Free All In by Paula Broadwell Page B

“atmospherics” and then initiate locally requested projects to improve standards of living, which included building medical facilities, schools and bridges. This level of understanding of local socioeconomic factors helped Knowlton to establish the Hamlet Evaluation System, an initiative to capture metrics for levels of security throughout the sub-provincial geographic areas.
    But metrics in counterinsurgency are messy, as both Knowlton and Petraeus learned in their respective military commands.
    WHEN HE ARRIVED IN Afghanistan, Petraeus, who had gone on to study advanced economics and international relations at Princeton, devoured statistics and data to help him understand the state of the war. He also knew that a commander could improve “situational awareness” and his understanding of the circumstances in various locations by reaching out to those in the field. He’d been schooled in techniques for achieving situational awareness by Knowlton and other early mentors, and now he worked to gain it by dint of his own eighteen-hour days, part of which he spent communicating directly with soldiers, scholars and journalists in the field, in locations ranging from the desolate outposts in Kunar and Nuristan provinces, on the Pakistan border in northeastern Afghanistan, to the main fighting effort in Helmand and Kandahar provinces, to the southwest.
    He was painfully aware that he didn’t know Afghanistan nearly as well as he had known Iraq when he assumed command of the surge in Baghdad in 2007. Others noticed it as well. In Iraq, he had already had nearly two and a half years on the ground when he arrived to command the surge. He’d had an inner circle team that was familiar with Iraq, too. This was, by contrast, his entry-level position in Afghanistan. He’d visited the country many times but he’d never lived there. Other than his military aide, no one on the small team he brought with him from Central Command had deployment experience there, either: not his executive officer, Commander’s Initiatives Group director, personal security detachment commander or personal public affairs officer. Petraeus valued their loyalty and their ability to interpret his vision more than their specific expertise. They would all gain that in time, he thought, and in the interim they would rely on the subordinate commanders and the personal and headquarters staff with Afghan experience whom he had inherited and would also reach out to his “directed telescopes.”
    In the meantime, he set out immediately to build what were perhaps his two most critical relationships. The first was with Ambassador Eikenberry, with whom there had long been some professional tension with the military in Kabul. Eikenberry had been in the news most recently for feuding with McChrystal. The second was with President Karzai, whom Petraeus had met a number of times in person in Kabul and Washington and with whom he had communicated periodically by telephone from the States.
    Petraeus had more than a little in common with Eikenberry, a retired Army lieutenant general who had graduated from West Point and Ranger School. They weren’t close friends, but they weren’t rivals, much less enemies. Petraeus had worked well with Eikenberry in past years, and he respected Eikenberry’s long service in, and knowledge of, Afghanistan. One Petraeus aide said the two men were determined to work together and put the past civil-military tensions behind them. Petraeus had invited Eikenberry to fly into Kabul from NATO headquarters, in Belgium, with the team. “It’s about creating a culture of teamwork,” the aide recalled. “He was setting a tone: We’re going to work
together
.’”
    After Eikenberry’s cables critical of Karzai were leaked in 2009, Eikenberry became the focus of complaints from Karzai. The Afghan president would repeatedly bring up the cables and also Eikenberry’s supposed