America hopes General Petraeus will do in Afghanistan what he did in Iraq. Afghans fear he might, writes Graham Usher General David Petraeus spent his first weeks as commander of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan briefing senators, meeting Afghan President Hamid Karzai and, on 12 July, visiting Pakistan Army chief General Ashfaq Kayani, the man and the institution many feel hold the keys to what by October will be America's longest war. At all events Petraeus warned "the going inevitably gets tougher before it gets easier." And at all events he was received as a kind of saviour. The Senate approved his nomination to head the Afghan war by 99 votes to zero, a unity unknown in a House rent by discord. "The Senate's quick action and General Petraeus's unrivalled experience will ensure we do not miss a beat in our strategy to break the Taliban's momentum and build Afghan capacity," said Barack Obama. The US president had sacked Petraeus's predecessor, General Stanley McChrystal, after a magazine interview in which McChrystal derided US civilian leaders engaged in Afghanistan, including Obama. In many ways the accolades showered on Petraeus are remarkable. On every index America is losing in Afghanistan. June was the bloodiest month for the occupation since the Taliban was ousted in 2001, with 102 US and NATO soldiers killed. The offensive on Kandahar, perhaps the US most critical Afghan mission if it is to break the back of the Taliban, has stalled on insurgent resistance and Afghan reluctance. And the goal of trying to protect Afghan civilians looks a sham. It's true -- notes a recent report by the Afghanistan Rights Monitor (ARM) -- that, at 94, Afghan civilian casualties from US airstrikes are down by half from last year, due to new directives from McChrystal. But 210 civilians have been otherwise killed by US or NATO raids, strikes and shootings in 2010, consequences of McChrystal's "surge" strategy of increasing US forces by 30,000 men. This is a spike on last year. Seven hundred Afghan civilians have also been killed by insurgents, most from roadside bombs. With 1,000 dead in less than six months, 2010 is becoming the worst year of the war for civilians too, says ARM. Petraeus is hardly blameless in this failure. Not only as head of US Central Command was he McChrystal's superior; he authored the counterinsurgency strategy McChrystal adopted and Obama approved. The surge in US troops, rapidly building up Afghan military forces and empowering the Karzai regime to become the tipping force in a civil war against the Taliban are all goals that have their provenance in Petraeus's time as head of occupation forces in Iraq in 2007-2009. None are working, so why the accolades? The answer lies in the myth, fashioned mostly by the US media, that it was Petraeus's 2007 policy of a surge in US troops that singlehandedly turned the war in Iraq. Since then, violence has declined in Iraq, down from an average of 2,600 deaths a month in 2006 to 300 today. Al-Qaeda has been weakened. But neither outcome was due to the surge. After the fall of Saddam Hussein, there were in effect two wars being fought in Iraq. One was a mostly Sunni insurgency against the US-led occupation. The other was what amounted to a civil war in Baghdad and central Iraq between Sunni and Shia Arabs. The Sunni insurgents held their own against the occupation. But they were roundly beaten by the Shia. One measure gives a scale of the defeat. Pre-occupation Baghdad was a multi-confessional city. Today -- according to a survey published last year by Columbia University -- there are a few hundred thousand Sunnis in a city of five million. The majority is overwhelmingly Shia. Fear of further loss was the reason many insurgents decided to back the occupation and turn their guns on Al-Qaeda. Petraeus put nearly 100,000 militiamen from Anbar province on the US payroll. He bought quiet and has enabled a relatively smooth US exit. But he didn't bring peace to Iraq, nor change what many see as its lethal dynamic toward war. While many Sunnis voted in the Iraqi elections in March, few of their leaders are resigned to Shia supremacy in Iraq. And the main Shia and Kurdish parties are currently working to exclude Iyad Allawi's Iraqiya list from government, despite it coming first in the poll. Most Sunnis voted for Iraqiya. Politics, in other words, has become the continuation of the war by other means. Iraq is not a success for Petraeus's strategy: it's a failure waiting to happen. Failure is at the door in Afghanistan. Yet Petraeus's remedies are drawn from the same Iraqi pool. He reportedly wants to train, arm and turn dozens of Pashtun villages into anti-Taliban militia, akin to the Awakening movement in Anbar. Karzai is said to be opposed, seeing the policy as the seed of yet more Afghan warlords and yet more war. Instead he wants political negotiations with the Taliban, predicated on the ultimate withdrawal of foreign forces but supported by regional states like Pakistan, Iran, Russia, China, Saudi Arabia and India. It's not clear whether this will end Afghanistan's three decades long civil war. But it stands a better chance than the myth of General Petraeus.
