David Petraeus May Be the Most Important Man in America

The Iraq 'surge' general will have to deal with the growing Islamic militant threat in a poorer and nuclear Pakistan. Yet that is only a part of his responsibility for Middle East and central Asia. The political situation in Pakistan worsens daily.

Pakistan is also stone cold broke. Pakistan needs about $15-billion to stay afloat.

Petraeus is uniquely qualified to fulfill his new role, but he will need a lot of help.

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Petraeus takes charge of US Central Command



Mark Tran and agencies
guardian.co.uk, Friday October 31 2008 11.13 GMT

David Petraeus, the general who directed the Iraq "surge", today takes charge of US Central Command, where he will head American military operations in the Middle East and central Asia.

Petraeus has signalled his priority will be Pakistan, the first country he will visit after today's swearing-in ceremony in Tampa Bay, Florida.

Nuclear-armed Pakistan faces a growing Islamist threat, has had to ask for financial help from the International Monetary Fund, and faces impatient calls from the US to crack down on Taliban and al-Qaida militants operating from Pakistan into Afghanistan.

Petraeus, an expert on counter-insurgency, comes into his new job credited with pulling Iraq back from the brink of disintegration. During the surge, sectarian violence fell off dramatically and the US military speaks glowingly of a newly confident Iraqi army.

The general has been cautious about Iraq's prospects, insisting that the job is far from finished. He has said the war in Afghanistan is likely to prove even longer and harder.

Pakistan is shaping up to be just as difficult. Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, has warned that any future terror attack on the US would come from Pakistan's western tribal regions, where the central government has little or no control. For US strategists, Pakistan may be considered a bigger immediate threat than either Iraq or Afghanistan.

"Dealing with Pakistan, where America's mortal foe al-Qaida is nestled alongside the Taliban, is clearly the most pressing problem we face," Bing West, a retired marine and former assistant secretary of defence, wrote in National Interest, the journal of international affairs and diplomacy.

Petraeus has acknowledged Pakistan will probably be altogether different from Iraq, where his counter-insurgency tactics succeeded. "Pakistan is going to do this on their own," he told rightwing thinktank the Heritage Foundation this month. "They have a very keen sense of sovereignty."

In an interview in Washington this week, a senior Pakistani official said his government was drawing up a more comprehensive strategy for fighting the insurgency, now regarded as the gravest threat to the government.

It would be carried out in cooperation with the US, but not on a US timetable, the official said. "We are going to run this."

There is tension between the US and Pakistan over the insurgency in tribal areas. The Bush administration has stepped up sending drone aircraft to attack targets in remote border areas inside Pakistan. Resulting civilian casualties have caused uproar among Pakistanis.

Petraeus's arrival at Central Command was not the original plan. The US secretary of defence, Robert Gates, wanted to move Petraeus from Iraq to the less demanding job of commanding US and Nato forces in Europe.

But Admiral William Fallon unexpectedly announced his retirement in February after a year at Central Command and Petraeus was named as his replacement.

Petraeus Recalibrates his Career - Focus Afghanistan

Politics does make for some strange bedfellows. Maybe politicians just crave strange, but this is an interesting twist. Has General Petraeus done a calculation that Obama will be president?

No one gets beyond one star and stays that way unless he plays and has mastered the ultimate military art of being a politician, camouflaged of course.

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Is Petraeus Preparing to Betray the Neo-Cons?

July 25, 2008 -

By: Lobe, Jim Israelenews

The Wall Street Journal had a good news piece today on where things are going with respect to a U.S. withdrawal — at least of combat troops — from Iraq entitled “Consensus May be Nearing on Iraq Pullout: Target Year of 2010 Gains Some Traction Among Principals as U.S. Looks Toward Afghanistan.”

I would add that, in addition to Obama, the Bush administration and now even the McCain Campaign, it appears that Gen. David Petraeus, who will take over as CentCom commander some time around Sep 1, is also preparing the ground for a move in that direction, suggesting in a Sunday interviewwith AP that al-Qaeda may “start to provide some of those resources that would have come to Iraq to Pakistan, possibly Afghanistan.”

“We do think that there is some assessment ongoing [by al-Qaeda] as to the continued viability of [its] fight in Iraq,” he said. “There is some intelligence that has picked this up,” he went on, adding, “It’s not solid gold intelligence.”

In fact, of course, evidence that al-Qaeda and its allies have shifted their focus back to Afghanistan and, more important from a strategic point of view, Pakistan has been accumulating for much of the past year; hence, Mullen’s and Gates’ increasing and increasingly vocal agitation about the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan and the growing influence and infrastructure of al Qaeda and Taliban forces across the border in Pakistan. In the two weeks before Petraeus’ interview, AP, the always-excellent Christian Science Monitor, and the New York Times published articles providing detailed evidence that al-Qaeda made its assessment some months ago and has been acting on it by sending many more fighters to Southwest Asia, including Iraq war veterans.

That Petraeus says that he believes al-Qaeda is only now making its assessment suggests the degree to which, as U.S. commander in Iraq, he has been focused exclusively on that theater and has fought tooth and nail against the Pentagon’s desire to accelerate its drawdown in troops there in order to free up more for Afghanistan.

Now, however, as commander-designate of Centcom, southwest Asia is about to become his responsibility, and he most certainly doesn’t want to lose — or be perceived as losing — there any more than he has in Iraq. In that respect, I think he is preparing to join the consensus, a consensus that, significantly, embraces the concept — pushed hard by Obama in recent days — that Afghanistan/Pakistan really does constitute the “central front” in the war on terror. (He may also believe that Obama is going to the next president and that continuing to insist that Iraq is the “central front” might be detrimental to his long-term career goals.)

If Petraeus does indeed move into the Southwest Asia camp, it will mark a huge setback for the neo-conservatives — whose Israel-centered agenda has accorded paramount priority to the Middle East and the Gulf — and whatever residual hopes they harbor for a U.S. attack on Iran. Tehran’s capacity to cause trouble in Afghanistan and even Pakistan is considerable, and I think that is one reason why Mullen and Gates have pushed for dialogue and detente.

Petraeus Testimony and the Candidates

• "We haven't turned any corners, we haven't seen any lights at the end of the tunnel. The champagne bottle has been pushed to the back of the refrigerator. And the progress, while real, is fragile and is reversible."-Petraeus

• “massive strategic blunder” and “I’m not suggesting that we yank all our troops out all the way, I’m trying to get to an endpoint,” -Obama

• "the height of irresponsibility" (to withdraw US troops prematurely, as his Democratic rivals propose.) -McCain

• "It is time to begin an orderly withdrawal of our troops," -Hillary

Hail to the Chief. "What to make of this?"

Was he thinking about the future?

Probably not much, but I did find it amusing. Wanting it or not, Petraeus would not be the first general to want the big one. There are not many people that have not thought and speculated about what they would do if they held the position of their boss. Care to speculate on how many generals either succeeded or lusted after the presidential office?

President Petraeus? Iraqi official recalls the day US general revealed ambition
By Patrick Cockburn
Published: 13 September 2007 Independent

The US commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, expressed long-term interest in running for the US presidency when he was stationed in Baghdad, according to a senior Iraqi official who knew him at that time.

Sabah Khadim, then a senior adviser at Iraq's Interior Ministry, says General Petraeus discussed with him his ambition when the general was head of training and recruitment of the Iraqi army in 2004-05.

"I asked him if he was planning to run in 2008 and he said, 'No, that would be too soon'," Mr Khadim, who now lives in London, said.

General Petraeus has a reputation in the US Army for being a man of great ambition. If he succeeds in reversing America's apparent failure in Iraq, he would be a natural candidate for the White House in the presidential election in 2012.

His able defence of the "surge" in US troop numbers in Iraq as a success before Congress this week has made him the best-known soldier in America. An articulate, intelligent and energetic man, he has always shown skill in managing the media.

But General Petraeus's open interest in the presidency may lead critics to suggest that his own political ambitions have influenced him in putting an optimistic gloss on the US military position in Iraq .

Mr Khadim was a senior adviser in the Iraqi Interior Ministry in 2004-05 when Iyad Allawi was prime minister.

"My office was in the Adnan Palace in the Green Zone, which was close to General Petraeus's office," Mr Khadim recalls. He had meetings with the general because the Interior Ministry was involved in vetting the loyalty of Iraqis recruited as army officers. Mr Khadim was critical of the general's choice of Iraqis to work with him.

For a soldier whose military abilities and experience are so lauded by the White House, General Petraeus has had a surprisingly controversial career in Iraq. His critics hold him at least partly responsible for three debacles: the capture of Mosul by the insurgents in 2004; the failure to train an effective Iraqi army and the theft of the entire Iraqi arms procurement budget in 2004-05.

General Petraeus went to Iraq during the invasion of 2003 as commander of the 101st Airborne Division and had not previously seen combat. He first became prominent when the 101st was based in Mosul, in northern Iraq, where he pursued a more conciliatory line toward former Baathists and Iraqi army officers than the stated US policy.

His efforts were deemed successful. When the 101st left in February 2004, it had lost only 60 troops in combat and accidents. General Petraeus had built up the local police by recruiting officers who had previously worked for Saddam Hussein's security apparatus.

Although Mosul remained quiet for some months after, the US suffered one of its worse setbacks of the war in November 2004 when insurgents captured most of the city. The 7,000 police recruited by General Petraeus either changed sides or went home. Thirty police stations were captured, 11,000 assault rifles were lost and $41m (£20m) worth of military equipment disappeared. Iraqi army units abandoned their bases.

The general's next job was to oversee the training of a new Iraqi army. As head of the Multinational Security Transition Command, General Petraeus claimed that his efforts were proving successful. In an article in The Washington Post in September 2004, he wrote: "Training is on track and increasing in capacity. Infrastructure is being repaired. Command and control structures and institutions are being re-established." This optimism turned out be misleading; three years later the Iraqi army is notoriously ineffective and corrupt.

General Petraeus was in charge of the Security Transition Command at the time that the Iraqi procurement budget of $1.2bn was stolen. "It is possibly one of the largest thefts in history," Iraq's Finance Minister, Ali Allawi, said. "Huge amounts of money disappeared. In return we got nothing but scraps of metal."

Mr Khadim is sceptical that the "surge" is working. Commenting on the US military alliance with the Sunni tribes in Anbar province, he said: "They will take your money, but when the money runs out they will change sides again."

"This is like deja vu all over again." - yogi bera

Army Times

Forty years ago, another of the Army’s best and brightest — like Petraeus a former commander of the “Screaming Eagles” — returned from a war with a top U.S. diplomat to do a public relations blitz.

Gen. William Westmoreland appeared with Ellsworth Bunker, the American ambassador to South Vietnam, before key congressional committees and on “Meet the Press.” The general delivered an address to the National Press Club in which he spoke of the war in terms that ring familiar today.

“We have found it to be like no other war we have fought before,” Westmoreland said of the U.S. forces’ struggle in Vietnam. “There are no moving front lines, just a changing picture of small actions scattered over the whole country.”

Even so, Westmoreland was optimistic, noting that the people of the country “have, in the past year, held free elections.” He said his troops had “learned to work alongside the Vietnamese army while encouraging the development of a representative government.”

After his speech, Westmoreland was asked a question that has come up in the congressional debate over Iraq: “Shouldn’t the running of the war be left exclusively to the military?”

“I think it was Clemenceau who said that war is too important to be left exclusively to the generals,” Westmoreland said, referring to Georges Clemenceau, the French prime minister during World War I. “I think, at this time in history, in view of the complexity of this confrontation, that Clemenceau was right.”

There is Trouble in Paradise. Malaki and Petraeus Have Hard Feelings.

I can't deal with you any more. I will ask for someone else to replace you." -Nouri al-Maliki to Gen David Petraeus

Iraqi leader tells Bush: Get Gen Petraeus out

By Damien McElroy, Foreign Affairs Correspondent
Last Updated: 2:44am BST 28/07/2007 Telegraph

Relations between the top United States general in Iraq and Nouri al-Maliki, the country's prime minister, are so bad that the Iraqi leader made a direct appeal for his removal to President George W Bush.

Although the call was rejected, aides to both men admit that Mr Maliki and Gen David Petraeus engage in frequent stand-up shouting matches, differing particularly over the US general's moves to arm Sunni tribesmen to fight al-Qa'eda.

One Iraqi source said Mr Maliki used a video conference with Mr Bush to call for the general's signature strategy to be scrapped. "He told Bush that if Petraeus continues, he would arm Shia militias," said the official. "Bush told Maliki to calm down."

At another meeting with Gen Petraeus, Mr Maliki said: "I can't deal with you any more. I will ask for someone else to replace you."

Gen Petraeus admitted that the relationship was stormy, saying: "We have not pulled punches with each other."

President Bush's support for Mr Maliki is deeply controversial within the US government because of the Iraqi's ties to Shia militias responsible for some of the worst sectarian violence.

The New York Times claimed yesterday that Saudi Arabia was refusing to work with Mr Maliki and has presented "evidence" that he was an Iranian intelligence agent to US officials. "Bush administration officials are voicing increasing anger at what they say has been Saudi Arabia's counterproductive role in the war," it reported.

Alongside the firm support of Mr Bush, Mr Maliki also enjoys the backing of Ryan Crocker, the US ambassador and his predecessor, Zalmay Khalilzad, now America's representative at the United Nations.

Mr Khalilzad took a swipe at Saudi Arabia in an editorial published earlier this month that was widely seen as an appeal for a larger UN role in stabilising Iraq.

Mr Crocker, who attends Mr Maliki's stormy weekly meetings with Gen Petraeus, said the Iraqi leader was a strong partner of America.

"There is no leader in the world that is under more pressure than Nouri al-Maliki, without question," he said. "Sometimes he reflects that frustration. I don't blame him. I probably would too."