The top commander vs. Mr. “Supreme Command”

In the closing talk of the COIN conference, Gen. David Petraeus said that 70 percent of the violence in Afghanistan is in just 10 percent of the country’s districts. (Meaning that a troop-intensive counterinsurgency campaign might not need as many troops as you might think.)

I guess he missed the opening talk by former State Department counselor Eliot Cohen, author of the terrific study Supreme Command, about civilian leadership in war. One metric that drives him batty, he said, is when officials say, “Well, 75% of the violence occurs in 10 percent of the country,” an approach Cohen said he finds, “profoundly misleading.” First, he said, if we aren’t there, we don’t know how much violence is occurring. Second, he said, the place might be “completely quiet” because the Taliban have already won in that area.

Irony alert: Cohen was one of the people — and I think the first one — who, at a meeting in the White House in December 2006, advised President Bush to dump Gen. Casey and pick Gen. Petraeus to replace him as the top commander in Iraq.

Cohen, fwiw, remains a Petraeus fan. Speaking of him and Gen. McChrystal, he said, “I think they are both truly exceptional commanders, and exceptional human beings.”

Alex Wong/Getty Images for Meet the Press