The Fourth Star (44 page)

Although Lieutenant Colonel Kuehl didn’t realize it, Petraeus’s command had helped spark the anti-Al Qaeda revolt in his Baghdad sector. Shortly after taking over, Petraeus had created the Force Security Engagement Cell, essentially a department of peace negotiations, to seek out reconcilable
enemies. He had put a British general in charge. “The Brits are good at talking to unsavory actors,” he reasoned, citing their experience in Northern Ireland. Several weeks earlier General Graeme Lamb, the first British general to lead the reconciliation effort, had made contact with a Sunni insurgent leader named Abu Azzam who had taken part in some of the first anti-Al Qaeda tribal uprisings in western Iraq in late 2006. By early 2007 Abu Azzam wanted help driving Al Qaeda extremists from his rural village closer to Baghdad.

Lamb, in turn, had introduced Abu Azzam to Lieutenant Colonel Kurt Pinkerton, the battalion commander in charge of the area. “See what you can do with this guy,” he said. Slowly the two men formed an alliance. In early April, Pinkerton asked the Iraqi for help finding recruits for the local police force in the area around Abu Azzam’s village. “A week or so later, I drove out to a school compound and there were about eight hundred to a thousand men waiting to volunteer,” Pinkerton recalled. He snapped a picture of the teeming crowd that made its way up to Petraeus. As was often the case in Iraq, something big was happening and U.S. commanders were only catching fleeting glimpses.

When Abu Abed started building his fledgling force in Baghdad’s Ameriyah neighborhood two months later, he borrowed some fighters from Abu Azzam’s group and turned to his fellow Iraqi for advice on working with the United States. The Americans, meanwhile, were also trading information about these potential allies. Pinkerton drafted a seven-page memo outlining his alliance with Abu Azzam that was sent to commanders throughout Baghdad, including Kuehl. “If you are not a very good diplomat, start learning,” Pinkerton advised in the memo. “Reconciliation isn’t about any one party winning, but about all parties’ willingness to compromise.” He suggested a series of gestures that had helped him win Abu Azzam’s trust, such as releasing low-level prisoners, giving him responsibility for security in his village, and rewarding his tribe with small reconstruction contracts.

Although Petraeus had emphasized the importance of reconciliation, the real work didn’t happen at his level. The enemy was too fragmented. Instead, the reconciliation effort depended on midlevel commanders seizing the initiative and making peace with their former enemies. Throughout
the summer, these officers brokered alliances with dozens of Sunni insurgents throughout Baghdad. They organized neighborhood watch groups that guarded checkpoints. Like Lieutenant Colonels Pinkerton and Kuehl, they revised the rules as they went, relying on their best instincts, informal advice from their fellow officers, and their knowledge of the local politics and personalities.

By late June Petraeus’s command was getting requests from his corps headquarters, which oversees daily military operations, asking for formal guidelines on the alliances. In its four years in Iraq, the United States had issued thousands of regulations governing just about every facet of a soldier’s life; the Army loved rules. Petraeus, however, resisted the urge to put anything in writing that would constrain officers’ options. He wanted them to experiment.

The Sunni reconciliation program marked a huge shift in strategy. Under Casey the focus had been on building the government and bolstering Maliki. Working with the armed Sunni groups, which were outside of the Shiite-dominated government’s control, undermined the central government’s authority. One of Petraeus’s main tasks over the summer was to convince Maliki, who saw the former insurgents as criminals, to at least tolerate the alliances.

Even before Petraeus set foot in the country for his third tour, Iraqi officials complained that he was overbearing, arrogant, and pushy. He put demands on government leaders and on rare occasions yelled at them. A regular target was Lieutenant General Ahmed Farouk, who ran Maliki’s Office of the Commander in Chief, a secretive arm of the government that was responsible for firing several Sunni army and police commanders. In one meeting, Farouk announced that the prime minister’s office was forming a special unit to inspect checkpoints in the capital. Petraeus erupted, dismissing the idea as nonsense. It was the equivalent of President Bush forming his own armed unit to scrutinize traffic cops in Washington, D.C. “We all know what the real problem is. It’s that you don’t have an NCO corps or junior officers who will enforce standards on checkpoints,” Petraeus barked. He leaned across the table and stared directly into the eyes of Maliki’s favorite general. “Everyone knows this. We’ve been talking about it for months. What are you going to do about it?” Petraeus’s red-faced
rant quickly outran his interpreter, who gave up translating. Petraeus kept yelling. He wanted to stop Farouk from forming the unnecessary unit. But the outburst also had a larger purpose. He wanted to discredit Farouk, whom he saw as a malign and sectarian influence on Maliki, and run him from the weekly security meeting.

In 2006 and 2007 U.S. officers talked about the Iraqis as if they were an inviolable force of nature: “We can’t want it more than the Iraqis,” generals would grouse. Petraeus believed he could make the Iraqis want what was best for them, though it would take time.

Petraeus never raised his voice with Maliki, but their relationship grew testy the longer it continued. He and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, a fluent Arabic-speaker, met with the prime minister on Thursdays in his office. Crocker took the chair closest to Maliki. Petraeus sat on the ambassador’s right. “Where are the M-16 rifles you promised us?” Maliki would rail one day. A few days later he’d accuse Petraeus of withholding ammunition from his troops.

“With respect, Mr. Prime Minister, I am prepared to give you my side of the story if you are willing to listen,” Petraeus would interrupt. To Maliki it looked as if the United States was more interested in organizing insurgents into militias than in building legitimate security forces. The prime minister’s aides began complaining that the United States didn’t even know how many Sunnis were participating in the neighborhood watch units.

In truth, it was hard for the Americans to keep count. The program was growing too quickly. By early fall Kuehl had 231 citizens on the U.S. payroll in Ameriyah, but there were at least 600 men in Abu Abed’s neighborhood force. Every month Kuehl gave the Iraqi about $160,000, most of which Abu Abed used to pay his men and buy local support. He sat behind a desk wearing a black cavalry hat, a gift from his American benefactors, and doled out money and favors to supplicants who lined up each afternoon outside his door. “I know Abu Abed was cutting deals in Ameriyah that we never saw and didn’t understand,” Kuehl said. Abu Abed also undoubtedly kept some of the money for himself.

The U.S. military, with Petraeus’s encouragement, had helped the anti-Al Qaeda uprising in Ameriyah take root and spread to other areas of
Baghdad, causing violence levels to drop throughout the capital. In the summer of 2007 the military didn’t control these fledgling uprisings. No one did.

As chief of staff, George Casey lived in Quarters One, a Victorian brick mansion at Fort Myer that he’d known since childhood; as a young boy he’d once set off the outdoor sprinkler system there, disrupting a garden party that he was attending with his parents. The house sat atop a hill overlooking Washington’s marble monuments and Arlington National Cemetery, where his father had been buried just weeks after he’d been commissioned as a second lieutenant.

One of George Casey’s first acts after taking office was to invite the retired general Edward “Shy” Meyer for lunch. Meyer, a longtime family friend, had been a protégé of Casey’s father. On the morning the elder Casey was killed, Meyer had tried to talk him out of flying his helicopter in bad weather. Nine years later, with the Army at its nadir, Meyer was named Army chief, the position Casey now held. He had been renowned for his bluntness in the job. In 1980 he had famously told Congress that the Army, still recovering from its defeat in Vietnam, was a “hollow force” that lacked the equipment and the motivated and educated soldiers it needed to prevail against the Soviets. His warning helped spur the Reagan defense buildup.

Casey and Meyer ate at a small table in his Pentagon office. Casey’s main job as chief was ensuring that the Army was holding up under the strain of two wars and was ready for any future conflicts. Some senior officers were concerned that the service, consumed with occupation duty and counterinsurgency, was losing its ability to fight a conventional war. Artillery units in Iraq and Afghanistan were being used as military police. Armor officers walked foot patrols, and when they were back in the United States, they spent most of their time recovering or preparing to return to
the wars. They didn’t have time to practice battalion- or brigade-sized assaults in their tanks. There were troubling indicators with regard to personnel issues. Suicides were rising. The Army was having a hard time retaining enough officers to fill jobs.

Casey invited Meyer to the Pentagon because he wanted some advice. “What were the early warning signs after Vietnam that the Army was in trouble?” he asked. Had anyone seen it coming? How quickly had the force collapsed?

It had been almost impossible to pin down the breaking point, Meyer replied. For years the force was strained by Vietnam but still holding together. Then all of a sudden it just fell apart. Experienced captains and sergeants started streaming out of the service, and no matter what the brass tried it was impossible to stanch the bleeding. It took ten years to pull the Army out of the spiral—and shifting to an all-volunteer force at the same time didn’t help. “There’s an invisible red line out there. You won’t know it until you cross it,” Meyer said. “Once you cross it, it’s too late.”

One key to keeping the Army away from the red line was convincing battle-hardened captains to stay in the military, Casey believed. But, worn down by repeated deployments, they were leaving at a growing rate. It wasn’t nearly as bad as it had been during Vietnam, but the Army had missed its goal for keeping captains two years in a row. Casey settled on the idea of a $20,000 retention bonus aimed at these officers in the Army. The Pentagon had long used cash bonuses to entice enlisted soldiers to stay in the service, but this was going to be the first time it had ever tried such a program out on officers.

Before he signed off on the bonuses, Casey asked division and brigade commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan to survey their captains and see if the cash payments would make a difference. The answer was mixed. Perhaps the most eloquent response came from Colonel J. B. Burton, who in the summer of 2007 was in charge of U.S. troops in west Baghdad and Ameriyah. “This is a very tough crowd of warriors,” Burton wrote. “They have spent the past four years in a continuous cycle of fighting, training, deploying, and fighting and seen no end in sight. They have seen their closest friends killed and maimed leaving young spouses and children as widows
and single parent kids… It’s not about the money, at least not $20,000. What these warriors really want is for their Army to invest in them personally by giving them time back to invest in themselves and their families.”

The long deployments weren’t the only gripe. Young officers also were frustrated that their Army hadn’t changed its training, equipment, and strategy quickly enough. At lower levels, captains and majors insisted that they had had to adapt to survive on Baghdad’s violent streets, but their generals were a step behind. The growing anger was captured most clearly in an essay written by Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yingling, a rising officer who was just about to take command of a 540-soldier battalion. Yingling published his critique, which was entitled “A Failure in Generalship,” in the June 2007 edition of
Armed Forces Journal
, a privately owned military publication. The essay was a passionate, angry, and in part naive cry for accountability and change at the top ranks. “America’s generals have been checked by a form of war that they did not prepare for and do not understand,” Yingling wrote. The essay’s most oft-repeated line came at the end: “As matters stand now, a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war.”

Yingling would admit that some senior officers had pushed for change. Both Petraeus and Chiarelli, for example, had written extensively about their experiences and the need to incorporate the lessons that young officers were learning in Iraq. To Yingling, though, the Army brass’s problems extended far beyond the efforts of a few reformers. The shortcomings in the general officer corps, he maintained, grew out of a personnel system that encouraged conformity and discouraged risk takers.

Within hours of its publication, the essay was rocketing around the Army by e-mail. Yingling had credibility because he had volunteered for two tours in Iraq, the second one working for Colonel McMaster in Tal Afar. He had a sterling pedigree that included three years teaching in the Sosh department at West Point and a recent selection to command a battalion. In short, he had a lot to lose.