Pleading Out: America’s Broken Public Defense System

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IN THE UNITED STATES, if you are charged with a crime that might land you in prison, whether a felony or misdemeanor, at the state or federal level, as an adult or juvenile, you have a right to effective representation in court, regardless of your ability to pay for it.
This will come as a surprise to many defendants. If you are poor and facing jail time, you will get your representation eventually, but there is a fair chance it won’t be effective. Some public defenders are incompetent, and some are able and committed. Either way, they won’t have time for you.
It isn't hard to see why. In 2007, the last time the Bureau of Justice Statistics surveyed the nation’s indigent defense services, there were 957 public defender offices employing 15,000 full-time staff. These offices handled about 80 percent of the country’s criminal cases, on a combined budget of $2.3 billion. In that same year, 2,330 state prosecutor offices employed 78,000 full-time staff. Their budgets were falling, but with a total of $5.8 billion in the kitty, their means far outstripped that of their defender colleagues.

Faced with a larger and better-funded prosecution regime, defenders can’t keep up. Twenty-two states operate public defender offices, and 17 reported full caseload information to the Bureau in 2007. Only four of those 17 states had enough attorneys to meet the government’s caseload standards, guidelines for the maximum number of cases that should be assigned to an attorney. Where public defense operates at the county level, less than a third of offices had enough attorneys. Other vital defense staff — investigators, paralegals, administrators — are similarly in short supply. It should come as no surprise, then, that you’re more likely to wind up in jail if represented by a taxpayer-financed lawyer than by one you hire yourself.
The consequences of the defender resource shortfall are obvious in Detroit, to name just one example. In the Motor City, misdemeanor cases are handled by a low-bid private contractor. For $661,400, five part-time attorneys working for the Misdemeanor Defender Professional Corporation dispose of 12,000–14,000 cases per year. That comes to 32 minutes of attorney time spent on each case, according to the National Legal Aid & Defender Association.
The numbers point to a disconnect between the principle — that everyone has a right to effective counsel — and actual practice. That difference haunts the American justice system.

The principle is enshrined in the Sixth Amendment to the Constitution, which states, “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right […] to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.” The Amendment was ratified, along with the rest of the Bill of Rights, in 1791. Yet for 170 years, this constitutional provision was deemed to apply only in federal courts. A defendant in a state court — where most defendants find themselves — might have had guaranteed access to an attorney, but only in special circumstances or if they were lucky enough to be tried in a jurisdiction that had taken the burden of public defense upon itself.
Not all jurisdictions did, and that is why Clarence Earl Gideon, a petty crook who nonetheless possessed a tenacious sense of justice, petitioned the Supreme Court in a case that would become one of the most significant in the history of American criminal law.

In the summer of 1961, Gideon was charged with breaking into a Panama City, Florida, pool hall and robbing it of liquor and change lifted from a cigarette dispenser. Impoverished and adrift, he requested that the court provide him an attorney. When his request was denied, he made a flailing and ultimately unsuccessful attempt at his own defense. From his prison cell, he appealed his conviction to the Supreme Court, arguing that his right to an attorney had been violated.
On March 18, 1963, the justices agreed, and in ambitious terms. “Any person haled into court, who is too poor to hire a lawyer, cannot be assured a fair trial unless counsel is provided for him,” Justice Hugo Black wrote in the majority opinion in Gideon v. Wainwright. “This seems to us to be an obvious truth.” The right to effective assistance of counsel was deemed fundamental and would be applied to the states in all felony cases. In Argersinger v. Hamlin (1972), the right was extended to any case, including misdemeanors, in which a defendant could serve jail time. Subsequent cases, such as Strickland v. Washington (1984), United States v. Cronic (1984), and Wiggins v. Smith (2003) asserted that the right to assistance is a right to effective assistance and laid out standards of effectiveness and ineffectiveness.
The Gideon decision was unanimous and, for the most part, had the support of the states. The story is told memorably in the 1964 book Gideon’s Trumpet, a learned and celebratory account by Anthony Lewis, who covered the case for The New York Times.


Anthony Lewis    R.I.P.

But as Lewis recognized at the time, the Court had established a right, and a right is not the same thing as its exercise. The justices left it up to the states to determine how the right to effective counsel would be implemented, and the results have been shoddy.
On the 25th anniversary of the decision, Lewis lamented that Gideon’s trumpet had already been “muted”: “We have to recognize that the premise of Gideon has not really been fulfilled. […] Too few lawyers represent poor defendants, and they are underpaid and grotesquely overworked.” In an editorial on the 30th anniversary, The New York Times sharply criticized a government that “stages mock trials.” And on the 40th anniversary, Lewis wrote, “Gideon […] would be disappointed today at the imperfect realization of his dream.”
Now we are 50 years out, and as journalist Karen Houppert makes clear in her new book, Chasing Gideon: The Elusive Quest for Poor People’s Justice, the situation for indigent defendants continues to be dire. Houppert’s book is an unrelenting spectacle of despair: innocents convicted due to lack of adequate counsel, a child abused by police and the courts under the diverted gaze of a contract public defender, dedicated lawyers exhausted by a system that cannot give their clients a fair chance, a mentally retarded defendant sentenced to the death chamber.

                                                                       
Karen Houppert’s reporting has appeared in a wide variety of publications, including The Washington Post Magazine, The New York Times, Newsday, The Nation, Salon, Slate, Mother Jones, Ms, The Village Voice, The Baltimore Sun, Glamour, Self, Fitness, etc. A former staff writer for The Village Voice, Houppert has won several awards for her coverage of gender politics, including a National Women's Political Caucus Award and a 2003 Newswomen's Club of New York Front Page Award. She moved to Baltimore in 2006 and began reporting on the city for Urbanite and The Washington Post Magazine. These days she is writing about the criminal justice system, race, poverty, education, politics—and their unholy mix here and in the nation at large.


 Houppert uses individual cases to highlight the struggle the poor face in seeking justice. She tells the story of Greg Bright, a New Orleans man who served 27 years for a murder he didn’t commit. What put him behind bars was the testimony of a single eyewitness, who the state almost certainly knew was mentally ill. The witness, who had a history of hallucinations and psychosis, was hospitalized and received mental health services on the same day in 1976 that she was initially scheduled to testify. Yet Bright’s inept public defenders did no investigation on his behalf. In prison he continued to fight for his innocence but for decades he got nowhere. “Two prosecutors tried Greg’s case,” Houppert writes. “[O]ne of them would go on to be the judge hearing all his appeals.” Her indictment of his treatment speaks to a broken constitutional promise: “Gideon guaranteed [Bright] an attorney, but a flawed indigent defense system and a lackluster lawyer rendered that almost meaningless.”
Bright might have had sounder defense had he not lived in New Orleans, where the defender program has historically been underfunded and neglected. Houppert reports that before post-Katrina reforms — which are already backsliding, thanks to Great Recession budget cuts — public defenders were part-time conscripts, dragged by judges from private practices that paid far better than indigent work. The lawyers benefited financially by doing as little as they could get away with on behalf of poor clients, instead reserving their attention for paying customers. New Orleans’s 30–35 part-time public defenders “averaged 28,000 clients annually,” Houppert writes.

Even a devoted, full-time defender faces enormous obstacles. Carol Huneke, an attorney in Spokane, Washington, risked being held in contempt in order to delay a case so that she could adequately defend her client, who was accused of vehicular homicide. Houppert reports that Huneke had 101 cases at the time, while the prosecutor in that case had 28. Only with the aid of affidavits by colleagues explaining that she was too overworked to proceed — and an appeal to the local media — was she able to win a continuance and, eventually, her case. Huneke was later fired for her outspokenness about the decrepit state of public defense in Washington.
Houppert’s narratives of crimes, investigations, and court proceedings are careful and engrossing, and she has has an excellent command of the relevant data, which she intersperses among interviews and case histories to great effect. She informs us that in Miami, some public defenders handled more than 700 felony cases in 2008 (the standard is 150), and others handled upwards of 2,200 misdemeanors (the standard is 400). In Missouri in 2004, defenders dispensed with a case every 6.6 working hours. In Louisiana, the accused might spend 120 days in jail before even seeing a lawyer. Bright got $190,000 in restitution for his nearly three decades of false imprisonment.
Yet exposing the injustice of the system is not enough now, just as it wasn’t enough when Lewis and others mourned the failure to turn principle into reality. ...
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What is more challenging and more important is to convince the public to pay for the defense of people who are guilty. This is the essential function of public defense, because the majority of the accused are in fact guilty. And everyone enters court innocent according to the law. It is impossible to protect only the actually innocent.
Of course, defending the innocent is important because it preserves the liberty of people wrongly charged. But defending the guilty preserves the legitimacy of the adversary system of justice itself. If we do not provide effective counsel even for the guilty, then we are giving up on the principle of due process that protects individuals from the power of the state.

Upholding Gideon in practice means zealously defending the least sympathetic members of society: thieves, conmen, repeat drunk drivers, rapists, kidnappers, murderers. If their defense is inadequate, we can't be confident in their convictions. Furthermore, if they are left out of the equation, tough-on-crime politicians will take advantage. Nothing sharpens a budget-slashing blade like a vicious criminal receiving a “Cadillac defense.” Houppert and those who support her project need to own these criminals too. The pursuit of justice is not a sob story. It’s a principled stand for a system that only works when it is equally committed to everyone’s protection.
Houppert gestures at these points, but gives them too little emphasis.
Another component of the right-to-counsel problem we don’t see much of in Chasing Gideon, or in other popular literature on public defense, is the prosecution and its interests. District attorneys have tremendous discretion in deciding who will be charged and what they will be charged with. Through mandatory minimums and three-strikes laws, legislatures have redistributed judges’ power over sentencing to prosecutors, who essentially decide how a guilty defendant may be sentenced by choosing among possible charges. And public defenders are overworked in part because prosecutors bring too many cases for defenders to handle.

Houppert does an admirable job of describing this, but she punts on explanation. There is no effort in Chasing Gideon to understand why prosecutors charge so many defendants and seek such long sentences, no attempt to understand the structural factors that drive prosecutors’ behavior.
And what, in moments of reflection, do prosecutors have to say about the dramatic imbalance in the resources they and their defender colleagues enjoy? What do they think of mass incarceration, the war on drugs, for-profit prisons, and other arguably corrupting aspects of the justice system? Just as we learn something of the large challenges we face when we take intimate portraits of defenders, we would learn from a close look at the prosecutors who bring the cases that are crippling the system. Without that, we are left with a caricature of criminal prosecutors as bad men and women whose only goal is to lock people up for as long as they possibly can. This is not a useful image.
What do prosecutors think of plea bargaining, for instance? Houppert barely scratches the surface here, but anyone interested in securing truly effective counsel for the indigent needs to go deep into the effects of plea bargaining, the principal means by which convictions are secured in U.S. courts today.

In Chasing Gideon, plea bargains are presented as an unfortunate product of a broken system. Overburdened defense attorneys are forced to advise clients to take pleas because the only other option is an ineffective defense. If the defender can’t make the time to investigate and prepare a proper case, then the defendant will be hammered at trial. Under these circumstances, plea bargaining becomes rational, and there is nothing defenders can do about it.
But plea bargains are not just a product of the system. They are the system. Some 95 percent of cases at the state and federal levels are resolved in negotiated guilty pleas. As Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in a majority opinion last year, “Criminal justice today is for the most part a system of pleas, not a system of trials.”
The quest for poor people’s justice won’t end until plea bargaining is massively curtailed. In individual cases, it often seems like a good idea, but its effect on the criminal justice system is corrosive. Easy bargaining rules allow prosecutors to amp up caseloads and defense attorneys to avoid their obligation to zealous advocacy. Rather than stand firm against the surfeit of charging and sentencing, the legal system has turned to plea bargaining in order to accommodate it.
It is worth pondering what exactly is this accommodation is getting us. A court system that efficiently delivers justice, or one that efficiently puts people in jail? New research suggests that it might be the latter: many who plead guilty may be innocent.

The essence of the plea bargain is that prosecutors threaten defendants with hefty penalties if they don’t cooperate and offer leniency if they do. The Supreme Court has not always looked positively on such deals, but in Brady v. United States (1970), the justices concluded that plea bargaining is acceptable as long as defendants do not “falsely condemn themselves.” But, as Lucian E. Dervan, a lawyer, and Vanessa A. Edkins, a psychologist, argue in their study, “The Innocent Defendant’s Dilemma” (published in the Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology), there is good reason to believe this is precisely what happens. Using a group of student subjects, Dervan and Edkins carried out an experiment designed to mimic the circumstances a defendant faces when considering a plea bargain. Half of the participants were put in a position to cheat on a logic exam by supplying answers to another student whom they did not know was working with the researchers. Nearly all of these participants cheated at the urging of the plant. Another group of participants were given no opportunity to cheat. The researchers then accused all of the students, guilty or innocent, of cheating.
Participants were given the option of defending themselves in front of an academic review board that, like a trial court, almost always rules against petitioners. The board could mete out a harsh sentence. If found guilty, students would lose compensation for study participation and be required to enroll in an ethics course that would demand up to three hours per week of their time for a whole semester. There would be an assigned paper and a final exam.
Or participants could “take the plea”: admit guilt and surrender their compensation, but face no review or additional discipline.

One might assume that innocent students would prefer to face the board. After all, they had not done anything, as a fair process should confirm. One would be wrong. Some 56 percent of innocent students plead guilty. “When study participants are placed in real [...] bargaining situations and are presented with accurate information regarding their statistical probability of success, just as they might be so informed by their attorney or the government during a criminal plea negotiation,” Dervan and Edkins write, “innocent individuals are actually highly risk-averse.”
Even if courtrooms are different — it would be surprising if half of innocent defendants were condemning themselves — we should take seriously these insights into the psychology of plea bargaining. There are many factors beyond guilt and innocence involved in a defendant’s decision to plead. It’s not hard to imagine that the risk of a severe penalty would prompt a defendant to plead when he otherwise wouldn’t. And the expense of a trial in money, time, and stress can have a similar effect. Indeed, The law recognizes that defendants plead even while maintaining their innocence. In the so-called Alford plea, the accused accepts guilt because he feels there is no chance of winning his case. The choice to plead may be voluntary, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t, in a meaningful sense, coerced.

It is unfortunate that Houppert doesn’t thoroughly engage issues such as the defense of the guilty, the role of prosecutors, and the consequences of plea bargaining. But Chasing Gideon is nonetheless a valuable book. Indeed, it is essential. We need these stories, lest we mistakenly believe that equality before the law is equality in practice. As Houppert shows over and over, the highest principles laid down in the Constitution and reaffirmed in the Gideon decision prove to be little more than charming platitudes once the real process of legal action takes its course.

THE LIMITS OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

Hampden was recently named America's 15th "hippest hipster neighborhood" by Forbes and some of its shops and residents are photographed here on February 13, 2013 in Baltimore, MD. (Katherine Frey/The Washington Post via Getty)

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DAILY BEAST JOEL KOTKIN

Urbanists, journalists, and academics—not to mention big-city developers— were easily persuaded that shelling out to court “the hip and cool” would benefit everyone else, too. And Florida himself has prospered through books, articles, lectures, and university positions that have helped promote his ideas and brand and grow his Creative Class Group’s impressive client list, which in addition to big corporations and developers has included cities as diverse as Detroit and El Paso, Cleveland and Seattle.

Well, oops.

Florida himself, in his role as an editor at The Atlantic, admitted last month what his critics, including myself, have said for a decade: that the benefits of appealing to the creative class accrue largely to its members—and do little to make anyone else any better off. The rewards of the “creative class” strategy, he notes, “flow disproportionately to more highly-skilled knowledge, professional and creative workers,” since the wage increases that blue-collar and lower-skilled workers see “disappear when their higher housing costs are taken into account.” His reasonable and fairly brave, if belated, takeaway: “On close inspection, talent clustering provides little in the way of trickle-down benefits.”

One group certain to be flustered by this new perspective will be many of the cities who have signed up and spent hard cash over the years to follow Florida’s prescription of focusing on those things—encouraging the arts and entertainment, building bike paths, welcoming minorities and gays—that would attract young college-educated workers. In his thesis, the model cities of the future are precisely those, such as San Francisco and Seattle, that have become hubs of highly educated migrants, technology, and high-end business services.

That plan, though, has been less than successful in many of the old rust belt cities that once made up much of his client base. Perhaps even more galling to these cities, Florida has turned decidedly negative in his outlook on many of those cities—now looking remarkably gullible—that once made up much of his client base.

The most risible example of this may have been former Michigan Jennifer Granholm’s “cool cities” campaign of the mid-oughts, that sought to cultivate the “creative class” by subsidizing the arts in Detroit and across the state. It didn’t exactly work. “You can put mag wheels on a Gremlin,” comments one long-time Michigan observer. “but that doesn't make it a Mustang.”

Alec MacGillis, writing at The American Prospect in 2009, noted that after collecting large fees from down-at-the-heels burgs like Cleveland, Toledo, Hartford, Rochester, and Elmira, New York over the years, Florida himself asserted that we can’t “stop the decline of some places” and urged the country to focus instead on his high-ranked “creative” enclaves. “So, got that, Rust Belt denizens?” MacGillis noted wryly in a follow-up story last year at the New Republic. Pack your bags for Boulder and Raleigh-Durham and Fairfax County. Oh, and thanks again for the check.”

One key constituency advocating “creative class” oriented development has been the grandees of urban real estate. Albert Ratner of Cleveland-based Forest City Enterprises, a major urban developer with a taste for subsidies, in New York and elsewhere, suggests Florida’s ideas provides the “playbook for developers.”

For Rust Belt cities, notes Cleveland’s Richey Piiparinen, following the “creative class” meme has not only meant wasted money, but wasted effort and misdirection. Burning money trying to become “cooler” ends up looking something like the metropolitan equivalent to a midlife crisis.

It would have been far more sensible, Piiparinen suggests, for such areas to emphasize their intrinsic advantages, such as affordable housing, a deep historic legacy tied to a concentration of specific skills as well as a strategic location. He urges them to cultivate their essentially Rust-Belt authenticity rather than chase standard issue coolness promoted by big developers like Forest City. Focusing on attracting the “hip cool” single set, Piiparinen maintains, simply sets places like Cleveland up for failure.

Geography of Hip Coolness

Perhaps the best that can be said about the creative-class idea is that it follows a real, if overhyped, phenomenon: the movement of young, largely single, childless and sometimes gay people into urban neighborhoods. This Soho-ization—the transformation of older, often industrial urban areas into hip enclaves—is evident in scores of cities. It can legitimately can be credited for boosting real estate values from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Wicker Park in Chicago and Belltown in Seattle to Portland’s Pearl District as well as much of San Francisco.

Yet this footprint of such “cool” districts that appeal to largely childless, young urbanistas in the core is far smaller in most cities than commonly reported. Between 2000 and 2010, notes demographer Wendell Cox, the urban core areas of the 51 largest metropolitan areas—within two miles of the city’s center—added a total of 206,000 residents. But the surrounding rings, between two and five miles from the core, actually lost 272,000. In contrast to those small gains and losses, the suburban areas—between 10 and 20 miles from the center —experienced a growth of roughly 15 million people.

The smallness of the potentially “hip” core is particularly pronounced in Rust Belt cities such as Cleveland and St. Louis, where these core districts are rarely home to more than 1 or 2 percent of the city’s shrinking population. Yet the subsidy money for developers is often justified in the name of “reviving” the entire city, most of which has continued to deteriorate.

Nor has this dynamic changed since the onset of the Great Recession, as urban boosters such as Aaron Ehrenhalt have suggested. Ehrenhalt, citing the perceived preferences of millennials, envisions an urban future where more reject the suburban life, in part as a reaction to the wreckage of the last housing bust. To Ehrenhalt, places like downtown Chicago are emerging as the modern-day version of early-20th-century Vienna, central cores that attracted the elites while the working class and middle class dullards regress to the suburbs. Yet in reality, an examination of data between 2011 and 2012 by Jed Kolko at Trulia found despite a spike in downtown residents, population losses continue in surrounding close-in urban neighborhoods, while the fastest growth has continued to be located further out in the periphery.

Class Politics in the “Creative Age”

Investments in “cool” districts may well appeal to some young professionals, particularly before they get married and have children. But overall, as Florida himself now admits, it has done little overall for the urban middle class, much less the working class or the poor.

Indeed in many ways the Floridian focus on industries like entertainment, software, and social media creates a distorted set of economic priorities. The creatives, after all, generally don’t work in factories or warehouses. So why assist these industries? Instead the trend is to declare good-paying blue collar professions a product of the past. If you can’t find work in deindustrialized Michigan, suggests Salon’s Ray Fisman, one can collect “ more than a few crumbs” by joining the service class and serving food, cutting hair or grass in creative capitals like San Francisco or Austin.

These limitations of the “hip cool” strategy to drive broad-based economic growth have been evident for years. Conservative critics, such as the Manhattan Institute’s Steve Malanga have pointed out that many creative-class havens often underperform economically compared to their less hip counterparts. More liberal academic analysts have denounced the idea as “ exacerbating inequality and exclusion.” One particularly sharp critic, the University of British Columbia’s Jamie Peck see it as little more than a neo-liberal recipe of “biscotti and circuses.”

Urban thinker Aaron Renn puts it in political terms: “the creative class doesn’t have much in the way of coattails.”

Why Hipness Can’t Save New York

The sad truth is that even in the more plausible “creative class” cities such as New York and San Francisco, the emphasis on “hip cool” and high-end service industries has corresponded with a decline in their middle class and a growing gap between rich and poor. Washington D.C. and San Francisco, perennial poster children for “cool cities,” also have among the highest percentages of poverty of any major urban center—roughly 20 percent—once cost of living is figured in.

Nowhere are the limitations of coolness more evident than in New York, our country’s cultural capital and now one of Florida’s three residences, along with Toronto and Miami Beach. Manhattan suffers by far the highest level of inequality among the country’s 25 most populous counties, a gap between rich and poor that’s the widest it’s been in a decade. New York’s wealthiest one percent earns a third of the entire city’s personal income—almost twice the proportion for the rest of the country.

This geography of inequality is now extending to the outer boroughs. In nouveau hipster and increasingly expensive Brooklyn, nearly a quarter of people live below the poverty line. While artisanal cheese shops and bars that double as flower shops serve the hipsters, one in four Brooklynites receives food stamps. New York has seen the nation’s biggest rise in homelessness; the number of children sleeping in the shelters of Mike Bloomberg’s “luxury city” has risen 22 percent in the past year.

The Issue of Race

On paper, the “creative class” theory worships at the altar of diversity. “The great thing about cities,” Florida told NPR last year, “is they're diverse. There's diverse people in them.” Yet even leaving aside their lack of economic diversity, the exemplars of “hip cool” world, notes urban analyst Renn, tend to be vanilla cities with relatively small minority populations. San Francisco, Portland and Seattle are becoming whiter and less ethnically diverse as the rest of the country, and particularly the suburbs, rapidly diversify.

Creatives may espouse politically correct views, but the effect of Florida’s policy approach, notes Tulane sociologist Richard Campanella, often undermine ethnic communities. As they enter the city, creatives push up rents, displacing local stores and residents. In his own neighborhood of Bywater, in New Orleans, the black population declined by 64 percent between 2000 and 2010, while the white population increased by 22 percent.

In the process, Campanella notes, much of what made the neighborhood unique has been lost as the creatives replace the local culture with the increasingly predictable, and portable, “hip cool” trendy restaurants, offering beet-filled ravioli instead of fried okra, and organic markets. The “unique” amenities you find now, even in New Orleans, he reports, are much what you’d expect in any other hipster paradise, be it Portland, Seattle, Burlington, Vermont or Williamsburg.

Families and the Future

Campanella also suggests another byproduct of hipster gentrification: a dearth of families. Ten years ago his increasingly “creative class” neighborhood of Bywater was family oriented. Now, it’s “a kiddie wilderness.” In 2000, 968 youngsters lived in the district. Just 10 years later, the number had dropped by 70 percent, to 285. When his son was born in 2012, it was the first post-Katrina birth on his street, the sole child on a block that had 11 when he first arrived from Mississippi in 2000.

Unsurprisingly, there’s not much emphasis about families in Florida’s work, in part because his basic theory puts focuses largely on groups like singles, childless young professionals and gays. He largely discounts suburbs, generally the nation’s nurseries, as outdated for the “creative age” and considers homeownership and single family houses, also vastly preferred by families, as fundamentally passé.

Indeed, the places that most attract “the creative class” are also the ones with the fewest families and children, led by San Francisco, Seattle, Manhattan, and rapidly gentrifying Washington, D.C. The very high prices per square foot, understandably celebrated by urban real estate boosters, have made it hard not only on the poor but on middle- and even upper-middle-class families. When you have children, you often have to let go of your bohemian fantasies; it’s hard to imagine being a parent in a place like San Francisco where there are a raging debates about the right of people to walk around naked.

The Real Geography of Opportunity

To be sure, the leading “creative class” cities have much to recommend them, and some of them, such as Portland and Boston, have registered impressive rises in their per capita income in recent years. But over the past decade, most “cool cities” have not been enjoying particularly strong employment or population growth; in the last decade, the populations of cities like Charlotte, Houston, Atlanta, and Nashville grew by 20 percent or more, at least four times as rapidly as New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, or Chicago. This trend toward less dense, more affordable cities is as evident in the most recent census numbers than a decade.

One reason for this: the fastest job growth has taken place in regions—Houston, Dallas, Oklahoma City, Omaha—whose economies are based not on “creative” industries but on less fashionable pursuits such as oil and gas, agriculture and manufacturing. Energy mecca Houston, for example, last year enjoyed the largest GDP growth of any major American city, easily outpacing “creative” urbanist favorites like Chicago, New York, San Francisco, or Boston. The other two top GDP gainers were Dallas-Fort Worth and, surprisingly, Detroit, largely as a result of the auto industry’s comeback.

Of course, some these ascendant cities now are sprouting their own “hip” neighborhoods. But these regions also accommodate far faster growth in rapidly expanding, family-friendly suburbs and exurbs. Equally important, none, including “creative class” hotspots Raleigh and Austin, are dense, transit-centered places of the kind urbanists suggest create economic vibrancy and attract the largest number of migrations.

In fact both Raleigh and Austin are both very low-density regions with only compact urban pockets surrounded by vast suburban communities. Take a walk in downtown Raleigh sometime; about five minutes from the densest central areas and you find yourself on tree-lined streets with nice single-family houses, essentially, older suburbs. Austin, too, is a relatively low-density place surrounded by the kind of suburban sprawl detested by Floridians; this is also the case with Charlotte, Atlanta, and other fast-growing cities.

These facts, of course, are unlikely to interfere with the self-interested lobbying by large developers for subsidies for downtown development much less the defined prejudices of the urban-centric media. But contrary to the narrative espoused by Florida and other proponents of high-density cities, the predominant future urban form in America is emerging (largely unrecognized to the media) elsewhere, in places less dense, economically diverse and, perhaps, just a bit less hip and cool.

 

 

Petraeus and the Change to the American Way of War

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NY REVIEW OF BOOKS TOM POWERS


by Paula Broadwell, with Vernon Loeb
Penguin, 394 pp., $29.95
The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War
by Fred Kaplan
Simon and Schuster, 418 pp., $28.00
The Fourth Star: Four Generals and the Epic Struggle for the Future of the United States Army
by David Cloud and Greg Jaffe
Three Rivers, 330 pp., $16.00 (paper)
The Generals: American Military Command from World War II to Today
by Thomas E. Ricks
Penguin, 558 pp., $32.95
Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam
by Nick Turse
Metropolitan, 370 pp., $30.00
Westmoreland: The General Who Lost Vietnam
by Lewis Sorley
Mariner, 395 pp., $15.95 (paper)
The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam: A Study of Military Influence and the Use of Force in the Post-Vietnam Era
 by David Howell Petraeus
Doctoral thesis, Princeton University, 317 pp. (1987)
The Centurions
by Jean Lartéguy, translated from the French by Xan Fielding
Dutton, 487 pp. (1962; out of print)



Former General David Petraeus, now retired from the United States Army and unemployed, had been a professional soldier for thirty years before he commanded troops in combat. The year was 2003, the place southern Iraq. The war to overthrow Saddam Hussein was only a few days old when Petraeus concluded that the scrambling retreat of the Iraqi army was not going to be the whole of the story.
“Tell me how this ends,” he remarked to a reporter embedded with Petraeus’s 101st Airborne Division, heading for Baghdad. “Eight years and eight divisions?”
Army folklore says “eight years and eight divisions” was General Matthew B. Ridgway’s answer when asked what it would take to rescue the French from defeat in Indochina in 1954. No president who was thinking straight—certainly not Dwight David Eisenhower—would ever commit so large a force for so long a time to anything less than a matter of the first importance. Survival of the French colonial regime did not come close. What Petraeus was saying was, now we’re in for it.

Open-ended wars—getting over them, staying out of them, stumbling into them—were the constant theme of Petraeus’s life as a solider. He had been a high school teenager in the mid-1960s when General William Westmoreland was playing tennis two or three times a week in Saigon, where his formal title was Commander of the United States Military Assistance Command Vietnam, or COMUSMACV. His preferred courts were at Le Cercle Sportif, a private sports club near the Saigon River, built by the French colonial regime in the 1890s. It was there in March 1966, while the army under Westmoreland’s command was climbing toward its ultimate peak of 540,000 men, that the general suffered his only wound during four years of war—a fractured wrist suffered when he fell on the court.

Saigon conversation in the mid-1960s inevitably came around, as an evening wore on in a French restaurant over a glass of French wine, to the French defeat in their eight-year war. President Lyndon Johnson had gone forward where Eisenhower hung back, but Westmoreland did not think the French had anything to teach us. Asked at a press conference what it took to defeat an insurgency, Westmoreland answered with a single word: “Firepower.” Big-unit war backed by firepower was Westmoreland’s strategy for beating the Vietcong, and nothing ever altered his view. By temperament he was not flexible, nor was he much of a reader. His favorite book in childhood had been the Boy Scouts of America’s Handbook for Boys. But it was impossible to ignore entirely the books written by the French about their long agony, and Westmoreland kept several of the best-known on his bedside table, next to his Bible—histories by the French writer Bernard B. Fall, and a novel called The Centurions.
Fall’s best-known books were Street Without Joy, a history of the long French failure, and Hell in a Very Small Place, his account of the French defeat in a set-piece battle at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, which decisively ended public support for the war in France.




The Centurions, by Jean Lartéguy, was a very different sort of book. The main characters were French officers captured at Dien Bien Phu. History records that their months in a jungle prison camp were horrific; at least half died. But Lartéguy focuses on a different matter—what the French officers learned from the Vietminh who had defeated them. The French higher-ups were not much interested in the Vietminh’s approach to war. Like the Americans, they believed that firepower, mobility, and professional soldiering would beat any ragtag army of guerrillas. But Pierre Raspéguy, the hero of The Centurions if there is one, listened to the Vietminh in Camp One and absorbed their rule number one. “You’ve got to have the people on your side,” he said, “if you want to win a war.”
The odds are good that nothing could have persuaded Westmoreland to look deeper, but Lartéguy and Fall never had a chance. Westmoreland [below] told a Time magazine reporter in 1966 that he was “usually too tired in late evening to give the books more than occasional attention.”




By the time David Petraeus graduated in the top 5 percent of his class at West Point in 1974, Westmoreland had been relieved of duty, kicked upstairs for a final tour as Chief of Staff of the Army, and retired to civilian life during which he gave hundreds of speeches insisting that he had not backed a losing strategy, had not lost the war, and was not to blame for the demoralized and confused United States Army in which Petraeus began his career. Ambitious, able, and energetic young men (and since 1976, women) graduate from West Point every year, all launched into a ferocious competition for command and promotion leading toward four stars and you name it; even the presidency, as Eisenhower proved, is not beyond reach. But in this challenging company Petraeus, as portrayed in several new books, which join an impressive group of others already published in recent years, was recognized by his peers at an early moment as a man destined to make a mark in his chosen branch of the Army—the infantry.
That summer Petraeus took the physically grueling, sixty-one-day course at the Army’s Ranger School in Georgia and Florida, finishing first in his class. From Ranger School, Petraeus proceeded to Vicenza, Italy, where he was assigned to the 509th Airborne Battalion Combat Team as a second lieutenant. During the following four years Petraeus learned two things. The first was that he liked the physical challenge, danger, and camaraderie of elite combat units like the 509th that made parachute jumps all over Europe. The second was that the war that had broken the confidence of the Army in Vietnam might have been fought in a different way, and might have had a different outcome.

Petraeus liked to explain the evolution of his thinking on this point. Versions can be found in at least three books—The Fourth Star by David Cloud and Greg Jaffe, published a few years ago; and the new books by Paula Broadwell, All In, and Fred Kaplan, The Insurgents. His education began when he asked about a portrait of a French military officer on the wall of a French army mess hall in the Pyrenees in 1976. The answer was General Marcel Bigeard, one of the French military officers who had been sent to a Vietminh prison camp after the fall of Dien Bien Phu.
What Bigeard learned in prison camp about fighting a revolutionary war he put to use as the commander of a brutal but successful campaign to break the back of an insurgency in Algiers in North Africa between 1954 and 1957. A lot of history attaches to the French defeat in Algeria, which Bigeard had at best delayed, but what seized Petraeus’s attention was the example of Bigeard himself, who had taught the French army in Algiers how to fight—conceivably to win—the sort of war it had lost in Indochina.

Petraeus’s French was not good enough to read Bigeard’s many books, but the man led to the war, and the war to Bernard Fall’s histories, bringing Petraeus eventually to Jean Lartéguy’s novel about Bigeard—unmistakable as Colonel Raspéguy in The Centurions. Unlike Westmoreland, Petraeus read this book not once but many times. It became a favorite of his, and of many officers close to him—so many that copies of The Centurions in English are now practically unobtainable. Petraeus often pulled the book down from a shelf close to hand to read from it for visitors. Kaplan zeroes in on a passage Petraeus particularly liked. One of the French officers is explaining how the Vietminh way of war differed from the French:

It’s difficult to explain exactly, but it’s rather like bridge as compared to belote [a similar card game popular in France]. When we make war, we play belote with thirty-two cards in the pack. But their game is bridge and they have fifty-two cards: twenty more than we do. Those twenty cards short will always prevent us from getting the better of them. They’ve got nothing to do with traditional warfare, they’re marked with the sign of politics, propaganda, faith, agrarian reform….
 

It was the full spectrum of the game—the nature of modern people’s war, as fought and lost by the Americans in Vietnam—that engaged Petraeus. Confronting that failure, of which the Army for years could barely bring itself to speak, has been the central work of Petraeus’s life. It is the great theme of the best of the new books, Kaplan’s The Insurgents, which relates the history of Army thinking about counterinsurgency. It is the reason Petraeus has attracted so much attention for so long, and it is what lends a somber note of broader loss to the recent end of Petraeus’s public career, which came so abruptly last fall, for reasons so entirely irrelevant to any issue of substance, that one is almost embarrassed to cite the details.

In addition to ambition and native ability, two factors can usually be found at work in the rise of a general in the United States Army—mentors and luck. Petraeus attracted the attention of an impressive string of high officers who pushed his career along. Important among them was Major General John Galvin, who arrived at Fort Stewart, Georgia, in 1981 to take command of the 24th Infantry Division where Petraeus, a new captain, had been jumped over his peers to serve as a battalion operations officer, a billet usually filled by a major.

The Fourth Star by David Cloud and Greg Jaffe offers a fine portrait of their unfolding relationship. Petraeus was an omnivorous reader, a tireless worker, and a fanatical runner. Galvin was not a runner but he was a reader and the two men quickly grew close. Petraeus thought Galvin should quit eating candy bars, run more, and get in shape. Galvin, who had a master’s degree in English literature from Columbia University, told Petraeus he needed to think beyond six-minute miles and the competition of military units for best in this or that.

Petraeus pondered Galvin’s arguments during a year he spent at the Army’s Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where he was one of the few captains, a typical distinction in Petraeus’s personnel file. Finishing first in his class was another. From Kansas, Petraeus went to Princeton University for a master’s degree which he followed with a doctorate. While he was writing his dissertation he taught in the Department of Social Sciences—called “Sosh”—at West Point, and in 1987 Princeton accepted his thesis, a solidly researched and forcefully argued 317-page document entitled “The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam: A Study of Military Influence and the Use of Force in the Post-Vietnam Era.”
As Petraeus saw things, American military history in the forty years after World War II centered on two crippling misadventures—the wars in Korea and in Vietnam. The vow of officers who lived through the first was “never again,” for veterans of the second “No More Vietnams.” What made the stove hot were the political limitations imposed by civilian leaders in Washington, who wanted to take a strong stand, but feared a slide into general war with China or even the Soviet Union. In Korea this meant no determined pursuit of enemy forces across the Yalu River into China. To this rule two more were added in Vietnam—no call-up of the reserves and escalation by slow degree. Army officers detested these restrictions, which they said compelled them to fight “with one hand tied behind our backs.”


General Petraeus with US and Iraqi troops in Samarra, north of Baghdad, 2007 (Thomas Dworzak/Magnum Photos)

In his thesis, Petraeus examines in detail what the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) recommended in various crises where military action was an option. For a decade after Korea, and again after Vietnam, the generals cautiously hid behind a position of “all or nothing”—go in big, do the job, and get out quick, which frightened civilian leaders, or…do nothing. What the Army wanted was “steel on target”—an enemy they could find and blow away. What the Army feared was Vietnam’s quagmire—military operations against an elusive enemy who disappeared at will back into the population.
Drawing on his reading of Lartéguy, Fall, and others, Petraeus considered this fear exaggerated, and he structured his Ph.D. thesis to cure the Army of its “so-called Vietnam syndrome.” But he was careful not to point out where the higher-ups had gone wrong. “Maybe,” he offered cautiously, “America’s doctrine, tactics and personnel practices were inappropriate.” Westmoreland might have read that passage three times without noting that the finger was pointing at him. What Petraeus tiptoes around is spelled out in Lewis Sorley’s fine biography of Westmoreland, and in a new book about the war on the ground by Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam.

 

The root error behind Westmoreland’s failure was the general’s belief that the enemy’s main force units were the problem, and that he could hammer out a win with a strategy he called “search and destroy.” The idea was General William DePuy’s, who had noted a ten-to-one kill ratio that favored Americans in early battles of the war. “We are going to stomp them to death,” DePuy told a reporter. With firepower and big-unit operations Westmoreland conducted a relentless “war of attrition” for the next two years, pursuing the fabled point on the graph where Americans were killing Vietcong faster than the enemy could replace them. In April 1967, Westmoreland told Lyndon Johnson in the White House, “It appears that last month we reached the crossover point.”

 It wasn’t true, then or ever. DePuy’s “biggest surprise,” he said later, was Hanoi’s willingness to “continue the war despite the punishment they were taking.” The numbers were indeed staggering. The ten-to-one ratio DePuy had noted held roughly true throughout the war—58,000 dead soldiers for the Americans, about 600,000 for Hanoi. But Hanoi never wavered. “I was completely wrong on that,” said DePuy.
But this tidy version of Westmoreland’s root error fails to address the full range of what the failure did to the Army, which in turn reflects the full horror of what the Army did to the Vietnamese. Here Nick Turse, a journalist and historian who specializes in military subjects, reminds us again of what Americans mainly prefer to forget. His title comes from the orders issued by Captain Ernest Medina before an attack in March 1968 on a Vietnamese village variously known to history as Pinkville, Son My, and My Lai.
“Are we supposed to kill women and children?” one of his men asked.
“Kill everything that moves,” the captain replied.

What Turse demonstrates in his harrowing book is the direct connection between Westmoreland’s pursuit of “the crossover point” and the killing of Vietnamese, not only at My Lai but throughout the country, in frightening numbers. After every battle MACV would release an official “body count”—the number of enemy killed, often accompanied by photographs of rows of bodies in black pajamas. Success in battle was a high body count, which helped officers get promoted and soldiers get leave. Turse recounts in sickening detail the spread of a body-count culture that accepted any body for the count—if it’s Vietnamese and it’s dead, the saying went, it’s a Vietcong.
Pretty soon all branches of the military were generating ever-higher body counts, whether from helicopter gunships, artillery firing “harassment and interdiction” rounds into the jungle at random, jets dropping napalm in “free-fire zones” where everything was fair game, soldiers attacking villages on the ground, or Navy patrol boats on the Mekong River. One ghastly six-month-long operation called Speedy Express resulted in tens of thousands of confirmed kills in the Mekong Delta, many in “battles” where the kill ratio climbed steadily—twenty-four to one in December 1968, sixty-eight to one in March 1969, 134 to one in April—sure sign the dead were mainly unarmed, which meant they were mainly civilian. It made no difference. Speedy Express was followed by backslapping all around.

How many Vietnamese civilians were killed during the eight years of the American war? Turse notes the difficulty in coming up with a firm figure. For obvious reasons the Army made no attempt to keep a running tally but after the war the Pentagon guessed the total might be 195,000. A Senate committee in 1975 suggested 415,000. A study in 2008 by health professionals at Harvard and the University of Washington thought the number of Vietnamese dead, soldiers and civilians alike, was around 3.8 million. The government of Vietnam has officially estimated the dead at three million, including two million civilians. If you think these high numbers are probably exaggerated, and if you do not like wondering why the Army killed so many people but lost the war, and if you feel this is all ancient history and it’s time to move on, then you are reacting pretty much the way the Army did. “No more Vietnams” was the Army’s version of lessons learned. It never wanted to hear the word “counterinsurgency” again.




American generals and their presidents have shared a common fate over the last seventy-five years; they are mainly remembered for their wars—presidents for the wars they pick to fight, generals for how they fight them. The last decade of Petraeus’s career contained both of his wars—in Iraq and in Afghanistan. Petraeus missed the first Persian Gulf war—he had been shot through the chest in a training accident—but he was on hand for the second in 2003 when he led the 101st Airborne Division to Baghdad. With heavy bombing from the air, followed by the quick advance of armored units, this was exactly the sort of war the Army had trained and equipped itself to fight after Vietnam. Saddam’s army, already severely weakened by the first Persian Gulf war in 1991 and a decade of sanctions, was no match for the Americans and soon dissolved.
After the fall of Baghdad, with its reassuring resemblance to the fall of Berlin in 1945, at least until the looting started, Petraeus was dispatched 225 miles north to the city of Mosul, third-largest city in Iraq, to confront the sort of war the Army hated. Unlike Washington officials, who expected to be bringing troops home by autumn, Petraeus sensed at the outset what Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld continued to deny for many, many months—the fall of Baghdad was not the end of the war, but the beginning of an insurgency. Confronting Petraeus in Mosul was a city in chaos where Arabs, Kurds, and Turks were turning on each other in the opening skirmish of a Shia–Sunni sectarian conflict threatening to turn into a full-scale Iraqi civil war—a threat still not decisively resolved.

The history of the war in Iraq deserves and will doubtless be the subject of a thick study, most of which will be devoted to politics and social setting—say 80 percent to politics and 20 percent to military action, which is roughly what counterinsurgency strategists think is the right mix, including Mao Zedong, the Vietnamese general Vo Nguyen Giap, Petraeus’s favorite French writers, and a host of Americans who became his friends and allies over the years.
Petraeus’s small piece of the opening phase of the Iraq war—his year in Mosul, 2003–2004—seems to have got the mix about right. He had been reading and writing about insurgencies for thirty years and he put his knowledge to work. At the top of his to-do list were money, politics, electricity, and jobs—all the daily grind of getting a city up and going after war had turned the country upside down. In the background there was plenty of shooting, soldiers on patrol, nighttime raids, and the like, but Petraeus’s effort was mainly—say 80 percent—devoted to buying and talking peace. “Money is ammunition,” he liked to say.
Some commanders in other cities did roughly the same, but most had the mix reversed, devoting 80 percent of their effort and attention to “kinetic” operations, by which the Army means going out in force to kill or capture bad guys. There was no common approach to the situation during the first year, which had not even received a commonly accepted name. Rumsfeld flatly refused to allow the word “counterinsurgency” to be uttered inside the Pentagon. When Petraeus rotated out at the end of his year, things looked better in Mosul than they did in a lot of Iraq, but a year later, after a different commander with fewer soldiers following a different approach, what Petraeus had built was coming undone. The same was apparent in Iraq as a whole

The rest of the story closely follows the history of President Bush’s two wars. Each began with a quick victory followed by a long period of feckless neglect in Washington while the Sunnis in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan organized insurgencies. Petraeus was sent to Iraq for a second tour trying to build military and police forces, a tougher nut to crack than Mosul. In the fall of 2005 Petraeus was assigned to command the Army’s Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, a sprawling entity that the departing commander called the Army’s “engine of change.” Among its many responsibilities were the writing of Army manuals, running the Army’s schools for officers, and defining Army doctrine—the accepted “school solution” to every military situation in which the Army might find itself. John Nagl, a younger officer Petraeus had known for twenty years, told him that now was the moment to rewrite the manual on counterinsurgency. At Fort Leavenworth Petraeus felt the themes of his life coming together. “Holy cow,” he thought. “They’re putting an insurgent in control of the engine of change.”

 

The writing of the US Army’s official Field Service Manual 3-24 on counter-insurgency operations is the subject of The Insurgents, to which Fred Kaplan brings a formidable talent for writing intellectual history. It is one of the very best books ever written about the American military in the era of small wars. Like Kaplan’s earlier book, The Wizards of Armageddon,^* an authoritative history of American thinking about nuclear weapons, The Insurgents is filled with the names of an obscure fraternity—men and a few women whose passion has been for thinking about the kind of war the Americans lost in Vietnam.
After a year of writing, the manual appeared at a fortuitous moment when four things coming together gave Petraeus his moment on the stage of history. The first was a sectarian killing spree in Baghdad, where a hundred or more bodies were being dumped on the city’s streets every day. Second was President Bush’s decision in December 2006 to put a new commander in Baghdad with a new strategy for fighting the war. Third was the willingness of Robert Gates, the new secretary of defense, to send five brigades of additional troops to Iraq to support the new strategy. And last was the agreement of Gates, retired generals, and a platoon of trusted White House advisers that Petraeus was the inevitable man.


President Obama with his new national security team at the White House in April 2011, when he nominated, from left, Leon Panetta as secretary of defense, General Petraeus as CIA director, General John Allen as commander of allied forces in Afghanistan, and Ryan Crocker as ambassador to Afghanistan (Jason Reed/Reuters)

There are plenty of critics who say it wasn’t Petraeus but just the natural progress of events that turned the war around, bringing a radical drop-off in sectarian killings and insurgent activity. But the fact remains that the Army for eighteen months did practically everything differently under Petraeus, from moving into small outposts spread throughout Baghdad, to paying the enemy to switch sides and join the Iraqi army and national police. As the sectarian war cooled down it was accompanied by a steep drop in enemy attacks and in American casualties. No one would now be likely to say that the original Army strategy in Iraq had been a good one, or that Petraeus pursued a bad one.
Luck gave him a chance to try the same again when President Obama put him in charge of the war in Afghanistan in 2010. That tour lasted less than a year and the results were more ambiguous, but Petraeus’s two wars proved something significant all the same—big-unit maneuver and heavy firepower made as many enemies as they killed; and the Army could summon the finesse to compete with insurgents for the loyalty of the people. But that is not the end of the story. What generals can do and what presidents want are sometimes two different things.

 In the end it was not General Petraeus but President Obama who decided how to bring the American war in Afghanistan to an end. The two men had appeared to be on the same page during Obama’s first months in the White House, when the president agreed to send an additional 21,000 US troops to Afghanistan. But later that summer Obama balked when Petraeus came back asking for more—at least another 40,000 troops to support a “fully resourced, comprehensive counterinsurgency campaign.” Obama now found himself in the painful squeeze once felt by Lyndon Johnson over Vietnam—pushed by a general who promised success if he was given what he needed. Obama dug in his heels. To outsiders it might have seemed that the Army and the White House were fighting over nickels and dimes, but in fact something fundamental was at stake—the mission.

What Petraeus wanted was men enough and time enough to turn the war around in Afghanistan as he had done in Iraq. That meant winning over the allegiance of the Afghan people, the classic goal of counterinsurgency. But Obama did not like the numbers and, along with many who knew Afghanistan well, he did not share the goal. His hopes were more modest—not “success” but a smooth departure. He agreed to support a “surge” of 30,000 more troops for a limited time with a narrower mission focused on al-Qaeda itself. But at the end of eighteen months, the president insisted, a drawdown of troops would begin—how many and at what pace were left to wait on events.

There was no open break between Obama and Petraeus, then or later. When the American commander in Afghanistan resigned in June 2010, Obama named Petraeus to replace him. In April 2011 he announced his nomination of Petraeus as director of the CIA, a move that occurred just as the White House and the Army were negotiating the details of the drawdown that had been demanded by Obama. What the Army wanted and what the White House wanted differed by a few thousand troops and a few months of fighting time; the Army wanted more of each, the White House less. But behind the numbers was a deeper difference over goals. As the moment of truth approached Obama kept his own counsel while Petraeus worked the media to argue for a slow, stretched-out drawdown to give his strategy time to work.
This behind-the-scenes struggle over troop levels and mission definition is related in Paula Broadwell’s now notorious and often gushing but still useful biography of Petraeus, All In, written with the help of Vernon Loeb, a long-time specialist in security policy at The Washington Post. Broadwell is a West Point graduate who left the Army to write about counterinsurgency and later spent many months in frequent contact with Petraeus in Kabul while researching her book. At some point the general and his biographer began an affair; last fall it spilled into the open in a messy way that compelled Petraeus to resign as director of the CIA. What happened to Petraeus says much about Washington, the effect of frequent deployments on military marriages, and the insecurity of e-mail, but nothing about the harsh demands of successful counterinsurgency.

 


Broadwell’s account is the best so far of the tense negotiations over the drawdown, which can properly be seen as the beginning of the last act of the American war in Afghanistan. President Obama listened patiently on June 15, 2011, when Petraeus spelled out the Army’s preferred schedule for drawdown: three thousand to five thousand out by the end of the year, with the rest of the surge troops to follow at the close of the 2012 fighting season. In effect, Petraeus was asking to keep all the surge troops in the field through the end of the 2011 fighting season, which typically concludes with the onset of cold weather in November; and to keep as many as 30,000 surge troops through the end of the 2012 fighting season. Counterinsurgency needs time and troops and Petraeus was trying to hold on to both for as long as possible.
A week of concealed struggle followed. Broadwell’s account includes an e-mail exchange between Petraeus and one of his mentors, retired General Jack Keane, who told the general he thought the president wasn’t going to give him what he wanted. “Should you consider resigning?” Keane asked.
“I told POTUS I’d support his ultimate decision,” Petraeus replied. “Besides, the troops can’t quit….”
Keane was right. At their White House meeting on June 22, Obama said no. He wanted ten thousand troops out by the end of 2011, and another 23,000 out by July 2012. Petraeus “was reportedly respectful, but he was not budging,” writes Broadwell. Midsummer was the middle of the fighting season; that was too soon to pull them out. Obama said he was willing “to consider splitting the difference and leaving the [23,000 surge troops] till the end of summer.” Petraeus pressed for a slower drawdown. He

expressed concern that removing the troops before the end of the fighting season [in November] would increase risk considerably and could immobilize the campaign plan…. Obama asked whether the three extra months would make that much difference; Petraeus said he thought they would.

Everyone paying attention to the war understood what was at stake in this final meeting. The top military command was represented by Gates and Chairman of the JCS Michael Mullen. “They said,” according to Broadwell, they would support “an ‘end of summer’ timetable”—a date that preserved some fraction of wiggle room for the Army. Petraeus and his allies in the Army wanted to build on the success already achieved and stay longer.
Obama and Biden wanted to draw down not just the troops but the war itself, and to back away from grand goals. Obama’s decision, reached without sentiment after a cool weighing of American interests, marked the end of the surge in Afghanistan—the moment when the United States said enough. By year’s end it was over in Iraq as well, at an estimated cost of at least 100,000 civilian deaths and millions of internal and external refugees. It is too soon to say what the US has achieved for its effort, but nobody argues that Iraq and Afghanistan are on the road to democracy. Counterinsurgency takes patience above all, and patience with costly fighting is the one thing presidents run out of quickest.
 

 Petraeus has been silent since his resignation. He has not yet written about the war he tried to fight or its final act, but the odds are good he is itching for his turn. The central work of his life has been learning how to fight the sort of war we lost in Vietnam. The Army swore that would be the last of its kind but it turned out to be the very kind presidents are drawn into—small wars against determined, popular movements where getting the politics right is 80 percent of the challenge. Great powers don’t much like small wars; a time comes when Americans, like the French in Indochina and Algeria and the Russians in Afghanistan, just want to get out. When Petraeus’s book arrives, as it surely will, the last chapter will be the interesting one—the one where he says what he is willing to say about Obama’s decision to wind it down. The open question is whether Petraeus ever truly believed it could end in any other way.

UPDATE

A documentary report by the Guardian and BBC Arabic links the former CIA director to two veteran advisers of El Salvadorean paramilitary squads who ran Iraqi interrogation centers, where Shiite torture of Sunni prisoners fueled the country’s sectarian violence. Petraeus was tasked in 2004 with organizing Iraq’s security forces and Col. James Coffman became his direct report. Along with Col. James Steele, Coffman hired Shiites to work as police commandos in intelligence centers where, according to a former Iraqi general, committees used torture to make detainees confess. This includes “using electricity or hanging him upside down, pulling out their nails, and beating them on sensitive parts,” according to the general. When word of this got out to the public, Iraq’s already-tumultuous civil war worsened.

Watch the full-length documentary on how General David Petraeus, commander of multinational forces in Iraq, was linked to special forces veteran James Steele

US special forces veteran links General Petraeus to torture in Iraq - video

Read it at The Guardian

March 6, 2013 1:02 PM