NCAFP George F. Kennan Award

Remarks by GEN David H. Petraeus

Union League Club, New York City

28 May 2009

Well good evening, thank you for that warm welcome, and thanks to Ambassador Negroponte and all of the speakers for your very kind words.  This certainly is one of those moments I wish my parents could have shared with me.  My father would have appreciated your generous words—and my mother would’ve believed every one of them!

It is more than humbling to receive an award named in honor of one of our country’s foremost diplomats and foreign policy thinkers.  And it’s a true privilege to share this stage with some of the giants of American foreign policy and to be honored by the organization that has dedicated itself for 35 years to helping our country tackle the most daunting of international challenges.

George Kennan, as this audience knows so well, was a realist in his approach to foreign policy and a lyricist in his writing about it.  He traveled far, scaled the heights of diplomacy, and shaped policies and thinking that guided our nation for decades.  He attended St John’s Military Academy in Wisconsin and then made his way to Princeton.  After a career in the Foreign Service that took him to Riga, Prague, Moscow, Belgrade, and Washington, he did a stint at Oxford, where he was the dissertation advisor for a young Rhodes Scholar from Harvard, Dick Ullman.  Ultimately, Kennan returned, of course, to Princeton.  

Six decades after Kennan studied there, with education at the US Military Academy behind me, I made my way to Princeton as well.  It was there that I got my first introduction to Kennan the man and to Kennan the thinker, as well as to the concepts of realism and idealism in American foreign policy.  And there, my dissertation advisor was Kennan’s protégé, Professor Dick Ullman.  

Kennan taught us all, of course, about the importance of culture and national traditions and of the forces that shaped them.  Decades later, we find ourselves relearning the importance of such understanding.  We have watched our country and our military being drawn into a vast arc of territory in the Middle East and South and Central Asia, among populations we’d not known sufficiently well.  Those of us in uniform have been called upon to become students of this region, one caught in the throes of a struggle between order and its nemesis.  And not unlike the Cold War that engaged Kennan and his contemporaries, we now have a long war of our own – part military conflict and part war of ideas – its battleground the geography of much of the world of Islam, where the forces of extremism are engaged against the forces of relative tolerance and modernism.

But those here know all this well; they’ve lived it.  In fact, seeing the great Dr. Kissinger and so many other individuals here tonight who helped guide us to victory in the Cold War brings back a flood of memories.  …

Well, our national security challenges have certainly evolved since those days, when the enemy, though enormous and possessing apocalyptic power, was nonetheless relatively monolithic and easily identifiable.  The threats to our security these days are more diverse, more irregular, and, in some respects, even more challenging than those posed by our Cold War adversaries.  In the Central Command area of responsibility, in particular, we face the particularly pressing concern of violent extremist organizations.  And this evening, I thought I might share with you our thinking on countering that threat.  

The theme of my remarks stems from the biggest of the “big ideas” from our recent CENTCOM Assessment.  It holds that countering terrorism in the CENTCOM region requires much more than just counter-terrorist operations.  Countering terrorism in our area, and in others as well, requires a counterinsurgency approach.  Thus, counterinsurgency, not counter-terrorism, is the proper intellectual construct.  And tonight, I’ll explain what I mean by that and explain further that this counterinsurgency approach has to be regional – and in some cases global – in nature, as well.    

COUNTERINSURGENCY—NOT JUST COUNTER-TERRORISM

The idea that counter-terrorism is not enough to counter terrorist organizations is, of course, a bit counterintuitive.  We have found, though, that the industrial size strength of the extremist organizations in the CENTCOM area requires much more than just counter-terrorism operations.  From Al Qaeda in Pakistan, Iraq, and other locations, to Hezbollah in Lebanon, to the Taliban and the extremist syndicate in Afghanistan and Pakistan, these organizations, in their very size and strength, can threaten the very existence of legitimate governments.  Thus they are, in essence, insurgencies, not just terrorist organizations.  And dealing with them thus requires counterinsurgency approaches.

This is not just an issue of semantics.  As Clausewitz noted two centuries ago, it is of the utmost importance to fully understand the nature of the conflict in which one is engaged.  “The first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and commander have to make,” he observed, “is to establish…the kind of war on which they are embarking, neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its nature. This is the first of all strategic questions and the most comprehensive.”

Nowhere did we relearn this lesson more clearly than in Iraq.  For several years in Iraq, we conducted as many as 10 counter-terrorist operations every night with our high-end Special Mission Units—and a similar number at least with our other elements and Iraqi forces.  These operations were impressively carried out and often succeeded in killing or capturing important terrorist leaders.  As you’ll recall, we killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi—the most capable leader Al Qaeda in Iraq has ever had—along with many of his deputies and other key leaders.  But despite the successes in our counter-terrorist campaign, the violence in Iraq continued to rise.  Clearly, we needed to continue the counter-terrorist operations, but to do so as part of a broader, more comprehensive, and more fully resourced counter-insurgency approach, as no number of counter-terrorist operations would be enough to “do in” Al Qaeda and deal with the other sources of violence.

With that in mind, when we launched the surge in early 2007, we sought to implement a more effective counterinsurgency approach.  First and foremost, we changed the focus of how our troopers were employed.  In an insurgency, the people are the decisive terrain.  So our troopers’ mission became above all to secure the people—noting that this task could only be performed if our units lived with the people we sought to secure.  Indeed, our presence was not the source of the problem.  The problem was the lack of that presence and the resulting fear among the people that they were defenseless in the face of the extremists.  Our presence gave them courage, and the Sunni awakening, the “Sahwa,” was one product of it.  

Second, we intensified our pursuit of a truly comprehensive approach, working to achieve progress not just in the security arena, but also on the economic, diplomatic, rule of law, and governance fronts as our troopers and our Iraqi partners fought to create the necessary “breathing space” in which we could achieve progress in those other areas.    

We called the multi-pronged, comprehensive approach against Al Qaeda and the other extremists in Iraq the Anaconda Strategy.   In the way that an Anaconda snake squeezes its prey in a 360-degree embrace, we sought to apply pressure simultaneously on all aspects of Al Qaeda and its affiliates, taking away their safe havens, disrupting their command and control, interdicting the flow of foreign fighters, reducing their access to explosives and weaponry, attacking their ideology, fracturing their sub-groups, going after their sources of funding, and undermining the support provided to them by the people.  We – and we means Ambassador Crocker, the Embassy, our coalition partners, and our Iraqi counterparts, as well as our military forces – we did this not just through military operations, but also by support for political activities, fostering reconciliation, encouraging national legislation, fusing intelligence, overhauling our conduct of detainee operations, addressing root causes of discontent, working with source countries of foreign fighters, carrying out an aggressive information operations campaign, and so on.  To be sure, our counterinsurgency approach still did include nightly operations by the best counter-terrorist forces in the world, as well as by increasingly effective Iraqi Special Operations Forces.  But our non-kinetic effects were just as important as our kinetic operations.  And in the end, the Anaconda strategy did what its name implies:  it gradually squeezed a good bit of the oxygen out of Al Qaeda in Iraq and, over time, significantly reduced its effectiveness, enabling the establishment of better security for the people and thus allowing progress in the other so-called lines of operation, as well.

Now we are seeing the awareness of the need for comprehensive, population-centric approaches take hold in other areas in the region as well.  In fact, I was in Islamabad on Tuesday, and the Pakistani Military and government have developed a reasonable counterinsurgency plan for their ongoing operations against the Taliban in the Northwest Frontier Province, designating one of their most competent corps commanders to coordinate support for the internally displaced persons, holding an all party political conference, reaching out to the people and the clerics, and so on.  The Saudi government has implemented, in an impressive manner, counterinsurgency principles in taking on the Al Qaeda threat that, four years ago, threatened to bring the Kingdom to its knees.  The Saudis have not only conducted superb counter-terrorist operations, they have also overhauled their operation of corrections facilities, established programs to rehabilitate detainees, incorporated families of terrorists in the resolution of problems, taken steps to reduce financing of extremists, and pursued other measures to help reduce the Al Qaeda threat in the kingdom.  And, of course, the recent strategy announced by President Obama for Afghanistan and Pakistan clearly recognizes the requirement for comprehensive, unified civil-military approaches, as well—albeit performed by the Pakistanis in the case of the effort in that country.  

REGIONAL COUNTERINSURGENCY—NOT JUST COUNTERINSURGENCY

While these developments are encouraging, having individual nations addressing the extremist threats inside their borders with counterinsurgency approaches is not enough.  Solutions applied only inside a nation’s borders will not suffice, because many of today’s violent extremist organizations are not just national entities, they are transnational in nature.  These organizations’ goals are not limited by borders, nor are their capabilities confined by traditional state boundaries.

We see this reality throughout the CENTCOM region.  For example, as Coalition and Iraqi forces have reduced the capabilities of Al Qaeda in Iraq, as Saudi Arabia has largely defeated Al Qaeda in the Kingdom, and as pressure has been applied against Al Qaeda in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan and in the Levant, we have seen some leaders and operatives displace to Yemen, where they have re-constituted the element known as Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.  Similarly, we and our coalition and Afghan partners cannot ultimately defeat the Taliban and other extremist elements in Afghanistan without complementary efforts in Pakistan.  Likewise, making lasting progress against Hezbollah in Lebanon requires addressing the support and influence provided by Iran through Syria.  The same is true for other elements in the region, like Hamas and Shia extremists operating in Iraq that are also supported by Iran.

Indeed, Al Qaeda and the other extremist elements in the region have a distinctly regional character.   They operate regionally, move funds regionally, shift forces regionally, and network regionally.  And some of them, Al Qaeda foremost among them, operate on a truly global level.  They are, at the least, regional threats.  And as such, they require regional and, in many cases, even global counterinsurgency solutions.  

A regional counterinsurgency approach requires a whole of governments (plural) effort, with countries coordinating across borders and along all lines of operation to assist each other in addressing extremist threats throughout the region—not just those within their own borders.  One could think of this as an Anaconda strategy writ large—a comprehensive effort by US, coalition, and regional partners to squeeze regional insurgencies with efforts on political, diplomatic, informational, and economic, as well as security, fronts.

This concept has gradually gained traction in the region, and there is, in fact, greater coordination, cooperation, and information sharing, as well as the provision of resources from one country to another.  CENTCOM’s efforts to build an ever more capable security architecture in the Gulf region are part of such an approach.

The concept of a comprehensive, whole of governments approach has also gained traction in the US interagency – though at times we have had to conduct a bit of an insurgency of our own in the interagency to help generate this traction.  But all elements of our government have generally been linking arms and working together to pursue comprehensive, whole-of-government approaches, essentially counterinsurgency approaches, to the regional and global extremist challenges we face.  

To be sure, some here rightly will observe that there is nothing new to this.  They will be among those who, as we say, “earned the T-shirt” doing counterinsurgency in Vietnam or El Salvador—and, in the case of Ambassador Negroponte, in Vietnam and El Salvador.  This will seem intuitively obvious to him, and to them.  But the fact is that the muscle memory in our departments—including in the Department of Defense—when it came to counterinsurgency and whole-of-government approaches was considerably diminished over the intervening years, and we have had to do a lot of discovery learning and undertake substantial institutional change, especially in our military, to get to the point we have reached today.

CONCLUSION

Ladies and Gentlemen, our country did not will the broad extremist challenges that confront the world in the Greater Middle East.  Much of our current involvement there stems from realist and idealist impulses in the wake of a cruel September morning seven-and-a-half years ago.  We have, to be sure, made mistakes and missteps since 9/11.  But we have also sought to learn and to adapt and to understand.  

As a witty soul once observed, war is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.  And in the years since 9/11, our soldiers, and our nation with them, have had to learn about Kirkuk and Kandahar, about Kut and Kabul.  We have been witnesses and partners in a great struggle playing out in the region that is CENTCOM’s area of responsibility—a struggle against oppressive practices and extremist ideologies of ruin and mayhem that would deny the world of true Islam its chance at decent rule and prosperity.  

Today, along with tens of thousands of U.S. civilians, more than 215,000 Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines, and Coast Guardsmen are hard at work in the CENTCOM area of responsibility.  They stand sentry in difficult settings, protecting our interests and advancing the life chances of people who want to defend their world against those who seek only to destroy it.  We have asked a lot of our young people, and they have responded magnificently.  Indeed, along with their gear and their skills, they carry with them not only American common sense and realism, but also that measure of idealism that has always marked America’s conduct and America’s message abroad.  They thus carry bits of Kennan and Kissinger and some of that great Princetonian Woodrow Wilson as well.  

It is on behalf of those troopers that I turn up among you this evening.  It is their sacrifices that have brought us together.  And it is on their behalf that I accept the award presented to me this evening.   In truth, you honor them – and I will take this award back to them, together with the message that they do not work and labor and fight alone.  Thank you very much.