Analyzing Obama's Options In Afghanistan

TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. My guest, Greg Jaffe, is the Pentagon correspondent for the Washington Post, and before that covered the military for the Wall Street Journal. We're going to talk about Afghanistan, some mistakes the military has made there and the direction it appears to be headed in now.

The New York Times reports today that President Obama's advisors are coalescing around a strategy that would focus on protecting about 10 top population centers, not the countryside and the remote regions.

Jaffe wrote a series of articles about a battle in a remote region called Wanat that exemplifies the problems the military encounters in the countryside of Afghanistan. Jaffe is also the coauthor of a new book that helps explain how Iraq changed the Army, why it's now emphasizing counterinsurgency and the disagreements that continue in the military about the effectiveness of that strategy in the Middle East.

The book is called "The Fourth Star: Four Generals and the Epic Struggle for the Future of the United States Army." The generals are George Casey and John Abizaid, who led the troops during - led the troops in Iraq until 2007, and Peter Chiarelli and David Petraeus, who then changed the strategy in Iraq to counterinsurgency. Petraeus is now the commander of CENTCOM.

Greg Jaffe, welcome to FRESH AIR. The four generals who you write about started their professional military careers in the �70s. Did they each take different lessons away from Vietnam?

Mr. GREG JAFFE (Pentagon Correspondent, Washington Post; Author): Yeah. Vietnam is a powerful thing kind of lurking in the background of the book and lurking in almost every officer's life from that era. I mean, all these guys missed Vietnam, but they all joined an Army in the early �70s that's badly broken by it, really at its nadir. But the big Army, I think, learns a lesson with regard to Vietnam that oh, my gosh, we're never going to do that again. We're not going to fight another guerrilla war. Wars need to be fast and quick, and we need to use overwhelming firepower to destroy the enemy, and we can vote not to fight an insurgency like they had in Vietnam.

I think Abizaid and Petraeus in particular both realized that armies don't always get to choose the wars they're in and that they needed to be ready at some level to fight this kind of war. But both Abizaid and Petraeus, for most of their careers, within that context, are dissidents within the larger Army.

GROSS: I was really interested in your descriptions of General Abizaid, who, you know, helped lead the war in Iraq in its first stage, but didn't seem to agree with the philosophy that the Army was using.

Abizaid's great-grandfather was Lebanese. Abizaid speaks fluent Arabic. He spent time in the Middle East before the war in Iraq, and it sounds like he was very skeptical of the Iraq War from the start, yet he helped lead it. He was the commander of all military forces in the region, the position that Petraeus later took over. So would you explain why he was skeptical of the invasion from the start?

Mr. JAFFE: Yeah, I mean, he does spend a lot of time in the Middle East. Now, he doesn't grow up speaking Arabic. He actually teaches himself Arabic or goes to the Defense Language Institute and then spends two years in Jordan at the University of Amman as a student. They he spends one year in Lebanon, in southern Lebanon in the mid-�80s, watching the Israelis fight a very tough insurgency with Shiite extremists, and particularly Hezbollah, which is just beginning to emerge at that period.

I think he has a sort of deep appreciation for the culture, religion and the huge role those play in the Middle East in terms of determining the fate of kind of countries and how wars unfold. So I think he was deeply skeptical. I mean, he likes to say you can't control the Middle East. If you try, it'll end up controlling you.

So I think he was deeply skeptical of these sort of grand ambitions to change places, particularly Iraq, where he also has this experience at the end of the Gulf War, an experience that's very different from the rest of the United States Army and leads him to take very different lessons from the Gulf War than most of the U.S. Army.

GROSS: So how did Abizaid's Gulf War experience shape his thinking on Iraq?

Mr. JAFFE: Well, you know, most of the Army's - for the Gulf War is the 100-hour tank battle, you know, which is this tank-on-tank fight in which the U.S. Army, you know, obliterates the Iraqi army. Abizaid has a different experience. He misses the tank battle. He's stuck in Italy, much to his chagrin and disappointment for that, but is sent in in the latter days of the war -essentially after the war - to northern Iraq on a mission to protect the Kurds.

It quickly turns to he's also protecting the Iraqi army and the Iraqi army soldiers from the Kurds, and Iraqi soldiers are running to his checkpoint. And he has this - tells this very interesting story. In the latter days of his mission there, he's walking with a Kurdish Peshmerga, a Kurdish militia fighter, and they - the Kurds have caught a couple of Iraqi soldiers who were stragglers, and they grabbed these Iraqis and they torture them and then kill them. And Abizaid, in his very typical, John Abizaid way, says hey, if you're going to kill them, anyway, why do you bother to torture them? And the Peshmerga, the militia, Kurdish militia fighter, says well, nobody fears death. People fear torture. And we have to kill them and torture them and leave them in the middle of the road as an example to the other Iraqi soldiers not to mess with us anymore.

And at that point, I think Abizaid, who already sensed this, realizes that the Iraq War might be over for the U.S. Army. It might be over for the United States of America, but it's still continuing for the Iraqi people and continues throughout the �90s, until we invade the country again in 2003.

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Greg Jaffe. He's the Pentagon correspondent for the Washington Post and the author of the new book �The Fourth Star: Four Generals and the Epic Struggle for the Future of the United States Army.�

We've talked a little bit about General Abizaid and why he was really skeptical that the war in Iraq would work because he knew so much about the Middle East and the ethnic and religious divisions there. Let's jump ahead and look at General Petraeus, who becomes the leader of the forces in Iraq, and he believes that counterinsurgency can work.

Again, he becomes a career Army person in the �70s, after Vietnam. What did he take away from Vietnam that made him think counterinsurgency's going to work in Iraq?

Mr. JAFFE: You know, it's interesting. It's less what he took away and where he came from. I mean, the Army, we think of it as this sort of big, green monolith, but it's actually a collection of sort of tribes and sub-tribes, and Petraeus is from this really interesting sub-tribe called the SOSH Department. It's essentially professors, officers who are chosen as professors, sent to the best graduate schools and then teach for a couple years at West Point before they go back out into the service. They teach cadets economics, political science, international relations.

And Petraeus grows up in the SOSH Department, and when he's there, it's an interesting time in the mid-�80s. The SOSH Department is taking very different lessons about the Vietnam War than the rest of the Army. The rest of the Army kind of looks at Vietnam, as I said, and says oh, gosh, we never want to do that again, and we can vote not to do it.

The SOSH Department argues that the mistake the Army made was not fighting a guerrilla war, but fighting a guerrilla war badly, and that wars were more than just about destroying the enemy and firepower and that if you really wanted to fight a counterinsurgency, you had to focus on protecting the population on economics, on politics.

Military officers had to be masters of sort of all of these domains, and this is the environment in which Petraeus sort of spends a lot of his time as an impressionable major, and I think that's where he kind of thinks to himself hey, we can do this. Counterinsurgency is something we can sort of master.

GROSS: So when Petraeus becomes the commander of the forces in Iraq, he changes the nature of the war in Iraq, turns it into a counterinsurgency, tries to persuade or buy off insurgents and get them to side with the Iraqi government and with the U.S. How much do you think he's changed thinking within the military about how the military should be fighting wars today?

Mr. JAFFE: I think he's had a huge impact just in terms of what officers do and how they approach war. I mean, Petraeus is an incredibly adaptable kind of guy. I mean, on the one hand, he looks kind of rigid. He's very sort of detail-focused, you know, as an officer, as a kind of battalion and brigade commander, a lieutenant colonel and colonel.

I mean, he was a notorious kind of micromanager with regard to having bazillions of rules, rules upon rules upon rules. But as a general, he's surprisingly adaptable and redefined sort of what it means to be an officer.

There's one example that I think sort of shows it, when - this is in Mosul, when he's there in 2003. Mosul's ultimately a failure for a lot of reasons, but it's an illuminating failure. I mean, Petraeus is there, and he's in - and one of the big problems is the locals badly want electricity.

So he cuts a deal with the Syrians in which he sells them Iraqi oil for electricity without cluing in the State Department. I think he realizes that if he asks the State Department, they might tell him no. So it was better just to do it and then have them undo it.

But it's interesting. He has these week-long negotiations with the Syrians. They finally agree, fly out to the border to open the valve to send oil, Iraqi oil, into Syria in exchange for electricity. They slaughter a lamb and dip their hands in the blood and then touch their hands on the pipeline, and Petraeus does this, as well. And I asked him, you know, how did it feel? He said warm.

But it goes to sort of what you have to do to be effective in these environments, and it's almost - he plays the role of a tribal sheikh out there. I mean, he's the sheikh of the biggest, most powerful tribe in northern Iraq in 2003, which is the 101st Airborne Division, and he recognizes that, you know, you have to throw yourself into this culture in that way to be effective.

GROSS: One of the things I walk away with from the book - and tell me if you think this is an accurate conclusion to draw - is that, you know, there were leaders in the military, top leaders in the military, who knew better than to fight the war in Iraq. They didn't think we'd win. They didn't think that the post-Saddam era would be a peaceful, manageable era, and yet they had to fight that war. They had to lead that war.

Mr. JAFFE: Yeah. I mean, it's part of being a military officer. I mean, it's interesting with regard to civil-military relations, which is sort of what you're talking about. How do you interact, or how do you respond when the politicians ask you to do something you don't want to do or you think is a bad idea?

Abizaid and Petraeus have, I think, substantially different interpretations of it. I mean, both of them understand that the military works for their political masters, but they interpret that relationship differently, and I'll give you an example. On de-Baathification, Abizaid - which is getting rid of the former - Saddam's former Baath Party people.

Abizaid argues fiercely against it. I mean, he bangs the table and screams that this is a stupid idea. Doug Feith and Paul Wolfowitz, two senior Bush administration officials in the Pentagon, compare de-Baathification to de-Nazification following World War II, and Abizaid screams this isn't World War II. This isn't the liberation of France. But when he's told that that's the policy, he shuts up and he executes it.

Petraeus, on the other hand, I think is more willing to push the limits and force people to tell him no or stop it. The example - a good example is in Mosul in 2003. You know, he holds elections there in which a Baathist is named governor. And he supports that Baathist, and that guy, Ghanim al-Basso, remains governor as long as he's there, as Petraeus is there, and sort of waits for someone to tell him no, don't do that.

Another example is the awakening, where the Sunni tribes stand up against al-Qaida and the U.S. pays, essentially, Sunni tribesmen in 2007 and 2008 to sort of come to the U.S. side. Petraeus doesn't ask permission back home to do that. He just does it and waits for someone to tell him hey, you shouldn't have done that.

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Greg Jaffe. He covers the Pentagon for the Washington Post, and he's the author of the new book "The Fourth Star: Four Generals and the Epic Struggle for the Future of the United States Army." Let's take a short break here, and then we'll talk some more. This is FRESH AIR.

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GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Greg Jaffe. He's the Pentagon correspondent for the Washington Post. Before that, he covered the Pentagon for the Wall Street Journal. His new book, "The Fourth Star," is about four generals who led the war in Iraq. It's called "The Fourth Star: Four Generals and the Epic Struggle for the Future of the United States Army."

You know, it's interesting, like in the war in Iraq, you see a military that is skeptical of the civilians' plans for Iraq, you know, the civilian leadership's plans for Iraq.

Mr. JAFFE: Yeah, I think all four were skeptical.

GROSS: Mm-hmm. And compare that to what we're seeing now in terms of the relationship between Obama and the military in Afghanistan.

Mr. JAFFE: Well, here's what I find fascinating about this moment. It's a little bit like we've fallen down one of these "Alice in Wonderland" rabbit holes. I mean, from Vietnam almost to 2007, it was the military who was saying to the civilians, hey, don't make us fix these broken societies. We can't do it. We can't make these people like each other, and this is the wrong way to use military power.

You know, the military comes out of Vietnam believing that to its core. And it's the civilians - whether it's the Clinton administration, which is pushing the military into places like Haiti or the Balkans or the Bush administration, which is pushing the military into Iraq. It's the civilians who are saying no, you guys can do it. Let's get in there and we'll figure it out.

And now we're at this moment where the military's saying with regard to Afghanistan, hey, give us 44,000 troops, more troops, in addition to the 68 we've got now. We can fix this place based on what we did in Iraq, you know, and what I think the military sees as Petraeus' Army's achievements in Iraq. We can do this.

And it's civilians now who are saying hey, wait a minute, whoa. This is a broken, messed-up place, and we need to be more modest in our ambitions. So it's a really odd moment.

GROSS: Like General McChrystal is recommending 44,000 more troops for Afghanistan and a full counterinsurgency, and President Obama seems to be very cautious about following that.

Mr. JAFFE: Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's McChrystal and Petraeus who are saying, you know, we can do this. Don't worry that the Karzai government is horrible and corrupt. You know, don't worry about this giant narcotics, opium problem. We can fix this place.

And, you know, 10 years ago, I think the military would have been saying hey, what are you, crazy? Stopping opium production is not our job. Fixing a broken government is not our job. And now they've very much hey, you know, let me at it, and it's an interesting moment. And it's sort of the skeptics in the military, the kind of more conservative people, who are saying hey, wait a minute, maybe this is something we can't do, whose voices are very much in abeyance right now. It's the Petraeus counterinsurgency crowd that is ascending.

GROSS: When we look at the impact of the counterinsurgency in Iraq, how much of a success can we really call it in the sense that I know things are better than they were. The Ministry of Justice was just blown up. There's still a lot of bombings in Iraq. You know, the government has still been really pretty dysfunctional, as far as I can tell. So, like, are we claiming a premature victory in terms of what the counterinsurgency really accomplished?

Mr. JAFFE: Yeah, I mean, I think it's way too early to call it a victory, and it's way too early to know how Iraq will turn out. I mean, it's - you're right. It's far better than it was, but it's certainly not what we set out to build. There's no question about that.

I mean, I think for the Army, 2007 was such a low point, the Army really - it's hard to underestimate how badly the Army felt about itself. Junior officers, you know, captains, even lieutenant colonels, majors, were really angry at their senior leadership, you know, that they just didn't understand this war. They didn't know how to fight it. And these guys felt like, look, we've learned the hard way. We've been walking these patrols and had to adapt to survive, and our generals have failed us.

So in many ways, I think the Army looks at Iraq as a huge success not because Iraq is a great place or not because we achieved our goals in Iraq, but I think because - well, I guess in some ways because Petraeus sort of saved the Army from itself there. You know, we got out without it breaking the force.

GROSS: Petraeus was so high profile when he was commanding the troops in Iraq, and now that he's the head of CENTCOM, you hear very little from Petraeus directly. You don't even hear that much about him. Why is that?

Mr. JAFFE: I think, yeah, I think Petraeus is aware of that, too.

GROSS: And also, I should add, you know, he has a reputation for being really ambitious and for actually, you know, really liking the attention.

Mr. JAFFE: He loves the press. Well, I don't know if he loves the press. He loves being loved by the press.

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Mr. JAFFE: Yeah, I mean, it goes to - I mean, the Petraeus-Bush relationship was a really unusual one, and it was a troubling one to many in the Army, and I think it was a troubling one even to General Petraeus.

I mean, President Bush, at the end of his tenure, was a wounded president. He could not speak credibly to the American people about the war, and he needed somebody who could, and Petraeus was that guy. And Petraeus was sort of the perfect person to fill that void.

I mean, he's a political general, and in the Army, that's a really derogatory term. It means that you spent kind of too much time in Washington, too much time in the Pentagon at the elbow of four-star generals and not enough time getting your boots muddy with soldiers. But I think Petraeus' career, which is a very nontraditional one, really helped him.

I mean, he - I think he does four tours as a general's aide. Most officers do one, and if you do two, you're looked at as a little bit of - a little bit suspect, a little bit of a sycophant. But this time he spends at sort of the elbow of four-star generals gives him a really terrific sense of how politics work in Washington. And so he's able to fill that void for President Bush to become the public face of the war, to deal with congressional delegations when they come, to sort of sell the war to the American people and to Congress, which is something that Casey and Abizaid determinedly did not want to do.

They didn't think it was proper for a military officer to do that, but Petraeus does it. Petraeus admits that he's a little uncomfortable doing it, but he does it, anyway. And I think Obama wants a very different relationship with his generals. He doesn't want one general to be the public face of the war.

You know, Bush would always say, well, I'm going to do what Petraeus says. And Obama is definitely not in the I'm-going-to-do-what-Petraeus-says or I'm-going-to-do-what-General-McChrystal-says camp. He's going to listen to a lot of voices and make a decision.

GROSS: Well, you know, in one article that you recently wrote for the Washington Post, you wrote that, you know, Obama chose General McChrystal for being like Petraeus, but now that's backfiring on Obama.

Mr. JAFFE: I think he chose - yeah, he chose him because he wanted somebody who could get the military to think about the mission in the broadest possible sense. You know, hey, this isn't about killing bad guys. It's about politics and government and reconstruction. So he wanted a McChrystal to sort of redefine what the military does, but he doesn't want another Petraeus, which is sort of what I wrote, another guy who's going to be the dominant face of the war.

Petraeus sort of senses that, and that's why he stepped back into the shadows, I think. I mean, he's got a very acute political sense, and he realizes that Obama doesn't want that.

McChrystal, interestingly, gets himself in trouble several weeks back in a speech in London in which he talks about the war and sort of his belief for the need for a sort of comprehensive counterinsurgency strategy. That upset some people in the White House. And if you look at McChrystal, his career path is very different than Petraeus'. I mean, all these generals are a product of their experiences. He spends most of his time in the black special operations world, doesn't spend a lot of time at the elbow of generals, doesn't spend a lot of time in Washington, and he doesn't have that sort of acute political sense, I think, that General Petraeus does.

GROSS: Greg Jaffe will be back in the second half of the show. He's the Pentagon correspondent for the Washington Post and coauthor of the new book "The Fourth Star: Four Generals and the Epic Struggle for the Future of the United States Army." I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross, back with Greg Jaffe, the Pentagon correspondent for the Washington Post and co-author of the new book, "The Fourth Star: Four Generals and the Epic Struggle for the Future of the United States Army."

October has been the deadliest month in Afghanistan. We're going to talk about the military options facing the Obama administration and a strategy it now appears to be favoring.

Can you sum up for us the options that General Stanley McChrystal is presenting to President Obama?

Mr. JAFFE: Yeah. I mean he's offered up three; although, these could change. I mean I think if the Obama administration changes the mission, then General McChrystal will have to go back and change what he needs to achieve the mission.

Right now, for the mission that he's been given, his preference is about 44,000 more troops on top of the 68,000 the U.S. has there now, and I think that will allow him to do what he thinks of as a comprehensive counterinsurgency strategy. That means, get into the populated areas, protect the people, try and rebuild the sort of Afghan government. Rebuild is probably the wrong term -it's build an Afghan government out there - build an Afghan economy.

So that's the middle option that seems to be I think the military's preferred option. The other option is about 10 to 15,000 more troops. That's going to mean that the Taliban will continue to have safe havens throughout the country that the U.S. military won't be able to take back. There are going to be areas where they're not going to be able to extend the reach the Afghan government, where they're not going to improve the economy. That's the low end option.

The high option is 80,000, which would be a comprehensive counterinsurgency strategy across the entire country. I don't think anyone thinks that that's within the realm of possibility.

GROSS: So with the 10 to 15,000 more troops, what would the plan be? What would the strategy be?

Mr. JAFFE: And I think the strategy is to hold as much as you can, to focus on building Afghan security forces to take over what you're holding, and slowly transition those areas to them. But I think it would markedly constrain your ambitions in the country. You know, hey, we're not going to build a coherent Afghan state and maybe that shouldn't be our goal.

You know, our goal should be preventing al-Qaida from having a safe haven there. But, you know, they're going to be parts to this country that are controlled by the Taliban and maybe that's okay for the near term.

GROSS: The Pentagon's top military officer oversaw a secret war game earlier this month to evaluate the two primary military options that McChrystal has put to Obama. So do you know how these war game scenarios, like, worked out? And what, if any lessons that they offer?

Mr. JAFFE: Right. I mean it's a tricky one because I mean these aren't big -you're predicting human behavior here, so there aren't big computer simulated models. And really, this was more sort of a debate. I mean one of the things that they did realize is that, I think - or assumed going in, that if you have 44,000 troops you can take areas back from the Taliban that you can't take if you've got 10 t0 15, which seems pretty obvious.

I mean the other thing I think they were looking at is, you know, how would the Taliban and Pakistan relate - react to the various options? I mean the interesting thing to me is, at this moment, the military's sort of staunch belief that it can build a coherent Afghan state, that it can conduct probably one of the most ambitious nation-building exercises in history.

I mean, I think I wrote in one column a few months back, that Afghanistan can sometimes make Iraq look like Switzerland. I mean parts of Afghanistan look like the 4th century. So it still amazes me, and it's really a legacy of sort of Petraeus' energy and intellectual dominance, that the military's saying, you know, hey, I think we can rebuild this place. I'm not saying they can't. I am saying it is a nation-building exercise that's far more ambitious than anything we ever attempted as a country.

GROSS: And one of the reasons why it's a bit of a leap of faith, to think that we can build a coherent government, a coherent democracy in Afghanistan is that, as you pointed out earlier, that kind of government has never existed in that country. So it's not a question of rebuilding. It's a question of creating something that never existed.

Mr. JAFFE: Yeah. No, that's true. And I mean on the plus side - I sound like a total skeptic. I mean if you look at the Army today, and this is I think part of what we try and capture in the book, the Army has really changed. Young officers, largely at Petraeus' urging and insistence and prodding, and in some ways, just through their own hard-won experience in Iraq and Afghanistan - I mean they really did throw themselves into these missions in way they haven't in the past.

I mean Petraeus really has changed the culture of the military. I mean it's interesting� I was just thinking how he does it, particularly when he was in Iraq. I remember there was one electrical transmission tower that got knocked down by insurgence about a year and a half before he got there. It was called Tower 57. And it wasn't that important a tower.

In fact, the Iraqis and the U.S. military had figured out how to route power around that down tower into Baghdad, so it wasn't having an effect being down. But Petraeus was insistent that Tower 57 be fixed and every morning at his morning briefing, he would hound folks hey, what are we doing to fix Tower 57?

And to ultimately fix it, it required the U.S. military, the Iraq Army, the Ministry of Electricity, the Iraqi Ministry of Defense - all kind of working together to put a plan to fix this tower and hold the terrains so the tower didn't get knocked down again. And by raising it every morning in his morning brief, he forces the Army to figure out, how do we fix downed electrical towers and all the different components that go into it?

And everybody else is watching the briefing, because all the other commanders watch it, think, gosh, I hope I don't have any Tower 57s in my area, because he's going to be crawling all over me if I have a downed electrical transmission tower. So they start to fix their towers and it just changes the mindset where they really do start to think about well, how do we rebuild these broken places? And I think it's given them a lot of the confidence that hey, we can do this in Afghanistan even though it's significantly harder.

GROSS: My guest is Greg Jaffe, the Pentagon correspondent for the Washington Post and co-author of the new book "The Fourth Star: Four Generals and the Epic Struggle for the Future of the United States Army."

More after a break.

This is FRESH AIR.

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GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Greg Jaffe. He's Pentagon correspondent for the Washington Post and co-author of the new book "The Fourth Star: Four Generals and the Epic Struggle for the Future of the United States Army."

Greg, The New York Times reports today that President Obama's advisors are coalescing around a strategy. Would you explain what that strategy for Afghanistan seems to be?

Mr. JAFFE: Sure. It's basically a variation on what General McChrystal said he wants to do, which is focus on the major population centers. Now the question is sort of how do you define those? There are 10 or so big cities that I think everyone agree these are places where you can extend the reach of the Afghan government where you can stabilize them.

Then they're a bunch of places, like Nuristan, Kunar Province that these are very remote areas, where extending the reach of the Afghan government is probably a 50-year project. And I think everyone agrees that those are bridges too far. The question is - these areas in the middle between those two extremes - and how much of an effect can you have in these areas in terms of extending the reach of good governance, growing an economy, all the things you need to do to defeat an insurgency?

GROSS: Now you actually wrote a series of articles recently about one of the remote areas in which there had been American troops. It didn't work out well, and I think that was a situation that helped lead to the strategy that the Obama administration seems to be leaning toward now. Tell us about Wanat, the area in which there were American troops. I think nine American soldiers were killed within a few hours one day. So tell us about Wanat and the lesson there.

Mr. JAFFE: Well, I mean essentially what you had was you've pushed U.S. troops into this very remote valley in a place called Nuristan Province, which is one of the most remote and isolated areas in Afghanistan. It was the last to convert to Islam. And the troops got in there and they were pursuing sort of classic counterinsurgency. In fact, the battalion commander is a guy named Bill Ostlund who's a protege of General Petraeus'.

General Petraeus thinks very highly of him. Ostlund is an exceptionally bright, hardworking, ambitious officer. He pushes U.S. troops into this valley in Wanat with the goal of hey; I'm going to protect these people from themselves. I'm going to connect them to the Afghan government so they're less of a threat to themselves; they're less of a threat to Afghanistan.

But the problem was that this little valley, I think, had no history of kind of any connection to the outside world and it desperately didn't want it, so it provoked a massive attack, you know, as many as 200 enemy fighters. A mix of outsiders, some Taliban, and a lot of locals who really pounded U.S. forces and drove U.S. forces from the valley, and they haven't returned in going on 15-16 months now.

GROSS: So you said that this battle in Wanat has come to symbolize the military's missteps in Afghanistan.

Mr. JAFFE: Yeah. I mean it's an interesting case too. I mean since the U.S. military has left Wanat, they've moved about six miles down the valley, an interesting thing has happen. I mean the locals actually are living with some of the Taliban commanders who prosecuted this attack and now they're beginning to express frustration with the Taliban who they also see as outsiders. I mean these are incredibly insular and remote places.

And it really goes to a question of, you know, can you transform these places, which is sort of the debate we've been having since 2003 with regard to Iraq. I mean think Abizaid is one of the more skeptics that these places are complex and different and foreign and you can shape them on the margins but you can't change them.

General Petraeus and the counterinsurgency crowd tends to be a lot more ambitious and thinks hey, you really can transform these places. Right now, at least within the Army, the counterinsurgents are ascendant.

GROSS: I think one of the big fears is if the United States pulled out of the Afghanistan, which we're very unlikely to do right now, that it could become a safe haven for the Taliban and therefore, a safe haven for Islamic extremists from around the world.

On the other hand, if we have troops in major cities but we pull out of the remote regions, do those remote regions become a safe haven for the Taliban and other extremist? And do they form almost like little mini states or mini governments in those remote regions and just wait there patiently until eventually the United States does pull out?

Mr. JAFFE: Yeah. I mean that's the concern. That's certainly possible. I mean in fact, I would say hey, they're already havens right now. I mean the Taliban or sort of Taliban surrogates already run places like Nuristan or some of the more remote regions of southern Afghanistan.

I mean the question is, can we build sort of a coherent Afghan state in the major cities at the same time this sort of threat lurks on the periphery? And it's an unanswerable question right now. It's a pretty big gamble.

I mean it's a gamble that we have to take because I don't think there's any real possibility of us finding the troops or the will power to sort of transform some of these more remote areas.

GROSS: Another question facing America, now, is do we have any kind of legitimate partner in President Karzai? The runoff election is coming up. Who knows who will win, but the whole political process is so shadowy. I mean the election was apparently rigged, initially, and so what kind of partner will we have in the government? And that question becomes even bigger, now that The New York Times has reported today that Karzai's brother, Wali Karzai is allegedly involved in Afghanistan's opium trade and that he's been getting regular payments from the CIA for the past eight years.

And one of the things he's been doing in return for those payments is helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that would work on the side of the government and the U.S. So let's just talk about his brother first. What do you make of that?

Mr. JAFFE: Well, I mean it's long been rumored that his brother was part of the opium trade. And it's long been a sort of subjected debate within the U.S. military and the U.S. government as to what do we do about it. But, I mean, I think it's part and parcel of trying to operate in these really damaged places like Afghanistan. You know, you're not going to have a government partner that's effective.

You're going to have to deal with a lot of corruption, and it's not a black and white case where there are good guys and bad guys. I don't think anyone falls into either camp in Afghanistan, so you've got to figure out well, who can I effectively work with without it so discrediting me in the eyes of the Afghan people that I'm ineffective?

And that's the real challenge here and there's no simple answer. And that will govern a lot in terms of how many troops do you think you can have. I mean this is a flawed government so - a deeply flawed government - so how far can you realistically extend its reach?

GROSS: So, you're not shocked that the CIA has been paying Hamid Karzai's brother, Wali, even though he's involved in the opium trade allegedly?

Mr. JAFFE: No. I mean, it's long been known that he's suspected to have been in the opium trade and it's long been known that he also provides a lot of intel to the U.S. government. So the fact that we're paying him for that intel, I guess, doesn't surprise me, you know. I mean, it is Afghanistan. You look in Iraq, part of the reason Iraq transformed was because we ended up paying folks who were working closely with al-Qaida. I mean, the sheikhs out in Anbar province, who are our critical partners. I mean, they're mostly smugglers, not to put too fine a point on it, and they've been doing it for centuries.

And this was something that I think General Abizaid would say and he's exactly right. We can't impose, sort of, our values and morals on these folks. In some ways, we've got to work with what we've got and we've got to be more flexible. And we've got to sort of try any tricks that we can within reason. I think that's one of the things that the Army's really learned over the last several years is that look, you can't kill all the bad guys. You've got to figure out which ones you can work with and which ones you can't.

GROSS: Let's talk about the bombing today in Pakistan, about three hours after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrived in Pakistan, in Islamabad. There was a bombing in Peshawar that killed more than 80 people. This was in a market. What does that attack say to you?

Mr. JAFFE: Well, I mean, you're going to have these bombings and the bombs - I mean, you look at the ones in Iraq and the ones in Pakistan, of late. They've gotten increasingly big and the ability of these, sort of, extremist groups to inflict mass casualties has grown. I mean, I think Pakistan is the key, which, I guess, has, sort of, become a cliche in Washington - but not to put too fine a point on it. But I don't think we really care about Afghanistan, but for the fact that it's next to Pakistan, which is a place that has nuclear weapons.

So, I mean, that's a huge concern. I think to the extent that you have unrest and the Taliban expanding their havens in Pakistan, it makes your problem in Afghanistan exponentially harder. If you can get the Pakistani government to move on some of these Taliban havens to disrupt the Taliban over there, it makes your problem in Afghanistan significantly easier. So, the - Pakistan is critical, not just because it's got nuclear weapons, but it also, I think, has a massive effect on what the realm of the possible is in Afghanistan.

GROSS: So, Greg, you've been covering the Army since 2000, since before 9/11. So, when you look at the Army in 2000 and you look at the Army now, what are some of the biggest changes you see?

Mr. JAFFE: I mean, it's so massive that it's hard to capture sometimes. I mean, the biggest change is just how officers think of warfare. You know, the Cold War Army, the Army that we had in 2000, thought of warfare as these, sort of, big tank-on-tank battles and war was almost an engineering exercise for them. It was how do you amass firepower, artillery, air, tanks, helicopters to destroy the enemy? I mean, this is an Army that understands that war is about politics and culture and religion and extending governance. It's a completely different problem set. It's almost like you've taken an Army of engineers and turned them into an Army of history and religion professors. It's a bizarre and fundamental transformation.

GROSS: And I guess the potential problem you see with that is that perhaps the Army has become too convinced that it's capable of changing people, of changing towns, of changing countries.

Mr. JAFFE: I think that's the worry. Look, we had the Powell Doctrine before which says hey, look, let's have limited clear aims, use overwhelming firepower to destroy the enemy and get out. That was a flawed vision because you look at what happens when you do that and you get giant messes like Iraq or Afghanistan, where we moved in quickly, toppled the Taliban and chaos ensued. On the other hand, not sure the Petraeus Doctrine which replaced it, which says, you know, hey, you can do big kind of nation building. You can really change these places. I worry that yeah, that that skews us a little towards hubris, in terms of what we can accomplish militarily, and the truth is somewhere between the two. I mean, I think the Petraeus Doctrine - it's a huge upgrade over what we had before in the Powell Doctrine. But it's also got, I think, significant dangers.

GROSS: When do you plan on returning to Afghanistan?

Mr. JAFFE: You know, I'd like to go back kind of after the strategy is settled. We're in this weird sort of limbo right now, where we're not quite - what we're trying to, what we want to accomplish and how we want to accomplish it. So, I mean, my gut would be I'd like to, you know, let us settle on our strategy, give it a month and then sort of see where we are. And whether what we've settled on is realistic and possible.

GROSS: Greg Jaffe, thank you so much for talking with us.

Mr. JAFFE: Yeah. Thanks very much.

GROSS: Greg Jaffe is the Pentagon correspondent for the Washington Post and co-author of the new book "The Fourth Star: Four Generals and the Epic Struggle for the Future of the United States Army." Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright National Public Radio.