By Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst
Editor's note: Peter Bergen, CNN's national security analyst, is director of the National Security Studies Program at the New America Foundation and the author of "The Longest War: America's Enduring Conflict with Al-Qaeda," from which this essay about Gen. David Petraeus is, in part, adapted. Petraeus stepped down as director of the CIA on Friday after admitting to an extramarital affair.
(CNN) -- Historians will likely judge David Petraeus to be the most effective American military commander since Eisenhower.
He was, after all, the person who, more than any other, brought Iraq back from the brink of total disaster after he assumed command of U.S. forces there in 2007.
To understand how daunting a task that was, recall that when Petraeus took over in Iraq, the country was embroiled in a civil war so vicious that civilians were dying at the rate of 90 a day.
Iraq's government itself was fueling the violence because the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior was home to a number of Shia death squads.
Meanwhile, al Qaeda's brutal Iraqi affiliate was recruiting hundreds of suicide attackers from around the Middle East who went on to kill thousands in Iraq.
As a result of this mayhem, some 5 million Iraqis -- around a fifth of the population fled the country or went into internal exile.
After a 2003 tour in Iraq where Petraeus effectively pacified the area in and around Mosul in the north and a second tour where he had a less successful stint trying to reform the disbanded Iraqi army, he was assigned to run the U.S. Army's Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, in 2006.
This was seen as something of a backwater for the rising star general who Newsweek had anointed with a cover story two years earlier headlined "Can This Man Save Iraq?"
But Petraeus saw his tour in Kansas as an opportunity to revamp the Army's counterinsurgency doctrine, something the military hadn't put any real thought into since the Vietnam War. And now it was a complex stew of Sunni and Shia insurgent groups that the U.S. military was fighting in Iraq.
So Petraeus turned his time in Kansas into a year-long exercise to rewrite the strategy and tactics of the Iraq War.
To help him, Petraeus recruited Iraq War veteran John Nagl, a Rhodes Scholar with a doctorate from Oxford who in 2002 published the book "Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam."
In November 2005, Petraeus gave a lunchtime speech at a counterinsurgency conference in Washington. Nagl recalls that Petraeus, his former history professor at West Point, "announced that he was going to write a counterinsurgency manual, and he announced that I was going to be the lead pen, which was the first time I'd heard of it."
Nagl assumed the role of managing editor of the manual and Petraeus recruited Conrad Crane, a military historian and a former West Point classmate, to be the lead writer. But there was no doubt who was in charge. Nagl recalls that Petraeus "was the driver, he was the vision, he was the copy editor, he read the whole thing twice, he turned around chapters in 24 hours with extensive edits and comments."
The writings of the French soldier-intellectual David Galula were quite influential on the group working on the manual. Galula had fought in Indochina and Algeria in the 1950s as an officer in the French army as it was attempting to stamp out nationalist insurgencies in its colonial possessions.
Around a decade later Galula
published "Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice," which
distilled the lessons of fighting and observing insurgencies in the Middle East
and Southeast Asia.
Galula laid down a general principle that is recognized as the
core of a successful counterinsurgency strategy: "The population becomes
the objective for the counterinsurgent as it was for his enemy."
This meant that seizing territory became far less important than
it was in a conventional war; ensuring that people felt secure enough so they
were not forced to have to side with the insurgents and, eventually, even felt
secure enough to provide intelligence about them, became the prize.
Once a first draft of the counterinsurgency manual was completed,
Petraeus and the lead writer, Crane, decided to convene a group of outside
experts to critique it. Crane recalls, "We had a vetting conference to go
over the doctrine, and I agreed with the general that we would do it, and I
said, 'Yeah, let's bring in 30 smart people to talk about it'; he brought in
150. It was quite a three-ring circus out at Fort Leavenworth."
Over the course of two days officials from the CIA, State
Department and leading academics and journalists such as Eliot Cohen, James
Fallows and George Packer were instructed to give their critiques, which
generated hundreds of pages of new ideas.
The army and Marines published the final version of the
Counterinsurgency Field Manual in December 2006.
The doctrines in this new manual deeply informed how the U.S.
military would fight the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The manual pointed to such unsuccessful counterinsurgency
practices as overemphasizing killing and capturing the enemy rather than making
conditions secure for the populace, conducting large-scale operations as the
norm and concentrating military forces in large bases for protection.
This was, in fact, a good description of what the U.S. military
had been doing in Iraq for the past three years of the conflict and an
explanation of why it was now losing the war.
Successful practices, the new manual emphasized, focused on
meeting the needs and ensuring the security of the population.
In a section titled "Paradoxes" the manual made a number
of recommendations that were hardly typical of prevailing U.S. military
doctrine: "Sometimes doing nothing is the best reaction" and
"the host nation doing something tolerably is normally better than U.S.
doing it well."
Emma Sky, an Oxford graduate and Arabic speaker who became
Petraeus' political adviser in Iraq, recalled that, "The biggest mindset
change was for the U.S. to look at Iraqis as not the enemy, but to look at the
Iraqis as people who needed protecting."
In February 2007 Petraeus was appointed by President George W.
Bush as the new U.S. commander in Iraq just as 30,000 troops of "the
surge" that Bush had recently ordered began arriving in Iraq.
Shortly after Petraeus' arrival he took a tour of Baghdad
neighborhoods he knew from his past deployments. Petraeus later told me,
"I just couldn't believe it...here's literally tumbleweed rolling down the
street of what I remembered as a very prosperous, upper-middle-class, former
military officers' neighborhood in northwest Baghdad. It was just. .
.Wow!"
There were now well over 200 car bombings and suicide attacks
every month in Iraq. Six months earlier there were around a quarter of that
number. Iraq was simultaneously exploding and imploding.
Petraeus' new counterinsurgency approach got American soldiers out
of their massive bases in Iraq and into Iraqi neighborhoods.
Petraeus explained this "population-centric" strategy in
a letter he sent to all of the soldiers he commanded. "You can't commute
to this fight...Living among the people is essential to securing them and
defeating the insurgents...patrol on foot and engage the population.
Situational awareness can only be guaranteed by interacting with people
face-to-face, not separated by ballistic glass."
Emma Sky says that Petraeus played another key role, which was
buying time in Washington for the new strategy to work by being the public face
and advocate of the new approach in Iraq. "Without his strategic
communications, without people's belief in Petraeus, we would never have got
the time."
The greatest test of whether the political will existed to
continue with the ramped-up Iraq effort were the congressional hearings held on
the sixth anniversary of 9/11.
On September 11, 2007, Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, the veteran
diplomat who was U.S. ambassador to Iraq, were grilled by both the Senate
Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees, on which happened to sit five
senators all seriously vying for the presidency-- Joe Biden, Christopher Dodd,
Barack Obama, John McCain and Hillary Clinton--- one of whom would become
president of the United States in just over a year.
Petraeus recalls that the hearing "Was just charged beyond
belief. I mean, you could just feel the spotlight of the world on you. It was
carried live in Baghdad."
Petraeus and Crocker gamely tried to present a picture of progress
in Iraq, but the Democrats were having none of it. Clinton interjected at one
point: "You have been made the de facto spokesman for what many of us
believe to be a failed policy. Despite what I view as your rather extraordinary
efforts in your testimony...I think that the reports that you provide to us
really require the willing suspension of disbelief."
This is Washington-speak for you are either wrong or lying.
The day before, the duo had also testified before a joint hearing
of the House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs committees. Petraeus knew it
was going to be a rough day when he received a heads up that the New York Times
was running a full-page ad about him, paid for by the left- wing advocacy group
MoveOn.org.
Under a banner headline GENERAL PETRAEUS OR GENERAL BETRAY
US?" the general was accused of "Cooking the books for the White
House." The ad copy went on to assert, "Every independent report on
the ground situation in Iraq shows that the surge strategy has failed...Most
importantly, General
Petraeus will not admit what everyone knows: Iraq is mired
in an unwinnable religious civil war."
Despite these criticisms, Petraeus' cautiously worded
congressional testimony about the turnaround that he was beginning to see in
Iraq proved to be accurate.
The violence in Iraq, which was peaking in almost every category
in the first months of 2007, steadily dropped after that. That decline was true
across the board, including attacks by insurgents, civilian deaths, U.S.
soldiers killed, Iraq security forces killed, car-bomb attacks and IED
explosions.
In December 2006 the U.S. military map of "ethno-sectarian"
violence in Baghdad was colored mostly yellow, orange and red, indicating
medium to intense violence. The same map two years later was mostly colored
green, indicating that the sectarian violence in Baghdad had largely subsided.
Of course, not all of this was due to the generalship of Petraeus.
Other important factors such as the tribal revolt against al Qaeda's Iraqi
affiliate worked in Petraeus' favor.
The Sunni Awakening movement had begun in 2006 before Petraeus
arrived in Iraq, but he and his top commanders deftly managed it.
The tribal fighters of the Awakening movement ended up on the
American payroll in the "Sons of Iraq" program, which by the spring
of 2009 had grown to around 100,000 men. Many of those men had once been
shooting at Americans; now they were shooting at al Qaeda.
Iraq today remains a dangerous place, but it is not in the grip of
a civil war, and political differences are more likely to be decided by
parliamentary maneuvers than by violence.
Certainly, Petraeus can claim a large share in the achievement of
that outcome.
Petraeus was later tapped to try to turn around another war that
wasn't going well, this time it was the war in Afghanistan and the call came
from President Obama in 2010.
The jury is still out on what level of success Petraeus achieved
during his tenure as the commander of U.S. and other NATO troops in
Afghanistan.
As a result of the operations resulting from the "surge"
of 30,000 U.S. troops into Afghanistan authorized by Obama and led in its
latter stages by Petraeus, longtime Taliban havens in the southern Afghan
provinces of Helmand and Kandahar have now been eliminated.
Special operations forces also have decimated the ranks of
mid-level Taliban commanders to such a degree that last year the average age of
Taliban commanders dropped from 35 to 25, according to U.S. military sources.
That said, the increased military pressure on the Taliban did not
bring them to the negotiating table in any meaningful way as had once been
hoped. And the Taliban continue to control many rural areas of the country.
Arriving at any judgment of Petraeus' record at the CIA is
complicated by the fact that he was there for only around a year and, of
course, most of the activities of the CIA are secret.
Some light will be shed on the agency's recent activity when the
acting director of the CIA, Michael Morell, testifies next week before the
Senate Intelligence Committee about the attack on the Benghazi consulate in
September that killed four Americans, including the U.S. ambassador to Libya and
two men who were recently revealed to be CIA employees.
It was Petraeus who was supposed to be delivering that testimony.
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