The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan (11 page)

The eruption had happened on April 14—I was flying from New York to Paris while the eruption was taking place. By the time I landed, European countries had already started to close their airspace. I’d gotten out on one of the last flights from America without knowing it. And now I was stuck in Paris.

I improvised.

The evening before, Dave made an offer: Come to Berlin with us. After last night’s drunken spectacle, I was starting to get pretty psyched about the assignment. I couldn’t quite believe how the story was playing out. I was getting the perfect material for a profile, beyond all my expectations. For the past few years, I’d wanted to write an in-depth profile of a general. Now I was waiting for someone to tap me on the shoulder and say, “Hey, asshole, wake up, this isn’t what you think.”

Over the past year, journalists had regularly been given intimate access to McChrystal and his staff. A reporter for
The New York Times
spent a few days in Kabul with him, producing a profile that found McChrystal’s only fault was that he worked so hard, “he sometimes affords little tolerance for those who do not.” He described his running habits: “eight
miles a clip, usually with an audiobook at his ears.” A writer from
The Atlantic
had enjoyed a good stay, writing an article titled “Man Versus Afghanistan.” He asked if McChrystal was Afghanistan’s only hope. He found reason to believe: McChrystal’s “eight miles a day, eating one meal a day, and sleeping four hours a night—itself expresses an unyielding, almost cultic, determination.”
Time
magazine had put him as runner-up for Person of the Year, opening with an anecdote about a competitive “eight to ten mile” run he had with General Petraeus.
60 Minutes
spent the most personal time with him: He allowed them to film him while he was jogging around the base. They’d all told the same story: McChrystal as a modern combination of saint and ninja, a “Jedi Knight,” as
Newsweek
called him. The stories, to me, rang false.

I’d seen another side of his personality. I didn’t quite know why they had shown it to me. Perhaps, I thought, because I was with
Rolling Stone
and they wanted to play the part of rock stars? (“On the cover of the
Rolling Stone
!” the Flynns had yelled.) Or maybe the side I’d been shown was there all along, and no one else had decided to write about it?

We’d grown accustomed to seeing the general as a superman—and the press rarely challenged this narrative in their coverage. We’d been bombarded with hagiographic profiles and heroic narratives of almost all our military leaders. When there were criticisms of generals, it usually came too late: after they’d left command, in score-settling books, sanitized magazine stories, and agenda-driven tell-alls.

Here, I realized, was a chance to tell a different story, to capture what the men running the war actually said and did. What I’d been seeing and hearing was distinctly human: frustration, arrogance, getting smashed, letting off stress. The wars had been going on for nearly ten years, and it had clearly taken its toll. I’d interviewed dozens of top military officials—including General David McKiernan, General Ray Odierno, General Peter Chiarelli, General George Casey. But McChrystal appeared to represent a new kind of military elite, a member of a warrior class that had lost touch with the civilian world. He’d spent much of the last decade
overseas consumed by the conflict, preferring war zones to Washington. He’d seen his wife, Annie, fewer than thirty days a year since 2003. When he and his men did have to deal with civilians, they were accustomed to the ritual genuflections of awe. As one State Department official who worked with McChrystal had told me, “First, I wondered why McChrystal was so hard on his military staff, but not on his civilian staff. I figured it out… He doesn’t really understand civilians—he doesn’t truly understand what their purpose is, doesn’t see how they are useful.”

The military itself was an isolated society—less than 1 percent of the U.S. population served or had any connection to the ongoing wars. It had its own culture and moral code. A recent survey of over four thousand active-duty military officers found that 38 percent believed civilians shouldn’t have control over military decisions during wartime. The American public—with an overwhelming apathy—had lost touch with the military, too. We started to mistake putting “Support Our Troops” bumper stickers on our cars and watching F-16s doing flyovers at the Super Bowl for civic participation. The guilt that many felt for not serving was covered up by an uncritical attitude toward those who did. No one wanted a repeat of the hatred shown toward veterans after Vietnam—a fear that had been regularly exploited to the government’s advantage as a way to shut down all criticism of its military adventures.

As a country, we’d changed since Vietnam—the ghost McChrystal and his generation of military leaders desperately wanted to exorcize. The fear that their wars, too, could end in disgrace: “It’s not going to look like a win, smell like a win, or taste like a win,” Major General Bill Mayville, McChrystal’s director of operations, would tell me. “This is going to end in an argument.” An argument they were determined to win. One of the first books McChrystal read after arriving in Kabul was Stanley Karnow’s
Vietnam: A History
. McChrystal called the author to ask if there were any lessons he could apply to Afghanistan. “The main thing I learned is that we never should have been there in the first place,” Karnow reportedly told him. It wasn’t what the general wanted to hear. In the Vietnam
War, McChrystal’s story would have been told as one of a deadly killer, devoid of the heartwarming tales of sacrifice and dedication and jogging that politicians and journalists had wrapped him in. In our cultural memory, he would have landed the role of Colonel Walter E. Kurtz in
Apocalypse Now
, the true killer in self-imposed exile, a reminder of the hypocritical morality of the nation, hiding along the banks of the river fighting an illegal war in Cambodia.

“Every man has a breaking point,” the general explains to Captain Willard in Francis Ford Coppola’s movie, briefing him on his mission to exterminate Kurtz. “You and I have one. Walter Kurtz has obviously reached his. And very obviously, he has gone insane.” Willard pauses, hungover. “Yes, sir, very much so, sir. Obviously insane.”

The lesson our leaders took from Vietnam was not, it turns out, how to avoid another Vietnam. It was how to seal off the horror: to ensure that only a small group felt and saw it. An all-volunteer military, and a further reliance on the most elite, specialized soldiers to do the nation’s work we prefer to ignore. Entering houses at midnight and shooting unarmed men while they sleep. A widespread acceptance of drone strikes, killings committed by remote control—McChrystal watched a man on a video feed in his headquarters for seventeen days before he ordered the strike on a compound to kill Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. He went to see the dead man’s body; the pictures of the corpse were displayed at a press conference, a modern-day version of putting a man’s head on a spike. Compartmentalize the horror, then embrace it. No need to leave Kurtz on the riverbank when you can give him the job running the war.

“He’s a poet-warrior in the classic sense,” says the photojournalist, played by Dennis Hopper. “I mean, sometimes he’ll, uh, well, you’ll say hello to him, right? And he’ll just walk right by you, and he won’t even notice you… If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you, if you can trust yourself when all men doubt you—I mean, I’m no—I can’t—I’m a little man, I’m a little man, he’s,
he’s a great man. I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across floors of silent seas—I mean…”

So far, I’d sensed an aura of recklessness around McChrystal and his men. From my conversations with them, it seemed they were sure that McChrystal was fighting the war on his own. They had convinced themselves that only he truly understood the stakes—stakes civilians like the vice president, who had dared to question the wisdom of McChrystal’s plan, didn’t get. Or the president himself, who had visited the front only once, couldn’t comprehend. And if McChrystal and his men believed they were indispensable to the war, then those who could be easily replaced—ambassadors, special envoys, presidents, civilians, journalists—could be dismissed with casual disdain and contempt. McChrystal, on the contrary, deserved only reverence for his sacrifices—which he regularly received from the press and his subordinates, among others—giving them a feel of the untouchable. “McChrystal,” as a State Department official would tell me at the time, reflecting on this attitude, “can’t be fired.”

I’d put enough time in Baghdad and Kabul to gain the credibility to be there, in Paris, with them—and a strange twist of fate might keep me in place.

Every reporting instinct I had said, “Don’t blow it.” Hold tight. Stay with them as long as possible. Go to Berlin. Forget Washington.

I texted Duncan at noon.

Hey man, can I join you all in Berlin? Fucking volcano!

  JUNE TO AUGUST 2009, KABUL AND BRUSSELS

On June 26, Gates asks McChrystal to write a strategic assessment of the war. McChrystal gets sixty days to do it, starting July 1. He decides to bring in a group of outside military experts to help write it.

The thinking is twofold: to get ideas so they’re not “drinking our own bathwater,” as McChrystal tells me, and, more important, to bring in influential Washington voices who’ll be able to help sell the plan back home.

About a dozen civilians get the invite, including Catherine Dale, Andrew Exum, Fred Kagan, Kimberly Kagan, Jeremy Shapiro, Stephen Biddle, Terence Kelly, and Anthony Cordesman. They are all well-known inside the Beltway’s foreign policy community.

It’s short notice. They want them in Afghanistan by the first week of July. Exum is the youngest member of the team at thirty-one. Exum did two tours in Afghanistan, the first when he was twenty-two. “I was back to save the war,” he tells me. Cordesman is the oldest, at seventy-one. Biddle, based at the Council on Foreign Relations, is perhaps the most
influential: He’s planned a vacation at the Basin Harbor Club in Vermont, and he has to reschedule the two weeks he’s supposed to teach in July.

They’re looking for problems, and they find them. The team gets ferried around the country—Kabul and Khost and Kandahar. They get briefs from intel officers. The intel people tell them about the Quetta Shura—the name for the Taliban’s leadership council hiding in the city of Quetta, Pakistan. They show them PowerPoint slides with key leaders and map out insurgent networks with aplomb.

But those aren’t the answers the team wants. In one meeting, Exum drills down on the briefers. Who controls the water? Who are the local power brokers? Tell me how they are related to the insurgency.

The intel officers shrug. The questions “scare the hell out of them,” says Exum.

Another member of the team grills a Special Forces commander: Who owns this land? What are the disputes? What tribes do they belong to? More shrugs: We don’t know.

The assessment team raises another big question: Why are we fighting in Helmand? It’s a question McChrystal has as well. Helmand is a province in southern Afghanistan. The ongoing offensive in Helmand is costing an American or allied life every four days. What’s it getting us? Helmand has no major population centers. Its primary source of agricultural income is poppy plants. The people are not educated. Helmand is Pashtun, so inclined to support the Taliban. The priorities should be Khost in the east and Kandahar down south, the assessment team determines.

Helmand represents the warped logic of the war: We’re there because we’re there. And because we’re there, we’re there some more. It’s too late to abandon Helmand—McNeill started it, McKiernan put resources there, and McChrystal has to finish it. It’s the momentum; the military has a “fetish for completion,” says one member of the assessment team. It is against every martial instinct to withdraw, to retreat, to leave land where blood has been spilled. Even when that land has very little strategic
significance, leaving is traumatic. The least significant places like the Korengal and Wagyal valleys will be abandoned to concentrate forces elsewhere in the upcoming year. It’s painful to do so. “It hurt,” one soldier lamented. “We all lost men. We all sacrificed.” Another soldier: “It confuses me why it took so long to make them realize that we weren’t making progress up there.” A U.S. military official will tell me: “What were we doing there, anyway?” It’s almost more painful to realize that leaving those valleys is as meaningless as staying in those valleys—no impact on our national security or the stability in Afghanistan whatsoever.

(McChrystal doesn’t think fighting in Helmand is a good idea, he tells U.S. military and civilian officials. No one seems to think fighting in Helmand is a good idea yet… They keep fighting in Helmand, and within nine months McChrystal launches another major operation there.)

Back at ISAF, the assessment team gets put into a small office room, next to the headquarters. There’s a midsize table, with computers along the wall and computers in the middle. The text of the paper is blasted up on a small screen, like a movie theater. The computer processors are making heat. It’s hot as fuck outside. The air-conditioning doesn’t work. It’s a miserable place to work.

There’s a clash of political perspectives. The Kagans are neoconservatives, a husband-and-wife team, a dual-headed beast. The Kagans like to take credit for the Iraq surge and are the most hawkish in the group. The Kagans are close to General Petraeus. Kim Kagan runs a joint in Washington called the Institute for the Study of War.