The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan (2 page)
Read The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan Online
Authors: Michael Hastings
15. Petraeus Can’t Do Afghanistan,
and We Aren’t Going to Get Bin Laden
PART I
DELTA BRAVO
APRIL 7, 2010, MILTON, VERMONT
I dialed the strange number with a sequence of digits too long to remember. The tone beeped in a distinctly foreign way. My call went through to Afghanistan.
“Hello, Duncan? This is Michael Hastings from
Rolling Stone
.”
I was in a house on Lake Champlain, smoking a cigarette on a screened-in porch with a view of the Adirondacks. I put the smoke out in an empty citronella candle, went inside, and grabbed a notebook from the kitchen counter.
Duncan Boothby was the top civilian press advisor to General Stanley McChrystal, the commanding general of all U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. Duncan and I had been e-mailing back and forth for a month to arrange a magazine profile I was planning to write about the general. I’d missed his call yesterday. He’d left a message. This was the first time I’d spoken to him.
Duncan had a slight British accent, ambiguous, watered down. He told me I should come to Paris, France.
“We’re going to discreetly remind the Europeans that we bailed their ass out once,” he said. “It’s time for them to hold fast.”
Duncan explained the plan.
The visual: Normandy. D-day. The Allied forces’ greatest triumph. Bodies washed ashore then, rows of white crosses now.
The scene: McChrystal standing on the banks of the English Channel, remembering the fallen, a cold spring wind blowing up from Omaha Beach. He’s a “war geek,” Duncan said; he spends his vacations at battlefields. A few months ago, on a trip back to DC, on his day off he went to Gettysburg.
The narrative: The trip is part of a yearlong effort for McChrystal to visit all forty-four of the allies involved in the war in Afghanistan. This time, it’s Paris, Berlin, Warsaw, and Prague. It’s to shore up support among our friends in NATO—to put to rest what Duncan called “those funny European feelings about the Americanization of the war.” From my perspective, he told me, there would be something new to write about. No one had ever profiled McChrystal in Europe.
Duncan was a talker. He hinted: I’m in the know. I’m in the loop. I’m in the room.
“What do you make of Karzai’s outburst the other day?” I asked. Hamid Karzai, the U.S. ally and Afghan president, had threatened to join the Taliban, the U.S. enemy. He’d done so just days after President Barack Obama had met with him. “That make life difficult for you?”
Duncan blamed the White House.
“The White House is in attack mode,” he said. “It took President Obama a long time to get to Kabul. They threw the trip together at the last minute. We had six hours to get it ready. Then they came out of the meeting saying how much they slammed Karzai. That insulted him.”
I took notes. This was good stuff.
Duncan spun for McChrystal—the general had invested months of his time to develop a friendship with the Afghan president.
“Karzai is a leader with strengths and weaknesses,” he said. “My guy
has inherited that relationship. Holbrooke and the U.S. ambassador are leaking things, saying they can’t work with him. That undercuts our ability to work with him. For the McCains and the Kerrys to turn up, have a meeting with Karzai, criticize him at the airport press conference, then get back for the Sunday talk shows. Frankly, it’s not very helpful.”
I was surprised by his candidness. He was giving me his critique over the phone, on an unsecured line.
“This is close-hold,” Duncan said, using a military phrase for extremely sensitive information. “We don’t like to discuss our movements. But I would suggest getting to Paris next week. Wednesday or Thursday. We’ll do the trip to Normandy on Saturday.”
“Okay, great, yeah,” I said. “So I’ll plan to meet up with you guys next week. For travel, the main thing is—”
“You’ll probably want to go to an event with us on Friday at the Arc de Triomphe, maybe sit down for an interview with The Boss, then take a train out to Normandy, and meet us there.”
“Cool. As much as I can get inside the bubble, I mean, travel inside the bubble.”
“I’ll let you know on the bubble.”
He hung up.
I e-mailed my editor at
Rolling Stone
: “Can I go to Paris?”
IT’S NOT SWITZERLAND
SEPTEMBER TO NOVEMBER 2008, KABUL
A handful of staffers are watching television on the 32-inch flat screen outside the office of General David McKiernan at the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) headquarters in Kabul. The buildings that house ISAF (pronounced
eye-saf
) used to be home to a sporting club for the wealthiest in Afghanistan, but for the last eight years it’s been the headquarters for a succession of American generals who have run the war in this country. It doesn’t have the harsh look usually associated with a U.S. military base: There are trees, manicured lawns, and a beer garden with a wooden gazebo. Guard towers overlooking the garden are perched on cobblestone walls, just refurbished by the Turks, with shiny new paneling, like the interior of a Hilton Garden Inn.
It’s 7:00
A.M.
on September 4 in Afghanistan, 9:30
P.M.
on September 3 in St. Paul, Minnesota, and Sarah Palin is on the screen. She’s giving her acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. She’s getting cheers from the crowd, the crowd is going nuts, but it’s too early in the morning in Kabul for anybody to be excited. The door to McKiernan’s office is open—it looks like a headmaster’s office at a boarding school, all
dark oak and thick carpet—and the general passes in and out, checking early-morning e-mail. He overhears a few lines of Palin’s speech as she gushes about her husband, Todd. “Sounds like someone’s running for prom queen,” McKiernan says with a smile.
McKiernan has more than a passing interest in the 2008 presidential election. The next commander in chief is going to be his boss. He’s been on the job since June, planning to stay for a two-year tour. It’s what he’d promised the Afghan generals, the diplomats, and his NATO allies.
It’s the fifty-seven-year-old general’s second chance to run a war. He got screwed in Iraq. He pissed off Don Rumsfeld, and Don Rumsfeld doesn’t forget. McKiernan was in charge of invading that country, and his plan called for more troops to prevent an insurgency from springing up. Rumsfeld didn’t want to hear it; Rumsfeld wanted to go in as small as possible. (And, by the way, a year earlier, McKiernan had testified to defend the Crusader artillery weapons system, a program Rumsfeld wanted killed.) After seeing McKiernan in Iraq, Rumsfeld judges the general to be “a grouch, resisting the secretary of defense,” as one retired admiral who advised the Pentagon puts it.
So after Baghdad falls, McKiernan is supposed to take over. Doesn’t happen. He ends up in limbo, or what passes for limbo when your country is at war in two countries—commanding the U.S. Army in Europe. His promotion to fourth star gets held up. He doesn’t get it for two more years, and even then over Rumsfeld’s objections.
During that time, the military world is changing. Iraq is a mess. Americans blame Bush, they blame Rumsfeld, they blame neoconservatives, oil men, Israel, the media, Dick Cheney, Halliburton, Blackwater, Saddam. The U.S. military, by and large, escapes the blame—they were just following orders. The public gives them a pass.
Not so within the ranks: There’s score-settling and finger-pointing going on. The finger points to an entire generation of military commanders. The poster boy is General George Casey—he oversaw Iraq’s complete spiral to shit and didn’t stop it, didn’t adapt, or so the story goes. He’s got
gray hair. He’s old-school. To top it off, Casey gets promoted to Army Chief of Staff—he gets rewarded for the mess.
McKiernan is old-school, too. He’s not one of these new-school generals, like a Dave Petraeus or a Stan McChrystal. Petraeus already has a historic reputation, and McChrystal is an up-and-coming star, currently working on the Joint Staff at the Pentagon. McKiernan is part of the old generation, or so they claim. He gets dubbed the Quiet Commander; headlines call him “low-key” during his time in Iraq. Even in the midst of an invasion, “he is rarely known to swear.” “In any type of a chaotic situation,” another general says of him, “he’ll be in the middle of it, directing things without emotion.” He’s a golfer, shoots in the seventies. He was on the debate team in high school. His best friend growing up says he “tended to be shy.” He hates PowerPoint and prefers a “walkabout style” of leadership to long-winded briefings, according to his colleagues.
He doesn’t have a deep fan base in the media, either. He doesn’t like to get his picture taken, doesn’t suck up enough when visitors from Congress come over to check out the front lines. McKiernan wouldn’t think to send an autographed picture of himself to a journalist, as David Petraeus once did. That’s not McKiernan’s style—he doesn’t even have a good nickname. At over six feet, with silver hair and a handsome square-jawed face, he could be typecast as the father in a teen movie who scares the hell out of any boy stupid enough to take his daughter to the prom.
He still gets his shot at Afghanistan, though. He’s next in line. The old school rules still hold sway on the promotion board.
It’s been a bit of an awkward transition, partly because President Bush wants to pass off Afghanistan to the next president. McKiernan says a few things that aren’t quite diplomatic: He notes that some of those European allies seem to treat war “like summer camp.” Even more awkwardly, in October, Dave Petraeus, once his underling, now becomes his superior. Dave gets the job as CENTCOM commander, which means he has oversight of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Not the worst situation, he thinks, just a bit uncomfortable.
A month after Palin’s acceptance speech, the presidential election is on television again at ISAF HQ. This time, the staff gathers to watch the vice presidential debate. It’s Senator Joe Biden from Delaware, squaring off against the governor of Alaska, Palin. Afghanistan is a hot topic in the debate, and they’re listening to see where the candidates stand, what they can expect. McKiernan has had a troop request on the table at the White House for months, asking for some thirty thousand more soldiers. The White House has resisted—they want NATO to pony up the reserves, and McKiernan is hoping the next administration will give him the soldiers he’s asked for.
