Kagan authored the "real Iraq Study Group" report as the American Enterprise Institute's rival to the Iraq Study Group report of James Baker and Lee H. Hamilton in December 2006. The AEI report, Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq, was released on January 5, 2007, and Kagan was said to have won over the ear of President George W. Bush,[3] strongly influencing his subsequent "surge" plan for changing the course of the Iraq War. Along with retired General Jack Keane, retired Colonel Joel Armstrong, and retired Major Daniel Dwyer, Kagan is credited as one of the "intellectual architects" of the surge plan.[4] According to Foreign Policy magazine, Kagan's essay "We're Not the Soviets in Afghanistan" influenced the strategic thinking of US Defense SecretaryRobert Gates, which reportedly influenced Gates's decision to support sending 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan.[5]
Remarking on the surge in 2015, Kagan said that while the AEI group convened that "it never occurred to me or anybody that was involved in this that we were going to affect policy. It was simply 'Maybe we can put some concrete numbers on the table, some concrete enemy on a map, some concrete units on a grid, and force other people who want to have this discussion to wrestle with the specifics of the problem.'"[6]
In 2010, U.S. Army General David H. Petraeus, who was appointed by President Barack Obama to head international forces in Afghanistan, hired Kagan as one of two experts on fighting corruption.[7] An article in The Washington Post on December 19, 2012, discussed the relationship that the Kagans had with General Petraeus and, to a much lesser extent, with his successor in July 2011, General John R. Allen. It discussed various visits made by the Kagans from mid-2010, including their having been given access to the Combined Joint Intelligence Operations Center in Petraeus's headquarters. It commented on and raised questions about their sponsorship by defense contractors through the American Enterprise Institute. It also detailed how the Kagans had become involved in Iraq in 2007 under an initiative by General Stanley A. McChrystal, who was their first introduction to Afghanistan in 2010.[8]