Counterinsurgency American style: Considering David Petraeus and twenty-first century irregular war

Abstract

This article examines the complex legacy of David Petraeus who was a key figure in the emergence of the US military shift towards counterinsurgency doctrine in the years after 2006. Although Petraeus has been perceived by critics as a publicity seeker, he can be credited with laying the foundations for a more serious commitment to COIN involving in particular in integrating conventional and Special Forces in arenas like village stability operations. The article looks a Petraeus's role in both Iraq and Afghanistan: it concludes that, in the case of Afghanistan, it is too early to assess whether counterinsurgency has had a decisive impact of the outcome of the war against the Taliban.

Keywords::

• Afghanistan
• Iraq
• ISAF, Stanley McChrystal
• Ray Odierno
• Operation Moshtarak
• David Petraeus: revolution of military affairs (RMA)
• Taliban
• Vietnam

Acknowledgements

This article is adapted from a book chapter that appeared in The Theory and Practice of Irregular Warfare: Warrior-Scholarship in Counter-Insurgency (Routledge, 2013) edited by Andrew Mumford and Bruno C. Reis.

Notes

^1.Broadwell, All In. Also see Robinson, Tell Me How this Ends and Gericke, David Petraeus.

^2. For example, in the dust cover endorsement of Broadwell's book, former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw declared that: ‘General Petraeus is one of the most important Americans of our time, in or out of uniform.’ Following Brokaw's lead, CNN news consultant David Gergen declared that Broadwell's book ‘helps us understand how Petraeus has become the living legend he is’. The Brookings Institution's Michael O'Hanlon similarly declared that in the book: ‘No one gives a truer picture of the war, or of the finest general of this era and one of the greatest in modern American history.’ In 2008, then Secretary of Defense Robert Gates used taxpayer funds to compile a video titled Surge of Hope as part of a tribute to his accomplishments, which played at a reception honoring him before his departure from Iraq in 2008. In 2009, Newsweek Magazine identified Petraeus as one of the 16 most powerful men in the world.

^3. Some of these strands are captured by Thompson, ‘Beneath Glowing Public Image’. Also see Davis, ‘Truth, lies and Afghanistan’; Porter, ‘How Petraeus Created the Myth of his Success’; Cohen, ‘General David Petraeus’ fatal flaw'; Walt, ‘The Real Lessons of l'affaire Petraeus’.

^4. Writing with a certain breathless quality, Ricks, The Gamble, 15, states: ‘The answer for what to do in Iraq would largely come through one person, General David Petraeus, who, over the next year [2007–2008] would lead the way in revamping the U.S. approach to the war.’

^5.Strachan, The Politics of the British Army.

^6.Bacevich, The New American Militarism. The seminal works on civil–military relations remain Huntington, The Soldier and the State and Janowitz, The Professional Soldier. Also see Finer, The Man on Horseback.

^7. Lineage of the neoconservatives is chronicled in Mann, The Rise of the Vulcans. The term ‘global war on terror’ is believed to have been initially suggested in the US context by Bush Administration political adviser Karl Rove, who saw the term as a powerful metaphor in domestic politics.

^8. According to Bob Woodward, Fox News president Roger Ailes tried to convince Petraeus to run for president unless Obama offered him the job as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as reported in Byers, ‘Woodward’.

^9.Russell, Innovation, Transformation and War.

^10. As particularly noted by Bacevich, The New American Militarism.

^11. A good example is , The Savage Wars of Peace and his more recent and equally poorly conceived and researched book Invisible Armies.

^12. During the author's visit to the NATO Training Mission Afghanistan in January 2011 to evaluate the US adviser program in the Afghanistan Ministry of Defense, many of the advisers openly stated in interviews that they were not allowed to report negative assessments on Afghan Army readiness, a command directive that all attributed to Petraeus.

^13.Macgregor, ‘The Petraeus Saga’.

^14. For a summary of the major works in counterinsurgency theory, see Thiel et al., ‘Beyond FM 3-24’. For another literature review, see Kilcullen, ‘Counterinsurgency Redux’.

^15. A narrative masterfully constructed in Porch, Counterinsurgency. Also see Porch, ‘The Dangerous Myths and Dubious Promise of COIN’.

^16. An argument perhaps best encapsulated by the orientalist historian Bernard Lewis in Lewis, What Went Wrong? Lewis's views found particular favor with Bush Administration neoconservatives as it prepared to launch the invasion of Iraq. Harvard historian Niall Ferguson argues this case in Ferguson, Empire.

^17. For a good example, see Hanson, ‘Our Enemies, the Saudis’.

^18. As chronicled in Moran, National Wars of Liberation.

^19. Americans rediscovered the ideas surrounding this time-honored tradition in COIN in Krepinevich, ‘How to Win in Iraq’.

^20. During congressional testimony in October 2005, then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was the first senior official to use these terms publicly. Neither the Central Command's General John Abizaid nor the US commander in Iraq General George Casey had any idea what she was talking about. Needless to say, the phrase eventually became widely adopted as the prevailing concepts used by US units to guide their employment in the field in Iraq and Afghanistan.

^21. Estimates of Iraqi civilian casualties vary between 100,000 and 200,000. An estimated 1.1 million mostly Sunni Iraqi refugees were displaced during the ethnic cleansing and sectarian fighting from 2004 to 2007 and remain in refugee camps in surrounding states. According to the US Army Surgeon General's Office, through November 2012, 5225 US servicemen/women were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan and the number wounded in battle is over 50,000 in both wars; 1572 have had limbs amputated and 486 of these suffered multiple amputations; 73,674 Army personnel are judged to be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder; 30,480 Army personnel have suffered traumatic brain injury. The data as reported in Wood, ‘U.S. Wounded in Iraq, Afghanistan’. According to the United Nations, 12,793 Afghan civilians were killed between 2007 and 2011. Brown University's Cost of War Project estimates US expenditures to finance the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan could reach $4.4 trillion.

^22. Points made in Cohen, ‘The Myth of a Kinder, Gentler War’. For an opposite reading of history, see Paul and Clarke, ‘Evidentiary Validation of FM 3-24’, 122–8. Also see more extensive treatment of the success of counterinsurgency in Paul, Clarke, and Grill, Victory has a Thousand Fathers.

^23. Comprehensively addressed in Connable, Embracing the Fog of War.

^24. Broadwell, All In; Ricks, The Gamble; and Kaplan, The Insurgents. For a summary that provides a context for the development of the new manual, see Nagl, ‘Constructing the Legacy of Field Manual 3-24’.

^25. This is not to minimize the participation by Navy and Air Force personnel conducting operations in Afghanistan and Iraq – of which there were thousands over the course of the war. But both wars were conducted primarily by the land forces, with the Air Force and Navy in a supporting role.

^26. Russell, Innovation, Transformation and War.

^27. Chronicled in Ucko, The New Counterinsurgency Era.

^28. No US Administration in recent history has ever publicly explained its strategic priorities in such detail. See National Security Strategy2006; National Security Strategy2002; National Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction2002; National Strategy for Homeland2002; National Strategy for Combating Terrorism2003; National Military Strategy2004; National Defense Strategy2005; National Strategy for Maritime Security2005. This list is by no means exhaustive but provides a flavor of the unprecedented attention paid by the Bush Administration to such issues.

^29.Stability Operations, Directive3000.5. Department of Defense.

^30.Irregular Warfare, Department of Defense.

^31. Russell, Innovation, Transformation and War.

^32. As emphasized by Ucko, The New Counterinsurgency Era.

^33. Summarized in Gordon, ‘The Struggle for Iraq’.

^34.McCone, Scott, and Mastroianni, The Third ACR in Tal'Afar.

^35. Russell, Innovation, Transformation and War.

^36. Chronicled in Ricks, The Gamble; Kagan, The Surge.

^37.Moss, ‘Bloodied Marines Sound Off’.

^38.Woodward, The War Within. Also see Woodward, ‘Secret Killing Program’.

^39. The wider context of the surge and the myriad factors affecting insurgent violence and its relationship to US military operations is trenchantly addressed in Ucko, ‘Counterinsurgency After Afghanistan’. Also see Ollivant, ‘Countering the New Orthodoxy’ and Porch, ‘Vietnam with a Happy Ending’.

^40. As summarized by West, The Strongest Tribe, 187–96.

^41.Amos, Eclipse of the Sunnis.

^42. As emphasized in Ollivant, ‘Countering the New Orthodoxy’.

^43. For an example of the tactical approach of US forces taken during the surge, see Johnson, Markel, and Shannon, ‘The 2008 Battle of Sadr City’.

^44. For a summary of the task force's capabilities, see Defense Industry Daily, ‘Task Force Odin’.

^45. Details and background on the launch of the Village Stabilization Program in Chandrasekaran, ‘U.S. Training Afghan Villagers to Fight the Taliban’; Naylor, ‘Program has Afghans as First Line of Defense’; Trofimov, ‘U.S. Enlists New Afghan Forces’; Connett and Cassidy, ‘Village Stability Operations’.

^46. For details on implementing these programs and difficulties of balancing the local focus with the need to involve district-level government, see Feitt, ‘The Importance of Vertical Engagement’. For a comparative look VSO in several different cases, see Dearing, ‘Formalizing the Informal’.

^47.Report on Progress and Stability Toward Security and Stability in Afghanistan, Department of Defense, 67–8.

^48. Use of these techniques in Iraq detailed in Porter, ‘How McChrystal and Petraeus Built an Indiscriminate “Killing Machine”’; Urban, Task Force Black; Shafer, Operation Dark Heart. Also see Russell, Innovation, Transformation and War, 155–9.

^49.Porter, ‘How McChrystal and Petraeus Built an Indiscriminate “Killing Machine”’.

^50.The Cost of Kill/Capture, Open Society Foundations.

^51.Filkins, ‘Prize on the Battlefields of Marja May Be Momentum’. Also see Montgomery, ‘One Year After Offensive’; Van Ess, ‘The Fight For Marjah’; Nissenbaum, ‘Knocked Out Of Power In Afghan Town’; Chandrasekaran, ‘Commanders Fear Time Is Running Out in Marja’.

^52. In one indication of the lack of local enthusiasm for the Afghan national government, locals in Kandahar showed little interest joining the Afghan National Army – despite chronically high unemployment in the province. See Rivera, ‘Afghan Army Attracts Few Where Fear Reigns’.