Posted by Tina
** It will take humanity as well as guns to beat the Taliban, says General David
Petraeus *** Sometimes a mans appearance can be misleading. This one is about 5ft 9in tall, not especially powerful in build; he has ears that stick out and teeth that seem too big for his mouth and he walks with a slightly asymmetric tilt. Yet this is General David Petraeus, the warrior whose surge saved America from a humiliating scuttle out of Iraq and who is now the head of United States Central Command (Centcom). *** Only when Petraeus engages in conversation does everything snap into place. Each of his words is chosen with painstaking precision and the gaze is similarly well directed. Above all there is a sense of restless intelligence; so perhaps it is not so extraordinary that this 56-year-old soldier has been named the worlds leading public intellectual by a panel nominated by two prominent magazines of the thinking classes, Prospect and Foreign Policy. **
** The winners citation declared: The so-called Petraeus doctrine is the only written piece of intellectual output in the last two years that has made a direct difference to the lives of millions. It is the first actively humane warfighting doctrine to come out of the Pentagon, enshrining the idea that winning a modern war requires ensuring the security and wellbeing of the civilian population. Petraeus has also waged a war of ideas against many in Washington who argued that fewer constraints and more ruthless tactics were required in Iraq. And, it points out, he won. *** Petraeus, who tells me that the most powerful tool any soldier carries is not his weapon but his mind, has the distinctive battle honour of the intellectual, namely a PhD. His was won in the examination halls of Princeton, with a 328-page doctoral dissertation entitled The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam. *** It seems Petraeus drew precisely the opposite conclusions from the Vietnam war to those drawn by the likes of General Colin Powell. Powell believed that the US army should become a machine that delivered a massive, technologically awe-inspiring military punch at high speed but would not get involved in nation-building or the messy stuff. In contrast, Petraeus believes that we dont get to choose what kinds of wars we fight and that the lesson of Vietnam is not that the US army should avoid counterinsurgency, but that it should become much better at it. Petraeuss Princeton dissertation of 1987 also forecast that this would be made necessary in any case by the rise of terrorism. *** Although Petraeus is now associated indelibly with the USs attempt to nation-build in Iraq, dont forget that in 2003, as a major-general, he commanded the 101st Airborne Division, which undertook the longest helicopter assault in military history. Has he become in any way hardened as a result of these experiences? If you mean: did I get hardened to losses, to casualties, I never found that I did. They never got any easier to accept. You have to keep thinking about it, otherwise its as though the casualty reports are like water poured into a vessel with holes, and it shouldnt be like that. I would make a point of going personally to the memorial ceremonies whenever possible and certainly when there were multiple losses. **