WASHINGTON — When Gen. David Petraeus took command of the war in Iraq at its low point in 2007, he sent a blunt e-mail to a fellow officer about the task ahead: “We’re going to get one last shot at this and we need to make it really count,” he wrote. “It’s not business as usual.”
Petraeus could make the same statement on Wednesday after being chosen by President Barack Obama to take over in Afghanistan. Once again he is being put in charge of a faltering war by a president desperate to see quick results.
By choosing him, Obama managed to make both a surprise pick to replace Gen. Stanley McChrystal — and the most logical one.
No other officer in the U.S. military is more qualified for the job, or has a better record at counterinsurgency warfare. In Iraq, Petraeus proved he was the right man at the right time. In Afghanistan, though, he will face in some respects an even tougher challenge, with even less promising prospects for something resembling victory.
In what may prove to be a defining moment of his presidency, Obama on Wednesday accepted the resignation of Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal as the commander of the war in Afghanistan, saying it was necessary to preserve the principle of military deference to civilian leadership.
The president said that McChrystal’s and his staff’s derogatory comments to a magazine about U.S. civilian leadership forced the move, but he stressed that the personnel shift doesn’t signal any change in American war policy.
On a pivotal day for his presidency, Obama called Afghan President Hamid Karzai, British Prime Minister David Cameron and a bipartisan group of American lawmakers to solidify support for his moves. Vice President Joe Biden and national security adviser James Jones also reached out, reassuring NATO allies. Obama is asking the Senate to confirm Petraeus before its July Fourth recess, and Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., promised speedy action starting next week.
Both publicly and behind closed doors, the president sought to use McChrystal’s ouster to unify support behind his Afghan counterinsurgency campaign and his July 2011 deadline to begin drawing down U.S. troops. He told his national security team that it’s “not an option but an obligation” to quit infighting and second-guessing the war plan, for the sake of the troops and the mission.
Obama emphasized that his decision to dump McChrystal wasn’t payback for “any sense of personal insult.” He said he had “great admiration” for McChrystal, who had always executed his orders faithfully. “But war is bigger than any one man or woman, whether a private, a general or a president.”
In a Rolling Stone magazine article, McChrystal, 55, and anonymous aides were quoted ridiculing members of the president’s war council, including Biden, Jones and Karl Eikenberry, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan.
This month, in testimony to Congress, Petraeus said that, while overall levels of violence were higher in Iraq, stabilizing Afghanistan “would be harder than Iraq due to the lack of human capital, damage after 30 years of war, illiteracy, lack of infrastructure and so on.”
But Petraeus has rarely failed at anything in a three-decade Army career that has seen him become perhaps the most influential soldier-scholar of his generation. In that sense, taking over day-to-day command in Afghanistan is a risky step for Petraeus, who was one of the few senior officers to emerge from the war in Iraq with his reputation enhanced.
Petraeus, 57, has always reveled in his reputation as a gung-ho airborne soldier, someone willing to take on the hardest assignments.
A hyper-competitive fitness fanatic who graduated from West Point in 1974, Petraeus rose through the ranks by outworking his peers and attaching himself to powerful mentors who helped him secure the right jobs, and came to rely on his efficiency and intellectual gifts.
Two decades before the Army found itself bogged down against an apparently intractable insurgency in Iraq, Petraeus wrote a prescient doctoral dissertation during a two-year sabbatical at Princeton University. He warned the Army needed to rebuild its counterinsurgency capabilities instead of focusing exclusively on preparing for conventional combat.
Petraeus had never served in combat before the invasion of Iraq, a fact that led his many detractors within the Army to question whether he had risen more by connections than talent. He silenced those critics in Iraq, although even Petraeus suffered setbacks in his early assignments. He led the 101st Airborne Division in the initial invasion and then was sent to Mosul, where he had early — but temporary — success at containing the insurgency. Later, he had mixed results leading the U.S. effort to equip and train the Iraqi army and police.
In the depths of the Iraq war, Petraeus helped develop the principles of counterinsurgency he later put into practice after taking over in Baghdad.
He ordered U.S. troops to abandon large bases for smaller combat outposts, where they could better protect Iraqis from insurgent attacks. He proved adept at forging relationships with Iraqi leaders as well as with the U.S. ambassador in Baghdad, Ryan Crocker.
Perhaps most importantly, he embraced the so-called Sunni Awakening, a movement by Iraq’s Sunni tribes to set up local defense units to fight the insurgency. Petraeus nurtured the trend by pressuring the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government to pay the units, which helped turn the tide in Iraq in 2007.
But the blueprint Petraeus developed in Iraq is only partially applicable to Afghanistan, and those aspects already are being implemented in many respects.
U.S. troops are already focusing on protecting the population, a trend Petraeus is likely to continue. He will probably focus on improving relations with mercurial Afghan President Hamid Karzai and with his civilian counterpart, U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry. And an effort to encourage Taliban fighters to reconcile with the government is likely to be expanded.
Petraeus “provides strength and continuity,” said Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., the chairman of the Armed Services Committee. “Indeed, he was the architect of the counterinsurgency strategy — he literally wrote the book setting it out.”
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