What keeps Gen. David H. Petraeus awake at night?
"The turmoil in Pakistan," he told an audience in East Hartford on Friday night.
Then he continued, geographically.
Afghanistan: "Vice President Biden had it exactly right when he said it's going to get harder before it gets easier," he said.
Iran: Would it welcome engagement?
He went on: Iraq, which we'll have to keep an eye on even as we take out combat troops; Yemen, where there's potential for al-Qaida to put down roots; Somalia, where troubles continue.
Petraeus, commander of U.S. Central Command, which oversees an area of the Middle East and Central Asia that encompasses the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan, 20 countries and a host of ungoverned spaces, addressed an audience of nearly 800, many in uniform, at Goodwin College. The event was sponsored by the World Affairs Council of Connecticut.
Much of his talk focused on Afghanistan, which has recently seen an increase in violence and narcotics trafficking and has been plagued by a resilient Taliban and al-Qaida-associated forces. President Barack Obama is expected to re-focus on Afghanistan, and Petraeus said it will require more troops, more civilian efforts, more funding and a new kind of effort.
The mission there is different from wars the nation faced years ago, Petraeus explained, with a different deciding terrain: human.
In past wars, winning might have meant taking a hill or capturing territory, he noted. "Counterinsurgency is not that way," he said. "It is tough, grinding, difficult, complex and frustrating."
It will also be different from the war in Iraq, he said. Iraq has oil, gas, water and mineral wealth far greater than Afghanistan's. Iraq has more history of centralized government, more human capital, and a vastly different infrastructure. The surge of troops that entered Iraq during 2007 was possible largely because of the infrastructure in place to absorb them, something Afghanistan does not have yet.
"We are constructing, not reconstructing," he said of Afghanistan.
But some of the same principles will guide operations there, like the emphasis on security and serving the people, having soldiers live close to the people and maintaining a persistent security presence, going after the enemies and holding onto the areas they desert.
The fundamental mission there, ensuring that transnational terrorists are not able to take sanctuary there as they did before 9/11, requires achieving other goals: killing and capturing terrorists, fostering a legitimate government and providing basic economic opportunities for citizens.
"Essentially, it requires a robust, sustained, comprehensive counterinsurgency campaign," he said.
The first priority there must be to reduce the cycle of violence, giving people "the necessary breathing space" to stand up for themselves and for the government to provide for the people, Petraeus said. From that can come legitimacy for the government, improved intelligence and increased security. "Each factor reinforces the other," he said.
He also spoke of the need to increase the budgets of the State Department and USAID to levels commensurate with the Department of Defense.
It may be trite to say you can't kill or capture your way out of a situation, though that part is also necessary, he said. "But you also need to be building and to develop and to assist and to help and to partner," he said.
Of Iraq, where he commanded the multinational forces from February 2007 to September 2008, Petraeus described improvements in the past two years, with less violence and a weakened al-Qaida in Iraq. He said he expects the U.S. to withdraw all combat brigades by summer 2010 but said there will be challenges: upcoming elections, the release of more than 10,000 Iraqi detainees, the return of Iraqis displaced by sectarian violence and ethnic and sectarian mistrust.
"There is a new hope in Iraq, but that hope rests on an emerging foundation," he said.
He addressed Iran briefly. It can be a destabilizing influence in the region, he said, but also shares some common interests with the U.S. and other nations.
Iran does not want to see a Shiite-led Iraq fail, he said. It does not want to see the Taliban run Afghanistan. And it has an enormous drug problem, with millions of addicts, and an interest in countering the narcotics trade from Afghanistan.
Much of the future will come down to whether Iran can accept some of the status quo, rather than trying to change the contours of the region in destabilizing ways, he said.
General Petraeus on new terrain of war
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Originally Posted by Vexille
