The Fourth Star (33 page)

By the summer of 2005 Iraq’s “purple finger moment,” in which Iraqis held up ink-stained fingers to celebrate their first election in three decades, had long passed. It was obvious to lower-ranking officers that something was badly wrong. One of the most influential young skeptics was Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl, who returned from a year of tough fighting in Iraq in the fall of 2004 and found that he was something of a celebrity. Nagl’s fame came not from battlefield heroics, but from the book on counterinsurgency that he had written while teaching in the Social Sciences Department at West Point. In it, he contrasted the U.S. defeat in Vietnam with the British victory in Malaya in the 1950s against another Communist insurgency. The difference, Nagl argued, was that the British generals saw the folly of using massive force against guerrillas who were often indistinguishable from ordinary villagers. Instead they focused on building local governments, training security forces, and protecting the civilians. In Vietnam, the United States resorted largely to search-and-destroy tactics after they began funneling in large numbers of troops.

Nagl’s conclusions about Vietnam were not that different from those Petraeus had reached in his own dissertation a decade earlier. “In these dirty little wars,” Nagl wrote, “political and military tasks intertwine, and the objective is more often ‘nation building’ than the destruction of an enemy army.” Nagl’s work exemplified George Lincoln’s original conception of Sosh as a place that should challenge the Army’s conventional wisdom and prepare it intellectually for the rigors of modern warfare. In Iraq,
new ideas were coming to an amazing degree from former Sosh professors, including Chiarelli, Petraeus, and Nagl.

When Casey took command in 2004, Nagl had been nine months into his yearlong deployment as the operations officer of a 700-soldier battalion in Khalidiyah, a poor Sunni city near Fallujah made up of block upon block of concrete houses surrounded by high mud walls. If Casey had asked, Nagl would have told him that his unit was losing. His men had minimal understanding of the culture and the centuries-old tribes that dominated the area. The police his battalion trained were routinely murdered, and most residents wanted nothing to do with the Iraqi or U.S. forces. “I don’t think we could have picked a more foreign place on earth to fight an insurgency,” he confessed.

On his way back to the United States in the fall of 2004 Nagl stopped by Al Faw Palace to see Grant Doty, a friend from Sosh who was working for Casey. He spoke briefly with Petraeus, whom he knew through Sosh connections. No one else had taken the time to talk to one of the Army’s most knowledgeable counterinsurgency experts and to hear his take on the war, on what was working in the field and what wasn’t. Nagl spent most of 2005 in the Pentagon, where his disillusionment grew. He railed to reporters and whoever else would listen that U.S. units were desperately short of interpreters. Often his battalion had dispatched patrols without any Arabic-speakers. “If soldiers can’t interact with the population, all they are doing is trolling for IEDs,” he said, using the military acronym for roadside bombs. He barraged Petraeus with e-mails complaining that the Army had no counterinsurgency doctrine and needed to ramp up an effort to write one immediately. And he worried that the military, just as in Vietnam, didn’t want to learn how to fight guerrilla wars. “Beware of the majors of Desert Storm,” he often said. These were officers who had fought in the 1991 tank battle and refused to believe there was any other type of war. It was the Army equivalent of “Don’t trust anybody over thirty.”

In northwestern Iraq, Colonel H. R. McMaster, the commander of a 3,500-soldier armored cavalry regiment, was leading his own rebellion in the summer of 2005. McMaster had long been a “water walker,” pegged early in his career, like Petraeus and Abizaid, as a future general. He had
earned a Silver Star for his battlefield prowess in the Persian Gulf War. The Army’s official history of the conflict opened with a vivid description of his tank crew destroying a much larger Iraq formation: “McMaster spotted the tanks. ‘Fire, fire sabot,’ he yelled as he kicked up his tank’s metal seat and dropped inside to look through his thermal imager. His clipped command was a code that automatically launched his three crew mates into a well-rehearsed sequence of individual actions.”

After the 1991 war McMaster earned a doctorate in history from the University of North Carolina and wrote an acclaimed book on Vietnam. Relying on recently declassified documents,
Dereliction of Duty
built a damning case that the Vietnam-era generals had caved in to President Lyndon Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, backing a war strategy they knew would fail. By the time McMaster was writing, Vietnam was no longer such an open wound, and General Henry Shelton, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, invited McMaster for breakfast at the Pentagon to talk to the military’s top four-stars about his research. Shelton had read the book on the recommendation of his executive officer, David Petraeus, then a colonel.

McMaster went on to work for Abizaid in Kosovo and at U.S. Central Command. Abizaid saw a little bit of himself in the young, intellectually restless officer. McMaster was emotional, stubborn, gracious, wickedly funny, full of boyish enthusiasm, and constantly questioning his commanders, especially in Iraq, where he led the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment. “Why did the U.S. military have to retake the same cities from insurgents again and again?” he asked. Why had there been no theater reserve force in the country that could react to a surprise enemy offensive or exploit fleeting opportunities? Why had the enemy been allowed to maintain safe havens? They were legitimate questions, but they also drove his superiors crazy.

“You need to stop thinking strategically,” McMaster’s brigadier general boss in Mosul warned him in the summer of 2005. It was Army-speak for “Shut the hell up, Colonel, and worry about your little piece of the war.” His bosses sometimes had a point.

McMaster’s piece of the war was Tal Afar, a city of about a quarter million residents set on an ancient smuggling route near the Syrian border.
Foreign fighters linked to Al Qaeda were using it as a staging area before heading off to Baghdad and Mosul. On the eve of an assault by McMaster’s regiment, General Casey flew in to hear his plan for retaking the city.

It was a tense time. In the weeks leading up to the operation, McMaster had asked for an extra battalion of about 800 soldiers to help clear the city’s southern district, a warren of muddy streets and alleys too narrow for the regiment’s tanks. He had expected a quick answer. After all, the attack into the city was the only major operation planned during the summer of 2005, and Tal Afar was key terrain for Al Qaeda. Instead he got no response.

Now the operation was days away and McMaster knew he was going to have to get by with fewer troops. He told Casey that he was going to position his forces in a sector adjacent to the troublesome southern district and try to draw the enemy fighters out so that they could be more easily killed. He didn’t mention the memos he’d written requesting the extra soldiers. It was too late to get them there before the attack was scheduled to kick off, anyway.

When the briefing was done the two officers hopped into an SUV for the short ride back to the airstrip where Casey’s plane was waiting. The regimental command post on the outskirts of Tal Afar was a big plywood building that looked like a beached ark. There was an old Saddam-era airstrip and several boxy brick buildings nearby. A single ribbon of blacktop led the five miles into the city. As they bumped down the rutted road toward the airfield, Casey told McMaster that he needed another battalion for his attack. After hearing the plan, Casey had reached the same conclusion as McMaster. The extra soldiers would drive out the insurgents in the densely packed southern portion of the city that had McMaster so worried. As he spoke, McMaster realized that his memos asking for more troops had been forwarded to Baghdad but had never made it up the chain of command to Casey.

Years later Casey would concede that such incidents were fairly common, and he suggested that his subordinate generals’ reluctance to ask for additional troops grew out of the Army’s can-do culture. “It’s our nature to get the job done with what we have,” he said. “And I was up against that all
the time.” An extra infantry battalion was flown in to help McMaster hold the city but didn’t arrive in time for the invasion.

McMaster saw a bigger problem. President Bush wanted to transform Iraq into a model democracy for the Middle East and an ally in the war on terror. Realizing those lofty goals demanded a massive commitment of troops, money, and civilian expertise. But the Pentagon was moving in a different direction. Rumsfeld was consumed by a desire to leave. In Baghdad the military’s strategy was focused on handing over the fight to Iraqis.

In his mission statement for his regiment, McMaster laid out his main objective as defeating the enemy and setting “conditions for economic and political development.” His superiors asked him if he was setting a higher standard for his area than he had been given. To McMaster the conclusion was inescapable: the United States was not fully committed to winning. “We’re managing this war, not fighting it,” he complained.

In the summer of 2005, Casey summoned Colonel Bill Hix to his office. He had a special mission for Hix: take one month and visit as many U.S. brigades and battalions as possible, then write a report grading the war effort. The two had forged an unusual relationship for a colonel and a four-star general. Hix, the son of a CIA operative, had spent most of his career in the Special Forces and had advised the Philippine military in its fight against Islamic guerrillas. Among the Americans in the palace, the bald, broad-shouldered colonel was the closest thing Casey could find to a counterinsurgency expert. He acted almost as a tutor, schooling Casey on a form of warfare he didn’t really understand. As Casey grew more comfortable, Hix evolved into a trusted advisor.

In Army terms, Hix was a “fireproof colonel.” He’d put in enough time to earn his full retirement pension and knew he was never going to make general. He served at his own pleasure and had nothing to lose. He and Casey frequently disagreed, particularly on the question of more troops, which Hix favored. “When I think I need more troops I will ask for them,” Casey would tell Hix. But Casey liked his candor.

Most of Hix’s time was spent in meetings or in his cubicle, where he
worked fourteen-hour days, cranking out slides and writing briefing papers for Casey and the Pentagon. Sometimes Casey brought him along when he went out to meet units. But the trips provided only fleeting glimpses of Iraq. By the summer of 2005 Hix was desperate to get out of the palace and see the real war.

To accompany Hix on his inspection tour, he drafted Kalev Sepp, a retired Special Forces officer who had fought in El Salvador, earned a history doctorate from Harvard, and taught classes in guerrilla war at the Naval Postgraduate School. Sepp had arrived a few days earlier at Hix’s invitation to deliver a series of lectures to Casey’s staff on counterinsurgency operations. As soon as he learned about the study, Hix had dashed back to Sepp’s cubicle. His friend wasn’t there, so Hix scribbled a quick message on a Post-it note. “You owe me
big
, Bill,” it read.

The two visited thirty-one different units and evaluated them using a checklist of counterinsurgency best practices developed by Sepp. Successful armies isolated the civilian population from the enemy by providing security, stable government, a strong police force, and decent jobs. They built sophisticated intelligence networks, used the minimum amount of force necessary in raids, and offered amnesty and rehabilitation to former insurgents.

Hix and Sepp didn’t want the units to feel as though they were being graded. So they tended to ask the field commanders open-ended questions: What were their priorities? What were their biggest concerns? What was keeping them from succeeding? Their fifteen-page report reached a dire conclusion: most of the U.S. units that they visited were ineffective. In a handful of cases brigade and battalion commanders didn’t understand how to defeat an insurgency. One commander in restive Anbar Province strode into a meeting with them, lit a cigar, and propped his feet on his desk. “We got three today,” he told them proudly. For him it was all about the body count.

Even if units in the field did everything right, they still didn’t have the manpower they needed to win. There weren’t enough U.S. and Iraqi troops in the country to drive insurgents from their safe havens and prevent them from returning, the report found, echoing McMaster’s frequent complaint. The advisory teams were too small and inexperienced.

But the biggest shortcoming, the report found, was the lack of political
and economic progress in the country. On those rare occasions when the government did make its presence felt outside of the Green Zone it displayed a pro-Shiite sectarian agenda that fueled the insurgency. If Casey wanted to fix the foundering war effort, he had to expand beyond training Iraqi troops and take on political and economic development in the country. Technically, the U.S. embassy was responsible for these areas. But the embassy was sorely lacking in money and manpower. Smart commanders tried to fill the gap, but they didn’t have the expertise to build local governments and jump-start the economy.