Petraeus rewrites the playbook

„Gen. David Petraeus appears to be making a strategic pivot in Afghanistan, supplementing his primary mission as military commander with the »warrior-statesman« role he had in Iraq, where he was able to fuse the political and military elements of the campaign. Petraeus has long been a proponent of the idea that wars in tribal societies are inevitably a mix of talk and shoot. He pounded the Sunni and Shiite insurgents in Iraq, and at the same time he opened new channels for them to find a path to accommodation with the U.S.-backed government.

The American commander is adopting something of the same two-sided approach in Kabul, four months into his job as the leader of NATO forces in Afghanistan. He is shooting more, increasing special-operations raids and bombings on Taliban commanders. But he is also talking more -- endorsing President Hamid Karzai's reconciliation talks with Taliban officials and guaranteeing their safety to and from Kabul as a confidence-building measure.

This is all out of the Petraeus playbook and an example of how he uses sometimes-eccentric emissaries to pass conciliatory messages, even as he steps up the tempo of attacks. In Baghdad, Petraeus maintained an unusual back-channel network of Arab aides who could pay midnight visits to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and others to woo them to agree privately to what they refused to acknowledge publicly. It's an approach well suited to societies where helping others save »face« is an essential aspect of dealmaking. With Petraeus in the political-military driver's seat, he can steer a process to push the disparate Taliban groups toward a political settlement.”