Foreign Policy In Focus

Gen. Petraeus allowed unprecedented access to conservative Washington think tankers.

On Tuesday, December 18, at the Washington Post, Rajiv Chandrasekaran revealed that, while he was top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David Petraeus relied on the advisory services of prominent conservative think-tankers and military historians Frederick and Kimberly Kagan. He seems to have allowed them near-total access.

Provided desks, e-mail accounts and top-level security clearances in Kabul, they pored through classified intelligence reports, participated in senior-level strategy sessions and probed the assessments of field officers in order to advise Petraeus about how to fight the war differently.

But

The Kagans’ proximity to Petraeus, the country’s most-famous living general, provided an incentive for defense contractors to contribute to Kim Kagan’s think tank. 

The Kagans had hoped to head off appearances of conflict of interest by working for free.

“There are actual patriots in the world,” Fred Kagan said. “It was very important to me not to be seen to be profiting from the war.”

Ah, the humility. Wait -- I've got an idea. It was just revealed that conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks is teaching a course during the spring semester at Yale titled "Humility." Apparently, he's spoken and written about the subject before. 

Brooks told New York magazine via email: "The title of the Humility course is, obviously, intentionally designed to provoke smart ass jibes, but there's actually a serious point behind it." From the course description: "The premise that human beings are blessed with many talents but are also burdened by sinfulness, ignorance, and weakness."

Then why not invite Fred Kagan to sit in and learn a thing or two about humility? Then, should Brooks choose to follow up his spring course with one on the fall titled "Hubris," he could invite Gen. Petraeus himself as a guest lecturer.

From national hero to cyber stalker in 1,000 easy emails.

While interviewing General David Petraeus's co-biographer Paula Broadwell, John Stewart asked her what it was like to be "embedded with a person at this level." Little did he know how embedded she was.

Of course, Petraeus resigned after his brief affair with Ms. Broadwell -- and his obsessive attempts to revive it in the form of over one thousand emails -- were discovered. Still, today's climate is forgiving enough to allow someone in such a high position to continue his job. One thinks of President Clinton.

However, it was out of the question in Petraeus's case, not only because he was head of an intelligence organization, but because Ms. Broadwell is under investigation for reading sensitive emails that Petraeus wrote. The Wall Street Journal reports:

The computer-security investigation … points to one reason Mr. Petraeus and the White House decided he couldn't remain in the senior intelligence position. An extramarital affair has significant implications for an official in a highly sensitive post, because it can open an official to blackmail. Security officials are sensitive to misuse of personal email accounts—not only official accounts—because there have been multiple instances of foreign hackers targeting personal emails.

FBI agents on the case expected that Petraeus would be asked to resign immediately rather than risk the possibility that he could be blackmailed to give intelligence secrets to foreign intelligence agencies or criminals. In addition, his pursuit of the woman could have distracted him as the CIA was giving Congress reports on the attack on the Benghazi consulate on Sept. 11.

Conservatives had already been claiming that someone at the CIA was "asleep at the wheel" of the Benghazi train wreck. Some now view one-time favorite Petraeus as a means by which they can further savage the administration over the attack. At Danger Room, Spencer Ackerman writes:

The Wall Street Journal cites several anonymous officials who go after Petraeus hard. The CIA [presence in Benghazi] … with the mission of hunting down ex-dictator Moammar Gadhafi’s unsecured rockets and missiles … operating out of an “annex” near the 13-acre consular compound, dwarfed the regular diplomatic presence in Benghazi. That apparently led to an expectation at the State Department that the CIA would secure the compound in the event of a disaster, which never congealed into a formal arrangement.

Worse …

The CIA had 10 people to protect its annex in Benghazi, but the State Department relied on a previously obscure British firm, Blue Mountain, [which] … paid its Libyan guards $4 an hour … to guard the entire compound. … It’s speculative, but the State Department’s expectation that the CIA would be “the cavalry” in an assault … might have contributed to State’s relatively lax security posture at the consulate.

Meanwhile, let's try to envision a scenario in which Ms. Broadwell perused Petraeus's official email account.

1. While he's deep in post-coital sleep, she sneaks off to his laptop. He has carelessly failed to log out of his email account.
2. While he scrolls through his emails, he lets her look over his shoulder.
3. He actually gave her his password. His intent might have been to allow her to log on and view saved drafts of emails he's written, but refrained from sending to avoid tracking. But, the sheer volume of emails he sent otherwise tends to invalidate this hypothesis.

Still a key question remains: was Ms. Broadwell just poking around on Petraeus's account out of curiosity? Or was she looking for something specific? If so, what?

In the end -- in fact, this story is just getting started -- it's ironic to those of us who have long stood in opposition to Petraeus that the woman who helped "hagiograph"* him was the catalyst for his fall from grace. Thanks to Petraeus's fatal encounter with Ms. Broadwell, he was transformed from engaged CIA director and "national hero" to a man who wrote over one thousand emails to the woman who'd broken up with him -- a common cyber-stalker, in other words.

*Write an idealizing biography.

(Pictured: Generals McChrystal and Petraeus.)

A woman named Paula Broadwell, whose book about Gen. David Petraeus will be published shortly, touched some tender nerves with a couple of posts at Thomas Ricks's Best Defense at Foreign Policy. Michael Cohen at Democracy Arsenal summed it up.

There's been a lot of back and forth between Paula Broadwell and Josh Foust about the issue of village razing in Afghanistan. . . . I won't bother to summarize the entire discussion, but it began with what I think can be charitably described as Paula's less than empathetic response to an Afghan village being destroyed. What I find most striking [besides] the rather bloodless manner in which Broadwell describes the incident [is the] unintentional, insight into how dramatically the war in Afghanistan has shifted in opposition to the population-centric policies being espoused a year ago.

A lot of COIN advocates will tell you that . . . even though airstrikes are up 300% and targeted killings are on the rise and more homes are being destroyed since General David Petraeus took over command . . . it's still just counter-insurgency. But for those with long memories the operational approach . . . under General McChrystal was to avoid civilian casualties and even property destruction at all costs, even at the risk of putting US troops in harm's way. (Some even argued that protecting civilians was actually more important than killing insurgents).

Cohen reminds us that the all-merciful McChrystal even wrote: "Destroying a home or property jeopardizes the livelihood of an entire family -- and creates more insurgents. We sow the seeds of our demise." 

The irony, of course, is that Petraeus was supposed to be the picture of moderation in contrast to Gen. Stanley McChrystal. Not only was the latter let go for indiscretions to Rolling Stone on the part of him and his staff, but, while in Iraq before his Afghanistan command, he helped with the cover-up of Cpl. Pat Tillman's death by friendly fire. Also, as Commander of Joint Special Operations Command in Iraq from 2003 to 2008, McChrystal acquired a reputation for ruthlessness. Along with killing al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, his unit killed or captured many other al-Qaeda leaders. It was also accused of abusing detainees.

Has Petraeus, then, bent and twisted counterinsurgency beyond all recognition? Near as I can tell, a main feature of COIN is that it's supposed to protect civilians. At this point, in Afghanistan, does anybody really know what counterinsurgency is anymore?

U.S. Special Operations forces night raids may be scaring the wits out of Afghans, but they're not the only ones freaked out. General David Petraeus professed to experience "astonishment and disappointment" when Afghan President Hamid Karzai recently called for an end to them because, aside from imperiling their lives, the raids drive Afghans into the arms of the Taliban.

In a Huffington Post article, Robert Naiman of Just Foreign Policy writes that the tactic of night raids "has been the subject of almost no public debate in the United States. Newspaper columnists aren't inveighing against the night raids. Members of Congress aren't demanding that the night raids stop." What if, he asks, "Afghans adopted a strategy of nonviolent resistance against the night raids? Could they be stopped?" Naiman explains. 

Let's suppose . . . that there were a well-organized popular movement in Afghanistan against the night raids. Let's suppose that this movement went around to respected Islamic scholars and got legal judgments that the night raids are an offense against Islam. Let's suppose that this movement prepared to defend villages where U.S. night raids are being carried out, and organized committees of unarmed women to implement this defense. And let's suppose that when a U.S. night raid began, a call would go out from the mosque, and a group of unarmed women would surround the house and say to the US soldiers: you're not coming in, and if you try, we will not move. And let's suppose that some Western NGO issued these women video cameras, as the Israeli human rights group B'tselem has issued Palestinians video cameras. And let's suppose that a group of people in the United States and Western Europe agreed that they would try to support this movement, by vigorously raising their voices in protest whenever US special forces tried to break the line of protesters. 

Nonviolent resistance is employed by thousands of Palestinians, along with sympathetic Israelis. Naiman cites the citizens of Budrus, who in 2004, used nonviolent resistance to force Israel to re-route the West Bank Barrier around its village. Do Focal Points readers think that this tactic has failed to achieve wide success in Palestine because it's an impotent act -- or because it hasn't been fully implemented? Can Gandhi's satyagraha work in Afghanistan as outlined by Naiman?  Let us know in the comments section.  

Be trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent. That’s the Boy Scout Law. Add be a good guest, stamp out corruption, walk rather than drive, improve governance, and fight the bad guys, and you will have the new code of conduct for counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan.

All together, there are twenty-four precepts in the counterinsurgency guidelines that General Petraeus issued to the troops on August 1. In addition to the ones mentioned above, they include securing the population, acting as a team, partnering with the Afghan Army, and doling out dollars carefully.

In theory, there is something new about these guidelines, which claim to take the general principles of the Army’s counterinsurgency field manual and apply them to the specific situation in Afghanistan. In actuality, the word Afghan has merely replaced the more generic “host-nation,” which, between 2006 and 2008, was almost always understood as Iraq. Like President Obama, Petraeus is toeing the line on Afghanistan. On the one hand, he is staunchly defending the current strategy against a growing number of critics who say we are losing the war. On the other hand, as the most recent code of conduct exemplifies, he is churning out new directives on the operational end of things to ensure his soldiers and everyone else that he is doing something to turn the tide of a failing war.

It is unlikely that this latest set of directives will do anything to improve the situation in Afghanistan. What they do instead is reveal just how disconnected and unrealistic the counterinsurgency strategy there really is. In terms of personal conduct, Petraeus is asking soldiers to behave themselves nobly, as some but probably not most soldiers naturally would. Let’s face it. Most people don’t join the army because they want to be good guests in a foreign country and drink tea with their enemies. The rank-and-file’s recent backlash against courageous restraint is just the most complicated and pressing example of the clash between the character that counterinsurgency demands and the character that defines conventional military culture.

On top of that, the new directives ask soldiers to advance wildly ambitious structural reforms that even the most experienced of statesmen have not been able to achieve in either Iraq or Afghanistan. Warning against putting money in the wrong hands, the code of conduct reminds soldiers, “We are who we fund.” I suppose that makes us both the Pakistani government to which we just promised another five hundred million dollars and the Iraqi government officials who pocketed the nine billion dollars we gave them from oil revenue we controlled during the occupation.

I’m not so sure the higher-ups are in a position to give the rank-and-file any advice on this one. Reading over the twenty-four guidelines is like reading the to-do list of Beaver Cleaver who also just happens to be Superman who also just happens to have a passion for fighting corruption and implementing good governance. The problem here is not just that counterinsurgency expects too much from soldiers. It’s that it expects too much from anyone involved in counterinsurgency—civil or military, American or Afghani. Whether practiced by a soldier or a state official, by a native or a foreigner, no individual code of conduct is going to bring about the huge changes in society that are necessary for counterinsurgency to be effective. This latest set of directives just underscores the absurd chasm between America’s enormously ambitious goals in Afghanistan and the embarrassingly simplistic and hokey conception of how to achieve them.
 
When I was in the Girl Scouts, they used to tell us to “always leave a place cleaner than you found it.” No matter how many codes of conduct Petraeus writes, when the US finally withdraws, Afghanistan will probably be even dirtier than before.