Petraeus And A New Kind Of War

Central to the story are ideas of counterinsurgency. Kaplan says that while counterinsurgency is not a new kind of warfare, it's a kind of war that Americans do not like to fight.

"We tend to call it irregular warfare even though this kind of warfare is the most common," Kaplan tells Fresh Air's Dave Davies. Kaplan, who writes the War Stories column for Slate, explains that Petraeus and a number of his West Point peers were interested in the writings of counterinsurgency theorists who believed that "insurgencies grow out of something. They don't grow out of a vacuum. ... They respond to people's needs in a country where the government is not satisfying those needs. And so, what you have to do is not merely capture and kill the insurgents, but change the social conditions. ... It was a different kind of warfare that required not just fighting, but what we now call 'nation building' [and] that required cultural sensitivity to the people around them, required living among the people, protecting the population, earning their trust so that they, in turn, will tell us who the bad guys are."

Petraeus implemented these theories with some success in Iraq, but less so in Afghanistan, where he lacked the familiarity with the country he had had in Iraq.

"The problem was, by his own admission, he knew nothing about Afghanistan," says Kaplan. "He'd been in Iraq three times. He knew that place well. He comes in and what's in his mind is Iraq. ... I was told that in a meeting with President Karzai once, Karzai laid out a problem and [Petraeus] said, 'Well, you know, in Baghdad we did it like this ...' to the president of Afghanistan. And the aide who was with Petraeus in the room — who had been both in Afghanistan and Iraq — when they were walking out he said, 'You know, it might be an interesting intellectual experiment for you to not even think about Iraq,' and Petraeus said, 'I'm working on it.' "

"He vetted candidates for an election; he held the election; he opened up the economy; he brought in fuel trucks from Turkey; he opened up the university; he opened up the border to Syria in northern Iraq all on his own initiative. ... There were no orders. So it worked for about a year and he was rotated out and a brigade half the size of his division came in with commanders who had spent the previous three months bashing down doors and killing and arresting people in Tikrit, and that's what they did in Mosul and the operation fell apart for another year or two."

His whole MO and his entire life was that he had overcome the odds. That he had defied expectations. You know, everybody knows the story that at one time when he was an assistant division commander he had been shot in the chest by a fellow solider whose gun accidentally went off in a live-fire exercise. He recovered much more quickly than the doctors said. He jumped out of a plane once, the parachute ripped, he free-fell for 60 feet, broke his pelvis. He recovered. His surge worked in Iraq ... to a degree that nobody had anticipated, and so he went into Afghanistan leery, but thinking that, 'Well, maybe I can pull this off.' "

"He always wanted to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but anybody who knows the military bureaucracy knows that that can be an exceedingly powerful position. ... Petraeus was distrusted by many members of the Obama White House. They thought that he boxed President Obama in on troop options ... in the discussions about Afghanistan. The perception was, this guy was too clever; he was too powerful. You didn't want a powerful general to be given such a powerful position. And so, in December in 2010, Bob Gates comes to Afghanistan, tells Petraeus, 'You're not going to get the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, what would you like [instead]?' and [Petraeus] came up with the idea of CIA director."

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies, in for Terry Gross. For 10 years now, Americans have become accustomed to seeing American soldiers fighting and dying in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our guest Fred Kaplan says that while America fought those wars, an internal conflict raged within the military about how to fight them.

When the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, top commanders knew how to wage a conventional land war with devastating effectiveness. But they discarded long-studied principles of counterinsurgency: How to deal with a conflict in which the enemy lives and fights among the population, when the battle is more for the allegiance of civilians than for territory.

In his new book, Kaplan describes the efforts of civilian strategists and younger officers to turn U.S. military thinking around and pursue a more nuanced approach to the fighting in Iraq. Kaplan says the officers succeeded in selling their strategy, and while it helped in Iraq, it failed in Afghanistan. Fred Kaplan is a veteran national security journalist. He writes the War Stories column for Slate and has written three previous books. His latest is "The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War."

Well, Fred Kaplan, welcome back to FRESH AIR. After the debacle of the Vietnam War, you might think that strategists in the American military would decide that they need to focus on how you engage in limited war, how you fight guerrillas, how to more effectively, you know, engage in one of these limited conflicts. But you write they did almost the opposite.

FRED KAPLAN: Right, the generals decided they would never fight another war like this ever again. By coincidence, at the same time the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union were increasing their conventional armies in Europe, and so they turned their attention to that theater, and it was the kind of theater that they were comfortable with fighting, wars that depended on firepower and amassing men, and machines, and metal and dropping bombs and that sort of thing.