All In by Paula Broadwell

Army/Marine Corps counterinsurgency manual at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Soon enough, both men were back in Iraq putting their ideas into practice during the surge.
    The list of top ten insights Ollivant e-mailed Petraeus in 2010 amounted to a withering critique of what the commander would soon be inheriting in Afghanistan in the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). The ISAF Joint Command (IJC), an operational command headed by Army lieutenant general David M. Rodriguez that was charged with coordinating all operations involving U.S., NATO and Afghan troops, was, he asserted, “structurally dysfunctional,” lacking the means to coordinate its activities with civilians who report to the U.S. Embassy. This was not a reflection on Rodriguez, Ollivant said, and he recommended that Petraeus make Rodriguez his deputy for maneuver. He also said the IJC had designated too many “key terrain districts” in the eastern command sector and was likely to make progress in ten at best. “You taught me well—‘underpromise; overdeliver.’ We have violated that principle here.”
    He recommended rethinking the military’s emphasis on Kandahar, in the south, and placing greater focus on the east. He also said he had “serious misgivings” about efforts to recruit and train the Afghan police, which he did not think would yield significant results by the announced drawdown in July 2011. “As I think you know well, the dirty secret on Iraq is that we never did really fix the police—we just made the Army good enough that no one noticed,” he wrote. “I maintain we would be much better off focusing on training the Afghan Army (we know how to train armies—we are one!) . . . The bottom line is that resources poured into the police effort (in general—exceptions abound) are not going to pay off by Summer 2011. If that date no longer carries meaning, then that changes things.”
    He said a revised Tactical Directive from the commander was desperately needed, given the “palpable” sense of isolation troops feel from senior commanders.
    Ollivant also noted the difficulties involved in asking young officers and their enlisted men to execute effective counterinsurgency operations, and he advocated pushing more support assets down to the company level, as he had in Iraq. Captains and lieutenants commanding these desolate outposts need human and technical intelligence assets, civil affairs support, even help running psychological operations. “There’s just too much to expect a 24-29-year-old with limited life experience to accomplish,” he wrote, explaining that they need assistance in partnering with Afghan units and help from more senior field-grade officers.
    Finally, Ollivant told Petraeus that his forces needed to focus on improving the quality of local government, which ideally should mean the assignment of more foreign-service officers from the State Department to help knit local officials into the national government structure, with its provincial and district governors, which President Karzai controlled.
    The place where effective government in Afghanistan happens, Ollivant explained in a subsequent e-mail to Petraeus, is at the district level, where power held locally by tribes, subtribes and clans can be merged with ministries and divisions of the national government. “It may be the closest thing to an overall decisive point that we have,” Ollivant wrote. When this melding of local and national happens and a Kabul-appointed governor meets a traditional council of elders, he added, “all relevant and legitimate interests can be at least acknowledged, if not always accommodated.”
    Petraeus always found Ollivant’s input thought-provoking, though he disagreed with his conclusion that they had failed to fix the police in Iraq. Petraeus thought the Iraqi police had made significant strides—albeit after Ollivant