Daniel Korski

Petraeus’ lonely fight

At last night’s Policy Exchange lecture, General David Petraeus said he had known the former CDS, Lord Guthrie of Craigiebank, since “he was simply Sir Charles.” I met Petraeus for the first time when he was simply a colonel, serving with NATO forces in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Even then he was thought of as a rising star. His leadership in Iraq, first in Mosul and then in Baghdad has only cemented his reputation.

Now, however, the scholar-warrior faces his probably greatest task – helping to defeat Taliban insurgents on both sides of the Durand Line. An effort, he said upon assuming command of CENTCOM in 2008, which might turn out to be “the longest campaign of the long war.”

Unfortunately, it may also be a campaign that the US ends up having to fight by itself. First of all, the mood inside NATO is becoming more and more defeatist by the day. If the Canadians and Dutch manage to pull out of ISAF in the next couple of years, as they have threatened to do, it is hard to see many other NATO allies staying beyond 2015, whatever the conditions on the ground. The Clegg-Ashdown article, with its suggestion of “a modern version of the old policy of Lord Curzon” to use air power and special forces to prevent the Taliban ever again marching on Kabul, has equivalents in the French, German and Dutch debates.

Second, even if other NATO allies stay for longer, it is hard to see how their militaries will adapt to the kind of close-quarter mentoring of local security forces that General Petraeus’ point man in Kabul, Stanley A.

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