Thoughts of an American Warrior
By ROGER COHEN
NYT
PARIS — When I asked Gen. David H. Petraeus what the biggest U.S. mistake of the past decade has been, he did a Zhou Enlai on the French Revolution number to the effect that it was too early to say. The outgoing commander in Afghanistan and incoming Central Intelligence Agency chief is adept at politics, one reason he’s the object of the sort of political speculation once reserved for Gen. Colin L. Powell, who was the face of the military to most Americans before Petraeus assumed that role later in the post-9/11 era.
Powell adopted the Pottery Barn rule as a cautionary military dogma: “You break it, you own it.” A Petraeus adaptation might be: “You own it, you stick with it.” He reckons he’s seen the movie of what disasters happen when America turns its back on Afghanistan and Pakistan. It’s called “Charlie Wilson’s War.” I’ll get to that in a minute.
But first, on mistakes, Petraeus became more forthcoming. He’s like that: a soldier-scholar with an impish smile who speaks in sinuous patterns that you sometimes have to read forwards and backwards before realizing: Oh, that’s what he means! He’d be with Kierkegaard: Life must be lived forwards but can only be understood backwards. Nobody over the past decade has absorbed more setbacks or reflected more on what policy corrections the bad stuff required.
He told me that, as Libya illustrates, the United States is no longer “eager to get all the way in on the ground”; and that “We have long since recognized that the ideal situation in the fight against extremists, against terrorists is first and foremost to provide intelligence to the host nation.” Then, “if they cannot act on it, help them develop the ability to do it for themselves.”
(More here.)
NYT
PARIS — When I asked Gen. David H. Petraeus what the biggest U.S. mistake of the past decade has been, he did a Zhou Enlai on the French Revolution number to the effect that it was too early to say. The outgoing commander in Afghanistan and incoming Central Intelligence Agency chief is adept at politics, one reason he’s the object of the sort of political speculation once reserved for Gen. Colin L. Powell, who was the face of the military to most Americans before Petraeus assumed that role later in the post-9/11 era.
Powell adopted the Pottery Barn rule as a cautionary military dogma: “You break it, you own it.” A Petraeus adaptation might be: “You own it, you stick with it.” He reckons he’s seen the movie of what disasters happen when America turns its back on Afghanistan and Pakistan. It’s called “Charlie Wilson’s War.” I’ll get to that in a minute.
But first, on mistakes, Petraeus became more forthcoming. He’s like that: a soldier-scholar with an impish smile who speaks in sinuous patterns that you sometimes have to read forwards and backwards before realizing: Oh, that’s what he means! He’d be with Kierkegaard: Life must be lived forwards but can only be understood backwards. Nobody over the past decade has absorbed more setbacks or reflected more on what policy corrections the bad stuff required.
He told me that, as Libya illustrates, the United States is no longer “eager to get all the way in on the ground”; and that “We have long since recognized that the ideal situation in the fight against extremists, against terrorists is first and foremost to provide intelligence to the host nation.” Then, “if they cannot act on it, help them develop the ability to do it for themselves.”
(More here.)
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