Knife Fights Page 17

  I’d mentioned McMaster more than once to Geren during our Pentagon meetings and again at Fort Riley and told him that a whole generation of junior officers saw H. R. as a hero. The fact that the Army had chosen not to promote McMaster to brigadier general was a collective slap in all their faces. Partly as a result of those discussions, in the summer of 2007 Geren refused to sign a proposed list of Army generals to conduct the promotion board for the next crop of Army brigadiers, seeing in the list few veterans of the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead of approving business as usual, Geren took the very unusual step of requesting that General Petraeus return to the States from command in Iraq in order to sit on and chair the board (despite there being a more senior four-star on the board).

  In a sign of how important the secretary of defense considered the selection of the next crop of Army one-stars, Gates gave his permission to Geren to pull Petraeus out of combat at a time when progress in Iraq was still uncertain at best. The board—which also included Lieutenant General Stan McChrystal, then the JSOC Commander and also brought home from Iraq; Lieutenant General Pete Chiarelli, Gates’s senior military assistant; and Lieutenant General Ann Dunwoody, the Army’s senior female officer—was known in the Army as the “H. R. McMaster promotion board.” It selected H. R. for his star at long last.

  It did something else that was arguably just as important, selecting Sean MacFarland for his first star as well. MacFarland was the brigade commander in Ramadi who had provided the initial support for what became the Al Anbar Awakening that created the Sons of Iraq. MacFarland’s efforts were multiplied by the heroic work of Captain Travis Patriquin, the Arabic-speaking tribal engagement officer who was killed by an IED on December 6, 2006. Travis was in many ways the Lawrence of Arabia of America’s war in Iraq; possessor of a larger-than-life personality as well as a flamboyantly exuberant and well-out-of-regulation mustache, he was loved by the tribal leaders he came to know in Al Anbar.

  Travis was not the first to reach out to the Sunni tribes to convince them that their future lay in efforts not to overthrow the Shiite government by force but to fight their battles at the ballot box. Nonetheless, his successful campaign in Al Anbar was the seed corn that Petraeus nurtured early in his new command after visiting MacFarland in his first week back in Iraq. Those who suggest that any commander would have taken advantage of the nascent Sunni Awakening are unfamiliar with the many previous efforts by Sunni sheikhs to gain American support for their efforts against Al Qaeda in Iraq. They withered on the vine without high-level American and Iraqi support, resulting in the deaths of many brave Sunni leaders and dampening future enthusiasm for rebellion against Al Qaeda.

  Meanwhile, back at Fort Riley, it was getting easier to train military transition teams for service in Iraq as the situation on the ground improved. The system remained suboptimal, as it would have been far better to have standing advisory units to deploy and redeploy; but when the individual members of a transition team arrived at Fort Riley, we were by then at least able to tell them where in Iraq they would be deploying and to put them in touch with the unit they would be replacing. We could offer no such assurances to Afghanistan-bound teams, headed for a critically underresourced theater. The frustration of the mission was real, but I enjoyed discussing counterinsurgency theory and practice with the teams during their training and gave my pitch literally scores of times during the twenty-two months I spent in command.

  When in June 2008 I gave up command of 1-34 Armor, the tank battalion with which I’d fought so hard in Khalidiyah, after a little more than twenty years in uniform, I also retired from the Army. To its credit, the Army pokes and prods you when you join and again when you leave, and it pays compensation for whatever damage has been inflicted on you in the interim by the vagaries of military service. At my exit physical, the counselor looked at my test scores and said, “Wow, your wife takes good care of you.” Blood pressure and cholesterol levels were fine, and even my knees and back, the traditional bane of career tankers, were not much the worse for wear—no doubt helped by the fact that my last command was on the plains of Kansas and involved getting into and out of a Humvee rather than jumping off a tank in Baghdad clad in seventy pounds of body armor, Kevlar helmet, and other gear.

  Giving the flag symbolizing command of 1-34 Armor to Colonel Jeff Ingram at Camp Funston, June 2008.

  From Kansas, we moved to a home we’d purchased in Alexandria, Virginia, not far from the neighborhood in which we’d rented Admiral Jim Stavridis’s house during my previous Pentagon tour. On July 15 I showed up for my first day at work at the Center for a New American Security in company with my new officemate, Nate Fick, for whom this was also coincidentally his first day on the job.

  Jim Miller, the director of studies at CNAS, had called a few weeks earlier to check to see whether I would be willing to share an office with Nate even though other senior fellows had offices of their own. Although I didn’t know Nate well, having met him in person only a few times, first through the good offices of newswoman extraordinaire Martha Raddatz, I leaped at the chance to spend time with a man I’d already written I would be proud to work for despite the fact that he was a decade younger than I was. We’d spend about six months together in a small office at the back of the CNAS office complex, which we occasionally noted was the side where the actual work got done, with Nate focusing on Afghanistan and me splitting my time between that war and the windup of the one in Iraq. I knew when Nate had been in the office because driving home on those days, my sides hurt from laughing so hard.

  While still on what the Army calls “terminal leave” (probably because in its worldview there is no life after the Army), I returned to Iraq in the summer of 2008 at General Petraeus’s invitation and struggled to comprehend the extraordinary reversal in Iraq’s fortunes in the three and a half years I had been gone. I was simply unable to process the facts in front of me, befuddled by the contrast between my memories of a destroyed society and the reality of one that was being reborn right in front of me. The most vivid illustration of the change was the jewelry shops that I saw in Baghdad, overflowing with gold clearly visible through plate-glass windows. Security in a city has to be pretty good for that business model to be effective.

  I traveled in the company of former Marine Bing West, whose book The Strongest Tribe I had reviewed for The Washington Post just prior to getting on a plane with him. I had liked it, which made it even harder to keep secret the fact that I’d read the book throughout the trip. Cotravelers were CNAS colleagues Colin Kahl and Shawn Brimley and New Yorker writer and New America Foundation president Steve Coll, whom I hadn’t previously known. Coll was the author of Ghost Wars, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning history of the American role in Afghanistan between the Soviet departure and September 10, 2011. He was a gracious traveling companion and took the opportunity to interview me for a profile on Petraeus he was then writing for The New Yorker.

  This was my first experience of the “battlefield circulation” think-tank trips that Petraeus pioneered in Iraq in an attempt to create a better-informed punditocracy and thus public back home. Our guide was Army Lieutenant Colonel Joel Rayburn, a silver-haired intelligence officer and former West Point history instructor who ran Petraeus’s strategic advisory group, a sort of internal staff think tank that dealt with issues including measuring progress in the counterinsurgency campaign. Although Bing was a former four-star-equivalent assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, Petraeus made me the senior member of the trip for protocol purposes. Bing was less concerned about the briefing slides titled “Nagl plus four” than about the fact that for the first time ever on one of his trips to Iraq (this was number nine), he hadn’t gotten shot at. Unlike the rest of us, he refused to wear body armor and Kevlar helmets when outside the armored vehicles, preferring his well-loved Red Sox baseball cap.

  The trip was a revelation. We met members of the Awakening Councils who had decided to side with the Americans and then work
for the Iraqi government in order to protect their communities from the Iraqi government’s Shia-dominated security forces. They were a bit rough, but they were effective. These so-called Sons of Iraq were aided by massive concrete T-walls, which separated Baghdad neighborhoods into easily controlled, mostly single-sect enclaves. Good counterinsurgents make good walls; the history of counterinsurgency is filled with barriers that serve to concentrate populations like the “new villages” of British Malaya, and the T-walls were the modern evolution—creating what Petraeus called “gated communities.” We also visited some of the joint security stations that enforced the peace throughout Baghdad, manned by Iraqi Police and Army soldiers who had come a long, long way from those I had helped stand up in Khalidiyah what seemed a lifetime earlier. Local security forces remained as important as they had always been in these fights—they were the exit strategy in our counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq just as they had been for the British in Malaya and the Americans in Vietnam.

  I came back from the trip inspired, almost unbelieving. Before I left Baghdad, I’d written a piece that reflected on the changes in Iraq since my long year in Al Anbar. Remembering how I’d felt at the end of that tour, I titled this Sunday Washington Post article “Back in Baghdad: This Time, Things Are Looking Up” and illustrated it with a picture of the coffee mug that Gary Belcher had created in Fort Riley almost four years earlier.2 Slides that Petraeus’s staff put together later show the number of attacks, civilian and military deaths, and car bomb attacks falling dramatically after the summer of 2007.

  Washington was still several months behind the reality on the ground in Iraq, as it had been when the situation spiraled downward earlier in the war. The same was true now when the trajectory was in the opposite direction and Washington was denying the success of its policy. The Democratic presidential candidate, Senator Barack Obama, had defeated his primary opponent in part because Hillary Clinton had supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003 from her perch in the U.S. Senate and because he outflanked her to the left on the issue. She had overlearned the lesson from a decade earlier, when Sam Nunn had torpedoed his chances at becoming secretary of defense by voting against the authorization for the use of force in Desert Storm.

  Obama campaigned against the war in Iraq, calling Afghanistan “the good war,” while his Republican opponent, Vietnam war hero John McCain, used progress in Iraq as a rallying cry. The result was overdetermined, with the collapse of the American economy reinforcing the foreign policy errors of the George W. Bush administration, and Obama won going away.

  Although CNAS was technically nonpartisan, many of the staff were not just Democrats but also working on the Obama campaign on their own time. They were delighted with the result. McCain had lost my support when he chose Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential candidate, giving up the “ready for leadership from day one” argument. He’d wanted Joe Lieberman as his number two and should have chosen him; McCain would probably still have lost, but he would have done so with a much greater degree of integrity. Lieberman would have been a credible presidential replacement from day one, and beyond that, he was an unusual, beyond-partisan-politics leader who did much good for the nation during his time in the Senate.

  The Obama transition team named Michèle Flournoy as cochair of its Pentagon transition, which was no surprise. All of us at CNAS had expected Michèle to go into the administration, but we thought Kurt Campbell was going to stick around to run the Center. He intended to do so until the president-elect made his “team of rivals” decision to select Hillary Clinton as secretary of state. Kurt was very close to Senator Clinton and couldn’t say no when she offered him the dream job of assistant secretary of state for East Asia. With Director of Studies Jim Miller tagged as Michèle’s deputy undersecretary of defense for policy and Chief Operating Officer Nate Tibbets en route to the National Security Council staff, CNAS was suddenly in free fall without noticeable leadership.

  I hadn’t really been emotionally ready to leave the Army the previous summer and was excited about the possibility of serving in the Pentagon in a political position, but I could hardly say no when Michèle asked me to fill her seat as president of CNAS. I took the position on condition that Nate Fick be selected to replace Kurt Campbell as chief executive officer, which was not a foregone conclusion by any means. Nate was widely viewed as too young (he had just turned thirty-two) and inexperienced in Washington to take on the role, but I was adamant. From my first meeting with him, I had been enormously impressed by his leadership skills, integrity, and sense of self. His book One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer was, I thought, the best memoir from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The self-awareness and maturity evident in his memoir were a big part of the reason I had jumped at Jim Miller’s offer to share an office with Nate. The bonds we formed in that office would pay off handsomely as he and I learned together how to run a think tank in Washington.

  We had a lot to learn—everything from where the money comes from to where it goes. We had to hire people to replace those Kurt and Michèle took with them into the administration and establish a research agenda, demonstrating that CNAS was still open for business under new management. It was a great adventure. An early good decision was the one to hire Kristin Lord to replace Jim Miller as our director of studies. I’d met Kristin at a conference on information operations in Florida hosted by Doug Wilson, who later became the assistant secretary of defense for public affairs. (Former CNAS head of external relations Price Floyd was his deputy; it was an incestuous little circle. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who repeatedly turned down requests to address CNAS over the next two years, reputedly said, “If I want to talk with CNAS, I’ll call a staff meeting.”) Kristin had blown me away with her clear thinking, her excellent writing skills, and her organizational ability. With her addition, the leadership team was formed, and as March 2009 began, we were ready to get started preparing for the annual conference in June that was the high point of the CNAS calendar every year.

  With General Petraeus at the 2009 CNAS Annual Conference.

  © Getty/Win McNamee

  CNAS’s long-range calendar hadn’t extended much beyond the November elections, so with no plan for the conference, there was a lot of work to do. My research assistant Brian Burton went to work on a paper projecting a future direction for American policy toward Iraq that would ultimately serve as the basis for a public discussion between George Packer, Jack Keane, the Iraqi ambassador to the United States, and me. However, the real coup was getting General Petraeus, now the commander of U.S. Central Command (which oversaw an area of responsibility from Egypt to Pakistan), to agree to give a public address at the conference. Both the ballroom and the overflow room of the Willard Hotel in Washington were jammed as Petraeus provided a masterful discussion of recent events and prospects in the CENTCOM area of operations. CNAS was back in business.

  Although CNAS had come into existence in no small part in reaction to the misguided invasion of Iraq and mishandled occupation that followed, CNAS 2.0 would focus on another war that was also not going well, although unlike the invasion of Iraq, it had at least been necessary: the war in Afghanistan.

  7.

  The Second Washington Fight

  Afghanistan

  Counterinsurgency is messy and slow under the best of circumstances, and Afghanistan was a long way behind Iraq in almost every way that mattered. The human capital in Iraq was far better; by 2009, the Afghan people had been shattered by thirty continuous years of war. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 was followed by a bitter guerrilla war in which mujahedeen, supported by the CIA, fought to expel the invaders, an almost unbelievable true story well chronicled in George Criles’s book Charlie Wilson’s War. After the Soviets’ departure came a civil war in which the Taliban eventually seized control of most of the country, although the central government survived as long as funds from the Soviet Union kept coming. The Afghan government fell only when the Soviet Union collapsed, some three yea
rs after the last Soviet troops crossed the Termez Bridge out of the country. The Taliban made the error of providing a home for Al Qaeda and its leader, Osama bin Laden. That didn’t work out well for the Taliban, as the American invasion in 2001 drove the remnants of both organizations into the frontier regions of Pakistan, where they almost immediately resorted to plotting an insurgency inside Afghanistan against the American forces there.

  As a result of the decades of constant fighting, good leaders and administrators were even harder to find in Afghanistan than they had been in Iraq. Iraq also had the advantage of substantial and increasing oil revenues, meaning that it could largely pay for its own security forces and development, and impressive infrastructure. Afghanistan was going to be a ward of the international community for the foreseeable future, and those in power had much more temptation to try to grab aid money to line their own pockets while the getting was good. They knew that the wartime funds were not going to last forever, unlike the prospect that Iraq’s leaders enjoyed: a share of substantial long-term oil revenues if they governed that country reasonably well.

  Afghanistan faced other challenges as well. It was a rural rather than an urban insurgency. The success rate of rural insurgencies is far higher than those fought largely in urban areas because the population in an urban insurgency is already concentrated in cities and easier to separate from insurgents, using expedients like the T-walls that divided ethnic factions in Baghdad. Furthermore, the population of Afghanistan was largely illiterate. I had explained the impact when briefing my classes of future advisers at Fort Riley: “In Iraq, they knew how to read; we had to teach them how to fight. In Afghanistan they know how to fight; we have to teach them to read. Unfortunately, it takes a lot longer to teach someone how to read than it does to teach them how to fight.”