Elated, the Directed Telescopes planned a command conference, at which he would explain this new approach to his subordinate officers, flown in from their headquarters around Afghanistan. We had already traveled out to some regions, to begin "socializing" the novel ideas.
But when he stood up to address the assembled brass, Petraeus seemed to skip past -- or even argue against -- the slides we had prepared explaining the new governance approach. We were stunned. What had happened? Had we misunderstood? Had he changed his mind?
For another month, we kept at it; I hammered out a detailed implementation of our general concept to be employed in Kandahar province, alongside the troop surge. But by mid-September 2010, it was clear to me that Petraeus had no intention of implementing it, or of pursuing any substantive anti-corruption initiative at all. Four months later, in an intense interagency struggle over the language of a document spelling out objectives for Afghanistan by 2015, the U.S. government, at the cabinet level, explicitly reached the same decision.
That was the moment I understood the Afghanistan mission could not succeed.
I spent weeks wracking my brain, trying to account for the about-face. Eventually, after a glance in my calendar to confirm the dates, it came to me. It was the Salehi arrest. The Salehi arrest had changed everything.
In those fervid days immediately after Salehi's release, Petraeus swung into energetic action. Karzai was blustering against the two special Afghan police teams, the Sensitive Investigations Unit (SIU), which had been developing the massive and complex Kabul Bank case, and the newer Major Crimes Task Force (MCTF), focused specifically on corruption, whose officers had executed the Salehi arrest warrant. Karzai would disband them both, he swore. Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry rallied much of the international community in defense of the two teams, and the red line held.
Then Karzai went after the special anti-corruption prosecutors. U.K.-financed top-up salaries, bringing their pay from $200 per month to $800 (for taking on some of the most ruthless and well-funded Afghan criminals), were cancelled by an Afghan government crying interference. Prosecutors on the Salehi case were demoted, sent to the provinces. The Afghan government barred U.S. Department of Justice attorneys from mentoring their Afghan counterparts on anti-corruption cases. This time, no one stepped up. No support came from the international community.
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