Petraeus was aware of the shortfall and addressed it much as the equally energetic and willful Templer had done in Malaya—albeit with some modern technological flourishes. Petraeus drove his ideas home in his morning PowerPoint conference with staff and subordinates known as the Battle Update and Assessment, in the nonstop emails he dispatched from two laptops that an aide always carried with him, and in twice-a-week “battlefield circulations” where he went to patrol with, and talk to, the troops. He made a point of sharing his email address widely and chatting with the lowliest soldiers under his command. He was a firm believer in flattening traditional hierarchies and giving his subordinates freedom to improvise. He was also an impressively hard worker, like most of the other officers in Iraq, routinely putting in seventeen-hour days, seven days a week.
More conventionally minded soldiers harrumphed that Petraeus was turning soldiers into social workers, but that criticism was far off the mark. The number of insurgents killed or locked up soared in 2007 (U.S. forces wound up detaining 27,000 Iraqis) but without generating the popular backlash that had accompanied offensive action earlier in the war. The difference was that now troops living in Iraqi neighborhoods were able to gain tips from the populace that allowed them to pinpoint insurgents and avoid the sort of counterproductive roundups of young males that had occurred in years past.
Senior commanders had hesitated to send troops to bed down in population centers before because they feared that this would lead to a spike in casualties that would erode public support for the war back home. This fear was not entirely misplaced. Indeed the summer of 2007 saw some of the most violent months of the entire conflict, with more than 100 U.S. soldiers dying each month in April, May, and June. But then, like a fever breaking, losses began to fall, ebbing to a low of 25 killed in December. A year later, in December 2008, only 16 American soldiers died. In all 4,484 American soldiers would die in Iraq by the end of 2011, but only 577 of those fatalities occurred after 2007. Just as significant was the rapid decline in civilian losses: from 23,333 slain in 2007 to 6,362 in 2008, 2,681 in 2009, 2,500 in 2010 and 1,600 in 2011. As of the end of 2011, the entire conflict would claim the lives of at least 70,000 Iraqi civilians and 15,000 Iraqi security personnel—and perhaps many more.
Most of Petraeus’s focus in 2007 was on breaking AQI’s hold on Anbar Province and the Baghdad “belts.” He calculated that once the threat from AQI had been reduced, Shiites would no longer seek protection from Moqtada al Sadr’s Mahdist Army. That gamble paid off in 2008 when Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki sent Iraqi troops with substantial American backing to clear the Mahdists out of their strongholds in Basra and Sadr City. Iraq remained divided by deep sectarian and political divisions that threatened its future, but it had stepped back from the abyss. And the security situation continued to improve in 2009, 2010, and 2011 even as U.S. troops numbers fell, although there was no guarantee that the situation would remain stable after the last U.S. military personnel left at the end of December 2011.
Some skeptics claimed it was not the “surge” that had brought about a 90 percent reduction in violence but the decision by more than 100,000 Sunnis to switch sides after being paid to join the Sons of Iraq program. No question, their defection was vital to the outcome, but monetary inducements alone were not sufficient to explain their change of allegiance—any more than the gold that T. E. Lawrence disbursed could be used to explain his success in mobilizing Bedouin tribesmen for the Arab Revolt. Tribesmen, like most people, are interested above all in safeguarding their own interests. They would not accept payoffs unless they were confident that they would be alive to spend their newfound wealth. Only when the Anbar sheikhs were convinced, as one of them told the author Bing West, that the marines were “the strongest tribe” and would be staying in Iraq for the long haul (or so they thought) were they willing to join the American side. If U.S. forces had been drawing down, rather than ramping up, in 2007, it is doubtful that the Sunni Awakening would have occurred.
The emergence of the Sunni Awakening was not a repudiation but a confirmation of Petraeus’s counterinsurgency doctrine: it showed how improvements in the security situation could snowball by inducing waverers and even enemies to come over to the government’s side once they were convinced that this was the winning side. Yet, no matter how successful the surge was tactically, it could not by itself guarantee long-lasting stability. Successful security operations only create the potential for inclusive and effective governance that addresses minority grievances and binds the country together. That opportunity had been seized in countries such as South Africa in the 1900s, Malaya and the Philippines in the 1950s, El Salvador in the 1980s, Northern Ireland in the 1990s, and Colombia in the 2000s. It was far from clear, however, that Prime Minister Maliki, a militant Shiite leader, would have the perspicacity of a Magsaysay or a Uribe. Indeed his sectarian and divisive agenda, no longer checked by a U.S. military presence after 2011, threatened to undo the gains that American troops and their Iraqi allies had fought so hard to achieve—and to alter the historical assessment of the surge’s ultimate success or failure.
The fact that population-centric counterinsurgency had worked in Iraq, at least temporarily and tactically, was, on one level, not terribly surprising, given its success in other lands and other years. But several aspects of the Iraq experience were unusual. In the first place, few if any countries, with the possible exception of Colombia, had ever recovered after being so close to collapse. In Malaya, Templer had prevailed after early setbacks, but the level of violence there was much lower than in Iraq, and Malaya was a much smaller country. Moreover Templer did not have to worry about much foreign interference, whereas Syria and Iran provided substantial support to the Sunni and Shiite insurgents, respectively. Finally in Malaya, as in most guerrilla conflicts, the insurgents had been isolated in the hinterlands far from the capital, whereas in Iraq the major cities—Fallujah, Ramadi, Mosul, Baqubah, Baghdad—were the battlegrounds. This was a double-edged sword: the sheer number of attacks in Baghdad and other urban areas magnified the crisis but also made it possible to improve the situation quickly by flooding the cities with American troops.
Equally ambivalent in its impact was the decentralized nature of the Iraqi insurgency: while AQI and the Jaish al Mahdi became the dominant groups among the Sunnis and Shiite, respectively, there were many other “resistance” organizations as well—by one count, fifty-six in all. Unlike Communist uprisings, this one had no central insurgent bureaucracy and no widely recognized leader like Ho Chi Minh or Fidel Castro. The lack of unity made it harder for the insurgents to prevail but also made it harder to stamp them out—“decapitating” strikes, such as the elimination of Zarqawi, could not defeat a diffuse uprising.
While urban insurgencies have traditionally failed, few insurgencies since the end of World War II had been defeated primarily by a foreign power. In most successful counterinsurgencies of recent decades, an indigenous government received substantial aid from abroad, even those where the bulk of the fighting was done by its own troops. This was not the case in Iraq, where American troops took the lead in 2007 despite the growing public opposition to the war in the United States. They were successful partly because they were not supporting a dictatorial regime, as the Russians had done in Afghanistan, but an elected government that, for all its faults, was broadly representative of the population. Like the British in Malaya, and unlike the French in Algeria and Indochina, the Americans made clear that they were not bent on an indefinite occupation by signing an agreement in 2008 calling for the withdrawal of U.S. forces by the end of 2011. It helped also that U.S. troops were seen as neutral arbiters in Iraq’s sectarian landscape. They were trusted by most Iraqis more than their own security forces.
As a result of his success in Iraq, Petraeus was given the thankless task of undertaking another difficult counterinsurgency effort, this one in Afghanistan—a country that had suffered years of neglect while the Bush administration concentrated America’s resources on Iraq. His task was made all the more difficult by rampant corruption in Afghanistan’s own government, by the presence of Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan, and by growing war weariness back home. Petraeus arrived at President Barack Obama’s request in July 2010 and left a year later to become CIA director, having claimed some progress but no dramatic turnaround as in Iraq. The conflict against the Taliban, the Haqqani Network, and other insurgents had started before the war in Iraq, and it would last longer. The war in Afghanistan showed that the Counterinsurgency Field Manual, however sound in its distillation of the lessons of history, offered no magic formula for instantly defeating determined guerrillas. Even under the best of circumstances any struggle against an entrenched insurgency would be difficult and protracted. And Afghanistan was hardly the best place to implement the precepts of counterinsurgency, as invaders from Alexander the Great to the British and Russians had previously discovered.
