All In by Paula Broadwell Page B

five-by-seven-inch notebook. “Just need to keep pushing out little stories, most won’t make the news, but they do add up,” said one of Smith’s notations. “Get with bureau chiefs, new sheriff in town,” said others. Petraeus was in an information war. Everything coming out of his mouth and the ISAF press office was likely to be “parsed” by the press, he concluded. It was critical to get the narrative correct, because that would be the key to buying time. The last note Petraeus emphasized to Smith: It would be essential to strive once again to be “first with the truth.”
    An advance team from CENTCOM had arrived a few days earlier to outfit Petraeus’s quarters: a warren of Conex containers, four in all, that the troops called his “hooch.” The first eight-by-twenty-foot Conex included a stationary exercise bike, a flat-screen TV and three large printers; the next one housed his desk, with three computers and considerable communications equipment: secure and unsecure telephones, VTC capability, and all the other technology needed to keep up with events—and the ticking clocks—in Washington and Kabul and the capitals of up to forty-nine nations contributing to the NATO-directed coalition. The third was his bedroom, which consisted of a single bed, an old mattress, two small lockers and an attached bathroom with a tiny shower. And the fourth was home to his enlisted aide. It was a stark contrast to the villa in which he’d lived in Baghdad—rumored to have been Saddam’s mother’s—or the new quarters he and his wife had moved into in Tampa just one month earlier.
    In his first “stand-up” briefing at 7:30 the following morning, Petraeus promised a review of the Tactical Directive, a document that provided detailed guidelines on the use of force in combat that had been issued exactly a year earlier—and had been strictly enforced—by his predecessor, the now-cashiered McChrystal. The document stressed the need to protect the Afghan people and called for limiting the use of close air support and artillery against residential compounds. “We must avoid the trap of winning tactical victories—but suffering strategic defeats—by causing civilian casualties or excessive damage and thus alienating the people,” it read.
    This Tactical Directive had proved problematic. The
Rolling Stone
article that led to McChrystal’s downfall scorched the general and his aides, caricaturing them as testosterone-addled frat boys as they insulted Obama, Biden, Holbrooke, Eikenberry and even Karzai, with whom McChrystal reportedly got along famously. But the article’s lengthiest passage described McChrystal’s meeting with a group of soldiers at an outpost near Kandahar who believed that his Tactical Directive and severe restrictions on the use of airpower were tying their hands and getting them killed.
    At ISAF headquarters in Kabul, looking out over forty staff officers seated before him at two horseshoe-shaped tables in the Situational Awareness Room, Petraeus said he understood the troopers’ message. “There is no question about our commitment to reducing civilian loss of life, which is a moral imperative I absolutely support,” he said, repeating the words he’d used during his Senate confirmation. “There is, however, concern in the ranks and in some of our nations about how we have applied the Tactical Directive, and they must be addressed.” Petraeus explained that he would rely on his operational commander, Lieutenant General David M. Rodriguez, to make recommendations. There was, Petraeus observed, “a clear moral imperative to make sure we are fully supporting our troopers in combat. This debate is not about changing the rules of engagement; it is about implementing the Tactical Directive in a way that gives soldiers in trouble the support they need while doing everything possible