The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan (18 page)

We’re all here to fill the void, I offered, poorly explaining my favorite passage from
A Scanner Darkly
, a novel written by Philip K. Dick. Working stiff police officer Bob Arctor has the wife, the two kids, the power mower, the house. One day, he hits his head in the kitchen—the cobwebs cleared, he wanted out. “Nothing new could ever be expected. It was like… a little plastic boat that would sail on forever without incident, until it finally sank, which would be a secret relief to all.” Arctor immersed himself in drugs and paranoia and a cause—he goes undercover
as an agent to find his truer self in a “dark world where ugly things and surprising things and once in a while tiny wondrous things spilled out at him constantly.” Knowing, all the while, that the cause itself is a lie. I quoted Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, who’d spent a life assuming dozens of different identities, writing under fake names and bylines. In one passage, Pessoa describes the secret to living a boring, middle-class life: “To resign oneself to monotony is to experience everything as forever new… He, of course, would say none of this. Were he capable of saying it, he wouldn’t be capable of being happy.”

I bungled the quotations, but I thought I’d gotten the meaning across.

Duncan brought up my story. I’d been waiting for this conversation, some kind of official push back to address what I had seen and heard.

“These guys, the team, they are enamored with him,” he said, speaking of the general. “They are excited, excited to talk to you.”

“They’re impressive. I mean, I’d like to do a story that looks at the whole team, you know, that would be great.”

“There is some concern about Friday night.”

The night in Paris.

“Friday night, well, you know, I’m going to put it in the proper context—I can make sure of that.”

He had another drink, and I finished my bitter lemon.

“Keep our interest in mind when you’re writing the story,” he said. “We’re naive, haven’t really done this stuff before.”

“Okay,” I said, thinking of the half-dozen other profiles they’d done.

“I’ll be leaving in two days,” Duncan said. “Hopefully my plane doesn’t crash.”

“Fuck, that would really screw up my story,” I joked.

“I don’t think so. Then you could write what you wanted without worrying about me losing my job.”

I left. It was around three
A.M
.

 SEPTEMBER TO DECEMBER 2009, WASHINGTON, DC

There’s a funny thing about these wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: What drives the policy debate and media coverage is rarely what’s actually happening on the ground. Baghdad burns for years until Washington really pays attention to it. The reason Washington pays attention to Iraq is because the Democrats use the war as a political issue to hammer Bush on a daily basis. Baghdad is nearly as fucked-up in the fall of 2004 as it is in the fall of 2005 and the fall of 2006, but Washington cares about it only in ’04 and ’06, because there’s a presidential and then a congressional election coming up. Iraq today is unraveling—terrorist attacks and civilian casualties continue, and the Iraqi government is repressive and authoritarian—but there’s no political advantage for either Democrats or Republicans to point that out.

The same dynamic is at play in Afghanistan. The country is just slightly more fucked-up in the fall of 2009 than in the fall of 2008. However, Afghanistan isn’t the kind of divisive issue that anyone in DC really gets much mileage out of, so it’s ignored.

That changes on September 21, 2009.
Washington Post
reporter Bob Woodward publishes McChrystal’s confidential assessment of the war. The report’s conclusion is that we are on the verge of “mission failure.” The implication: McChrystal wants more troops.

Overnight, Afghanistan starts to matter in Washington.

There’s a lot of leakology about the document. Who leaked it? Who benefits? Whom does it hurt? It leaks four days after Michèle Flournoy, undersecretary of defense for policy, brought copies to members of Congress—maybe Congress leaked it, maybe Flournoy herself. If you’re giving it to Congress you have to figure it’s going to leak, right? Maybe Jim Jones leaked it—he’s close to Woodward, so that makes sense. Maybe McChrystal leaked it, or Gates, or Mullen, so they could put pressure on Obama. Maybe it’s just one of those random things—maybe there isn’t a very thoughtful motive and it’s just that Woodward, sitting across the desk, is such an amazing reporter (and he is that, no doubt) that he persuades his source to give it to him after an hour of conversation.

In Kabul, McChrystal learns that the assessment leaked. He’s pissed for about thirty minutes, but then he says, “Hey, maybe it’s better that it’s out there.”

The White House disagrees. The White House is furious.

For one, they’re pissed at McChrystal. Is McChrystal trying to fuck them, or is McChrystal politically naive? A White House official tells me the leak undercuts the strategic impact of the twenty-one thousand troops already sent. They didn’t even give the new troops a chance to turn things around.

On September 27, six days after the leak, a McChrystal interview airs on
60 Minutes
. During the interview, McChrystal lets it slip that Obama has spoken to him only once since he took over the war. That’s a headline. (What prompts the
60 Minutes
correspondent to ask that question? Could it be that McChrystal’s staff happens to mention it to the
60 Minutes
correspondent when the camera is off? McChrystal doesn’t think Obama is talking to him enough. Maybe putting a little calculated pressure
on him through the media, they’ll get the face time they want with the commander in chief. Maybe not so naive…)

The White House doesn’t like what happens in London, either. Four days after the
60 Minutes
interview, McChrystal gives a talk at the Institute for Strategic Studies. He’s asked about a policy option to draw down U.S. troops to focus on counterterrorism operations, an option that Vice President Joe Biden has been advocating. “The short answer is: no,” he tells the audience. He then says if Obama adopts that policy, it would lead to “Chaosistan.” He tells the audience he’s been encouraged to speak bluntly, though “they may change their minds and crush me someday.” (Chaosistan, it turns out, is also a name given to a classified CIA analysis.) He’ll tell a magazine that Biden’s plan is akin to fighting a fire by “letting just half the building burn down.”

This time, Obama summons him to a face-to-face meeting aboard Air Force One. Obama is in Copenhagen. They meet for less than an hour. McChrystal isn’t impressed. Another photo op—a direct response to the
60 Minutes
story. They believe it’s a photo op to convey the idea that “Hey, look, Obama does talk to his generals,” members of his team will tell me. The White House, says Duncan, is still in “campaign mode.” The incident, though, reveals that McChrystal can use the media to get what he wants—just fire up that Washington media! Soon after the
60 Minutes
story, McChrystal starts speaking to the president twice a month.

The leak, though, is the big one. The leak brings unwanted attention to the brand-new strategy review the Obama administration had quietly begun on September 13. It’s at least the fifth review of the Afghanistan war policy in just over a year for the United States government. It’s Obama’s second review of the strategy. The urgency behind the review, though, is not due to the existence of McChrystal’s strategic assessment. It’s because McChrystal’s strategic assessment
goes
public.

The Pentagon uses the media to force Obama’s hand. Before the review even begins, Petraeus calls a
Washington Post
columnist and tells him that the only viable option is a “fully resourced, comprehensive counterinsurgency
campaign.” McChrystal’s allies in the press rally to push his plan—inviting influential thinkers to the assessment team pays dividends. Stephen Biddle writes an essay supporting the strategy he helped devise. The Kagans do the same. As does Anthony Cordesman. For
The Washington Post
, Andrew Exum reviews a new book about Pat Tillman by Jon Krakauer—
Where Men Win Glory
. The book is hard on McChrystal, accuses him of being involved in the Tillman cover-up. Exum pans the book. He doesn’t mention McChrystal’s role in the cover-up, or mention him by name. Exum fails to disclose the fact he worked for McChrystal as an advisor. (The deception is egregious enough that the
Washington Post
ombudsman is forced to apologize for the oversight.) The same book is also reviewed in
The New York Times
—the reporter trashes the book as well. The review, rather strangely, doesn’t mention McChrystal’s role in the Tillman cover-up, either. This reporter, Dexter Filkins, publishes a glowing
New York Times Magazine
cover story on McChrystal the next month.

There are two camps in the debate over the Afghanistan policy: Team Biden and Team Pentagon. Biden wants a small footprint, Pentagon wants a big footprint. For guidance, the guys in the White House are reading
Lessons in Disaster
, a book about the Johnson administration’s disastrous decision to escalate in Vietnam. The guys in the Pentagon are flipping through
A Better War
, a book that argues that the military could have won Vietnam if the politicians in Washington had just given them more time. McChrystal presents three options to the president—80,000 more troops, 40,000 more troops, and 25,000 more troops. By shooting high, he’s hoping to get the middle number, what he truly wants.

The battle lines are drawn: Petraeus, Mullen, Gates, Hillary, and McChrystal are all pushing for at least forty thousand more troops. Biden, Eikenberry, Holbrooke, and Lute think that’s a mistake. They are ignored; all Eikenberry does is “whine,” according to a White House official. The White House claims the conclusion of the review isn’t preordained, but outside the White House bubble it’s clear from early on
that Obama is going to cave. “If he approves anything less than General McChrystal’s 40,000-troop option,”
The New York Times
points out, “Mr. Obama could face criticism from Republicans and some moderate Democrats.” Obama isn’t going to stand up to all that shiny brass. He doesn’t want to look weak. He’s intimidated by the crowd.

There’s another massive leak. On November 11,
The New York Times
runs a story about the memos Ambassador Eikenberry wrote. The two memos are devastating and scathing critiques of McChrystal’s strategy. They are also the most prescient. The cables explain, point by point, why the McChrystal strategy is doomed to fail. They say Hamid Karzai is “not an adequate strategic partner.” The memos say that sending more troops is likely to intensify “overall violence and instability” and leave the U.S. without an exit strategy. They call the projected transition to Afghan control “imprecise and optimistic” and the costs of the effort “astronomical.” Eikenberry points out that there is no Afghan civilian government to take over after the military operation, and that any such government would take “years to build.” He writes that “more troops won’t end the insurgency.” He also points out that Karzai has “explicitly rejected” the counterinsurgency proposal since being briefed on it. The memos, actually, read a lot like Matt Hoh’s resignation letter.

When McChrystal learns about the Eikenberry cables, he is incensed. His feelings infect his staff. “When was the last time Eikenberry even commanded troops?” Casey Welch tells me. All in all, it’s a bad sign—McChrystal’s own strategy calls for a civilian and military partnership, and now it’s public record that the top diplomat and top general in Afghanistan have radically different views of the war. More to the point, Karzai, the man who the United States will be relying on, doesn’t want any part of the strategy, either.

The White House credits itself for what it calls the most comprehensive foreign policy review ever conducted.

The first detailed account of this fall review appears a few months later in a book called
The Promise
, written by Jonathan Alter. Alter is a veteran
journalist and a Democratic insider in the White House. He’s got the sources and lays it out from President Obama’s perspective.

In page after page, Alter recounts the administration’s best efforts to get a handle on Afghanistan. Obama wakes up to the fact that Gates and Mullen and Petraeus might not have his best interests at heart. In the first week of October, Obama calls Gates and Mullen to the Oval Office. With a “cold fury,” according to the account of the meeting, Obama tells Gates and Mullen never to “box him in” again. He tells them the leaks are “disrespectful of the process” and harmful to the men and women deployed in Afghanistan. Mullen is “chagrined” by the meeting; Gates will go on to say in a speech that the generals and diplomats should give their advice “candidly but privately.” The White House believes they made their point, though an insider will tell journalist Richard Wolffe that Obama was “frustrated by the length of time to elicit everything he needed from the military.” The White House convinces itself that it is in control of the policy. The White House thinks McChrystal is “naive” and “in over his head” as far as the media.

During the review, Vice President Biden repeatedly suggests another plan. Rather than send a hundred forty thousand troops, why not do CT Plus, or counterterrorism plus? Rather than a comprehensive counterinsurgency plan, this would call for a smaller troop presence augmented by U.S. Special Forces and Predator drones, focused on hunting and killing Al-Qaeda. The glaring logical gap the Biden plan tries to address: There are “less than one hundred” Al-Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan, according to Jim Jones. So why do we need a hundred fifty thousand NATO troops to protect us from less than one hundred Al-Qaeda fighters? We know that the soldiers in Afghanistan won’t be fighting Al-Qaeda in the vast majority of the cases. They’ll be fighting local insurgents who are fighting (a) because they are in a civil war or (b) because there are foreigners on their land. McChrystal’s strategy has so little to do with Al-Qaeda that Senator Lindsey Graham has to remind McChrystal and Petraeus that they need to include more Al-Qaeda in their “message” to sell the war.
Obama will repeatedly ask his military commanders to outline the Biden option, but they never send Obama the plan.