The Fourth Star Part 7

By the summer of 2005 Iraq's "purple finger moment," in which Iraqis held up ink-stained fingers to celebrate their first election in three decades, had long pa.s.sed. It was obvious to lower-ranking officers that something was badly wrong. One of the most influential young skeptics was Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl, who returned from a year of tough fighting in Iraq in the fall of 2004 and found that he was something of a celebrity. Nagl's fame came not from battlefield heroics, but from the book on counterinsurgency that he had written while teaching in the Social Sciences Department at West Point. In it, he contrasted the U.S. defeat in Vietnam with the British victory in Malaya in the 1950s against another Communist insurgency. The difference, Nagl argued, was that the British generals saw the folly of using ma.s.sive force against guerrillas who were often indistinguishable from ordinary villagers. Instead they focused on building local governments, training security forces, and protecting the civilians. In Vietnam, the United States resorted largely to search-and-destroy tactics after they began funneling in large numbers of troops.

Nagl's conclusions about Vietnam were not that different from those Petraeus had reached in his own dissertation a decade earlier. "In these dirty little wars," Nagl wrote, "political and military tasks intertwine, and the objective is more often 'nation building' than the destruction of an enemy army." Nagl's work exemplified George Lincoln's original conception of Sosh as a place that should challenge the Army's conventional wisdom and prepare it intellectually for the rigors of modern warfare. In Iraq, new ideas were coming to an amazing degree from former Sosh professors, including Chiarelli, Petraeus, and Nagl.

When Casey took command in 2004, Nagl had been nine months into his yearlong deployment as the operations officer of a 700-soldier battalion in Khalidiyah, a poor Sunni city near Fallujah made up of block upon block of concrete houses surrounded by high mud walls. If Casey had asked, Nagl would have told him that his unit was losing. His men had minimal understanding of the culture and the centuries-old tribes that dominated the area. The police his battalion trained were routinely murdered, and most residents wanted nothing to do with the Iraqi or U.S. forces. "I don't think we could have picked a more foreign place on earth to fight an insurgency," he confessed.

On his way back to the United States in the fall of 2004 Nagl stopped by Al Faw Palace to see Grant Doty, a friend from Sosh who was working for Casey. He spoke briefly with Petraeus, whom he knew through Sosh connections. No one else had taken the time to talk to one of the Army's most knowledgeable counterinsurgency experts and to hear his take on the war, on what was working in the field and what wasn't. Nagl spent most of 2005 in the Pentagon, where his disillusionment grew. He railed to reporters and whoever else would listen that U.S. units were desperately short of interpreters. Often his battalion had dispatched patrols without any Arabic-speakers. "If soldiers can't interact with the population, all they are doing is trolling for IEDs," he said, using the military acronym for roadside bombs. He barraged Petraeus with e-mails complaining that the Army had no counterinsurgency doctrine and needed to ramp up an effort to write one immediately. And he worried that the military, just as in Vietnam, didn't want to learn how to fight guerrilla wars. "Beware of the majors of Desert Storm," he often said. These were officers who had fought in the 1991 tank battle and refused to believe there was any other type of war. It was the Army equivalent of "Don't trust anybody over thirty."

In northwestern Iraq, Colonel H. R. McMaster, the commander of a 3,500-soldier armored cavalry regiment, was leading his own rebellion in the summer of 2005. McMaster had long been a "water walker," pegged early in his career, like Petraeus and Abizaid, as a future general. He had earned a Silver Star for his battlefield prowess in the Persian Gulf War. The Army's official history of the conflict opened with a vivid description of his tank crew destroying a much larger Iraq formation: "McMaster spotted the tanks. 'Fire, fire sabot,' he yelled as he kicked up his tank's metal seat and dropped inside to look through his thermal imager. His clipped command was a code that automatically launched his three crew mates into a well-rehea.r.s.ed sequence of individual actions."

After the 1991 war McMaster earned a doctorate in history from the University of North Carolina and wrote an acclaimed book on Vietnam. Relying on recently decla.s.sified doc.u.ments, Dereliction of Duty Dereliction of Duty built a d.a.m.ning case that the Vietnam-era generals had caved in to President Lyndon Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, backing a war strategy they knew would fail. By the time McMaster was writing, Vietnam was no longer such an open wound, and General Henry Shelton, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, invited McMaster for breakfast at the Pentagon to talk to the military's top four-stars about his research. Shelton had read the book on the recommendation of his executive officer, David Petraeus, then a colonel. built a d.a.m.ning case that the Vietnam-era generals had caved in to President Lyndon Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, backing a war strategy they knew would fail. By the time McMaster was writing, Vietnam was no longer such an open wound, and General Henry Shelton, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, invited McMaster for breakfast at the Pentagon to talk to the military's top four-stars about his research. Shelton had read the book on the recommendation of his executive officer, David Petraeus, then a colonel.

McMaster went on to work for Abizaid in Kosovo and at U.S. Central Command. Abizaid saw a little bit of himself in the young, intellectually restless officer. McMaster was emotional, stubborn, gracious, wickedly funny, full of boyish enthusiasm, and constantly questioning his commanders, especially in Iraq, where he led the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment. "Why did the U.S. military have to retake the same cities from insurgents again and again?" he asked. Why had there been no theater reserve force in the country that could react to a surprise enemy offensive or exploit fleeting opportunities? Why had the enemy been allowed to maintain safe havens? They were legitimate questions, but they also drove his superiors crazy.

"You need to stop thinking strategically," McMaster's brigadier general boss in Mosul warned him in the summer of 2005. It was Army-speak for "Shut the h.e.l.l up, Colonel, and worry about your little piece of the war." His bosses sometimes had a point.

McMaster's piece of the war was Tal Afar, a city of about a quarter million residents set on an ancient smuggling route near the Syrian border. Foreign fighters linked to Al Qaeda were using it as a staging area before heading off to Baghdad and Mosul. On the eve of an a.s.sault by McMaster's regiment, General Casey flew in to hear his plan for retaking the city.

It was a tense time. In the weeks leading up to the operation, McMaster had asked for an extra battalion of about 800 soldiers to help clear the city's southern district, a warren of muddy streets and alleys too narrow for the regiment's tanks. He had expected a quick answer. After all, the attack into the city was the only major operation planned during the summer of 2005, and Tal Afar was key terrain for Al Qaeda. Instead he got no response.

Now the operation was days away and McMaster knew he was going to have to get by with fewer troops. He told Casey that he was going to position his forces in a sector adjacent to the troublesome southern district and try to draw the enemy fighters out so that they could be more easily killed. He didn't mention the memos he'd written requesting the extra soldiers. It was too late to get them there before the attack was scheduled to kick off, anyway.

When the briefing was done the two officers hopped into an SUV for the short ride back to the airstrip where Casey's plane was waiting. The regimental command post on the outskirts of Tal Afar was a big plywood building that looked like a beached ark. There was an old Saddam-era airstrip and several boxy brick buildings nearby. A single ribbon of blacktop led the five miles into the city. As they b.u.mped down the rutted road toward the airfield, Casey told McMaster that he needed another battalion for his attack. After hearing the plan, Casey had reached the same conclusion as McMaster. The extra soldiers would drive out the insurgents in the densely packed southern portion of the city that had McMaster so worried. As he spoke, McMaster realized that his memos asking for more troops had been forwarded to Baghdad but had never made it up the chain of command to Casey.

Years later Casey would concede that such incidents were fairly common, and he suggested that his subordinate generals' reluctance to ask for additional troops grew out of the Army's can-do culture. "It's our nature to get the job done with what we have," he said. "And I was up against that all the time." An extra infantry battalion was flown in to help McMaster hold the city but didn't arrive in time for the invasion.

McMaster saw a bigger problem. President Bush wanted to transform Iraq into a model democracy for the Middle East and an ally in the war on terror. Realizing those lofty goals demanded a ma.s.sive commitment of troops, money, and civilian expertise. But the Pentagon was moving in a different direction. Rumsfeld was consumed by a desire to leave. In Baghdad the military's strategy was focused on handing over the fight to Iraqis.

In his mission statement for his regiment, McMaster laid out his main objective as defeating the enemy and setting "conditions for economic and political development." His superiors asked him if he was setting a higher standard for his area than he had been given. To McMaster the conclusion was inescapable: the United States was not fully committed to winning. "We're managing this war, not fighting it," he complained.

In the summer of 2005, Casey summoned Colonel Bill Hix to his office. He had a special mission for Hix: take one month and visit as many U.S. brigades and battalions as possible, then write a report grading the war effort. The two had forged an unusual relations.h.i.+p for a colonel and a four-star general. Hix, the son of a CIA operative, had spent most of his career in the Special Forces and had advised the Philippine military in its fight against Islamic guerrillas. Among the Americans in the palace, the bald, broad-shouldered colonel was the closest thing Casey could find to a counterinsurgency expert. He acted almost as a tutor, schooling Casey on a form of warfare he didn't really understand. As Casey grew more comfortable, Hix evolved into a trusted advisor.

In Army terms, Hix was a "fireproof colonel." He'd put in enough time to earn his full retirement pension and knew he was never going to make general. He served at his own pleasure and had nothing to lose. He and Casey frequently disagreed, particularly on the question of more troops, which Hix favored. "When I think I need more troops I will ask for them," Casey would tell Hix. But Casey liked his candor.

Most of Hix's time was spent in meetings or in his cubicle, where he worked fourteen-hour days, cranking out slides and writing briefing papers for Casey and the Pentagon. Sometimes Casey brought him along when he went out to meet units. But the trips provided only fleeting glimpses of Iraq. By the summer of 2005 Hix was desperate to get out of the palace and see the real war.

To accompany Hix on his inspection tour, he drafted Kalev Sepp, a retired Special Forces officer who had fought in El Salvador, earned a history doctorate from Harvard, and taught cla.s.ses in guerrilla war at the Naval Postgraduate School. Sepp had arrived a few days earlier at Hix's invitation to deliver a series of lectures to Casey's staff on counterinsurgency operations. As soon as he learned about the study, Hix had dashed back to Sepp's cubicle. His friend wasn't there, so Hix scribbled a quick message on a Post-it note. "You owe me big big, Bill," it read.

The two visited thirty-one different units and evaluated them using a checklist of counterinsurgency best practices developed by Sepp. Successful armies isolated the civilian population from the enemy by providing security, stable government, a strong police force, and decent jobs. They built sophisticated intelligence networks, used the minimum amount of force necessary in raids, and offered amnesty and rehabilitation to former insurgents.

Hix and Sepp didn't want the units to feel as though they were being graded. So they tended to ask the field commanders open-ended questions: What were their priorities? What were their biggest concerns? What was keeping them from succeeding? Their fifteen-page report reached a dire conclusion: most of the U.S. units that they visited were ineffective. In a handful of cases brigade and battalion commanders didn't understand how to defeat an insurgency. One commander in restive Anbar Province strode into a meeting with them, lit a cigar, and propped his feet on his desk. "We got three today," he told them proudly. For him it was all about the body count.

Even if units in the field did everything right, they still didn't have the manpower they needed to win. There weren't enough U.S. and Iraqi troops in the country to drive insurgents from their safe havens and prevent them from returning, the report found, echoing McMaster's frequent complaint. The advisory teams were too small and inexperienced.

But the biggest shortcoming, the report found, was the lack of political and economic progress in the country. On those rare occasions when the government did make its presence felt outside of the Green Zone it displayed a pro-s.h.i.+te sectarian agenda that fueled the insurgency. If Casey wanted to fix the foundering war effort, he had to expand beyond training Iraqi troops and take on political and economic development in the country. Technically, the U.S. emba.s.sy was responsible for these areas. But the emba.s.sy was sorely lacking in money and manpower. Smart commanders tried to fill the gap, but they didn't have the expertise to build local governments and jump-start the economy.

Casey needed control of all aspects of the counterinsurgency campaign, Hix and Sepp argued. There was a historical precedent for the power grab. In the latter days of the Vietnam War the United States placed the economic and political development in the country under the control of General Creighton Abrams, who took over from William Westmoreland. Some historians maintained that Abrams's "one war" approach had produced positive results by the early 1970s. The s.h.i.+ft had just taken place too late-after the American people and Congress had given up on the war.

In early September Hix and Sepp described their report's findings for Casey and his senior staff. Sepp knew that Casey's father and Creighton Abrams had been friends in Vietnam, and decided to take a chance by playing up the personal connection. "Sir, it is time to do what your father's friend Creighton Abrams did and merge the civil and military effort in Iraq under a single director, which would be you," he said. Casey set his hands on the conference table in front of him, tilted his head, and stared off into the distance. He didn't say anything.

Hix warned that the U.S. military could build Army and police forces forever, but without economic and political progress they would eventually crumble. "All these Army and police forces are going to be like Wile E. Coyote going off a cliff without an economic and political foundation underneath them," he said. Hix then turned up the pressure. He understood that governance and economics were the State Department's turf. But if the United States lost, the blame wouldn't fall on the secretary of state or the amba.s.sador. It would fall on Casey. Only the Pentagon had the half-trillion-dollar-a-year budget and the manpower to deliver. "This is your war," he told his boss.

A few days later Casey flew with his two advisors to central command headquarters in Qatar so that they could give Abizaid and his staff the same pitch. Abizaid had just come from watching a video shot by French journalists that showed insurgents setting up a roadside bomb as bystanders and police applauded. As long as U.S. troops were in Iraqi neighborhoods, the violence would continue, he believed. He listened intently to Hix.

"So you are telling me that we have a total absence of effective government at the local level in Iraq?" Abizaid asked.

"Sir, in some cases it's worse than just an absence," Hix replied. The s.h.i.+te-dominated government was targeting Sunnis and driving them into the insurgent ranks. Fixing the problem would require about 10,000 additional troops who would report to Casey and focus solely on economic development, infrastructure repair, and local governance. In Vietnam, a slightly smaller country, Abrams had used a force of about 7,000 soldiers and aid workers.

Casey sent the report to Rumsfeld, but he and Abizaid decided that asking for control of the economic and political aspects of the war effort wasn't going to work. "I made the judgment that it was going to take an awful lot of energy to get it done and the likelihood of success was low," Casey recalled. At the time the State Department was proposing building Provincial Reconstruction Teams to conduct development projects in each of the eighteen provinces. The effort consisted of only a few hundred Foreign Service officers and lacked the money to make a real difference. Still, Casey thought that the civilian-led teams were a reasonable first step. At least the State Department was trying. The answer was to make State do more, not to do everything himself.

Casey did adopt Hix's recommendation to train incoming officers in the principles of counterinsurgency. He didn't need to fight with Was.h.i.+ngton for permission to do it and it didn't take very many extra troops. The one-week immersion course was a significant step forward for an Army that was receiving virtually no counterinsurgency training back in the United States. One officer cycling through an early cla.s.s said that his unit's preparation for Iraq had consisted of "kick in the door, two in the chest," recalled Sepp. Casey's cla.s.ses preached the importance of using measured force to avoid alienating the Iraqi people and stressed the importance of mentoring Iraqi forces. Soldiers also received some instruction in Iraqi culture. Ideally such training would have occurred back in the United States, where there was more time. But the inst.i.tutional Army, strained by the heavy pace of deployments, was slow to adapt. "Because the Army won't change itself, I am going to change it here in Iraq," Casey had said. The first U.S. officers began pa.s.sing through the school, which Casey playfully dubbed the "Hix Academy," in November 2005.

When he left Iraq, Hix went to work in the Pentagon, where his frustration grew. In Was.h.i.+ngton, the Joint Staff, the State Department, and the Bush administration were willing to do just enough to prolong the war, he believed, but not enough to prevail. Their outlook on the war was "eerily similar to the escalatory minimalist approach" that had failed so miserably in Vietnam, Hix wrote in an e-mail to Casey in early 2006. "We need to rededicate ourselves to winning the war," he added.

His critique was almost identical to McMaster's in Tal Afar. Hix, however, had played a major role in helping Casey develop his strategy for Iraq, which focused on pus.h.i.+ng Iraqis to take the lead in the fight, and he felt a measure of responsibility for its shortcomings. In retrospect he said that he was too quick to buy into a bit of decades-old wisdom from British colonel T. E. Lawrence that became a mantra for U.S. troops throughout Iraq in 2005 and 2006. "Do not try to do too much with your own hands," Lawrence of Arabia had counseled. "Better the Arabs do it tolerably than you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not win it for them." By late 2005, Lawrence's maxim was plastered on the wall of command posts throughout Iraq as if it were a religious commandment.

But Lawrence had been fighting a completely different type of war than the Americans were. He and his tribal militias were trying to drive out the occupying Turkish army with hit-and-run attacks, not govern a country. "Lawrence was the insurgent," Hix concluded. "His insights are useful, but we were wrong to treat them as canon law."

Casey's small plane touched down on the narrow landing strip outside Tal Afar, where a car was waiting to ferry him the short distance to McMaster's makes.h.i.+ft plywood headquarters. After a year in combat, McMaster's regiment was heading home. Casey took a seat at a table piled high with m.u.f.fins, coffee, and sodas while McMaster delivered what he thought was a routine briefing on his pullout plans.

"Publish the orders," Casey said suddenly as he rose to his feet. He pulled out a Bronze Star and pinned it to McMaster's tan uniform. The surprise visit was an honor he bestowed on only a handful of his best field commanders. McMaster's regiment had won praise for its successes. Like Petraeus, McMaster had had the good sense to make sure he had plenty of reporters around to doc.u.ment his troops' triumphs.

When his soldiers had arrived four months earlier they'd found an all-out sectarian war. Gangs of Sunni religious extremists kidnapped s.h.i.+tes and left their headless corpses on the city's streets. The city's terrified police force, made up entirely of s.h.i.+tes, holed up in the ruins of a sixteenth-century Ottoman castle in the city's center, sending out small teams to conduct reprisal attacks on mostly innocent Sunnis.

McMaster's first priority was to stop the killing. At a time when many commanders were pulling back from cities and handing over their sectors to Iraqi forces, he established twenty-nine small outposts in an effort to separate the feuding groups. He replaced both the city's proinsurgent Sunni mayor and its s.h.i.+te police chief with outsiders from nearby Mosul. Lastly, he closely controlled the Iraqi army and police forces in the city. With his area on the verge of civil war, McMaster believed that only an outside force could mediate between warring Sunnis and s.h.i.+tes.

Casey and Abizaid had long believed that U.S. forces in Iraqi cities fueled resentment over the occupation, and emphasized that their top priority should be to build up Iraqi forces. McMaster insisted that only American troops could stop the killing. In sharply worded a.s.sessments, he catalogued the Iraqis' flaws. Local Sunnis were terrified of the abusive s.h.i.+te police commandos sent from Baghdad. The Iraqi troops were incapable of standing up to brutal Sunni insurgents. They couldn't feed themselves without U.S. help or repair broken equipment. When one of their soldiers was killed by insurgents, the unit wasn't even able to s.h.i.+p the body home. Instead the battalion commander ordered his men to put the decomposing corpse in a room with the air-conditioning turned on full blast. In a scene reminiscent of a Faulkner novel, the Iraqis then pa.s.sed a hat hoping to collect cab fare for the 500-mile trip to the dead soldier's family home in Basra. Eventually McMaster paid the fare.

U.S. advisors complained that McMaster didn't give their Iraqis a chance. "The Iraqi division commander in Tal Afar was really no longer the division commander," Colonel Doug s.h.i.+pman told an Army historian. "He was now taking very direct orders from a colonel in the American Army." In Baghdad, the U.S. one-star in charge of the advisory program told McMaster that he didn't understand Casey's strategy, which emphasized training Iraqis and taking a step back so that they could handle the fight. McMaster testily dismissed the criticism. "It's unclear to me how a higher degree of pa.s.sivity would advance our mission," he said.

After Casey pinned on McMaster's Bronze Star, the two walked down a narrow hallway and ducked into McMaster's windowless office. Casey knew there was tension between McMaster and some of the officers above him. He told McMaster that he was an extremely talented officer who had a better sense for the war's complexities than just about any other commander. But he needed to listen more and be willing to take no for an answer, especially when it came from his superiors. The two officers were polar opposites. McMaster, pa.s.sionate and intense, was a risk taker who always craved a good argument. Casey tried to be a team player and searched for consensus.

By late 2005, McMaster's approach of moving U.S. troops into Iraqi cities and safeguarding citizens was starting to gain notice in Was.h.i.+ngton, where it had caught the eye of Phil Zelikow, a top advisor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. To sell the strategy as a potential model for the rest of Iraq, Zelikow decided he needed to come up with a pithy phrase that described it. He settled on "clear, hold, and build," a play on General Creighton Abrams's "clear and hold" strategy in Vietnam. U.S. and Iraqi troops would clear insurgents from an area. Instead of leaving, they would stay behind, as McMaster's troops had done, establis.h.i.+ng small outposts to protect the people. Lastly, they would rebuild the government and infrastructure.

In late October, Secretary Rice unveiled the concept in testimony to Congress and Rumsfeld hit the roof, insisting that the term made no sense. "It is the Iraqis' country. They've got 28 million people there. They are clearing; they are holding; they are building. They're going to be the ones doing the reconstruction in that country," he railed to reporters.

Casey felt betrayed as well. When Rice next visited Iraq he pulled her aside. "Madam Secretary, what's clear, hold, and build?" he asked.

"That's your strategy, George," she said.

"Well, if it's my strategy, don't you think it would have been appropriate for someone to ask me about it?" Casey replied.

Later that day, he confronted Zelikow, whom he had hosted in Iraq a few months earlier. Casey didn't explicitly object to the "clear, hold, and build" phrase, though he agreed with Rumsfeld that the priority needed to be on building up the Iraqis to take the leading role. He was most upset that Zelikow hadn't sought him out to discuss the idea before he and Rice took it public. "This is bulls.h.i.+t. It is personal. You came here and I opened the books to you. I gave you free access to everything, and you don't have the courtesy to call me and tell me what you are doing," he said. In fact, Rumsfeld's insistence that the Defense Department dominate the strategy debate and his refusal to listen to outside critics had made such cooperation almost impossible.

With Iraq collapsing into civil war, President Bush cited McMaster's approach as proof that after "much trial and error" and many b.l.o.o.d.y setbacks, the United States had finally found a winning strategy. An influential New Yorker New Yorker article described McMaster and his troops as "rebels against an incoherent strategy." By that point, McMaster's regiment was home; U.S. troop levels in Tal Afar had been cut by more than half, and the security in the city was starting to deteriorate. article described McMaster and his troops as "rebels against an incoherent strategy." By that point, McMaster's regiment was home; U.S. troop levels in Tal Afar had been cut by more than half, and the security in the city was starting to deteriorate.

Baghdad November 2005 "I understand you are looking for a kidnapped boy," an Iraqi colonel whispered to Brigadier General Karl Horst as they walked out of a routine meeting inside the Interior Ministry. "You need to go to this location." He quietly pressed a piece of torn paper into the American officer's hand. Horst, one of two a.s.sistant commanders in Baghdad, had been looking for the fifteen-year-old for several days, ever since the boy's distraught parents told him that their son had been abducted by a s.h.i.+te militia with ties to the Interior Ministry. The scribbled note was his first lead.

The location listed on the colonel's note was a three-story concrete building near the Green Zone, known as the Jadiriyah bunker. When Horst arrived there, a dozen police officers in camouflage uniforms blocked the entrance. He told them to let him pa.s.s. They refused. After an extended argument and a call to the interior minister, an Iraqi general showed up and agreed to take him on a quick tour of the facility.

For the next fifteen minutes they wandered up and down the same empty halls and stairwells. Horst was furious. "I want to see the prisoners," he demanded.

"We're getting there," the general replied.

Down a dark hallway, he smelled a pungent odor coming from behind two locked double doors and ordered the jailers to open them. "The man who has the keys is gone for the day," the general replied. Horst threatened to break open the lock with a sledgehammer, and the guards quickly produced the missing key. Inside the six-foot-by-twelve-foot room were a dozen blindfolded inmates. One of the prisoners began nodding toward a second set of locked doors at the back of the small, windowless room.

As the door opened, Horst was. .h.i.t by an overpowering smell of dirty bodies, urine, rotten food, and human feces that made him retch. One hundred fifty-six prisoners-all but three of them Sunnis-were sitting in lines with their legs crossed. The guards stepped outside, and the prisoners began lifting up their s.h.i.+rts to show b.l.o.o.d.y whip marks where they had been beaten. Many of them had been held in the building for months. At least sixteen inmates had died there.

The guards identified themselves as part of an off-the-books unit within the Interior Ministry that patrolled largely Sunni neighborhoods of western Baghdad. "They'd run missions at night, gather up Sunnis, torture and kill them," Horst recalled. Aside from a small cartoon-covered notebook with names written inside it, there were no records in the building. None of the Sunnis in the torture facility had been charged with a crime. There was also no sign of the fifteen-year-old boy. The United States evacuated two dozen emaciated prisoners to a military hospital. Horst snapped some pictures and stuffed the worst-looking torture implements-whips, handcuffs, a b.l.o.o.d.y metal pole, and a mace-into a box as evidence. During his nine months in Baghdad, Horst had come to believe that the s.h.i.+te-dominated police were waging a coordinated campaign to clear Sunnis out of the capital's mixed neighborhoods. Now he had proof.

Petraeus had left Iraq about two months prior to the discovery of the prison bunker to take command of the Army's Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth. Before he was a.s.signed there he'd been told that the Pentagon bra.s.s were considering him for three slots: the Leavenworth position, a top slot on the Joint Chiefs staff, and an a.s.signment as the superintendent at the U.S. Military Academy. The superintendent job was a terminal three-star position, meaning that if Petraeus was put there, he could never get promoted again. In early 2005, Army secretary Fran Harvey had casually mentioned to Colonel Mike Meese, the Sosh department head, that Petraeus might be headed to West Point. Meese, whose position in Sosh gave him more influence than the average colonel, flipped. "Sir, that is the stupidest thing I have ever heard," he said, arguing that it would take the talented general permanently out of the war.

Petraeus was given the Leavenworth slot. He'd been replaced in Iraq by Lieutenant General Martin Dempsey, a smart and affable officer who had led the U.S. division in Baghdad in 2003. Before Petraeus departed, he'd heard rumors that s.h.i.+te militias were infiltrating the Special Police Commando force that he had spotted training on the edge of the Green Zone in late 2004 and had enthusiastically backed. The first hints of a problem came when General Thavit, the hard-nosed Sunni who had founded the group, was shunted aside by the s.h.i.+te-dominated government in the spring of 2005. Over the course of the summer the commando force grew rapidly and complaints about them multiplied. In Tal Afar, McMaster's regiment snapped pictures of the police commandos' abuses and sought their permanent removal from the sector. Hix and Sepp's report to Casey in August 2005 noted that several U.S. officers had expressed concern about the s.h.i.+te force.

Petraeus successfully pushed to have one police commando commander removed and cut off U.S. support to the Interior Ministry's major crimes unit when its troops were caught abusing prisoners. But it was tough to get hard evidence of widely rumored atrocities because there weren't enough advisory teams. The ten-man teams, each of which was a.s.signed to a 500-man Iraqi unit, simply couldn't keep eyes on the Iraqis twenty-four hours a day. "You had such limited means to put hands on [the commandos] and the need was so urgent to get them out there," Petraeus recalled.

Horst had been worried about the s.h.i.+te police forces since early summer, when he had first mentioned his concerns to Casey. He thought that sectarian violence and militia infiltration of the police were a bigger problem than Al Qaeda extremists coming into the country from Syria. "That's not the read that I am getting from my guys, Karl," Casey had told him. Like Petraeus, Casey had heard the rumors of s.h.i.+te militias taking over the police but could never nail them down. "We were always trying to figure out what the heck was really going on there," he recalled.

Horst believed the prison bunker proved that his earlier instincts had been right. A few hours after the last Sunnis had been taken from the facility he met with Casey and gave him the photographs from the prison bunker along with the box of torture implements. "Sir, this is a manifestation of the sectarian problem that we have been trying to describe," he said.

Casey took off his gla.s.ses and rested them on the top of his head as he stared at Horst's pictures. He rubbed his eyes with both hands, something he did only when he was thinking hard or worried. He'd seen this problem coming. In an e-mail to a senior U.S. emba.s.sy official nine months earlier, he'd outlined the potential pitfalls of his strategy to s.h.i.+ft the fight to the security forces. One of the biggest was that the government would "politicize the security ministries, the military and the police forces, heightening Sunni anxieties." Now Casey was staring at a brown cardboard box of torture implements that suggested his greatest fear was being realized.

The discovery couldn't have come at a worse time. The second round of elections was set for December 30, just five weeks away. The Sunnis had boycotted the first vote in January 2005, and Casey was working to convince Sunni leaders to go to the polls in December. He reasoned that if the Sunnis took part in the balloting and won a place in the new government, the fighting might die down some.

He promised Horst that he'd press Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari to investigate what had happened at the bunker. He also wanted to a.s.sign an American team to probe whether the interior minister knew about the abuse. Horst's body was coursing with adrenaline as he walked out of Casey's small Green Zone office. He found Casey hard to read and wondered if he understood the severity of the problem. The secret prison proved that the U.S. strategy wasn't working, Horst thought. The military was essentially handing power to a sectarian government and suspect militias. It was time, he believed, to try something different.

CHAPTER ELEVEN.

"What Would You Do, Lieutenant?"

Green Zone, Baghdad November 2005 Just before nine in the morning a convoy of Chevy Suburbans pulled up at the Adnan Palace, an ugly pyramid-shaped building on the western edge of the Green Zone. Casey clambered out of one vehicle along with several aides and diplomats, pushed through the towering wooden doors, and headed up the marble staircase to the second floor where Bayan Jabr, the interior minister, was waiting. A small man with a closely cropped salt-and-pepper beard who had spent years in exile during Saddam Hussein's rule, Jabr now presided over a force that included some 135,000 local police and 30,000 national police commandos. He and Casey settled into a pair of cus.h.i.+oned armchairs. Like other government officials, Jabr normally didn't start working until much later in the day, but Casey had wanted to see him first thing.

"This is what we found," Casey said, pointing at a cardboard box that his aide had brought to the meeting and placed on the low coffee table in front of them. It was the same container Karl Horst had shown Casey the day before, with the whips, shackles, and other torture devices that his men had removed from the Jadiriyah bunker. Sticking out of the top was a fearsome-looking barbed club. Jabr recoiled and then let out a resigned sigh. "Iraqis," he muttered, as if such behavior was a national trait. Casey handed him photographs of the emaciated, broken men who had emerged from the dank prison. He wanted no misunderstanding. The secret prison was in an Interior Ministry building less than a mile from his office and guarded by men on Jabr's payroll. The only possible conclusion, Casey said in a level but firm voice, was that Jabr himself or the people around him had known about the facility and had condoned it.

With his French-cuff s.h.i.+rts and pa.s.sable English, Jabr was one of the smoother members of the cabinet. He knew nothing about this, he sputtered. He was far removed from such sordid matters. Many of the guards had trained under Saddam Hussein, when all prisoners were treated this way. What did Casey expect? "We will have an investigation," he said. The meeting lasted no more than fifteen tense minutes. By the time Jabr appeared before the press later to announce the joint Iraqi-U.S. investigation of the prison, the minister had recovered his composure. Most of the prisoners had been foreign terrorists, he told disbelieving Western reporters, holding up several pa.s.sports. "n.o.body was beheaded or killed." It had been worse under Saddam.

Casey found Jabr hard to believe, too. After returning to his office, he ordered a secret investigation to a.s.sess whether the minister had known about the prison. Though it was never acknowledged publicly, U.S. and British intelligence eavesdropped on the top levels of the government, intercepting their cell phones and text messages. When the secret report came back a few weeks later, there was no definitive proof linking Jabr to the torture operation. But Casey was convinced that he at least had known about it. The bunker was run, the United States believed, by a relative of Jabr's, known as Engineer Ahmed, who was often seen around Adnan Palace. The United States wanted to use the Jadiriyah incident to force personnel changes at the Interior Ministry, starting with Jabr. When Casey and U.S. amba.s.sador Zalmay Khalilzad presented Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari with the cla.s.sified report a few weeks later, the subject only seemed to make him weary. "He just said, 'Okay. I'll look at this,'" Casey recalled. He and Khalilzad talked about whether they should try to force the prime minister to do something by giving him a deadline to take action or calling a press conference to further expose the abuses in the ministry. Casey decided it was the amba.s.sador's call. "As a military guy, I didn't feel like I ought to dictate to the prime minister," he explained. Eventually the subject of Jadiriyah was dropped. No one important was fired, and Jabr remained in senior government posts.

There were more episodes like this one the longer Casey remained in command, moments that raised fundamental questions about the course the United States was embarked upon in Iraq. If the Interior Ministry had been infiltrated by s.h.i.+te militias that abused Sunnis and was headed by a minister who denied the evidence, how could the United States proceed with its plans to place it in charge of security? Wasn't that a path to failure? Casey wasn't blind to these and other contradictions. He had been in command for nearly eighteen months, longer than any other senior American, military or civilian, and knew better than most the flaws at the core of the U.S. effort. Not that Casey doubted the course he was on. He was in many ways the prototypical officer, curious and thoughtful, open to new information and ready to adjust-but usually at the margins, enough to a.s.sure himself that whatever problems existed were being addressed, if not entirely resolved. The meetings at Adnan Palace and with the prime minister were good examples. He wasn't going to let the incident pa.s.s, but he wasn't going to provoke a showdown, either. It wasn't his job. This was a sovereign country, and it was up to the amba.s.sador to handle the prime minister and major political issues, not him. Besides, he told himself, the last round of national elections was only a few weeks away. The next government would be better.

Casey had arrived in Iraq determined to keep his goals limited, not to take on tasks beyond the military's purview and ability. It was the same mind-set that the Army had adopted during the 1990s peacekeeping missions in an attempt to avoid another Vietnam-like quagmire, which had destroyed the force. The longer he remained in Baghdad the more he became convinced of this logic. Military power could drive down the violence and buy time to build a government. But the military couldn't force the Iraqis to get along with each other; it couldn't win the war. There were big downsides to expanding the military's role. Asking the Army to do more, he believed, risked breaking the inst.i.tution to which he had dedicated his life and cared for deeply.

By early 2006, however, people who mattered were beginning to doubt him and the strategy. In November, Senator John McCain went public with his criticism in a major speech at the American Enterprise Inst.i.tute, a conservative think tank a few blocks from the White House. The lunchtime audience overflowed into the hallways, straining to catch every word from the former prisoner of war who would shortly announce his candidacy for the presidency. "There is an undeniable sense that things are slipping," he said, reciting the worrisome trends in Iraq. He was careful not to blame the White House or even Rumsfeld, whom he privately considered a disaster. Instead the former Navy pilot aimed his remarks at the military men in Baghdad. U.S. commanders had been slow to adopt "a true counterinsurgency strategy" that emphasized protecting the population and holding on to areas cleared of insurgents, he said. Wrongheaded plans were afoot to reduce troop levels and hand off the mission as quickly as possible to the Iraqi army and police. "Instead of drawing down, we should be ramping up," he declared, and instead of rotating its generals after one-year tours, the Pentagon should keep the best of them in Iraq, mentioning Petraeus, Chiarelli, and others. "We need these commanders and their hard-won experience to stay in place." He didn't praise or even mention Casey. That was the way a mugging was done in Was.h.i.+ngton.

Petraeus was about as far from the war as a soldier could get. When he first learned that he had been chosen to head the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, he was disappointed. He wasn't entirely sure what his new command even did. Digging into it on the Internet, he learned that he'd have responsibility for running the Army's nationwide network of training centers and schools. He would also oversee the drafting of Army doctrine. Gradually Petraeus's enthusiasm built.

Every couple of days Petraeus would regale Colonel J. R. Martin, his former West Point cla.s.smate, with some new aspect of the job that had piqued his intellect. Martin had a more immediate worry: "I was concerned that he wouldn't be able to get promoted out of it," he recalled. Even among Petraeus's clique of supporters, the orders sending him to the Kansas outpost were seen as a sign that the higher bra.s.s thought that the ambitious general, after almost thirty months in Iraq, needed a good rest-or that the Army needed a rest from him.

On a crisp October afternoon, Petraeus took command at Fort Leavenworth from Lieutenant General William Wallace. When Wallace had been sent to Kansas in mid-2003, it was widely seen as punishment, meted out by Rumsfeld, after the general confessed to a reporter that the United States hadn't antic.i.p.ated the waves of crazed Saddam Fedayeen guerrillas that hara.s.sed U.S. troops on their initial drive to Baghdad. "The enemy we're fighting is a bit different from the one we war-gamed against," he'd said. At Leavenworth, Wallace hadn't made big changes. Petraeus wasted no time in demonstrating that he had an altogether different approach to the job. After an honor guard fired the traditional fifteen-gun salute, a sergeant handed Petraeus a gleaming bra.s.s sh.e.l.l casing from the barrage. "I don't know how you got it polished up so quickly," he said, fingering the spent cartridge, "but you clearly know how I like to operate."

Far from the battlefields of Iraq-where the war was going from bad to much worse-the bright and ambitious general began plotting an insurgency of his own, one aimed at changing his service. Like any good guerrilla, Petraeus chose to attack a spot that was poorly defended: the Army's counterinsurgency doctrine. By 2005 the doctrine hadn't been revised in more than a quarter of a century; it was a dusty doc.u.ment that few even bothered to read.

A year earlier, Wallace, whose first a.s.signment in the Army had been as an advisor to the South Vietnamese army, had a.s.signed a lieutenant colonel who had never laid eyes on Iraq to rewrite the doc.u.ment. The overwhelmed officer labored in almost complete obscurity. In a matter of days, the new commanding general made rewriting the counterinsurgency doctrine his top priority. Doctrine provides an intellectual framework for how to fight different kinds of wars. Often it is written to reflect conventional Army wisdom. In rare instances, new doctrine has driven major changes in the Army. In the early 1980s the Army unveiled the AirLand Battle Doctrine, a recipe for defeating much larger Soviet armor formations. It called on commanders to strike ninety miles behind the front lines with helicopters and artillery, using speed, cunning, and intuition to surprise the more mechanistic Soviets. The doctrine, which drove the Army for two decades, was an explicit rejection of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara's rigid, measurement-focused approach to war.

Petraeus wanted his counterinsurgency doctrine to have the same impact as AirLand Battle. At the time, he had a couple of big strikes against him. One was Fort Leavenworth itself. Even by Army standards, the base is in the middle of nowhere. A nineteenth-century frontier fort located on the high bluffs overlooking the Missouri River, an hour's drive from Kansas City, it is probably best known as the site of an old limestone prison. It doesn't get much attention from Was.h.i.+ngton except when a high-profile inmate arrives in leg irons. Leavenworth is also home to the Army's staff college, where young, rising officers learn to do war planning. The post's red brick houses, lecture halls, and softball fields make it feel more like a tweedy midwestern liberal arts campus than an Army base. Petraeus had spent a year there in 1982-an uneventful sojourn, except that he graduated first in his cla.s.s. He hadn't been back since.

The second major handicap Petraeus faced was that doctrine is hardly an exciting topic. He asked Conrad Crane, a cla.s.smate of his from West Point who had written extensively about counterinsurgency and taught history at the Army War College, to oversee a large team that was going to rewrite the new doctrine. Petraeus enlisted a number of high-profile Was.h.i.+ngton figures, both military and civilian. Among those included was Eliot Cohen, a Johns Hopkins professor who had been a critic of the Bush administration's handling of the war and would go on to serve in the influential position of counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. He also called on now Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl, the Rhodes scholar and Sosh alum whose book on Vietnam and Malaya had made him a minor celebrity, appearing on the cover of the New York Times Magazine New York Times Magazine. In early 2006, Nagl was working in the Pentagon, where he was growing increasingly disillusioned with the war effort.

Finally Petraeus called a friend who had served in the Clinton administration, Sarah Sewall, who was running Harvard University's Carr Center for Human Rights. He'd met her in the early 1990s when he was doing his research project on the U.S. intervention in Haiti. The center agreed to cosponsor a Fort Leavenworth conference to provide suggestions for improving the new doctrine's first draft. Petraeus made sure the conference received the proper attention, flying in congressional staffers, journalists, and a bevy of political scientists, human rights advocates, and military historians.

He held court before them for two days. At a dinner on the first night, he unveiled a recent article he'd written for Military Review Military Review on the fourteen most important things he'd learned from soldiering in Iraq. The observations weren't especially novel, but the crowd of counterinsurgency experts and Was.h.i.+ngton insiders was adoring. The next day the partic.i.p.ants set to work on revising the first draft of the doctrine. It was path-breaking. on the fourteen most important things he'd learned from soldiering in Iraq. The observations weren't especially novel, but the crowd of counterinsurgency experts and Was.h.i.+ngton insiders was adoring. The next day the partic.i.p.ants set to work on revising the first draft of the doctrine. It was path-breaking.

For decades, the American way of war had been to bludgeon the enemy so thoroughly with heavy firepower that he would realize he had no chance and submit quickly. In this way, the Army hoped to avoid drawn-out conflicts like Vietnam that sapped both the military's willingness to fight and the support of the public at home. This approach was the essence of the so-called Powell Doctrine, named after General Colin Powell when he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs during the 1991 Gulf War. As he first had done twenty years earlier in his dissertation, Petraeus took direct aim at Powell's tenet that the country could simply choose not to fight in messy guerrilla wars. "Most enemies of the United States ... know they cannot compete with U.S. forces" in a conventional war, the 453-page manual began. "Instead they try to exhaust U.S. national will, aiming to win by undermining and outlasting public support."

The most radical aspect of the manual was its insistence that the primary focus in counterinsurgency wars should be on protecting the civilian population and not on killing the enemy. It made this point in a series of Zen-like warnings dubbed the "paradoxes of counterinsurgency."

"Sometimes, the more force is used, the less effective it is," one of the Powell Doctrine-defying precepts maintained. And so it went, point after point: "Sometimes, doing nothing is the best reaction." "Some of the best weapons for counterinsurgents do not shoot."

Petraeus's manual also attacked an idea that had become gospel in the Army during the 1990s peacekeeping missions-that protecting the force was of paramount importance in low-intensity wars. The manual insisted that in counterinsurgency wars soldiers had to a.s.sume greater risks in order to distinguish the enemy from the innocents, safeguard the population, and in the end achieve greater safety. "The more you protect the force, the less secure you may be," the doctrine warned.

The new manual received lavish press coverage engineered by Petraeus, who acted as his own publicist. Most generals keep journalists at arm's length, believing the surest way to stunt their careers is to appear to be grandstanding in the press. Petraeus was different. He courted journalists with the same intensity he brought to every task, remembering their names and returning their e-mails at all hours. Thanks to Petraeus's finely tuned public relations sense, stories about his new doctrine and the brain trust that developed it were featured on the front pages of the Wall Street Journal Wall Street Journal, the New York Times New York Times, the Los Angeles Times Los Angeles Times, and the Was.h.i.+ngton Post Was.h.i.+ngton Post. The doctrine's authors even made an appearance on Charlie Rose Charlie Rose, and Lieutenant Colonel Nagl had a seven-minute sit-down with comedian Jon Stewart on The Daily Show The Daily Show. In the history of Army manuals, there had been nothing like it. In its first week, the manual was downloaded more than 1.5 million times. It was later reprinted by the University of Chicago Press as a paperback, and reviewed in the New York Times Book Review New York Times Book Review.

The manual helped the exhausted Army feel as if it had expertise in the type of warfare it was facing in Iraq, and it positioned Petraeus as the most cogent thinker about the deepest strategic and tactical questions the country was facing. Anybody could see he wanted to get back to the war. In his second-floor office at Leavenworth, he would obsessively log on to the cla.s.sified computer network used by commanders in the war, tracking operations, movements of units, and casualties as they unfolded four thousand miles away.

As Petraeus plotted his return, Pete Chiarelli was already on his way back to Iraq. In December 2005, the White House had nominated him for a third star and appointed him to serve under Casey as the commander in charge of daily military operations for a force that now numbered 160,000 U.S. troops along with 23,000 more from Britain and a smattering from other countries. Chiarelli was ecstatic.

He had only been back from his first tour since March, but it had been a restless few months. After returning to Fort Hood and spending a few weeks with his family, he had headed for Was.h.i.+ngton to deliver briefings at the Pentagon, on Capitol Hill, and at some foreign policy think tanks about his year in Iraq. The road show, as he called his presentation, was a hit. What 1st Cav and USAID had accomplished in Sadr City was a blueprint, he argued, for the unconventional approach the U.S. government, both military and civilians, needed to try throughout Iraq. He talked about the April firefight in Sadr City with a pa.s.sion that few other generals could duplicate. As he spoke, an aide would unveil a chart that showed attacks concentrated in areas with the worst government services. It was followed by another chart that showed violence dropping off almost entirely after the money started flowing and the jobs programs got under way.

At a time when there was little good news from Iraq, Chiarelli was one senior officer who exuded confidence. Chiarelli's ideas also had some appeal to the Bush administration. He wasn't insisting that the answer was more troops, a prerequisite for any general who hoped to earn Rumsfeld's nod.

For once his timing was perfect. Major General John Batiste, who had been chosen as Casey's deputy, suddenly retired out of frustration with Rumsfeld and the way the war was being fought. Rumsfeld needed a bright former division commander, preferably with Iraq experience, to take Batiste's place. The a.s.signment went to Chiarelli.