ECONOMIST: Petraeus: The man and the myth
Gen. David Petraeus, arguably the most consequential Army leader of his generation, resigned Nov. 9 as director of the CIA.
ASSOCIATED PRESS, 2010Published: Sunday, November 18, 2012 at 3:00 a.m.
Last Modified: Friday, November 16, 2012 at 5:53 p.m.
Despite a torrent of lurid details emerging from the FBI investigation that led to the fall of retired Gen. David Petraeus as director of central intelligence, and despite attempts to attach significance to the delay in informing the president of his chief spy's plight, the political consequences are likely to disappoint Barack Obama's enemies.
Conspiracy theorists see a connection between the Nov. 9 resignation of the nation's most famous soldier over an extramarital affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell, and ongoing congressional investigations into the attack in Benghazi, Libya, that led to the murders of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans in September. While the CIA overrelied on the security supposedly provided by Libyan militias, there is no evidence that rescue attempts were deliberately delayed by the agency's leadership or the White House.
The shock wave caused by the departure of Petraeus might indeed have been an unwelcome distraction from an election campaign that was going Obama's way, but he was above all a hero to Republicans. He had even been seen as a possible vice presidential pick before his appointment to the CIA job 17 months ago.
Of more abiding interest is what sort of legacy this extraordinary career has left.
The general's status as the epitome of the modern soldier/statesman/scholar was rooted both in real achievement and in a myth of his own and others' creation. Back home after two tours in Iraq, he used the time to digest the lessons he had learned to rewrite the army's field manual on counterinsurgency, aka COIN.
At the heart of what became known as “population-centric COIN” was the notion that the operational priority should be providing security for ordinary people and thus creating the conditions for a government under attack by an insurgency to earn legitimacy though the provision of goods and services.
By late 2006, faced with what looked like a descent into bloody civil war, most senior American officers were ready to give up on Iraq. President George W. Bush, desperate to try to find a less appalling denouement to the war, saw Petraeus, supported by a controversial “surge” in troop numbers, as a possible lifeline for his reputation.
How much of the relative success that followed was due to Petraeus and how much to the so-called “Anbar Awakening,” the rejection by Sunni tribal leaders of al-Qaida's ethnic slaughter that had begun shortly before the general's return in January 2007, is still argued over. Petraeus may have been lucky, but he worked with the grain of events to bend the history of the war around a narrative of narrowly averted disaster that was more or less true.
In June 2010, when Stanley McChrystal, Petraeus' dedicated protege, resigned as commander in Afghanistan after the reporting of remarks by his staff critical of the new administration, Petraeus was sent for by Obama to repeat his magic in Kabul.
A time-limited troop surge was under way, but he knew official patience was running out and that the chances of applying a successful COIN strategy in a country as divided and poor as Afghanistan were slim. Even so, the speed with which he abandoned it in favor of a much more “kinetic” approach aimed at getting a quick improvement in security by killing as many Taliban as possible was breathtaking.
By the time Petraeus handed the reins to his successor, Gen. John Allen, 13 months later, a deadline for the withdrawal of foreign troops at the end of 2014 had been set.
From the Economist magazine.
Allen was bizarrely drawn into the Petraeus scandal on Tuesday when the Pentagon revealed that he had exchanged thousands of emails during a four-year period with Jill Kelley. It was Kelley, a Tampa-based socialite who knew both men, who had triggered the FBI inquiry into Petraeus last May after receiving threatening emails from an apparently jealous Broadwell. Allen's confirmation hearing as the new supreme commander in Europe has been put on hold because of the “inappropriate” nature of some of the emails.
COIN required more time and money than war-weary, economically stressed voters would stomach. As Obama reiterated during his re-election campaign, nation-building now needs to take place at home. Boots on the ground are out again, and special forces and drones, used to seek out and kill America's enemies, are back in.
After becoming director of central intelligence, which has become the lead agency in fighting the high-tech, intelligence-led campaign against al-Qaida and its offshoots, Petraeus had no compunction in helping strangle his own COIN baby when it had outlived its usefulness.
As director, Petraeus was an enthusiastic advocate for the increasingly paramilitary CIA that has evolved over the past decade. He recently asked for a further 10 aircraft to be added to the agency's fleet of 40 or so Predator/Reaper drones.
Concerns have grown, however, even within the administration, over the perceived lack of accountability underpinning the CIA's remote killing of terrorist suspects. Whoever succeeds Petraeus, possibly current acting director Michael Morell or possibly John Brennan, Obama's counterterrorism adviser, may want to do things differently, perhaps handing over the main responsibility for drone attacks to the Pentagon's Joint Special Operations Command and re-emphasizing the agency's traditional intelligence-gathering role.
For all his great public service, his intellectual dazzle and his uncanny ability to win over both hard-bitten reporters and skeptical lawmakers, Petraeus may not actually be much missed.
From the Economist magazine.
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