Part 10 (1/2)

Such ignorance was neither inevitable nor helpful. ”American forces are operating in a relative vacuum of Iraqi sentiments,” a study by the Center for Army Lessons Learned reported several months later. ”This contrasts with the British, who have developed a 20-question survey that is continually administered throughout their area of operations.”

Recognizing their profound lack of understanding, American commanders launched a major effort in the fall of 2003 to improve U.S. intelligence gathering and a.n.a.lysis. On October 1, Abizaid issued an order to reorganize intelligence operations in Iraq, so that all the data gathered would pour into one new Intelligence Fusion Center. In this new organization, a.n.a.lysts would work side by side with interrogators and the CIA would cooperate with military intelligence. Until the fall, the CIA, the Special Operations units, and the divisions all had separate databases. Now a new database would be created to try to ensure, for example, that someone detained and released in Ramadi would trigger an alert when he was caught a week later in Mosul with traces of explosives on his hands. Most important, networks would be delineated, so that the U.S. effort would go after not just the front-line deliverymen of roadside bombs, but also some of the commanders running the bomb factories, the keepers of safe houses in villages on the outskirts of Baghdad, the financiers sending in new funds and supplies, and the recruiters training people and sending them in across the Syrian border. In the fall, Centcom spent $11 million to create an intelligence architecture for this, a senior official in that headquarters said.

These steps were seen inside the Army as a major success story, and they were portrayed as such to journalists. Yet it was not so, even though it felt that way to many officers, probably to the majority of those involved. ”In insurgencies, lots of things are counterintuitive,” one expert who consulted with U.S. military intelligence in Iraq said later. That is, the move that seems reasonable may not actually be the wise one. For example, getting better intelligence was a laudable tactical goal, but launching an all-out offensive that used combat methods against the population to obtain it wasn't, because it undercut the larger strategic goal.

Sanchez later recalled in a legal statement growing out of the Abu Ghraib case, ”I was having multiple intel updates, understanding that... our effectiveness against the insurgency was going to come from our ability to harvest human intelligence.” This was a comment typical of commanders in Iraq, reflecting the view that U.S. forces were adept at executing strategy and tactics, and only needed better intelligence to act upon. ”The only way you're going to get yourself inside of their decision cycle and their operating system is by getting individuals to talk,” Sanchez said.

The problem was that the U.S. military, having a.s.sumed it would be operating in a relatively benign environment, wasn't set up for a ma.s.sive effort that called on it to apprehend, detain, and interrogate Iraqis, to a.n.a.lyze the information gleaned, and then to act on it. ”As commanders at all levels sought operational intelligence, it became apparent that the intelligence structure was undermanned, under-equipped and inappropriately organized for counter-insurgency operations,” Lt. Gen. Anthony Jones wrote in an official Army report a year later.

One person in particular was squeezed between the heavy demands and the unprepared military: Brig. Gen. Barbara Fast, the top Army intelligence officer in Iraq. She was under huge pressure to revamp and improve her operation. In effect, she was being told that she she was the weakest link. We are in a war, the feeling grew among commanders, and while our troops and tactics are doing a great job, and our commanders are great guys, still we are in trouble-so it must be because we have lousy intelligence. was the weakest link. We are in a war, the feeling grew among commanders, and while our troops and tactics are doing a great job, and our commanders are great guys, still we are in trouble-so it must be because we have lousy intelligence.

The Army's recent history with female generals also complicated Fast's position. In 1997, Lt. Gen. Claudia Kennedy had been named chief of Army intelligence in what was seen by some subordinates as a gender promotion-that is, a marginally competent officer given her high position because the Army, in a political act, wanted to catch up with other services, which at that point were giving female officers three-star positions for the first time. Kennedy's major mark on the Army was made in 2000, when she became the first general ever to accuse another of s.e.xually hara.s.sing her. In retirement she became politically active, and she toyed for a time with running for senator from Virginia, eventually deciding against it. She endorsed John Kerry in 2004 and appeared at the Democratic convention in Boston, along with some other retired generals. Fast, by contrast, was seen by peers as a smart operator who had earned her position. ”She's one of the few people who was there under Sanchez who understood what was going on,” said an intelligence officer who served under her, and who also found that she was willing to back up subordinates who took unpopular positions or delivered unwelcome news. ”She clearly is better than anyone else in [the intelligence branch in] the general officer ranks of the Army.”

The key to actionable intelligence was seen by many U.S. commanders as conducting huge sweeps to detain and question Iraqis. Sometimes units acted on tips, but sometimes they just detained all able-bodied males of combat age in areas known to be anti-American. The 4th Infantry Division, operating in the northern and northeastern parts of the Sunni Triangle, soon attracted attention among other commanders for its eager embrace of such tactics. Other commanders were more discriminating. The 82nd Airborne's Swannack said his division detained thirty-eight hundred people between August 2003 and March 2004, but screened them, and ultimately s.h.i.+pped only seven hundred of them to Abu Ghraib. His staff was wary of the operation at the prison, he recalled: ”They saw all these folks going into there, and it was h.e.l.l to get them out of there. I had to personally intervene to get people out of there-they'd just get scarfed up.”

Divided conquerors: the major U. S. unit commanders Paradoxically, after focusing too much on the operational level in its invasion plan, the Army focused too little on it during its subsequent occupation, said retired Maj. Gen. Robert Scales, one of the Army's most insightful senior officers. Its battlefield orientation didn't prepare it to discern what the operational level was in a counterinsurgency. ”The operational level of war in Iraq was dealing with Iraqis, with nongovernmental organizations, with the media, with the rest of the world,” he said. ”The center of gravity was the will of the people.”

Again and again, the jobs that the Army failed to handle in Iraq in the summer and fall of 2003 would be in that crucial but neglected operational area of counter-insurgency, which simply means that no one was connecting all the dots. Supply convoys raced across the countryside to stock big U.S. bases, undercutting the larger effort, as drivers-worried U.S. troops or Third World contractors-shot at Iraqi civilians to make them keep their distance. Personal security details for CPA officials rocketed through Baghdad, forcing Iraqi cars onto sidewalks, needlessly alienating the capital's population. Frustrated combat troops used force first, violating a lesson of every successful modern counterinsurgency campaign: Violence is the tool of last resort, especially for troops foreign to the local population. Civil affairs officers, whose job it is to work with local populations, clashed frequently with the commanders of units they were supposed to support because of the different imperatives they faced, with little direction from higher levels of command.

All of these disparate areas were strands that should have been pulled together and coordinated by Gen. Sanchez, the commander with oversight of operations across Iraq. But he failed to do that. U.S. Army divisions operated like fingers without an operational hand or a strategic arm to guide them. Sanchez took a distant stance that gave each division commander leeway to handle the situation in his own area. Normally such decentralization would be welcome, but it works only if guided by a larger strategy that coordinates each unit's actions. In military shorthand, that direction is called the commander's intent. Sanchez didn't provide it. ”I'm not sure that General Sanchez had any impact at all,” said Hammes, who served with the CPA, one of his last posts before retiring. ”I never got a clear commander's intent” statement from the commanding general.

Indeed, Sanchez's headquarters spent weeks debating a draft campaign plan but never issued one during his time there. One Army intelligence officer who served in Iraq in 2004 was even more emphatic. ”For the first year of the war ... there was no campaign plan issued to military personnel by CJTF-7 to deal with reconstruction of Iraq and to deal with the growing insurgency,” he recalled. ”Various units subordinate to CJTF-7 essentially did what they thought was the right thing to do, but their efforts were not coordinated by any clear, overarching campaign plan.” The result, he said, was that ”the divisions were kind of left out there to dry,” by themselves.

Andrew Rathmell came to a similar conclusion. ”The military leaders.h.i.+p ... did not do a good job of conceptualizing the campaign as an integrated political-military effort; sometimes failing to put tactical 'kinetic' operations in the broader political context.” This meant that tactical successes never added up and reinforced each other, but rather tended to peter out by themselves.

In addition, the Army, having forgotten almost everything it had learned in the Vietnam War about counterinsurgency, hadn't taught its commanders in such a way that they would arrive at similar and reinforcing answers to the tactical problems they faced. When Maj. Gregory Peterson studied the issue a few months later at Fort Leavenworth's School of Advanced Military Studies, an elite course that trains military planners and strategists, he found the American experience in Iraq in 2003-4 remarkably similar to the French war in Algeria in the 1950s. Both involved Western powers exercising sovereignty in Arab states, both powers were opposed by insurgencies contesting that sovereignty, and both wars were controversial back home. Most significant for Peterson's a.n.a.lysis, he found both the French and U.S. militaries woefully unprepared for the task at hand. ”Currently, the U.S. military does not have a viable counterinsurgency doctrine, understood by all soldiers, or taught at service schools,” he concluded.

The result was that each sector felt like a separate war, with different approaches and rules, showing a lack of coordination that runs against the repeated findings of theorists and pract.i.tioners of counterinsurgency. French Col. Roger Trinquier's 1961 commentary on the lessons of Algeria is frequently disturbing, especially in its unabashed endors.e.m.e.nt of torture in interrogation and its general embrace of terrorist methods to fight terrorism. But the veteran paratroop commander is more persuasive when he echoes other experts in his discussion of the absolute necessity of strategic coordination in putting down an insurgency.

The struggle against the guerrilla is not, as one might suppose, a war of lieutenants and captains. The number of troops that must be put into action, the vast areas over which they will be led to do battle, the necessity of coordinating diverse actions over these vast areas, the politico-military measures to be taken regarding the populace, the necessarily close cooperation with various branches of the civil administration-all this requires that operations against the guerrilla be conducted according to a plan, established at a very high command level. [Trinquier adds in a footnote: In principle, that of the commander of the theater of operations.]

It was common for observers of U.S. military operations in 2003-4 to note that each division's area of operations felt like a different war. In the north, Petraeus's 101st Airborne conducted what was generally seen as a thorough and effective operation, balancing war fighting and nation building. Just to the south, in the Sunni Triangle, there was an increasingly tough little war, especially in the area to the north and west of Baghdad where the 4th Infantry Division was based. The 82nd Airborne and the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, operating to the west of Baghdad, posted a mixed record, with some successes and fewer ma.s.s detentions, but also with Fallujah, Ramadi, and the upper Euphrates Valley turning into increasingly tough problems. At the country's center, Baghdad became an area for a series of terrorist bombings.

”The good side of Rick Sanchez is, because all the division areas were different, he ... kind of left us to figure out what he needed to do, and how to do it,” said Swannack, who commanded the 82nd Airborne Division in Iraq twice-first in the invasion in the spring of 2003, and then in the fall and winter of 2003-4. Sanchez didn't offer much strategic guidance, he said. ”It was pretty much, 'You do what you need to do, and I'll give you the resources.'” He would try to raise tough issues with Sanchez by e-mail, but sometimes never received a response. ”I don't know why. Responsiveness to division commanders' issues was weak.”

”I never got a visit from anyone from CJTF-7 staff,” concurred Maj. Gen. Odierno, who commanded the 4th Infantry Division in the northern Sunni Triangle. ”Sanchez visited me once,” he added, holding up a lone index finger.

Arguably, that hands-off approach made some sense, because conditions differed so radically in the north and south, and compared to the Sunni belt across the center of the country. But it also led to a kind of incoherence in the effort, and worse still, to the use of tactics that undercut long-term goals. ”Failing to define at the strategic levels the kind of war we were actually fighting-and in various locales, battles civilian and military forces were actually winning-unintentionally left many of those local efforts without a higher, guiding, and legitimizing purpose,” Maj. Isaiah Wilson later commented.

Petraeus jumps through a window of opportunity Mosul, the biggest city in northern Iraq, could have erupted at any moment in 2003. As a U.S. military intelligence a.n.a.lysis warned at the outset of the invasion, Mosul came with a ready-made civil war, hosting some 110,000 former Iraqi army soldiers and 20,000 Kurdish militiamen happy to fight them. It also was the home base of the Iraqi Islamic Party, which had survived Saddam's efforts to crush it. The city overflowed with potential enemies of the U.S. occupation, so much so that Saddam Hussein's sons, Uday and Qusay, chose it as their hiding place.

Despite that troublesome lineup, of all the divisions occupying Iraq in 2003-4, it was the 101st Airborne, commanded by Maj. Gen. David Petraeus and headquartered in Mosul, that was most successful in launching an effective coun-terinsurgency campaign. ”The 101st under Maj. Gen. Petraeus is considered most successful in terms of jump-starting the economy and the political process,” concluded a 2004 Army War College study.

Mosul and northern Iraq under Petraeus in 2003 offer a glimpse of how the occupation of Iraq might have been conducted more effectively, and in such a way that the hopes of bringing home most U.S. troops relatively soon might have been realized. There was no postinvasion pause in the north. Because the pace of U.S. operations never sagged, there was no breather in which the adversary could gain the initiative. ”The eerie silence and absence of U.S. military operational activity that defined the immediate weeks and months of transition ... [were] not present in the northern provinces. There was no hiatus (no 'cease fire') in the north,” commented Wilson, who served in Iraq first as an Army historian and then as a strategist for Petraeus.

Petraeus had more education about counterinsurgency operations than any other division commander in Iraq. During the 1980s he had earned a Ph.D. in international relations at Princeton, where his dissertation subject had been the effect of the Vietnam War on U.S. military thinking about the use of force. In the course of his research he had read deeply into the French experience in Indochina. While the French didn't win there or in Algeria, the vanquished often learn more from a war than do the victors. ”Counterinsurgency operations, in particular, require close civil-military cooperation,” Petraeus wrote in his study. He warned against U.S. military att.i.tudes that impeded ”the crucial integration of political and military strategies.” Also, he noted that the use of force may be necessary, but by itself ”it is seldom sufficient.”

Petraeus also took quiet steps to ensure unity of command in his area-a fundamental military principle, to be sure, but something that the U.S. effort overall didn't enjoy. Unity was particularly important in the intelligence arena, where he had his chief of staff, Col. James Laufenburg, pull together several divergent intelligence elements by creating a joint interagency task force for counterterrorism- an effort made easier because the CIA officer in Mosul was a former subordinate of Petraeus's with whom he had kept in touch. To ensure that all worked together, Petraeus also fired a warning shot across the bow of the ”black” Special Operators in the lOlst's area. ”We're delighted to have you with us,” he told them, ”but if you conduct operations without first getting our approval, I'll request your removal from our area of operations.” He took pride in conducting targeted raids with a minimum of violence. In one, 101st troops and a Special Operations unit went after thirty-five suspects simultaneously in Mosul at 2:00 a.m a.m. and caught twenty-three of those they were after, with only a single shot fired.

Petraeus said that his role was ”a combination of being the president and the pope.” Others saw his role as somewhat less elevated. ”Petraeus, up north, was like a politician-he bought everyone off,” said Kellogg, the retired Army general who served as a senior CPA official.

”Plainly stated, the 101st Airborne waged a different war in the north than was waged in other parts of the country,” Maj. Wilson wrote. ”Winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people was the guiding purpose of all civil-military actions in the north.” While other divisions conducted ”anti-insurgency” operations, aimed at killing the enemy, he concluded, the 101st waged a ”counter-insurgency” campaign, meant to undercut support for the enemy.

Petraeus's campaign began pretty much as did those of other division commanders. ”When we arrived in Mosul, it was chaotic,” he said. ”I mean, there was no order. There was no police on the street, they were looting, they were looting everything they could put their hands on. The province governate building was completely sacked. We went into Mosul with real force, huge, sixteen hundred soldiers in a single lift, I think the longest air a.s.sault in history, [and] established really overwhelming force in the city.” The first week saw a spate of small fire-fights. But by the end of that time the 101st ”had established a position of real dominance.” He was determined to capitalize on that position. ”We had, in a sense, almost a degree of omnipotence, and you had to exploit that-the window of opportunity is there, you had to jump through it.”

He and his planners knew that they were in ”a race against time. We were very conscious that any army of liberation has a half-life connected to it, where it turns into an army of occupation. And what we wanted to do, of course, was to extend that half-life as long as we possibly could, by good deeds and by getting the word out on those good deeds.”

The story that Petraeus tells with some pride about this period involves not a firefight or a raid but how he ensured that government employees were paid. The 101st had picked up a rumor that the manager of a major bank in Mosul had saved a huge amount of Iraqi government money from being looted. The cash was in an underground vault that had been purposely flooded to protect it, with the stacks of currency sealed in plastic. Petraeus had the manager brought to him and sat across a table from him. ”I understand you were able to safeguard some money,” he began.

The Iraqi leaned forward and said softly, ”Yes, I did.”

”I understand you have enough to pay the salaries of the government workers,” Petraeus said.

”Yes, we do,” the banker confirmed.

Great, thought the general. ”Let's go ahead and do it,” he said, ”let's pay the workers.”

The banker shrugged. ”I'd love to, but I don't have the authority,” he replied. ”Who has the authority?” Petraeus asked. ”Baghdad, the minister of finance,” the Iraqi said.

”Well, sorry to inform you, I was just down in Baghdad, and there really is no ministry of finance functioning at this point,” Petraeus said. ”Yes, that's too bad,” the banker sadly agreed.

”Well, what are we going to do?” Petraeus politely asked. It was an insightful question to pose. Had he had wanted to, Petraeus simply could have ordered his combat engineers to blow the door off the safe and take the money. But, thinking strategically, he was searching for Iraqi solutions to the problems he encountered.

”Well, you have the authority,” the banker finally said.

”You're right,” Petraeus agreed. He had learned what the banker needed. So Petraeus pulled out a sheet of his stationery, which stated on its letterhead that he was ”Commanding General, 101st Airborne Division (Air a.s.sault),” and wrote out an order telling the banker to meet the government payroll.

The banker read over the order, then looked up, a mite skeptical. ”What, no seal?” he asked. The Americans hadn't known that Iraqi officials always applied official seals to doc.u.ments. The next day Petraeus sent an aide to find an Iraqi shop to make an official seal of the Commanding General, 101st Airborne, replete with the two stars of a major general.

Petraeus and his subordinate commanders and staff devised a strategy based on three principles. First, ”this is a race against time.” Second, ”the real goal is to create as many Iraqis as possible who feel they have a stake in the new Iraq,” which created a yardstick by which to measure any proposed move: Will it give Iraqis a stake? The third principle governed the division's tactics: ”Will this operation produce more bad guys than it takes off the street by the way it's conducted?” Understanding this, one of the lOlst's company commanders, Capt. Daniel Morgan, recalled that he decided to handle detainees differently than they were treated elsewhere. ”My company did not blindfold our detainees. We did upon arrival into Mosul, but we realized within a month-June 2003-that this was of no significance, and hurt us.”

Petraeus also decided that cordon and sweep operations, in which every military-age male in a given area was rousted, were pointless. He thought most Iraqi men, even insurgents, so valued their household privacy that they would surrender peacefully rather than subject their families to intrusive nighttime searches. So he had the 101st conduct cordon and knock searches, in which suspects were surrounded and then invited to turn themselves in. In addition, he said, there were so many phony tips pa.s.sed by Iraqis feuding with each other that this softer approach helped sort out those tips without unnecessarily insulting Iraqi dignity.

During the summer of 2003, a common rumor among Iraqis was that the night-vision goggles used by American troops could enable them to peer through the clothes of women. When a brigade commander in the 101st, Col. Ben Hodges, heard this from sheikhs in his area, rather than just tell them it was false, he decided to show them by putting on an exhibition where a variety of U.S. military observation and imaging devices would be laid out for them to examine and use. The 101st staff laughingly referred to this as the First Annual Tigris River Valley Sheikhfest-and then was pleasantly surprised to see the meeting repeated and evolve into a formal Tigris River Valley Commission in which regional issues could be discussed every month.

A summary written by the staff of the 101st Airborne noted that by January of 2004, the north of Iraq appeared in remarkably good shape. There was an average of just five ”hostile contacts”-bombs, ambushes, drive-by shootings-a day in the division's operating area. That figure included attacks not just on U.S. troops but also on Iraqi security forces. By contrast, there were about twenty-five meetings a day between commanders in the division and local Iraqi leaders or managers of key facilities.

But the city would encounter far more trouble after the 101st went home in the spring of 2004 and was replaced by a far smaller, less effective unit. Not all officers thought that Petraeus was blameless for that. ”He had eighteen thousand soldiers up there, and the enemy was just biding its time and building capacity, waiting him out,” argued one skeptical military intelligence officer. That view seems unfair: Mosul was quiet while Petraeus was there, and likely would have remained so had his successor had as many troops as he had-and as much understanding of counterinsurgency techniques. Also, it is notable that the population-oriented approach Petraeus took in Mosul in 2003 would be the one the entire U.S. Army in Iraq was trying to adopt in 2006.

Divisions go their own way To the west of Baghdad, Maj. Gen. Charles Swannack got mixed reviews for being aggressive but ”very selective,” recalled Keith Mines. ”They didn't just go bouncing around.” But, he told his family at the time in an e-mail, ”their answer to everything is more firepower, while my answer to most everything is to get them back in their barracks and send me out with a suitcase of money.”

In the capital itself, the 1st Armored Division was led by Brig. Gen. Martin Dempsey, who generally was seen as handling a difficult job well, under the global spotlight of Baghdad.

North of Baghdad, Odierno's 4th Infantry Division operated in the northern part of the Sunni Triangle. His unit proved to be almost the opposite of Petraeus's 101st Airborne. As the Marines had suspected when turning over the area north of Baghdad, Odierno and his division would take a combative posture in Iraq. ”Odierno, he hammered everyone,” said Kellogg, the retired Army general who was at CPA. Odierno's brigades and battalions earned a reputation for being overly aggressive. Again and again, internal Army reports and commanders in interviews said that this unit-a heavy armored division, despite its name-used ham-fisted approaches that may have appeared to pacify its area in the short term, but in the process alienated large parts of the population.

”The 4th ID was bad,” said one Army intelligence officer who worked with them. ”These guys are looking for a fight,” he remembered thinking. ”I saw so many instances of abuses of civilians, intimidating civilians, our jaws dropped.”

”Fourth ID fueled the insurgency,” added an Army psychological operations officer. He said that it frequently was manipulated by the insurgents into firing at innocent civilians. ”Guys would come up from Fallujah, set up next to a farmhouse, set off a mortar, and leave. And the 4th ID would respond with counterbattery fire. The 4th ID's CG [commanding general] fostered that att.i.tude. They were cowboys.”

”They are going through neighborhoods, knocking on doors at two in the morning without actionable intelligence,” said a senior officer. ”That's how you create new insurgents.”