Visions of Somalia have begun haunting the place. On Nov. 15, 17 of Petraeus’s men died in a midair collision between two Black Hawk helicopters, apparently caused by enemy ground fire. Eight days later, in a seedy commercial neighborhood, Iraqi assailants killed two GIs in their vehicle, then a mob robbed their corpses. “Two months ago, no one would have thought of staging attacks like this,” says Jassim Mohammed Ali, the owner of a butcher shop just around the corner. “But now the Americans are treating the people of Mosul very badly. They humiliate us.” At a tobacco shop down the street, proprietor Rifat Sayeed shares that anger against the soldiers. “They stop you anywhere they want, search you anywhere they want, men and women,” he says. “They’re not treating us like humans.”
The 101st has tried to do things right. The city had endured weeks of chaos before the Americans arrived. Four rival leaders were claiming to be mayor. Looters, revenge killers and roving armed militias owned the streets. To impose order with a minimum of bloodshed, Petraeus used a massive airlift, bringing in some 1,600 troops within a few hours. They reached out to the locals by patrolling the streets on foot rather than in tanks and armored vehicles. The general, a veteran of nation-building programs in Haiti and Bosnia, personally worked to broker a power-sharing agreement among local leaders representing Kurds, Christians and Turkomans as well as Arabs. The 101st also opened 400 schools by using $35 million in “commander’s emergency-response funds” confiscated from the previous government, and disbursed a total of $155 million in U.S. aid for local farmers and big infrastructure projects.
Now the cash is gone, and the first installments of Congress’s new appropriations have yet to arrive. The people of Mosul feel cheated. “We’re all contending with the ‘man on the moon’ problem,” says Petraeus. “The locals say, ‘You’re capable of putting a man on the moon, and you haven’t given me a job’.” The general is philosophical about their resentments. “Try as we will to be an army of liberation, over time they will take you for granted. And as hard as you may try to repair any damage that’s ever done, or avoid inconveniencing people, it’s inevitable when you’re conducting military operations that there will be some of this.” No one understands better than a career soldier the limits of what armed force can achieve. It’s one of the fundamental axioms of guerrilla warfare: an insurgency can be contained by military means, but it can be defeated only by political means.
Petraeus has devoted serious thought to the subject. The Army sent him to Princeton for two years in the early 1980s to earn a Ph.D. in international relations. The topic of his dissertation was how Vietnam reshaped the military’s thinking on the use of force. The 50-year-old Petraeus, who graduated from West Point in 1974, never served in Vietnam; Iraq has been his first combat assignment. But the Army’s experience in Southeast Asia is a key to understanding its approach to Iraq. Officers on the ground in the present conflict, all the way up to Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, make no secret of their tactical need for more troops. They talk of patrols they can’t conduct, roadblocks they can’t mount, crossroads they can’t control for lack of manpower. Yet the senior brass has an overriding strategic objection. It wants no part of another Vietnam, and worries that if it asks for reinforcements, the civilian leadership will seize upon the notion that the military can “solve” Iraq. Petraeus likes to quote a maxim of his old boss, Gen. Hugh Shelton, the former Joint Chiefs chairman: “The military makes a great hammer, but not every problem is a nail.”
Still, Petraeus is not shy about using the hammer when he has to. Since the recent spate of attacks began, the 101st has cracked down hard, raiding houses and carrying out “cordon searches” in which entire neighborhoods are roped off and thoroughly combed. The division’s detention centers are filled to bursting, but new prisoners keep coming in. “The enemy is not shrinking at anything,” says Petraeus. “They will go after any target that’s out there. Our imperative is, as quickly as we can, to wrap these guys up.” Even Kurdish authorities, some of the most loyal friends the Coalition has in Iraq, have begun criticizing the latest offensive for being too heavy-handed.
Petraeus knows the crackdown will almost surely add to Mosul’s grievances and boost support for the insurgents. He only hopes the surge in guerrilla attacks won’t last much longer. “We’ve had periods before when there have been spikes in activity,” he says. “What we’ve had starting a month or so ago is a sustained spike. Arguably the spike has already gone down.” If that’s the case, Petraeus may succeed in minimizing the damage to Mosul’s hearts and minds. British military officers, who in private are deeply critical of the U.S. Army’s counterinsurgency tactics, single out the 101st as the exception.
In any occupation, it’s never easy to find the right balance. “You live sort of a roller-coaster existence,” Petraeus says. “The highs are very high, and the lows are very low. The night the two helicopters crashed, we really felt like we were on the upswing. We’d been aggressively wrapping these bad guys up. And then you have this terrible, beyond-belief loss of life.” The only way to deal with such setbacks is to keep going, the general says. “You move forward with more commitment, because we believe that’s what the soldiers would have wanted. One soldier came up to me at the memorial service for the guys who died in the Black Hawk crash and said, ‘Hey, sir, we just got 17 additional reasons to get this thing done right’.” Yet even as Petraeus recounts the story, you know that he didn’t need even one more reason than he already had.
title: " Wrap These Guys Up " ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-18” author: “Amber Taylor”
Petraeus and his troops have produced a textbook example of waging peace, empowering the civilian populace, repairing the economy, even sending local kids to summer camp. Mosul had the first functioning city council in post-Saddam Iraq. Petraeus has ordered big signs posted in every barracks: WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO WIN IRAQI HEARTS AND MINDS TODAY? But for the last month or so the public’s mood has turned hostile. Guerrilla attacks, once rare, have become routine. In the past six weeks, 31 of Petraeus’s soldiers have died in action, including one who was killed last Friday in a direct mortar hit on division headquarters. As the general remarked to NEWSWEEK last week, “It’s difficult to be kind when you’re getting shot at.”
Visions of Somalia have begun haunting the place. On Nov. 15, 17 of Petraeus’s men died in a midair collision between two Black Hawk helicopters, apparently caused by enemy ground fire. Eight days later, in a seedy commercial neighborhood, Iraqi assailants killed two GIs in their vehicle, then a mob robbed their corpses. “Two months ago, no one would have thought of staging attacks like this,” says Jassim Mohammed Ali, the owner of a butcher shop just around the corner. “But now the Americans are treating the people of Mosul very badly. They humiliate us.” At a tobacco shop down the street, proprietor Rifat Sayeed shares that anger against the soldiers. “They stop you anywhere they want, search you anywhere they want, men and women,” he says. “They’re not treating us like humans.”
The 101st has tried to do things right. The city had endured weeks of chaos before the Americans arrived. Four rival leaders were claiming to be mayor. Looters, revenge killers and roving armed militias owned the streets. To impose order with a minimum of bloodshed, Petraeus used a massive —airlift, bringing in some 1,600 troops within a few hours. They reached out to the locals by patrolling the streets on foot rather than in tanks and armored vehicles. The general, a veteran of nation-building programs in Haiti and Bosnia, personally worked to broker a power-sharing agreement among local leaders representing Kurds, Christians and Turkomans as well as Arabs. The 101st also opened 400 schools by using $35 million in “commander’s emergency-response funds” confiscated from the previous government, and disbursed a total of $155 million in U.S. aid for local farmers and big infrastructure projects.
Now the cash is gone, and the first installments of Congress’s new appropriations have yet to arrive. The people of Mosul feel cheated. “We’re all contending with the ‘man on the moon’ problem,” says Petraeus. “The locals say, ‘You’re capable of putting a man on the moon, and you haven’t given me a job’.” The general is philosophical about their resentments. “Try as we will to be an army of liberation, over time they will take you for granted. And as hard as you may try to repair any damage that’s ever done, or avoid inconveniencing people, it’s inevitable when you’re conducting military operations that there will be some of this.” No one understands better than a career soldier the limits of what armed force can achieve. It’s one of the fundamental axioms of guerrilla warfare: an insurgency can be contained by military means, but it can be defeated only by political means.
Petraeus has devoted serious thought to the subject. The Army sent him to Princeton for two years in the early 1980s to earn a Ph.D. in international relations. The topic of his dissertation was how Vietnam reshaped the military’s thinking on the use of force. The 50-year-old Petraeus, who graduated from West Point in 1974, never served in Vietnam; Iraq has been his first combat assignment. But the Army’s experience in Southeast Asia is a key to understanding its approach to Iraq. Officers on the ground in the present conflict, all the way up to Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, make no secret of their tactical need for more troops. They talk of patrols they can’t conduct, roadblocks they can’t mount, crossroads they can’t control for lack of manpower. Yet the senior brass has an overriding strategic objection. It wants no part of another Vietnam, and worries that if it asks for reinforcements, the civilian leadership will seize upon the notion that the military can “solve” Iraq. Petraeus likes to quote a maxim of his old boss, Gen. Hugh Shelton, the former Joint Chiefs chairman: “The military makes a great hammer, but not every problem is a nail.”
Still, Petraeus is not shy about using the hammer when he has to. Since the recent spate of attacks began, the 101st has cracked down hard, raiding houses and carrying out “cordon searches” in which entire neighborhoods are roped off and thoroughly combed. The division’s detention centers are filled to bursting, but new prisoners keep coming in. “The enemy is not shrinking at anything,” says Petraeus. “They will go after any target that’s out there. Our imperative is, as quickly as we can, to wrap these guys up.” Even Kurdish authorities, some of the most loyal friends the Coalition has in Iraq, have begun criticizing the latest offensive for being too heavy-handed.
Petraeus knows the crackdown will almost surely add to Mosul’s grievances and boost support for the insurgents. He only hopes the surge in guerrilla attacks won’t last much longer. “We’ve had periods before when there have been spikes in activity,” he says. “What we’ve had starting a month or so ago is a sustained spike. Arguably the spike has already gone down.” If that’s the case, Petraeus may succeed in minimizing the damage to Mosul’s hearts and minds. British military officers, who in private are deeply critical of the U.S. Army’s counterinsurgency tactics, single out the 101st as the exception.
In any occupation, it’s never easy to find the right balance. “You live sort of a roller-coaster existence,” Petraeus says. “The highs are very high, and the lows are very low. The night the two helicopters crashed, we really felt like we were on the upswing. We’d been aggressively wrapping these bad guys up. And then you have this terrible, beyond-belief loss of life.” The only way to deal with such setbacks is to keep going, the general says. “You move forward with more commitment, because we believe that’s what the soldiers would have wanted. One soldier came up to me at the memorial service for the guys who died in the Black Hawk crash and said, ‘Hey, sir, we just got 17 additional reasons to get this thing done right’.” Yet even as Petraeus recounts the story, you know that he didn’t need even one more reason than he already had.
