple two-story, one-and-a-half bathroom, four-bedroom house was rich with books and newspapers. Petraeus's mother was, at times, overly attentive and prone to worrying, but she adored her children and, as a librarian and a lover of Charles Dickens and other classics, took great care in Petraeus's intellectual development. Miriam wanted her son to go to Oberlin College, where she and all her cousins had received their degrees. But for a boy growing up seven miles from West Point, the allure of the U.S. Military Academy was irresistible.