في يناير 2012 استلمت كتاب الكاتبة برودويل مع زميلها  فيرنون لوب بالبريد وقبل ان يطلق في الاسواق لغرض عرضه في الصحيفة التي اعمل بها ..الكتاب يتحدث عن تجربة القائد العسكري الجنرال ديفيد بترايوس في افغانستان وبعض تجربته في العراق .. طرح الكتاب في الاسواق في بدايات فبراير وصار فورا على قمة قائمة الاحسن مبيعا حول العالم .. ولا عجب .. لمن يعرف المعية القيادة عندما تتفاعل مع قضايا الناس بصورة ايجابية 

Confront and Cooperate

Gulf News

By: Mayada Al Askari- Staff writer

Oh, it is a card move, I guess, where you are betting all your chips on the expectation that you have the winning hand, and knowing that if you don't, you are out of the game," said one of my American colleagues when I asked him what General David Petraeus's biography title, All In, meant.

However, after reading the book, I would like to think of the title in terms of how Petraeus functions — as he gives his all, and becomes all involved in the mission he is carrying out. It is always 101 per cent, and never less.

In this biography written by Paula Broadwell and Vernon Loeb, we get a picture of General Petraeus bearing the mantle of Grant, MacArthur and Eisenhower.

Military expert Broadwell initially set out to study, for her dissertation, the role of education, experience and key mentors on Petraeus's intellectual development, and examine these principles in action over his career. But when President Obama put him in charge of the war in Afghanistan in the summer of 2010, she decided to meld her research with an on-the-ground account of his command in Kabul. Broadwell was embedded with the commander on the front lines of fighting and was at the epicentre of strategic command in Afghanistan. Broadwell and Loeb also examine Petraeus's impact on the United States military.

The writers walk us through the year General Petraeus had to make the gains in Afghanistan that the president would need to begin his promised drawdown of forces in July 2011. They depict every detail in a manner which brings to life the way the general ran the command from his 1,400-person headquarters in Kabul.

Petraeus emphasised the importance of the civilian side of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, declaring, "Cooperation is not optional ... We are part of one team with one mission." He focused on results rather than the process.

The book points out how foreign funds fuelled Afghan corruption and how General Petraeus forced more accountability at the source. Instead of giving unqualified support to Kabul-appointed authorities, he put more trust in the popular local leaders, which is very similar to his counterinsurgency plan for Iraq when the country was on the threshold of a full-fledged civil war back in 2007. Local leaders in Afghanistan worked with his troops on the ground. Petraeus also had the excellent vision of creating local police units staffed by villagers themselves, under the control of the ministry of the interior. He believed rightly that this system was better than the Afghan National Army or the Afghan National Police for keeping the Taliban out of regions the US military had cleared. Security in Afghanistan, he believed, depended on cooperation from the bottom up, not imposition from the top down.

Petraeus's tenure in Afghanistan ended as suddenly as it began when he left to head the CIA. He had lost a political battle with the White House to keep the surge of troops in place through the autumn of 2012. As explained very well in the book, while General Petraeus may have been "all in", the Obama administration was all in, up to a point.

Petraeus considered resigning but dismissed that option as a "selfish, grandstanding move with huge political ramifications". Still, the pace of withdrawal may have been less important than the war's trajectory. As admitted by Petraeus himself, he was, in any case, more of a surge guy than a drawdown guy.

Petraeus is today the CIA chief, a position that may or may not hold harder challenges than fighting Al Qaida with his own bare hands, and all the bad blood that comes with it. But that will be left to the history of our era to decide.

For me, as I told Broadwell during our interview for Weekend Review, General Petraeus is the one man who saved my country, Iraq, from total destruction.