Obama's master of war has a way with words

A week and a half ago, under a stern grilling by the Senate Armed Forces Committee over the progress of the war in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus froze, then slumped forward across the witness table.

Pictures show a confused Petraeus being supported by aides, appearing uncertain of where he was. Dehydration was later cited as the cause.

Petraeus, who was treated for prostate cancer last year, will now be in no doubt where he is and where he is heading: back to Afghanistan from Tampa, headquarters of Central Command, to replace his disgraced protege, General Stanley McChrystal, who was fired last week by President Barack Obama for disparaging comments - in a profile in Rolling Stone magazine - about the Administration's leadership.

In doing so, Petraeus becomes Obama's third commander of the war since April last year.

Like his two predecessors, Petraeus' reputation comes buffed to a high sheen by his admirers in the military, thinktanks and media, who tick off the inevitable facets of his kind: warrior, intellectual, leader and jock.

Two weeks ago, at a dinner at the United States ambassador's house in London, Petraeus was ragged for one of these, his notoriously competitive approach to athletic feats.

When ambassador Louis Susman, a Chicago Democrat, retold the story of Petraeus' rapid recovery from an accidental gunshot wound to the chest - "by doing 50 press-ups the next day" - Petraeus replied tartly: "I never stop at 50."

Where the determinedly self-promoting Petraeus is different from some of those who have gone before, however, is in his sharp awareness of the political hinterland in which he operates, recognising not only the link between politics and war in counterinsurgency efforts but also in relation to his own ambitions.

"I am surprised he took this job," one who knows Petraeus commented. "He always has his eye on his own place in history. This one is lose-lose. He can only have agreed out of a sense of duty. And I admire him more for that."

For in a failing war - and on a tight timetable from Obama to withdraw large numbers of US troops by July 2011 - Petraeus must be aware of the fate of the generals who went before him: David McKiernan, who lasted barely nine months before being sacked by Obama, and McChrystal, who last week suffered a similarly brisk White House defenestration.

Both victims, in one way or another, of the internecine struggles over the best policy for Afghanistan.

Behind these squabbles is a schism almost theological in its dimensions: between the faithful followers of the military counterinsurgency strategy (Coin) that Petraeus authored with McChrystal - nicknamed the "Coindinistas" - and the "doubters", a nebulous but growing group within the ranks of the senior international civilian and military officials in Afghanistan who are dubious that the war can be won.

Petraeus' appointment sets the stage for a clearer delineation of that divide - although in far less antagonistic terms - between a politically popular commander who believes the policy can work and Vice-President Joe Biden, with whom Petraeus has been able to get on in the past, the most senior "doubter" who argues for a pared counterterrorism strategy for Afghanistan and a final deadline for withdrawal. How they combine or collide will define the war's unravelling.

Petraeus, unlike McChrystal, comes equipped for this particular kind of battle. His great unacknowledged skill, as author and journalist Patrick Cockburn argued at the weekend, is presentational, in particular of unwelcome realities as something more palatable.

In Iraq, where the conventional view of his fans is that he turned the war around with his surge in 2007, Petraeus' biggest achievement was in reality to persuade Americans that withdrawal, without leaving a safe and secure state behind, despite the cost in life and money, was somehow victory.

In Iraq, sceptics question how much of the reduction in violence around the time of the Petraeus-directed surge was down to him and how much to a fortunate confluence of events, including a Shiite ceasefire and former Sunni insurgents turning on al Qaeda.

Petraeus's ambition was apparent early on. At the time of his elevation to command in Iraq, a childhood friend told the Cornwall Local, a newspaper in his home town in New York State, that when she and Petraeus played house her role was as the stay-at-home mother while he was a US senator.

Commissioned into the infantry after West Point in 1974 as the Vietnam War wound down, Petraeus married young, to the academy superintendent's daughter.

His interest in Vietnam, on which he wrote his PhD thesis, came later when, at airborne school in France, he met French paratroopers who had fought in Indo-China.

Unlike some of his post-Vietnam contemporaries, his career, until the invasion of Iraq in 2003, was marked not by combat experience but by peacekeeping operations. When he was shot in the chest by a fellow US soldier, his wound was accidental, as was a bad fall in parachute training.

Even during the Iraq invasion, his division, the 101st Airborne, saw relatively little fighting. Significant, however, was the authorship under his lead of the US military's new counterinsurgency doctrine while in charge of the Army's officer school, emphasising protecting the population even if it risked more US casualties, an unpopular policy with US soldiers his predecessor McChrystal rigidly enforced.

The resulting book, Counterinsurgency, uniquely for an army field manual, was reviewed by the New York Times. It confirmed what at least one former civilian adviser has described as his "triumph of the nerds" at the top of the US military, driven by the notion that it is "brainpower, not brawn" that wins conflicts.

According to Steve Coll, writing in the New Yorker in 2008, it was this publication which projected Petraeus into the role of the celebrity general de nos jours, making him a favourite of both the media and the "liberal-minded intelligentsia" with his appeal for blending politics with military action while minimising war's lethal aspects.

He was thrust further into the limelight by President George W. Bush's repeated name-checking of the general, a calculated tactic at a time when Petraeus was regarded as more credible on Iraq than the Administration.

All of this raised suspicions, which he has readily denied, that he has his own eye on political preferment, perhaps even a run for president.

Petraeus' acute awareness of the requirement to provide a satisfactory bridge between military and political accountability perhaps explains why, as he has admitted, he has found the experience of reporting to Congress so gruelling, not least in his 2007 testimony when the success of his surge was fiercely cross-examined.

His first concerns, as some of those who have served under him have made clear since the announcement that he is going to Kabul, are perhaps unsurprising focusing on trying to heal the toxic divisions among the senior US civilian and military officials on the ground.

Petraeus has said his notion of the relationship between the general and his civilian leaders was inspired by Samuel Huntington's The Soldier and the State, which calls for officers to regard themselves as impartial and professional. A registered Republican until 2002, he stopped voting on becoming a two-star general.

The leadership style of the slightly built Petraeus is at marked variance to McChrystal, whose background is in the largely closed world of special forces, preferring a PowerPoint-driven management theory of communication to his subordinates.

All of which leaves the elephant still standing squarely in the room. It is not the question of the character of Petraeus but whether, given Obama's statement that it's only the personnel, not the policy, that is changing, he can bring some unity to a fractured effort as he did in Iraq. And turn the war around?

One thing is clear, that Afghanistan is not Iraq. Where Iraq was a largely modern urban society with a history of a centralised state, Afghanistan has never had that experience. What state did exist has been eroded by three decades of conflict.

Few are under any illusions that the government forces loyal to the much criticised President Hamid Karzai are yet ready - if they ever will be - to take over effectively from the US-led forces.

Which leaves a final question: whether Petraeus is being parachuted in to win the war or whether, once again, he will be asked to paper over the whole mess through his carefully groomed credibility - to declare that conditions have been met to begin withdrawal.

A job for the politician in Petraeus. For the PR man, not the soldier.

The Petraeus file

* Born: November 7, 1952 in Cornwall, New York State, the son of Miriam, a United States citizen, and Sixtus, a Dutch sea captain.

* Best of times: Widely lauded for his command of the surge in Iraq in 2007. It focused on attempting to protect the civilian population to give political initiatives - in partnership with military operations - time to flourish.

* Worst of times: His appearances before Congress in 2007, where he was challenged over the early success of the surge.

* He says: (About progress in Iraq in 2008) "We have our teeth into the jugular and we need to keep them there."

* They say: "A general is not an astute general if he does not appreciate the connection between politics and war. That opened up the opportunity for Petraeus to rise to the top, because he is sensitive to politics, cultivates the media and wishes to be seen as a man of ideas, not just as a man of action." - Colonel Andrew Bacevich, Boston University.

- OBSERVER