Neoconservatives have constructed dangerous illusions around David Petraeus's strictly limited successes
History has not dealt kindly with American generals of late. Remember when ‘Stormin’’ Norman Schwarzkopf ranked as one of the great captains of the ages? When members of Congress talked of promoting General Colin Powell to five-star rank, hitherto reserved for the likes of Marshall and Eisenhower? When bombing the Serbs into submission elevated General Wesley Clark to the status of a would-be presidential candidate? Or when Tommy Franks travelled the world giving speeches at $50,000 a pop to explain how he had liberated Afghanistan and Iraq? More recently still, remember when journalists fell in love with Stanley McChrystal, the ‘Zen warrior’ who seldom slept, thrived on one meal a day, was ‘fit as a tuning fork’, and filled his e-reader ‘with serious tomes on Pakistan, Lincoln, and Vietnam’?
With the passage of time, the stature of these figures has diminished considerably. Men once deemed fit for idolatry now seem more human than godlike. Today we know them — to the extent that we know them at all — for their follies and failings as much as for their achievements. No doubt General McChrystal’s body fat level was (and perhaps is) admirably low. Far less admirable — to the extent of rightly costing him his job — was the climate of contempt for senior civilian officials that he stupidly allowed to flourish in his headquarters.
Fate has thus far spared General David Petraeus from this tendency toward reputation deflation. As he retires from the US Army to become director of the Central Intelligence Agency, his standing in Washington and with much of the American public remains very high indeed. The encomiums accompanying his departure from active duty are as numerous and as colourful as the medals that cover his chest. And his talent for seducing journalists remains unimpaired.
As Petraeus passed through London on his victory lap en route back to Washington, he agreed to meet with the Daily Telegraph’s Con Coughlin. The result reads less like an interview than a mash note. Coughlin begins by gushing about ‘America’s most famous commander of the modern age’ going for a ‘punishing daily run’ around Hyde Park. He turns next to describing his subject’s ‘indefatigable determination to triumph over adversity’, repeatedly demonstrated throughout the eventful life of ‘this proud champion of America’s warrior class’. Then there is this striking declaration:
Gen Petraeus’s reputation for pulling victory from the jaws of defeat was made in Iraq, where he masterminded the controversial military ‘surge’ strategy — the ‘Petraeus doctrine’ — which, in 2007, succeeded in ending the violent insurgency against the US-led coalition.
Calling the Daily Telegraph fact-check department: did the violent insurgency in Iraq end in 2007? If so, how are we to explain the bombs that continue to detonate in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities, inflicting casualties at a rate that elsewhere in the world would suggest imminent state failure? What are we to make of authoritative reports that violence in Iraq is today on the upswing?
The uncomfortable truth is that the famous ‘surge’ ended nothing; in Iraq, armed insurgency persists. What Petraeus pulled from the jaws of defeat in 2007–2008 was not victory but conditions allowing the United States to extricate itself from a recklessly mismanaged (and unnecessary) war and to do so with a modicum of dignity. The reduction of violence achieved during Petraeus’s tenure as commander in Baghdad has made possible an orderly withdrawal. As Churchill said of Dunkirk, such an achievement, however commendable, should not be confused with victory.
The knaves and fools who called for the invasion of Iraq in the first place insist otherwise, of course, likening the surge not to Dunkirk but to Alamein — the turning point when all that had been dark became light. Indeed, neoconservatives and militarists of various stripes stand in the forefront of the claque celebrating Petraeus as master of the modern battlefield. Embracing the fiction of the surge as a triumph of historic proportions enables them to deny their complicity in promoting what has been an unmitigated disaster for their country. (Perhaps not surprisingly, the Wall Street Journal has run an op-ed touting Petraeus for that fifth star that Powell never received.)
Aside from the less-than-glorious outcome achieved in Iraq, there is also the little issue of Afghanistan. As Petraeus departs, it too remains squarely in the ‘unwon’ column, precisely where it was when he arrived to replace the unfortunate McChrystal.
‘For the first time since 2006,’ Coughlin quotes Petraeus as saying, ‘we have seen the level of insurgent attacks drop off.’ For an enterprise now nearly a decade old, that qualifies as a pretty modest definition of success. As for the general’s claim that the United States and its allies are ‘waging a comprehensive counter-insurgency campaign to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a safe haven for the Taleban and other extremists’, that’s about 50 per cent blarney. Here too the United States will happily settle for a tie, to be achieved either by cutting a deal with the Taleban or, failing that, by handing the problem off to the Afghan government in time to complete the departure of US forces already scheduled for 2014.
As for a ‘Petraeus doctrine’, forget it. If any such animal ever existed, it’s long since become extinct. The United States has neither the patience nor the wallet necessary to implement a ‘comprehensive counter-insurgency campaign’ in Central Asia or anywhere else.
The actual hallmark of Petraeus’s tenure in Kabul was not counterinsurgency but killing. Today, for better or worse, Nato is killing lots of people, not only in Afghanistan but also in its neighbour Pakistan. To measure progress, Petraeus even revived the once discredited metric of body count. The big question that few in Washington want to consider is this one: will these efforts to bludgeon the Taleban into negotiating — symbolised by the increase in armed drone attacks instituted at Petraeus’s behest — have the unintended effect of pushing Pakistan over the precipice into complete chaos? Should that occur, all bets will be off and Petraeus’s application to enter into whatever is the postmodern equivalent of Valhalla will be returned without action.
Yet the point here is not to quibble over honours, deserved or undeserved. Time has a way of settling such matters. My own guess is that a decade from now, Petraeus’s ‘surge’ in Iraq will probably rank alongside Schwarzkopf’s Desert Storm: a noteworthy operational achievement, yielding few if any strategic benefits. In Afghanistan, his name will appear on a long list of predecessors and successors, none of whom could get the job done.
In the meantime, however, the infatuation with Petraeus does real harm. It contributes to an abiding American (and perhaps more broadly western) misunderstanding of war. The illusion that generalship determines war’s outcome — call it the cult of the commander — clouds our judgment. We persuade ourselves to think that however disappointing the last war, installing the right general — someone like David Petraeus — will ensure a better outcome next time. It obscures one of history’s central teachings: that war by its very nature is unpredictable and uncontrollable, a leap into the dark certain to yield consequences other than those predicted. Nothing in Petraeus’s record overturns that core truth.
Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University.