Obama Wanted a Petraeus. Buyer Beware.

By Greg Jaffe
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 11, 2009

It is hard not to look at Stanley McChrystal without seeing David Petraeus.

Both generals are fitness freaks, capable of running soldiers half their age into the ground. Within hours of taking command of faltering wars, both were vowing to remake their forces. "We must change the way we think, act and operate," McChrystal wrote in September instructions to his troops in Afghanistan. He was practically channeling Petraeus, circa 2007, who challenged his troops in Iraq to adopt a new "warrior-builder-diplomat" mind-set.

These similarities were a big selling point for the Obama administration, which this summer decided it wanted its own Petraeus -- a creative wartime commander and gifted manager who could push the military in Afghanistan into unfamiliar realms, such as economic development and tribal politics.

But the past week showed that a Petraeus redux comes with some heavy baggage -- for McChrystal as well as the White House. As the administration debated its strategy in Afghanistan, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and national security adviser James Jones publicly upbraided McChrystal, who is seeking a major increase in forces, for stating in a speech in London that a shift to a smaller U.S. presence and a narrower focus on killing al-Qaeda terrorists would be "shortsighted."

These days, the last thing that the White House and the Pentagon brass want is a general who can bypass the chain of command; a general who speaks directly to the president; a general who emerges as the dominant American voice on the war. The last thing they want, in other words, is another Petraeus.

In the closing days of his second term, a weakened President George W. Bush vowed repeatedly that when it came to Iraq, he was going to listen to his general on the ground. Bush spoke directly with Petraeus via video teleconference once a week and made it known to all that the general's opinions on the war carried more weight than anyone else's in Washington. Petraeus's influence with the White House and with lawmakers who flocked to Baghdad for face-to-face briefings redefined the role of a modern wartime commander.

President Obama is determined to deal with his generals in a different fashion. "When someone like General McChrystal strays in the gray zone between war and politics and then gets his hand slapped, it reflects the effort to begin redrawing clear boundaries," said retired Col. Andrew J. Bacevich, a military historian at Boston University.

Petraeus's rise was a bit of an anomaly, the perfect marriage of a wounded president and a general well prepared to navigate Washington war politics. He had spent a huge chunk of his career, by Army standards, at the elbow of powerful four-star generals at the Pentagon. Even when he wasn't working for an influential boss, he still finagled a ringside seat to watch Washington's inner workings.

As a lowly major and academic fellow at Georgetown University researching on a paper on peacekeeping, Petraeus wormed his way into key White House meetings on the eve of the U.S. intervention in Haiti in 1994. "Who are you?" President Bill Clinton's deputy national security adviser, Sandy Berger, barked at him during one session in the Situation Room. Petraeus sheepishly explained that he'd come at the invitation of Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott.

Petraeus's political instincts carried over to Iraq. When a vacuum emerged after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, Petraeus rushed to fill it. As the commander of the 101st Airborne Division in the northern city of Mosul in 2003, he spent a week negotiating with feuding Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds and Yezidis to pull off Iraq's first elections. Shortly thereafter, the Coalition Provisional Authority, which was running the country, issued an order to commanders banning any more balloting.

Petraeus took it upon himself to negotiate with Syria and Turkey to exchange Iraqi oil for badly needed electricity. The Syria deal came as a surprise even to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, who in late 2003 was trying to freeze out Damascus. But, because it was already inked, no one countermanded it. The joke in the 101st was that Petraeus ran the only division in the Army with its own foreign policy. In Baghdad and at the Pentagon, some of Petraeus's detractors began to refer to him as "King David." But even his critics conceded that he got things done.

In the summer and fall of 2007, when it looked as if Congress would pull back funding for Iraq or try to cap troop levels, Petraeus became the public face of the conflict. It was a role that his predecessor, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., had resisted, and one that made many of Petraeus's fellow generals uncomfortable. Even Petraeus privately expressed to friends unease about his high profile. But he also embraced it, reasoning that it was the only way to ensure that the president's war strategy, which was under attack in the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill, would be properly supported and executed.

When McChrystal arrived in Kabul this summer, he looked as if he was tearing a page from the Petraeus playbook, right down to the "60 Minutes" profile that highlighted his compulsion for details, his blistering morning runs and his refusal to don body armor when meeting with Afghan elders and strolling through markets. But Afghanistan isn't Iraq. And Obama isn't Bush.

Under the new administration, the weekly video teleconferences between the president and his wartime commander are gone. This month, the White House weighed bringing McChrystal back to Washington so he could attend one of its Afghanistan strategy sessions in person, but then asked him to remain in Kabul and take part via video hookup.

Senior U.S. officials said they wanted the general to stay put because their strategy deliberations hadn't progressed as quickly as they had expected and they weren't ready for him to weigh in with the president. The determination to hold McChrystal back also reflected Gates's and Obama's preference for the defense secretary and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to serve as the primary interlocutors with the White House on the Afghan war.

Once the White House has settled on a new strategy, Gates has said, he expects McChrystal to adopt a higher profile on Afghanistan. "There is no one more knowledgeable and more persuasive on these issues than Stan McChrystal," the defense chief said in recent remarks at George Washington University.

However, McChrystal's recent stumbles also show that, despite the many similarities, he's not quite Petraeus. In the early 1980s the two men briefly served together at Fort Stewart, Ga., where they were both standout young officers intent on landing spots with the Army Rangers, the military's elite infantry unit. But their career paths quickly diverged.

Petraeus took a job as the aide to then-Maj. Gen. John Galvin, who pushed him to go to graduate school in international relations at Princeton University. Galvin, a bookish general with a streak of Yankee stubbornness, became one of several four-star surrogate fathers to Petraeus. McChrystal, by contrast, spent most of his Army career in the shadows, serving repeated tours with elite infantry and special operations units.

As a general, McChrystal had high-profile jobs on the Pentagon's Joint Staff, which oversees the combatant commanders' operations around the world. In Baghdad he worked closely with Petraeus and earned a reputation as an innovator who helped dismantle the Sunni insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq and Iranian-backed Shiite militia groups. But he is a bit of a naif when it comes to the ways of Washington. "He is a field general, not a Washington general," said Eliot Cohen, a counselor to then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and now a professor at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies.

One sign of Petraeus's political savvy is how he has conducted himself in recent weeks and months, radically cutting back his public appearances. Some of that may have been due to his recent treatment for prostate cancer, but he has also told fellow officers that he wants to maintain a much lower profile. In September, Petraeus even confessed unease about taking questions at the Army's Infantry Warfighting Conference at Fort Benning, Ga. And when he was asked about troop levels in Afghanistan at last week's Association of the U.S. Army conference in Washington, the general did a little dance and dodged the question. "I got to stay agile up here, moving target," he said, shuffling his feet and smiling.

Even Petraeus has come to realize that, for now at least, he can no longer be Petraeus.

jaffeg@washpost.com

Greg Jaffe is a military correspondent for The Washington Post and the co-author of "The Fourth Star: Four Generals and the Epic Struggle for the Future of the United States Army."