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Petraeus’s confirmation hearing, Vice President Biden flew to MacDill Air Force Base, in Tampa, the home of Central Command headquarters, to have dinner with Petraeus and his wife as a show of support. One of Petraeus’s aides called it “the last supper.” Petraeus had been confirmed unanimously in a 99–0 vote by the Senate that day, and he departed for Afghanistan the next morning.
    VILLAGE BY VILLAGE , valley by valley, Afghanistan is one of the most forbidding, inhospitable places on earth to fight a major war. The soaring, snowcapped Hindu Kush range bisects the country, which is about the size of Texas, running from its eastern border with Pakistan to its western border with Iran. The average altitude is 14,000 feet, with some peaks reaching 25,000 feet. The hazards and hardships of fighting there were first brought home in the early days of the global war on terror, when seven service members died on a freezing mountain called Takur Ghar in March 2002.It was the largest combat loss of life in a single day since eighteen soldiers had died during the Black Hawk Down battle in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993. But by July 2010, the heaviest fighting had shifted to the lush terrain around the southern city of Kandahar, where canals, mud walls, vineyards and dirt roads had all been intricately seeded with deadly improvised explosive devices (IEDs)—roadside bombs by a fancier name. They were by far the biggest killers of American troops and their NATO allies.
    â€œEvery tiny piece of terrain out here exacts a terrible price,” Army Special Forces officer Major Fernando Lujan wrote to his former students at West Point [members of the “Long Gray Line”], who themselves would soon be serving in Afghanistan. “You just hope that commanders will learn quickly to pay only once. Don’t clear what you can’t hold. The Taliban will reclaim it before you finish walking or driving back to your base and lay IEDs along the way you came.” It is axiomatic in counterinsurgency warfare that land taken but not held becomes a victory for the insurgents. Once the insurgents return, the population feels abandoned. Lujan, starting a three-year tour rotation between Afghanistan and an Afghan-related billet in the United States, had just returned from an advisory mission with U.S. and Afghan units in the lush Arghandab River Valley, outside Kandahar, where Soviet forces staged their last offensive before withdrawing in defeat in 1989. His letter to his students captured the war Petraeus was about to inherit.
    Lujan described the “worst IED threat I have ever seen in my life” and said that the “insurgents have figured out how to make caveman-simple, pressure plate or command wire devices against which all our technology is worthless. We’re seeing a reverse evolution in tactics, and they’re deadly effective.” Lujan foreshadowed the fighting that was to come in the Arghandab District of Kandahar Province in the fall.
    By the time he wrote the cadets, Lujan was speaking Dari, sporting a heavy beard and wearing an Afghan uniform. Lujan had gone native in his role, melding his background and training as a Special Forces and foreign-area officer. He loved what he was able to do and figured that if he died in Afghanistan, it would have been for a worthwhile cause.
    Lujan, as a member of the Counterinsurgency Advisory and Assistance Team (CAAT), was part of Petraeus’s team of “directed telescopes,” and Petraeus would come to greatly value his insights. The directed telescope concept, once employed by Napoleon, is a process by which a senior commander uses aides or trusted advisers, often junior officers, to focus on issues beyond his sights, thus helping the commander expand his knowledge of the battlefield. As such, the CAAT was a group of current and former military officers, heavy on Special Operations experience and Ph.D.s, created a year earlier by