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  Little in his career, however, had prepared him to mediate ethnic civil wars or rebuild broken societies, like Bosnia. In the gathering darkness Casey waited as the last of the Muslim returnees’ homes were searched to make sure that they had abided by their promise to get rid of all of their weapons. Standing alongside Casey were several Serb officials and the town’s former deputy mayor, a Muslim who had come back with the other returnees. The Muslims warily eyed the Serbian observers. Their presence was a bit like “having Darth Vader in your house,” Casey recalled. An hour passed. Nothing was uncovered in any of the nearly three dozen houses searched, until only the residence where Casey was waiting remained. He began to think he had pulled it off, the peaceful return of refugees to their communities, a small but unmistakable success on his first foray into real peacemaking. Then a Serb policeman found two AK-47s, two hand grenades, and a bag full of ammunition in the very last house—the one where Casey was standing. The weapons belonged to the Muslim deputy mayor. Casey was staggered. The agreement that he’d spent weeks negotiating between the Muslims and Serbs was off. “I’m looking at this guy going, ‘What the fuck were you thinking?’” he recalled.

  A standoff ensued. When the Serb police tried to arrest the deputy mayor, dozens of Muslim women lay down outside the house, blocking their departure. Trapped in a surrounded Muslim home as night fell, the Serb police were growing noticeably nervous. Fearing the situation could escalate into violence, Casey took custody of the deputy mayor and left the village. Crestfallen, he returned to the U.S. camp and told Lieutenant General Bill Nash, the cigar-chomping commander of the multinational force, about the collapsed deal.

  “George, never forget it’s their country,” Nash told him. It was Nash’s way of saying that even a force as powerful as the U.S. Army couldn’t resolve centuries-old sectarian and ethnic hatreds and shouldn’t try. U.S. troops could separate the Serbs and Muslims and provide basic security, but they should leave the lengthy job of building a functioning country to the civilian experts or the Bosnians themselves. No one could force these people to get along, certainly not the U.S. military. It was a lesson Casey never forgot, and one the entire Army would take with it to Iraq.

  A few months later General John Shalikashvili, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, came through Bosnia. He noticed that Nash was talking at length with John Abizaid, who was Shalikashvili’s executive officer, about the situation on the ground. Before Shalikashvili left to return to the Pentagon, he pulled Nash aside.

  “You want Abizaid?” he asked. Nash had worked with Abizaid several years earlier and knew his reputation as one of the Army’s brightest minds. He immediately said yes. When Abizaid arrived a month later, Nash gave him Casey’s job overseeing daily military operations. A crestfallen Casey was shifted to a less prestigious position as the assistant division commander overseeing logistics and supply issues.

  Many officers in Casey’s position would have felt threatened by the high-flying Abizaid, who at the time was the youngest general in the Army. Casey chose to embrace the newcomer, who exuded the confidence and street smarts that he lacked. Prior to Bosnia, Casey had long believed that the best Army officers focused on tough field training, taking care of their soldiers and maintaining their equipment. This muddy-boots mentality had helped the service recover from its nadir after Vietnam and had proved its value in the Gulf War. Abizaid was a different kind of officer who sought answers to problems that most officers didn’t see. Instead of focusing downward on his troops, he thought about how forces such as radical Islam were transforming the Middle East and could create new problems for the United States. He was comfortable working with foreign militaries. Where Casey had struggled to win the trust of the Russian officers in Bosnia, Abizaid seemed instinctively to know how to make former Soviet officers, who bristled at their second-tier status, feel valued.

  Working together in Bosnia turned Casey and Abizaid into close friends. Both were outwardly easygoing and unflappable. Over the next decade, their careers would move in parallel. Casey, in particular, seemed to study his younger friend’s progress through the Army and emulate it. He would follow Abizaid in a series of increasingly important jobs at the Pentagon over the next five years.

  Casteau, Belgium

  June 11, 1999

  After seventy-eight days of bombing, the Kosovo war was over and Brigadier General Pete Chiarelli thought he could finally relax a little. Chiarelli was working for General Wes Clark, the NATO commander running the war. Clark typically arrived at his headquarters around 7:00 a.m., so Chiarelli made it a point to get into the office by five-thirty. That way he’d have an hour to sort through the overnight traffic and pull out key pieces of intelligence that Clark needed to see first thing in the morning. Usually he didn’t make it home until 11:00 p.m. It was like that seven days a week.

  The Clinton administration started the war in an attempt to thwart Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic’s ruthless assault on ethnic Albanians living in the Serb province of Kosovo. The thinking was that Milosevic would buckle in a few days, but he had held on far longer than expected. Finally he’d agreed to withdraw his troops from the tiny province and allow in a peacekeeping force. That morning, Chiarelli updated Clark on the timetable for sending in the troops and then returned to his desk just outside the NATO commander’s door.

  Then the telephone rang. On the other end was an Army major with an urgent report: hundreds of Russian troops stationed in Bosnia were heading for Kosovo, several hours’ drive away. The Russians, who had ties to the Serbs, had been insisting for weeks that they wanted to control their own sector of the province. The Clinton administration and Clark were deeply opposed to it. Chiarelli rushed back into Clark’s book-lined office. “Sir, the Russians are moving forces,” he warned. The two officers dashed out of the office to a videoconference on the crisis.

  George Casey, who had left Bosnia for a high-profile job as the deputy director for political military affairs on the Joint Staff in the Pentagon, was also at the center of the action. He’d spent weeks shuttling back and forth between Washington and Moscow with Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott negotiating the terms of the Russians’ participation in the Kosovo peacekeeping force. Landing the important job had been especially satisfying. A decade earlier when Casey had tried to find a slot in the office he was now running, he had been summarily dismissed. “No, no, no. He’s never been in the Pentagon. We can’t use him,” he’d heard someone yelling in the background when he called to ask about the job. But his Bosnia tour had given him on-the-ground experience in the region that many senior officers lacked.

  Around 6:00 p.m. Clark was still trying to get a fix on what the Russians were doing when he broke away to take a call from Casey, who was in Moscow a day earlier. The head of the Russian military had threatened to seize a sector in Kosovo as soon as NATO troops deployed. The Foreign Ministry, meanwhile, was taking a softer line. Casey told Clark that he didn’t think the Russians could move that quickly.

  Clark disagreed. In fact, reports from the ground in Bosnia suggested that several hundred Russians were already moving. Across the border in Kosovo, Serbs who had learned of the deployment were getting set to welcome them. The key decisions were being made not in Moscow but rather on the ground in Bosnia and Kosovo. For both Casey and Chiarelli, the aftermath of the Kosovo war was an introduction to political and military crisis solving at the highest levels, and their involvement pushed them ahead of many of their Army peers in the endless competition for the next job.

  Casey spent the next several weeks shuttling from the Pentagon to the Kremlin and Macedonia as part of a team hammering out the broad outlines of a deal that would place the Russian peacekeepers under NATO control but also salvage some measure of Russian pride. Chiarelli also found himself busier in the weeks after the end of the conflict than he had been during the bombing campaign. More tense issues would arise, including the return of hundreds of thousands of refugees and the disarming of Kosovar Muslims on
whose behalf the war had been fought.

  Chiarelli owed his career to Clark. A few years earlier he had been finishing a year at the National War College in Washington and had no job lined up. He sat in his basement in suburban Virginia and typed out letters on his Commodore 64 home computer to every division commander in the Army, asking for a job as an operations officer, or G3 in Army parlance. Landing such a position was essential if he was ever going to be promoted again. “This may not be the normal way of doing business,” he wrote. “However, I would like your help as I look for a division G3 job.” Only Clark, who was the commander of the 1st Cavalry Division, invited him for an interview. Although they had never met, Clark had been an instructor in the West Point Social Sciences Department in the early 1970s after returning from Vietnam. He hired him after a twenty-minute interview. Chiarelli never knew why. The best theory he could come up with was that the Sosh connections had saved him again. When Clark was named NATO commander he hired Chiarelli as his executive officer, essentially his senior aide.

  Chiarelli learned a lot from Clark. Clark was an activist general who was comfortable using military power to prevent humanitarian disasters and stabilize failing states. As NATO commander he quietly encouraged U.S. troops in Bosnia to arrest mafia-like criminals and strengthen the country’s moderate political opposition, knowing such moves would draw the ire of his more conservative Pentagon bosses who were opposed to anything that smacked of nation building. “You have to push the envelope,” he told his soldiers. “If you put this strategy down [on paper] and circulate it, it’s dead.”

  Chiarelli also learned a good deal about how not to handle himself from Clark, a brusque, highly intelligent man who had made lots of enemies during his long Army career. He never cared how hard he drove his subordinates. He wasn’t deferential to his superiors, and his unrivaled ambition left him with few allies in the Army or the Pentagon. Six weeks after the Kosovo war ended, Clark got a call from Joint Chiefs chairman General Hugh Shelton, who told him that he would be replaced the following April as NATO commander. Clark, who was in Lithuania at the time, couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Normally it was a three-year job, often extended to four. He had just finished his second year and had fought and won the first war in NATO’s fifty-year history. “I stood there stunned. Was I being relieved of duty?” he wrote in his memoirs.

  It was 3:00 a.m. back in Belgium when Chiarelli was awoken at home by a call from his apoplectic boss. They were firing him, Clark said. Not only that, Clark railed, but within minutes of hanging up with Shelton he had gotten a call from a Washington Post reporter who already knew he had been dismissed. The Pentagon had leaked the news to make it impossible for him to lobby the White House to reverse it. “He was definitely upset, and rightfully so,” Chiarelli recalled. “This guy had just won a war and here he was being shown the door.”

  In Kosovo, Clark’s Pentagon bosses resented his demands for more forces, especially a request for two dozen Apache helicopters. Clark wanted to use the low-flying helicopters to destroy Serbian military forces at close range, but Defense Secretary William Cohen was deeply opposed to the plan. The helicopters were too vulnerable to ground fire and might lead to U.S. casualties. In a war fought primarily for humanitarian reasons, he believed, there was no compelling reason to put U.S. troops’ lives at risk. Cohen also suspected that Clark was using his back-channel contacts with the White House and State Department to reverse Pentagon decisions that he opposed.

  Although Clark had the backing of the White House and the State Department on many of his initiatives in Kosovo, he had alienated his most important boss: the defense secretary. His high-profile dismissal wasn’t soon forgotten in the Army. “The lesson I took from it is that your chain of command is your chain of command and that you are obligated to do your best to work within it to the extent that you can,” recalled Abizaid.

  In 2001, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld arrived in the Pentagon deeply opposed to using the military for nation-building ventures. Within weeks of taking office he asked the Joint Staff to draw up plans for pulling American troops out of the Balkans, insisting that such missions should be handled by the same civilian agencies that had repeatedly proven themselves incapable in Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia, and Kosovo. Rumsfeld also was convinced that activist commanders, such as Clark, had been given too much latitude by the Clinton administration to use military power to help stabilize weak or failing states. He wanted to rein in the generals.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Sheikh of Sheikhs

  Out of the French army’s soul-destroying trial by fire in Algeria there has so far emerged one superlatively good combat commander, a 42-year-old ex-bank clerk from Toul named Marcel Bigeard. So notable is Colonel Bigeard’s tactical genius and so successful his Spartan training methods that for three years, whenever French troops scored one of their rare clearcut victories over the Algerian rebels, French newspaper readers automatically looked for the name of his 3rd Colonial Paratroop Regiment.

  —Time MAGAZINE, AUGUST 1958

  Camp Asaliyah, Qatar

  March 26, 2003

  On the sixth day of the invasion of Iraq, Lieutenant General John Abizaid sat in for General Tommy Franks, the top commander in the Middle East, at the daily war update conducted by video with the top brass back at the Pentagon. It was midmorning in Washington. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and General Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, greeted Abizaid, who appeared on-screen wearing desert fatigues. A handful of officers from Kuwait also were on the call. They wore bulky chemical protection suits, minus only the airtight headgear. Three Iraqi missiles had fallen nearby less than an hour earlier, and one of the colonels in Kuwait noted that he might have to break away if they got word a chemical attack was under way.

  The Washington team nodded, but their relaxed mood was palpably different from the atmosphere of gathering dangers facing the Army in the field. A sandstorm blowing from the south had grounded helicopters and slowed the advance on Baghdad to a crawl. Attacks by Saddam Hussein’s Fedayeen, the fanatical fighters in civilian clothes who prefigured the coming insurgency, were escalating, especially on military supply lines that snaked to the Kuwaiti border. Some units were down to only a few days of fuel and ammunition.

  Three months earlier, when General Franks had suggested that he might need a deputy to help manage the war, Abizaid had jumped at the chance. He was working for the Joint Staff in the Pentagon, far from the action. When he told Kathy, she knew it wasn’t even worth trying to talk him out of it. Now here he was on an unmarked base in Qatar, a small Persian Gulf kingdom where Central Command kept its forward headquarters—still not exactly the front lines. His windowless office sat inside a big sand-colored tent. Like a Russian nesting doll, the tent was further encased by an even larger prefabricated metal building. Outside, the desert temperatures often soared past 110 degrees. Inside, the air-conditioning blew so cold that soldiers often found they had to wrap themselves in fleece jackets. On computer screens in his office, Abizaid could track minute-by-minute movements of ground units and aircraft throughout the Middle East. He spoke daily with senior Pentagon leaders on video teleconferences. Hundreds of officers scrambled around the headquarters cranking out Power-Point slides by the thousands. It was a strange way to fight a war.

  But it wasn’t really the war that troubled Abizaid. He had no doubt that U.S. troops would drive Saddam from power. What concerned him was what would come after the dictator fell. Dave Petraeus, who was leading the 101st Airborne Division through a brutal sandstorm as it drove toward Baghdad, had the same worry. Rumsfeld and Franks’s war plan assumed that a lightning assault would quickly topple Saddam’s regime. Once the dictator was gone, they expected, Iraqis and the relatively small team of civilians and retired generals that the Pentagon had assembled would handle delivery of humanitarian aid and any other problems that arose until a new government could be established.

  Both Abizaid and Petraeus had heard such pr
omises about civilians taking over the postwar reconstruction from the military in the 1990s. And both expected that, just as in the nineties, the military would have to fill the void when the civilian teams were overwhelmed by the chaos that followed combat. The 9/11 terrorist attacks demonstrated the danger that could emerge from chaotic, ungoverned places, like Afghanistan. But the Bush administration wanted no part of nation building there or anyplace else. They hadn’t absorbed the lessons of the 1990s about the military’s unavoidable postconflict role. After the 2001 terrorist attacks, a small force made up of U.S. special operations troops invaded Afghanistan and, with precision bombing and local allies, quickly toppled the Taliban. The Bush administration left about 10,000 troops to hunt down the remnants of Al Qaeda. Then it turned its focus to Iraq, and to toppling Saddam and transforming Iraq into a model democracy for the Middle East. Ordered to prepare for an invasion of Iraq, the military was quite happy not to be saddled with rebuilding Afghanistan. The same attitude pervaded the early stages of the Iraq war, to Abizaid’s and Petraeus’s frustration. As the U.S. force pushed north, they were among the few who worried about what would happen after Baghdad fell.

  Abizaid’s and Petraeus’s views on Iraq differed in other key respects, however. Petraeus had high hopes for the postinvasion period. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if this place turns out to be something?” he said to a reporter a few weeks into the war. “There’s no reason why it couldn’t be. They have lots of money, unless some petty despot takes over.” Abizaid had a darker view. He knew how deep the ethnic and sectarian hatreds ran in the country and how quickly they could explode. He also recalled his time in Lebanon, when the Israelis had attempted to occupy an Arab land. Prior to the invasion, he had e-mailed his staff an academic study on the occupation. He hoped his troops would take two lessons from Israel’s failure: occupation duty is hard even for the best-trained military, and the longer you stay the harder it gets.