Killing Machine (6 page)

“It’s a wonderful debate to have,” Petraeus answered. “But we are where we are.” The United States had two counter-insurgency wars on its hands, in Iraq and in Afghanistan. My question reminded him, he continued, of a conversation he had joined a couple of nights before, in Amman, at a dinner party attended by Jordanian intellectuals. . . .“At a certain point,” he remarked, “you have to say, with respect, ‘Let’s take the rearview mirrors off this bus.’ ”
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When the election finally rolled around, Obama received more than twice as many electoral votes as McCain, 365 to 173, and won the popular vote by eight million votes. On election night he addressed a crowd estimated at 250,000 in Chicago’s Grant Park. He began his speech to supporters by saying it was a “defining moment” in American history.

If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.
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One has to wonder whether many of those who came out that night expected what would happen in the next few weeks as the president-elect assembled his team.

The New Team

Petraeus’s answer to Steve Coll seemed in conflict with the heavy emphasis in the new army manual on learning from the past. But not really. What sometimes goes unnoticed is that in general-speak, there is a world of difference between saying one should learn from the past and urging one to learn from past mistakes. When Petraeus spoke, as he often did, about taking the rearview mirrors off the bus, he was actually referring directly to that difference. The lessons the manual recommended learning came from the French experience in Algeria and the successful British efforts against a Communist insurgency in Malaya. One of the manual’s authors, John Nagl, wrote that no book was as important to the preparation of the manual as David Galula’s
Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice
(2006). Galula, a French army officer in Algeria, summed up what had gone wrong: “If the individual members of the organizations were of the same mind, if every organization worked according to a standard pattern, the problem would be solved. Is this not precisely what a coherent, well-understood, and accepted doctrine would tend to achieve?” In other words, the answer was really very simple: everyone had to be on the same page. “Precisely,” wrote Nagl.
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Obama’s relationship with the history of America’s engagement in the Middle East was equally ambivalent and equally narrowly focused on a useful past. During the campaign he had asserted that he wanted not only to end the Iraq War but to change the mind-set that had led to the war. Yet none of his speeches reflected such a broad purpose. Instead, all of his speeches, beginning even with the 2002 Chicago peace rally speech, read forward from 9/11—and were limited to the mistake of going to war with the wrong country. He should not have played the role of history professor in the campaign, obviously, but his possible advisers on foreign policy—later set aside in favor of an entire crew from the Center for New American
Security—exhibited very different outlooks on America’s challenges in the post–9/11 world, and a willingness to rethink the mind-set much more than the candidate who had expressed the desire to look at fundamentals.

Despite the hard edge to their primary campaign debates over foreign policy, and despite what his supporters might have hoped, Obama asked Clinton to be his secretary of state. Perhaps the most telling decision Obama took before inaugural day, however, was retaining Robert Gates as secretary of defense. The president-elect met with Gates not in the Oval Office or in the Pentagon, but in the fire station at Reagan National Airport. “They pulled the trucks out so that our cars could go in,” said Gates, describing what had happened. He also announced that after this Deep Throat-style get-together he found Obama’s plan for removing combat troops from Iraq within a sixteen-month period, an “agreeable approach.” That was somewhat short of a full endorsement of the president-elect’s plan, but Obama himself was now emphasizing the need to be as responsible about getting out of Iraq as we had been irresponsible about getting into it. He still held to his timetable—but now it appeared more as an aspiration than a settled question. He also said that he would listen to the views of the Joint Chiefs and the commanders in Iraq about the “transition.”
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Moreover, it now appeared that there would be 50,000 troops remaining for some time—“remissioned” as advisers, who would nonetheless shoot at people on certain occasions. Gates and Petraeus, along with the commander in Iraq, General Ray Odierno, had come up with “remissioning” as a formula that would allow Obama to keep his pledge to Democrats without entering into a confrontation with the Pentagon. Like all other members of the Bush team, the secretary of defense had opposed all timetables until the Iraqis themselves pushed Washington into accepting one that would have most American forces out by 2012. “The question is, How do we do this in a responsible way? . . . I think the president-elect framed it just right yesterday.”

Gates also told reporters that he had no intention of being a caretaker secretary of defense, a comment that indicated he expected
to play a key role in policy decisions. Bob Gates had a long record in national security affairs—much of it filled with controversy. During the 1980s he was a leading hawk in the Reagan administration, convinced even that Mikhail Gorbachev represented nothing more than a Soviet schemer who had pulled the wool over his admirers’ eyes and was actually as dedicated to nefarious Communist ambitions as any predecessor in the Kremlin had ever been. In the Reagan administration, and then in the George H.W. Bush follow-up, Gates managed to alienate two secretaries of state, George Shultz and James Baker, by his attempts as deputy national security adviser and CIA director to shape policy toward Russia.

Somehow he had shed that ideological persona by the time he, as a member of the Iraq Study Group that recommended an alternative plan for ending the war, expressed skepticism about staying the course or escalating the number of troops in Iraq. Bush ignored the study group’s recommendations when he sent 30,000 troops and Petraeus back to Iraq. But he replaced Don Rumsfeld with Gates, now praised as a realist—and identified as such when Obama announced his decision. “He restored accountability,” the president elect said. “He won the confidence of military commanders, and the trust of our brave men and women in uniform, as well as their families. He earned the respect of members of Congress on both sides of the aisle for his pragmatism and competence. He knows that we need a sustainable national security strategy, and that includes a bipartisan consensus at home.”
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Taken together, Obama’s comments certified Bob Gates as a wise man who, when the president’s hand had been forced, accepted the call of duty to get rid of the zealots and bring back “accountability . . . pragmatism and confidence.” What he did not talk about was Gates’s enthusiasm for counterinsurgency theory, which was sweeping through the Pentagon and which, it will be remembered, Obama had picked up on in his 2007 speech at the Wilson Center. Gates expanded on the emerging American strategy for maintaining its world position in a lengthy speech at Kansas State University after a year as the Pentagon’s new leader. He began by recalling anxious times in the past, beginning with how Sputnik in 1957 had brought
fear of being left behind in the missile race, continuing with the shock of the Tet offensive, and then moving into the 1970s, “when it seemed that everything that could go wrong for America did.” What was not apparent at these times, however, were the long-term effects of key presidential decisions from the time of Harry Truman and “the doctrine of containment” through the “muscular words” of Ronald Reagan and the “masterful endgame diplomacy of George H.W. Bush.”

The new challenge that began with 9/11 “may be unprecedented in complexity and scope.” In many respects, he said, all the challenges of the twentieth century had their beginnings in ancient hatreds and conflicts, buried alive during and after World War I. “But, like monsters in science fiction, they are returned from the grave to threaten peace and stability around the world.” Echoes of the long years of religious warfare in Europe were present “in the growing Sunni versus Shia contest for Islamic hearts and minds in the Middle East.” And in our own country, between Lincoln and Kennedy, two presidents and one presidential candidate “were assassinated or attacked by terrorists—as were various tsars, empresses, princes, and, on a fateful day in June 1914, an archduke.”

We needed also to remember, he went on, that four times in the past century the United States had come to the end of a war convinced that “the nature of man and the world had changed for the better,” and, turning inward, had unilaterally disarmed, “in the process giving ourselves a so-called ‘peace’ dividend. Four times we chose to forget history.” Holding a doctorate in history, Gates rejected neocon theories about the “end of history” and the global triumph of liberal capitalism. That separated him from the Bush true believers, yet also from those realists who criticized the invasion of Iraq. It may have been undertaken in the mistaken notion that Saddam Hussein had an active WMD program, but he held it was justified on other grounds. Still, his message in the lecture at Kansas State University was not about the defense budget or military power as such, he said, but about the need to integrate all elements of national power to meet the challenges. “I am here to make
the case for strengthening our capacity to use ‘soft’ power and for better integrating it with ‘hard’ power.”

Almost paraphrasing the new counterinsurgency manual and the writings of Petraeus advisers David Kilcullen and John Nagl, the secretary of defense predicted that “asymmetric warfare will be the mainstay of the contemporary battlefield for some time. . . . Success will be less a matter of imposing one’s will and more a function of shaping behavior—of friends, adversaries, and most importantly, the people in between.” That was what we finally did in Vietnam, he said, however uncomfortable it might be to bring up that war, under General Creighton Abrams, who brought all the multiple agencies involved into alignment, “all of
us
on one side and the enemy on the other.” By the time American troops “were pulled out,” Abrams had “helped pacify most of the hamlets in South Vietnam.”

He had reversed the fortunes of war and the mistakes of his predecessor, General William Westmoreland, and Westmoreland’s losing strategy of “search and destroy,” and provided the intellectual platform for a counterinsurgency plan. Nowhere had a top leader before Gates explained it in such detail. The argument was readily accepted by an unusual “coalition” of neocons and “liberals” who peopled the Washington think tanks and moved back and forth between downtown D.C. and across the river at the Pentagon. Gates saw himself as both a witness to and presiding over this developing strategy.

In Afghanistan the military has recently brought in professional anthropologists as advisors. The
New York Times
reported on the work of one of them, who said, “I’m frequently accused of militarizing anthropology. But we’re really anthropologizing the military.”

And it is having a very real impact. The same story told of a village that had just been cleared of the Taliban. The anthropologist pointed out to the military officers that there were more widows than usual, and that the sons would feel compelled to
take care of them—possibly by joining the insurgency, where many of the fighters are paid. So American officers began a job training program for the widows.
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The dream candidate was about to become the counterinsurgent president who depended more on Bob Gates than any other foreign policy adviser. But the decision to surge in Afghanistan had already been foretold—if anyone had been listening carefully. The shift to a counterinsurgency strategy by George Bush—a choice forced, of course, by the debacle Iraq had turned into—had become the guiding star. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice explained all this to the policy-making readers of
Foreign Affairs
. “In these pages in 2000,” she wrote, “I decried the role of the United States, in particular the U.S. military, in nation building. In 2008, it is absolutely clear that we will be involved in nation building for years to come. But it should not be the U.S. military that has to do it. Nor should it be a mission that we take up only after states fail.”
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The real reason why the United States had to take up this burden, it turns out, was the unstoppable progress of globalization. “As globalization strengthens some states,” explained Rice, “it exposes and exacerbates the failings of many others—those too weak or poorly governed to address challenges within their borders and prevent them from spilling out and destabilizing the international order. In this strategic environment, it is vital to our national security that states be willing and able to meet the full range of their sovereign responsibilities, both beyond their borders and within them.”
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When Barack Obama became president, his liberal critics complained that he had abandoned his original positions and adopted most of Bush’s foreign policy positions. His outlook fitted Rice’s analysis, albeit without her rearguard defense of the Iraq War. As she put it: “This story is still being written, and will be for many years to come. Sanctions and weapons inspections, prewar intelligence and diplomacy, troop levels and postwar planning—these are all important issues that historians will analyze for decades. But the fundamental question that we can ask and debate now is, Was
removing Saddam from power the right decision? I continue to believe that it was.”
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