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By THANASSIS CAMBANIS
THE INSURGENTS
David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War
By Fred Kaplan
Illustrated. 418 pp. Simon & Schuster. $28.
The American occupation of Iraq in its early years was a swamp of incompetence and self-delusion. The tales of hubris and reality-denial have already passed into folklore. Recent college graduates were tasked with rigging up a Western-style government. Some renegade military units blasted away at what they called “anti-Iraq Forces,” spurring an inchoate insurgency. Early on, Washington hailed the mess a glorious “mission accomplished.” Meanwhile, a “forgotten war” simmered to the east in Afghanistan. By the low standards of the time, common sense passed for great wisdom. Any American military officer willing to criticize his own tactics and question the viability of the mission brought a welcome breath of fresh air.
Most alarming was the atmosphere of intellectual dishonesty that swirled through the highest levels of America’s war on terror. The Pentagon banned American officers from using the word “insurgency” to describe the nationalist Iraqis who were killing them. The White House decided that if it refused to plan for an occupation, somehow the United States would slide off the hook for running Iraq. Ideas mattered, and many of the most egregious foul-ups of the era stemmed from abstract theories mindlessly applied to the real world.
There is no one better equipped to tell the story of those ideas — and their often hair-raising consequences — than Fred Kaplan, a rare combination of defense intellectual and pugnacious reporter. Kap*lan writes Slate’s War Stories column, a must-read in security circles. He brings genuine expertise to his fine storytelling, with a doctorate from M.I.T., a government career in defense policy in the 1970s and three decades as a journalist. Kaplan knows the military world inside and out; better still, he has historical perspective. With “The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War,” he has written an authoritative, gripping and somewhat terrifying account of how the American military approached two major wars in the combustible Islamic world. He tells how it was grudgingly forced to adapt; how it then overreached; and how it now appears determined to discard as much as possible of what it learned and revert to its old ways.
“The Insurgents” proceeds like a whodunit starring a fringe community of officers who resisted the military’s post-Vietnam embrace of mediocrity. It’s breathtaking to realize just how hidebound and doctrinaire the Pentagon had become in the decades before 9/11. Though the cold war had ended, most top generals still believed the military should be training to block Soviet tanks at the Fulda Gap. Even while American “advisers” fought in minor shooting wars all over the globe, the brass officially denied these were genuine combat missions, calling them first “low intensity conflicts” and then, even more laughably and misleadingly, “operations other than war.” Kaplan explains how officers bent on preserving their careers and avoiding “another Vietnam” happily parroted nonsense to climb the ladder. Insurgencies and occupations were not a Pentagon priority; anyone who prepared for them was committing career hara-kiri.
All along, however, a small fraternity of independent thinkers nurtured a running critique of the way America conceived of, and actually fought, war. Though few in number, they were sprinkled throughout the Pentagon bureaucracy, the military ranks and the world of research institutions. This network grew into a powerful cabal, and Kaplan traces their work in meetings, military journals, commands and conflict zones over four decades. Their poster boy was David H. Petraeus, who distinguished himself by ambition, self-promotion and intellect. Eventually he almost single-handedly elevated counterinsurgency doctrine (known by its military acronym COIN) into a sort of gospel. For a brief period, COIN held sway in Washington.
Today, it’s easy to condemn its faddish and facile elements, accentuated by its smug advocates (“An Insurgent Within the COIN Revolution,” one of them titled a PowerPoint presentation).But Kaplan reminds us just how bad things had gotten in military circles by the time the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld simply fired or ignored officers and advisers who pointed out facts that didn’t fit his conclusions. Men like Petraeus were dismissed as bookish nerds. Officers who criticized the orthodoxy, like Andrew Krepinevich Jr., were hounded out of the service, or, like H. R. Mc*Master, watched their careers stall. They are the heroes of Kaplan’s book, although ultimately he gives them mixed reviews. They fell in thrall to their own gumption, he says, and as they rose to power they became complacent — especially *Petraeus. “In part from overconfidence, in part from inertia,” he started to see his counterinsurgency doctrine “as a set of universal principles,” Kaplan writes.
Still, how the COIN insurgents took over United States security policy makes for thrilling reading. These officers were assiduous climbers, and it is riveting to watch them swing from the battlefield, where they practiced neat COIN tricks like bribing militias and walling off neighborhoods by sect, to the Pentagon, where they engaged in conference-room jujitsu and water-cooler back-stabbing. For students of war, there’s lots to learn about why the occupation of Iraq went badly and then better, and why America’s designs to remake Afghanistan were never realistic. For everyone, there’s a fascinating history of how true belief and dogged commitment can infect a resistant bureaucracy and grudgingly extract change.
The savvy Petraeus invited journalists everywhere, spawning the best kind of free publicity: profile after profile that portrayed him in heroic terms as a *scholar-soldier always receptive to hard truths and willing to engage in self-*criticism. He knew how to manage up, cultivating powerful Pentagon patrons and winning President Bush’s favor with a misleading op-ed in The Washington Postjust before the 2004 election that touted what he claimed were a series of achievements in Iraq. He invited outside experts who agreed with him to advise him. When they thought he was acting on their ideas, they became passionate advocates. He ghostwrote articles, and then quoted them under his own byline. Kaplan relates how Petraeus, assigned in 2005 to run Fort Leavenworth, including its doctrine division, radically rewrote antiquated training manuals. A panicked staff member told him he was violating Army regulations that limited his changes to 10 percent; Petraeus demanded to see the rule, which, it turned out, didn’t exist. It was a military myth. The anecdote exemplifies both the military’s aversion to change and Petraeus’s style of forcing it.
By the time he was appointed the top commander in Iraq in 2007, Petraeus had learned from his earlier mistakes as the head of the mission to train Iraq’s security forces. Mosul, the city that he had successfully pacified for a year at the beginning of the war, had fallen apart; his improvised tactics had done some good, but couldn’t survive transition to a new commander. Petraeus had churned out hundreds of thousands of hastily trained but well-armed police officers and soldiers, following orders to stand up indigenous forces of any quality so that America could stand aside. Once the Iraqi civil war heated up, these sloppily mustered forces deserted, defected or joined death squads. But now that he was in charge, he adopted as his strategy the Army field manual he had just written, and surrounded himself with old friends and mentees.
Petraeus and his merry band changed tactics, mobilizing a counterinsurgency network to pursue extremists with force, but spending most of their resources protecting Iraqi civilians from carnage. Petraeus got extra troops. And he benefited from significant developments completely beyond his control: Sunni tribes broke with Al Qaeda in Iraq, while the most formidable Shiite militia, the Mahdi Army, declared a unilateral cease-fire so its leader could purge rogue units.
President Bush had promoted the COINdinistas because they were flexible, pragmatic problem solvers and because he had a nagging problem on his hands: how to get out of Iraq without looking defeated. Counterinsurgency was just one part of the fortuitous mix that yielded a just-good-enough resolution for Iraq. Petraeus and the officers and experts had been right about how to fight in Iraq and reached plum positions in the Pentagon. But they overestimated themselves. They fancied they were inventing a new way of war and casting out the demons of a moribund Pentagon. In fact, they were doing something far less grandiose.
After President Obama took office, he adopted counterinsurgency strategy for Afghanistan, and made Petraeus the commander in that war. Yet by then, as Kaplan persuasively argues, counterinsurgency doctrine had calcified into dogma. COIN was just one tool in a great power’s kit, not a one-size-fits-all solution, and in Afghanistan it made no sense at all. A counterinsurgency requires a long commitment, 10 years or more, and great numbers of troops, but the United States intended to pull out after a quick, small surge. Moreover, the Afghan government shared almost none of America’s goals, making the war’s mission untenable.
Kaplan damningly portrays a group of military officers and outside experts who cynically recommended a troop surge and a switch to counterinsurgency tactics in Afghanistan even though, he claims, they were skeptical that any strategy could actually stabilize the country. A formulaic Petraeus rambled on about his glory days in Iraq, even during meetings with the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, drawing warnings from his no-longer-fawning subordinates. He left with an aura of failure, and Obama, having been boxed in by his generals to escalate in Afghanistan, ultimately outmaneuvered them, calling their bluff and ordering a drawdown. The lesson of the COINdinistas’ subversive struggle in the bureaucracy and their brief heyday was that you can’t want victory more than the foreign government you’re trying to prop up.
Kaplan’s narrative ends before the news of Petraeus’s embarrassing and career-halting extramarital affair, but the denouement of “The Insurgents” is sadder and certainly far more consequential.
The COIN brigade forced the Army to adapt, to become what one officer called “a learning organization,” but the Pentagon failed to grasp the most important lesson of the decade: that the military does best when it can learn new types of missions quickly, whether delivering aid after a tsunami, stabilizing a failed state or running covert missions against international terrorist rings. Instead, it exchanged an old dogma for a new one. Once persuaded that the military could do counterinsurgency, few in Washington stopped to think about when it should do it. “Petraeus had stressed the importance of getting ‘the big ideas’ right, but the ideas in COIN theory weren’t as big as he seemed to believe,” Kaplan writes.
Obama has ordered the Pentagon to preserve the lessons of counterinsurgency and stability operations in case they’re needed in the future, but Kaplan reports that the president has also ordered that minimal manpower or matériel go toward preparing for resource-draining exercises in counterinsurgency and nation-building. The counterinsurgency cult was more than a fad, Kaplan establishes. But it was much less than a revolution.
Thanassis Cambanis is a fellow at the Century Foundation. His next book portrays Egypt’s revolutionaries after the fall of Mubarak.
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