The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan (20 page)

He finished: “We’ve made more mistakes than you can imagine since we’ve been there.”

There was a ten-minute question-and-answer period.

A German foreign affairs expert noted: I noticed you spent forty-five minutes talking about the war and mentioned Al-Qaeda only once. He’d nailed the gaping flaw in the entire premise of the war—if it was supposed to be about terrorism, how was it that the vast majority of our resources and energy were directed at insurgent networks that posed no threat to Western Europe or the United States?

After the presentation, I walked outside on the mezzanine. Dave was there, working the phones. Dave was pissed. Dave was trying to get the general back to Afghanistan, but Ocean 11 was still grounded. Dave spoke to an Air Force colonel on the phone. He pointed out that commercial pilots were now flying out of the airport. The Air Force colonel told him: Commercial pilots are allowed to take more risks than Air Force pilots.

“One of Dave’s jobs is to remind the USAF that they’re worse than the French,” Duncan said.

Dave looked over the mezzanine into the lobby. He spoke in compact bursts—acronym-laden language that packed as much information as possible into short sentence fragments. He arranged things, fixed things, did the logistics. I listened in.

“Yeah, Jeff. The attaché’s office. I just got off the phone with your attaché again. I said, ‘Hey, listen, there’s some confusion from both sides. The pilots are in the middle.’ I said, ‘Do me a favor, please call the AMD at 603, USAV, and give them the no-kidding situation here in Berlin.’ That’s happening now. As for the waivers, do me a favor. Give me a point of contact. If you just text me it, then I’ll call. Can you hold on one second, Jeff? [Answers the other line.] This is Dave. Yeah, this is Dave Silverman. Yeah. Yeah. With the German MOD here in Berlin. We leave right now to depart there for a 1230 meeting with the minister of defense. Okay, bye. [He switches back.] Hey, Jeff? Hey, Jeff, you there? Jeff, hello? Motherfucker. One second…”

Next on the schedule was a ceremony at the Ministry of Defense. Dave, Duncan, and I jumped into a taxi.

“This fucking volcano is the bane of my existence,” Dave said.

Dave got an e-mail forwarded to him: In March, McChrystal had gone on patrol with a unit in southern Afghanistan. One of the soldiers in the unit had been killed—one of the guys McChrystal had met. Another member of the unit e-mailed McChrystal the news. Dave started to
read out loud what the soldier, Staff Sergeant Israel Arroyo, had written to McChrystal:

“ ‘It comes from the battlefield. It is not about the loss of the soldier, but the preservation of that soldier’s will to give it all knowing they were willing to sacrifice for their country… comrades, friends, and family. That’s why we soldiers still stay in the fight. I’ve lost three soldiers on this squad this year. Still stay in the fight. Not for me, but for my fallen heroes. For their memories and families. The bond between soldiers is stronger than anything in the world. Even when one dies, the other will live to tell about a great comrade or friend. This bond no soldier has ever lost, always. Amen.’ ”

“So this sergeant who wrote to him…” Duncan said.

“Not exactly sure, but definitely one of the guys on patrol with him was killed,” Dave said.

“Man, the guys he went down to explain firsthand…” I said.

Dave’s attention switched back to the event at the Ministry of Defense. “Where are we standing in the road…” Dave said.

“Are the press not allowed in? Do they have to do their shots from outside? I see they are doing their shots,” Duncan said as we pulled up to the back of the Ministry of Defense.

Dave looked back down at his BlackBerry and continued reading Arroyo’s account of what had killed his friend.

“ ‘Sir, we were doing an RNS patrol three hundred meters from the COP. The ANA saw lights in because they know us and the villagers. Three to four steps back, Corporal Ingram entered and stepped on an AP mine that day, killing him and wounding two others: the medic, PFC Carlson, and PFC Hill. I was lucky because nothing happened to me, but my bell rung pretty hard. Ingram made it to… KAF, but didn’t make it. Corporal Ingram’s last words to me before he loaded on the bird that day was to write to you. With sadness in my heart, I do so.’ ”

“Jesus Christ,” I said.

“What did he write back?” Duncan said.

Dave started reading out part of McChrystal’s response.

“ ‘Israel, there is not much I can say to a soldier’s leader who has felt the reality of this in a way that many others will find difficult to understand. I hope you understand and accept my thoughts and prayers to you and your entire squad. After a month meeting and walking with you, the bombs were…’ ”

We got out of the car and were met by a U.S. military official from the Berlin embassy. Dave and Duncan inspected the grounds. The ceremony was to take place behind the Ministry of Defense building. There was a smooth stone courtyard with a pathway leading into the new war memorial. During World War II, the building was the headquarters for the German military; it was also the spot where the coup against Hitler was attempted in 1944. The conspirators were executed in the courtyard, and there was a memorial to German Resistance fighters placed inside the compound to remember them. The ceremony for McChrystal, though, was at a newer memorial, built the year before and dedicated to the 3,100 soldiers and civilians who died in military operations after World War II.

Duncan and Dave did the advance work to make sure where McChrystal was arriving from, how many steps he was going to take, how long the ceremony would last. What if it rains? Where’s the umbrella? Who hands him the wreath? Where are the German media going to stand?

They counted off the paces and the path McChrystal would walk.

“Just stop right there,” said the U.S. defense attaché. “And yeah, you right there.”

“Where is everybody else standing?” Duncan asked. “Where are we standing?”

“Along this line. The impression I had was it was just going to be four… COMISAF, minister of defense.… That’s the impression I had,” the attaché said. “All the press—behind the red line there.” He pointed to a red line marked on the ground adjacent to the memorial.

We walked into the monument. In Germany, even having a monument recognizing the war in Afghanistan was controversial. German chancellor Angela Merkel had made headlines when she decided to go to a memorial service for German soldiers killed in action at the beginning of the month—it was the first time after four years in office that she’d gone to the funeral of a soldier who’d been killed. The structure had a Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall feel to it, with the names of those who had been killed projected up on granite stone. Each dead was marked with a German dog tag, and an oath spelled out in Morse code.

“A German dog tag, they break it in half and keep the other half on the body,” the attaché explained.

“This is all Afghanistan?” I asked, pointing to the new additions.

“They’ve lost thirty or forty,” the attaché said. “I’d have to get the exact number.”

McChrystal showed up with a German police escort—a black leather motorcycle squad that looked like something out of
The Matrix
. The German media stood behind the red line. I’d never seen a press corps so quickly quiet down.

The skies were gray. The rain started. The music started. McChrystal walked into the memorial and laid down the wreath. The cameras clicked rapid-fire.

We had lunch inside the ministry. I sat at a table with a high-ranking German officer who was in charge of media affairs. He was a large man with broad shoulders and silver hair and an intimidatingly wide forehead. He explained the context for the upcoming event. Local residents near a base in northern Germany were pissed about the sound of helicopters flying overhead. Recently, a few of those helicopter pilots had been in a helicopter crash, and the next ceremony was to award them medals. The German officer wanted to use the event to make the point that the Germans shouldn’t be complaining about noisy helicopter traffic.

“It’s a good opportunity to orchestrate the media,” he said.

Those at the lunch looked at me. I was a member of the media. Would I take offense that the military viewed me as a target for orchestration? Nope. We shared an awkward chuckle.

The ceremony for the pilots was at the other end of the building. A lectern had been set up next to a glass case displaying the medals. The German defense minister spoke. He was at the high point of his career—a smooth-looking thirty-eight-year-old, considered an up-and-coming star in German politics. (The shine wouldn’t last the year: Ten months later, he was forced to resign after he was outed for plagiarizing sections of his doctoral thesis.)

I wandered around the room. McChrystal and the defense minister both delivered brief remarks. I started examining the glass case, taking pictures of the medals with my phone. I noticed I was the only American left in the room: Team McChrystal had blown out of there. I tried to catch up with them, but a German police officer wouldn’t let me go through the back door to get to the motorcade.

I received a text from Duncan: The convoy had rolled. I missed it. I was left behind.

 DECEMBER 2009, WEST POINT, KABUL, AND WASHINGTON, DC

Obama chooses West Point to deliver his speech on his new strategy. Or, more accurately, McChrystal and Petraeus’s strategy. He tells the audience of cadets all the reasons why fighting Afghanistan is a bad idea. He tells them that we’re going to do it anyway. He uses his favorite catchphrase, “Let me be clear”—a signal that he’s not going to be clear at all. The president will pay a price for his ambiguity.

There are three audiences for the speech: Obama’s liberal base, the Pentagon, and the Afghans. Obama adds in a line: The United States will begin to withdraw troops in July 2011. He adds the line so the military won’t “jam him,” as they jammed him with the McChrystal assessment, according to a senior U.S. official. Put a public benchmark out there, put the Pentagon on notice.

To make the case for escalation, Obama reaches back to the specter of September 11. He morphs, as Bush did before him, the Taliban into Al-Qaeda. He blames the failure in Afghanistan on the Iraq War, which he points out he was against. He says that he’s not interested in a “nation-building project of up to a decade,” saying it’s too costly to be there. He
claims this year it will cost $30 billion for the military (it ends up costing $59.5 billion). He acknowledges that the real issue isn’t even Afghanistan, it’s Pakistan—a conclusion his advisors had come to during the three-month-long review. (So if the problem is Pakistan, why are we sending a hundred thousand troops to Afghanistan?) Obama also says that he’ll close the prison at Guantánamo Bay (he doesn’t) and that all troops will be out of Iraq by the end of 2011 (maybe they’ll be gone).

He goes on at length about how Afghanistan is not Vietnam. In Vietnam, he says, the United States didn’t have a broad-based coalition of allies. (There were only New Zealanders, Filipinos, Australians, Thais, South Vietnamese, and South Koreans fighting alongside the Americans. In Afghanistan, only nine of the forty-three nations Obama cites are supplying over one thousand troops.) He says that in Vietnam we were fighting a popular insurgency and in Afghanistan we aren’t. (At the time, U.S. officials also claimed the Vietcong weren’t that popular and blamed journalists for exaggerating their presence. In Afghanistan, the Karzai government is about as popular as the Taliban—Karzai even calls the Taliban his “brothers.”)

The July 2011 line about beginning to withdraw from Afghanistan is supposed to be heard by the antiwar left, too. It’s not. They hear the other message: that Obama is going to triple the scope of the war, an unprecedented escalation that will create an almost entirely new conflict. (The surge in Iraq was only a one-sixth increase in the number of troops; Obama has, in under a year, tripled the number of Americans in Afghanistan, while doubling the total number of NATO troops.)

The Afghans are supposed to take another message from Obama’s speech: that we’re going to be in with them for the long haul. The Afghans don’t hear that, though. They hear that the United States is getting the fuck out in July 2011.

The Pentagon hears July 2011 and its response is: Hmmm, how about 2014? Even the choice of July 2011 is suspicious. “It was clearly a political decision,” says one Pentagon official. “Anyone who knows anything
about Afghanistan knows that it doesn’t make sense to start withdrawing troops in the middle of the fighting season.” (The summer is traditionally when fighting spikes in Afghanistan.)

In Kabul, McChrystal’s staff reacts negatively to the speech.

“It was a terrible speech,” says Dave Silverman. “It was written by a fucking twenty-five-year-old.” (Actually, a thirty-two-year-old.) Dave’s feelings are echoed through McChrystal’s command and throughout the military at large. Doesn’t Obama understand that this isn’t one of those issues where you can split the difference? By putting July 2011 in there, Obama is making it harder to get support among the Afghans for the strategy, Pentagon officials complain. In a way, Obama is getting the worst of both worlds. He’s paying the domestic political costs for escalating, but he’s not gaining the confidence of the Afghans, which the strategy is supposed to rely on. The Afghans sense we’re just looking for the exit. This sense is reinforced by lines like “If I did not think that the security of the United States and the safety of the American people were at stake in Afghanistan, I would gladly order every single one of our troops home tomorrow,” and “That’s why our troop commitment in Afghanistan cannot be open-ended—because the nation that I’m most interested in building is our own,” and “America will have to show our strength in the way that we end wars.”