My Share of the Task(61)

                “Your guys are doing what we need them to do,” he said.

                But he left it at that. He did not slap a map down on the coffee table and explain what he was trying to accomplish and how our forces could help. His reticence was natural. TF 714’s relevance to Sanchez was probably unclear. At that moment, we were tasked with capturing or killing the high-value former Baathist leaders—a set known colloquially as “the deck of cards” after the Pentagon had printed packs of playing cards with the grainy photographs and names of the top Baathists and distributed them to soldiers before they rolled across the Kuwaiti border.

                The previous summer, our units had been key in the fight that killed Saddam’s sons, Uday and Qusay, but we had not yet captured Saddam himself, the ace of spades. Sanchez had a lot to worry about in the fall of 2003, and I sensed that he did not know whether I would just be another of the countless visitors who appeared on his calendar every few months, or whether I was committed to becoming a real partner. We never got much beyond pleasantries, and I had no sense of the big direction of the war. Elsewhere in the palace, I met with the chief of staff of the CPA and second-highest ranking civilian in Iraq, Ambassador Patrick F. Kennedy. I explained to him what TF 714 was.

                I arrived with some prejudice about the uneven and often unserious national resolve to make hard decisions in the months after the invasion. Many agencies were at fault for that, but the atmosphere in the palace added to my doubts about the CPA. Certainly many smart people worked hard to overcome great odds that summer and fall. But seven months of spotty progress had left many cynical. Policies kept them cloistered behind the palace walls, where they often worked alongside unqualified volunteers whose tour lengths were far too short to gain adequate, let alone advanced, understanding of the complexities of Iraq. The CPA ordered fundamental challenges—that would affect the lives of Iraqis and the Americans fighting among them—to be tackled by spectacularly unqualified people, like a twenty-five-year-old with no financial credentials responsible for rebuilding the stock market. I left the palace that day thinking, Holy shit.



                The next morning, October 25, I helicoptered with Dave Tabor and Scott Miller to Mosul, 250 miles upstream of Baghdad on the Tigris. The second-largest city in Iraq, with some 1.8 million people, Mosul was the responsibility of then–Major General David Petraeus. His 101st Airborne Division had fought up from Kuwait through southern Iraq and into Baghdad, at which point they had been moved north. The city sat where the Arab and Kurdish regions met uneasily, with the Sunni Arabs predominantly in the traditional city center south and west of the Tigris and the Kurds in suburbs to the northeast.

                In a former palace overlooking the city, Dave Petraeus was full of energy, as always. His office was a huge, marble-floored room turned into a warrior’s den by the combat gear hanging on hooks and the cot he slept on, covered with the camouflage poncho liner issued to every soldier. Dave and I had shared an early fascination with irregular wars and the counterinsurgents who had fought them in Indochina and Algeria. As effectively as any commander at the time, Dave had read the situation in his area of Iraq, recognized the tremendous threat of instability, and moved rapidly to seize the fleeting opportunity to forestall it. He made early progress by spending energy and money on economic and political development. His force established governing councils, opened schools, and corralled, equipped, and dispatched a local Iraqi security force. But when the twenty thousand soldiers of the 101st turned over Mosul to an American unit only a fraction of their size the following January, the insurgents soon destroyed what calm Dave’s force had been able to win.

                TF 714 had a small detachment working in Mosul in conjunction with Dave’s division, and we enjoyed his strong support. Still, when I reviewed with our team how they ran targeting missions periodically, based on the trickle of tips and intercepts they were able to scrape up in the early days, I was convinced they were having limited effect. In October 2003, Saddam and his network of former regime members remained our primary focus, but at this point the picture we could draw was very rudimentary. Rare bits of intelligence came from the task force headquarters in Baghdad or from the other outposts throughout the province. They were working hard to understand the people who lived in the big city down the hill from their compound and were accomplishing as much as a team of sixteen could. But they were largely cut off from the rest of our force. I thanked them for their work and went to the helicopter pad feeling that despite their talent and dedication, the team’s isolation limited their ability to contribute effectively. The price of that isolation was made clear on the airlift down to Tikrit.