The War Within (19 page)

"That was Casey and Abizaid's strategy," Rumsfeld said.

"I understand that, Mr. Secretary," Keane said. "But I think your influence over this strategy was there." He reminded Rumsfeld that he disagreed with what he called the secretary's "minimalist ideology"óthe desire to avoid creating an artificial dependence by doing everything for the Iraqis. Rumsfeld always had believed that the model from Bosnia-Kosovo in the 1990s was wrong, bloated by far too many people from U.S. agencies doing too many things that local governments should do for themselves. Reasonable logic, Keane said, but not in a situation with

"somebody contesting you and conducting armed violence against you."

Rumsfeld kept putting it off on Abizaid and Casey.

But you influenced the environment with your strong views, Keane replied. You allowed this to happen. The effort to advise the Iraqi security forces needs to be beefed up considerably, he added. The U.S. forces doing the training of Iraqis are often National Guard and Reserve officers who don't have operational experience and on occasion are advising more experienced Iraqis. Some of it was embarrassing. "This needs to be the number one personnel management policy in the United States Army," Keane said.

"It is," Rumsfeld replied. "These guys have got it, and they're fixing it."

"No," Keane said gently. "I have too much anecdotal evidence to the contrary. The advisory program is far less than what it really needs to be, and we have to put a major emphasis on it."

Keane didn't think he was telling Rumsfeld anything he didn't know deep down. He offered some possible solutions.

The options on the table, as he saw them, included immediate withdrawal, gradual withdrawal, or staying where they were and increasing the number of advisers and trying to better the Iraqi security forces. "All those options leave the enemy with the initiative, leave the enemy with its momentum," Keane said. "And they will continue to exploit the vulnerabilities and push this government. It will fracture the government, force it to disintegrate and we have the potential of truly leading to a civil war, where you don't have to debate whether it is or not. It'd be obvious to everybody. There is no option remaining to us at this point other than to do what should be obvious to all of us nowówhat we never did. And that is get security for the peopleÖ. It has become so obvious to me that security has become the necessary precondition for political progress, for economic development, and even for social progress in this country that's so fractured."

Keane saw that Rumsfeld didn't agree, but the secretary wasn't in his usual combative mode.

What was needed, Keane said, was an "escalation of forces to gain security." It would mean many more brigadesótens of thousands more troops.

At this, Rumsfeld's face sank. It was exactly what the man who had conceived of a small, agile force did not want.

"How do we attain victory?" Keane asked. "You cannot defeat the insurgents by destroying their forces, in other words by focusing on killing and capturing. The fact is they will be re-created." There was an almost limitless supply of discontented and angry young men in Iraq. While killing insurgents had a value, Keane said, killing alone was not an acceptable strategy. "Victory is attained by the permanent isolation of the insurgent from the population," he said.

"You have to protect the population to get that kind of isolation. The bitter lesson learned: The insurgents, Sunni insurgents, control the population in the contested areas.

"We would concentrate our forces in an area to run out the insurgents, we would place static forces to control the population once that's done, and protect them and support [them]. And prevent the insurgents from coming back in to terrorize and intimidate and also to assassinate." We must live "with and among the people" 24/7, Keane said, "not returning to forward operating bases each night, as we have in the past. We're much too isolated from the people. We have to control the population in terms of movementsócensus, ID cards. Eventually we need to set up local elections and test leaders. And we have to drive out the remnants of the insurgents."

Keane cited a model from 2005. "You remember Tall Afar, for example, H. R. McMaster?"

"Yeah, yeah, I do," Rumsfeld said.

"Let me take you back to that," Keane said. It was a city of 250,000 people. The operation was carried out in three phasesódrive the insurgents out, set up static patrol bases in the town, and win trust from the people so they'd help prevent insurgents from coming back in. Colonel McMaster then held local elections to empower the local officials and brought in economic recovery. He stabilized that city in about six to eight months, which is pretty remarkable, Keane said. "Anybody that's looked at it knows how remarkable it is."

Reading from notes he had jotted on yellow legal pages, Keane asked, "What else can we do? First of all, we have to decide if we
want
to win. And are we really serious about it? That's a major decision. And you have to recognize that the current strategyóif we don't change it, we will lose and we will fail.

"If we want to win, then we have to match our policies and our resources with our rhetoric." Then, aiming squarely at General Casey, Keane said, "We have to put somebody in charge who knows what he's doing. We have to demand victory from him and hold him and the other generals accountable. And tell them they are not coming home until they achieve it."

Also, he said, we must put the entire weight of the U.S. government behind this effort. "Recognize the limitations of good, conventional war commanders. Some do not make good counterinsurgency leadersólack of intellectual flexibility, agility in dealing with a high degree of uncertainty." Conventional warfare leans heavily on satellites and upscale signals intelligence to help determine where the enemy is, he continued.

"In counterinsurgency or irregular warfare, you really don't know where the enemy is." In conventional warfare, the enemy has to move equipment, supplies and men, thus flagging his intentions. "Here, you can't see any of it. So every single day, you're dealing with a very high degree of uncertainty. And in my view, not everybody can deal with that if you are trained to deal" with conventional fighting. What a commander naturally does is to try to control uncertainties and develop measurements to assess performance. "But we were not doing it in the context of what the enemy was really doing to us," Keane said. He recommended that Rumsfeld assemble some people to examine the strategy, using the accelerating violence as a rationale for an outside study.

"This is a good time to make a change with Casey and Abizaid," Keane told Rumsfeld. Both generals already had been extended. "You put in a new strategy, in fairness to that strategy, we should put a new team in to execute it and not rely on the old team. It's much too much for them to make a dramatic change and reject their politics from the past. I don't believe you have to make a major announcement of the change, in the sense that you can give the generals a soft landing." It was an unwritten, and normally unspoken, military rule: Protect the generals.

As Rumsfeld listened, Keane pressed on with his notes. "Stop the ramp-down planning now," he said. Casey had put this in motion despite the rising level of violence. It was confusing everyone about U.S. intentions and commitment.

How willing would troops on the ground be to risk their lives, knowing that withdrawal was imminent? "Stop pressuring to accelerate the training of Iraqis, and stop pressuring to accelerate the transition to Iraqis. Stop the plans to move to four mega-bases." Casey's plan was eventually to move entirely out of Baghdad. Defeating insurgencies required decentralization just like the insurgents, Keane said, and Casey was going to make everything more centralized to reduce casualties. Reducing casualties was essential, but not at the expense of the mission, he said.

Number eight, Keane saidóhe had listed his pointsódouble the size of the planned Iraqi security force to 600,000

army and police.

Rumsfeld clearly didn't like that one, but he remained silent.

"We need to generate more U.S. forces," Keane said again, without suggesting how many more. "We need enough to secure Baghdad." More forces could be found many ways. "We don't have to do 12-and seven-month tours for the Army and Marine Corps, respectively. We can go to longer tours for each. We can go to indefinite tours. We have fought more of our wars based on indefinite tours."

Going back to his time as Army vice chief, Keane recalled, "I'm the one that recommended to you the one-year tour, if you remember, and then you asked me to go over and talk to the president about it a couple of days later. So I obviously believed in the value of a rotation.

"But this goes back to my original premise about 'Do we want to win, and how serious are we?' And if we are, then it's going to be at some sacrifice." Operations Together Forward I and II had failed miserably, Keane reminded the secretary, and primarily because there were not enough troops to protect the population.

"What we do right now is, we have forward operating bases. Big bases, highly protected, very Americanized inside."

The largest bases had gyms for working out and movie theater complexes like those found in U.S. shopping malls.

"And so, we go outside those bases on patrol. Patrols are overwhelmingly vehicle-borne patrols," which only invited the stepped-up IED attacks. "We call them presence patrols. They have very little value. They do not pick up much intelligence, and we're more targets than anything else."

As an alternative, Keane said, "We would move into a neighborhood and occupy some empty buildings that are not being used. Or, in some cases, we may take over some building that the Iraqis are using or living in, and we would work out a payment for them to do it." It had been done before. The soldiers would eat there, sleep there and patrol there. They would do foot patrols, and the IEDs don't work as well against such patrols, Keane said. "The advantage that that patrol has is its contact with the people, day in and day out. Talking to merchants, talking to citizens. And eventually, what happens is the people see that we're staying, not leaving. Trust begins to build up, and this is an important issue."

The soldiers and the Iraqis become mutually dependent. "And that takes a few weeks to happen, but it will happen because then they start to clue them on who the enemy is, and if there's a threat to them in the area, then they'll start reporting the threat. And we have evidence that that's what's happened in Tall Afar over and over againÖ. We know this can work in terms of the people becoming, really, an intelligence vehicle for us."

Keane said, "We have to fix the strategic and operational intelligence." Not enough people were working on Iraq.

"The Central Intelligence Agency, reported to me from a reliable source, has 38 analysts that work exclusively on Iraq. We have more working on China than we have on Iraq, and yet Iraq is of emergency proportions and is a major threat in terms of our national security if we lose it."

Rumsfeld made some pejorative comments about the CIA, to which Keane agreed.

The Joint Chiefs' intelligence directorate, called J-2, and the Defense Intelligence Agency have 61 people who work Iraq exclusively, Keane said. They are supposed to have 156. So they're sitting below 50 percent strength in the entire Pentagon on Iraq intelligence.

"We are not mapping the networks," Keane said. "What I mean by that is, in the theater, in Iraq, we don't have enough analysts to actually try to determine the insurgent and al Qaeda network. What is it, and how do you map it?

This is like detailed homicide work, detective work, putting the mosaic together." That entails tedious reading and sifting of interrogation reports, tactical operations, signals intercepts, other human intelligence reports, he said, along with captured documents.

Keane also had a laundry list for how to reconstitute the political and civil society in Iraq.

"We need to avoid triumphant rhetoric. It's caused credibility problemsóthe so-called Westmoreland 'light at the end of the tunnel.' Casey's been withdrawing forces twice now, based on successes. And what I'm telling you is obviously that hasn't worked, and what we have to do is increase forces. So if we're going to accept a change in strategy here, then as that strategy begins to work, which I think it will, we have to avoid being triumphant about it. Because the enemy has a vote here, and we've always underestimated our enemy."

Number 15 on Keane's list: "We have to win the battle of Baghdad. We have to absolutely stabilize Baghdad by control of the population, I know I've said that before, but I'm coming back to it for emphasis."

As if this were not enough, Keane had a reading assignment for Rumsfeld. "I think you and others should read, to understand this, a book called
Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice
by David Galula. It's only about 100

pages, and if you don't want to read the whole hundred pages, read the foreword and the introduction, and then read chapters four through seven, which is really execution."

Galula, a former French military officer, had argued in the 1964 book that insurgencies are revolutionary wars that are won or lost based on who wins the support of the local population.

The defense secretary had taken notes, asked questions and probed. But it was a scaled-down version of the old, fiery Rumsfeld. As Keane left, he realized that the atmosphere within the office seemed different. Every aspect of Rumsfeld, from the tired look on his face to his body language, signaled a sense of resignation. Nothing Keane had said should have come as a surprise to Rumsfeld, Keane thought, other than the fact that a friend was saying it all so directly.

But something had to change. Between 50 and 75 U.S. service members were being killed each month, and that number was rising sharply.

L
ieutenant General David Petraeus was a rising star in the Army and, in Jack Keane's view, the general most likely to solve the Iraq problem.

Petraeus also was like a little brother to Keane. They had first met back in the late 1980s, when Keane was a colonel at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, and Petraeus was a major working as an aide to Army Chief of Staff Carl Vuono.