The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan (30 page)

The Washington Post
would describe the video’s “powerful poignancy.”

During the Vietnam War, the number-one hit song in 1967 was Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth,” opening with the lyrics,
“There’s something happening here.”
It was an antiwar ballad that captured the erosion of public support for the war. Pop culture had turned against Vietnam. There’d been no equivalent song over the past decade. No hit song had ever addressed either the conflict in Afghanistan or Iraq. We lived in Imaginationland, as the
South Park
creators dubbed it (as they also created Team America, the name McChrystal and his team had jokingly appropriated to describe themselves). Our culture was a cocoon against unpleasant realities. The soldiers in the video had weighed in, lip-synching a song about a jealous boyfriend who couldn’t reach his girlfriend in the club. The song had nothing to do with Afghanistan and nothing to do with war or peace. That was the point. The disconnect between Afghanistan and the United States was total.

I should have left my phone at home because this is a disaster.

I closed my e-mail and texted Duncan.

Hey dude, I’m in Kabul.

  FEBRUARY 2010, KABUL

General Stanley McChrystal is preparing to launch the largest operation he’s ever commanded. The plan calls for fifteen thousand troops to descend on the town of Marja. Marja is a rural area in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan. Not much to see, more a collection of mud huts and houses. Marja doesn’t seem very important—there are only fifty thousand residents, not exactly a population center. In fact, the previous summer, McChrystal looked down upon wasting troops in Helmand. A justification is, of course, offered. Marja must be controlled in order to eventually control Kandahar. Kandahar must be controlled to control Afghanistan. Afghanistan must be controlled to control Pakistan. Pakistan must be controlled to prevent Saudi Arabian terrorists from getting on a flight at John F. Kennedy International Airport in Jamaica, Queens.

Marja is crucial because it’s a “proof of concept” for the larger operation to come this summer, McChrystal says. We must push out the insurgents with a “rising tide of security,” then install a “government in a box.” The White House and the media will be watching closely. Marja would
remind Obama advisor David Axelrod of Vietnam, prompting him to caution: “We have to be careful not to believe our own bullshit.”

McChrystal wants to give the Marja operation legitimacy—he wants to put an Afghan face on it. For this, he believes, he needs to get President Hamid Karzai’s sign-off. McChrystal thinks that Karzai has not embraced his role as “commander in chief,” he says. Over the past few months, the general’s goal has been to get Karzai to accept more responsibility for his country by bringing him into the loop on military decisions and by personally informing him about civilian casualty incidents. Getting Karzai to step up, U.S. military officials think, is the only way for their strategy to succeed. As every counterinsurgency plan makes clear, a legitimate government is necessary to win. It’s critical to have a legitimate leader atop that government.

If there is one thing that Karzai is not, it’s a legitimate leader. To make him appear legitimate, McChrystal has dragged him around the country over the past year, bringing him to parts he rarely visits. Trying to get him out of the palace, where McChrystal’s staff believes he wallows in a haze of paranoia and delusion. He is, as a State Department cable will describe him, a “lonely and alone man who suspects his inner circle is leading him in the wrong direction, but does not know who else to trust. The president pays significant attention to the mostly negative media coverage of his government—behavior that reinforces his suspicions that enemies are ‘out to get him.’ ” Karzai is particularly frustrating to the Americans because he doesn’t even bother acting like a leader, they think. Like the shit he’s pulling right now.

It’s Friday, there’s a ninety-minute window to make the decision to launch Operation Mostarak in Marja. The stakes are as high as they’ve been. Over ten thousand Afghan and American troops are already out there in the field, motors running, fuel trucks and complex lines of logistics prepared. Reporters are embedded, ready to write about an operation that had been getting hyped for weeks. The operation was supposed to
have gone off Thursday night. The sun comes up on Friday, and the operation still hasn’t happened.

Afghan defense minister Rahim Wardak assures the Americans that Karzai’s permission is coming—we’ll get it, we’ll get it, we’ll get it.

McChrystal asks to get Karzai on the line.

A McChrystal staffer makes the call to the director of protocol at Karzai’s palace. General McChrystal wants to speak with President Karzai, the staffer explains.

“He can’t,” answers the Karzai aide. “President Karzai is taking a nap. He has a cold.”

You don’t understand, the McChrystal staffer insists. It’s about the operation in Marja. It’s the largest operation that has been launched in years in Afghanistan. It’s important to speak with Karzai now.

“No, that’s not possible. He has a cold.”

No one wants to wake Karzai up, says Charlie Flynn.

“They are like ‘Inshallah,’ ” says Flynn, using the Arabic phrase for “God willing.” Meaning it may or may not happen.

What is this cold? What is this cold? Is Karzai actually sick? Or is he high as a kite? One veteran Kabul journalist believes Karzai is a “two pipe a day man.” U.S. officials who work with Karzai think he’s a manic depressive and the dope may fuel his paranoia. How is it that when there’s a massive military operation about to be launched in his country, the largest since the U.S. invasion, he’s spending the day in bed?

McChrystal’s team refers to Karzai as “the man with a funny hat.” Karzai is known in the West for his stylish tribal outfits, specifically his collection of headgear. His most notable accessory is the karakul— a V-shaped hat made from the pelts of newborn sheep. His getups have earned him plaudits from American fashion designers—Tom Ford once called him the “chicest man on the planet.” McChrystal’s staff have a different view of his style. They come up with a nickname for his favorite cap: “the Gray Wolf’s Vagina.”

Karzai is a strange dude with a long history with the Americans. In the
eighties, he was one of America’s allies in aiding the mujahideen to fight against the Soviets. He’s from a wealthy Pashtun family, the Popalzai tribe. He has deep roots in the United States as well: His half brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, ran an Afghan restaurant in Chicago during the early nineties before returning to Kandahar to become a key player in the nationwide drug ring, according to U.S. officials. His other cousins and uncles have U.S. business interests as well; they own a restaurant in Baltimore called Helmand. Another brother is a biochemistry professor in New York. Karzai, though, never lived in the United States. He spends his time in Pakistan during the Taliban regime. After the attacks on September 11, the Americans turn to Karzai to liberate Kandahar. He’s almost killed, and it’s an officer in the CIA (who is currently the CIA’s station chief in Kabul, a rough-and-tumble redneck nicknamed Spider) whom Karzai credits with saving his life. (It’s Spider who will have the best relationship with Karzai during Obama’s tenure, not Eikenberry or the generals.) Karzai is chosen at the Bonn conference in Germany in 2001 to become Afghan’s interim president—he wins the first election in 2005, then the second in 2009, both with massive amounts of fraud.

During the Bush years—which Eikenberry says Karzai looks back on fondly as the “Golden Age”—Karzai develops a personal relationship with the American president. That changes when Obama takes over. Eikenberry and Holbrooke think that if Karzai can circumvent the regular diplomatic process and go directly to the president, then they won’t be able to do their jobs. Obama agrees—and Karzai takes it as an insult. Relations further deteriorate after the fraudulent election, and Karzai starts to behave increasingly erratically, from an American perspective at least. He starts to make not so subtle threats. He appears with Iranian president (and current American enemy number one) Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in March. He takes cash by the bagful from the Iranians, too, delivered to his innermost circle of advisors. He makes a public threat to join the Taliban, a threat he’ll make repeatedly over the year ahead. He wants to ban security companies from Afghanistan.

More important: He doesn’t agree with McChrystal’s counterinsurgency plan. He doesn’t want more foreign troops in the country. Never has, and never will. He makes that point explicitly to Ambassador Eikenberry in September 2009. His half brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, will take the critique even further: Not only is COIN a bad idea, but Afghans don’t even care about democracy, Ahmed Wali Karzai says. Those two views, joined together, essentially undermine any rationale for much of what the Americans are planning to do—which is set up some kind of democracy through a comprehensive counterinsurgency strategy. U.S. officials will eventually acknowledge that Karzai doesn’t want to do counterinsurgency and therefore makes a bad partner.

One would think this would give the United States pause. It doesn’t.

McChrystal’s strategy, of course, relies on a credible Afghan government and credible Afghan leadership. It relies on getting Karzai on board. He is clearly not on board. If he’s not behaving the way we want him to behave, U.S. military officials tell me, we’ll figure out a way to gently force him to behave in the way we want him to behave. We’ll turn Karzai into a war president. Today that means getting Karzai to wake up.

On Friday, February 12, McChrystal sees a moment to make this happen. Let Karzai give the order to charge. But he’s napping. This does not sit well with McChrystal.

McChrystal decides to go over to the palace to wake up Karzai himself. He convoys over, joined by Minister Wardak and other Afghan officials. He goes into the parlor of the president’s residence. They wait for thirty minutes. Karzai finally appears.

“He looked like he’d been in bed all day,” Charlie Flynn says.

McChrystal explains to Karzai: Mr. President, we need your permission to do this. This is your insurgency, he tells him, but I’m your general.

Karzai responds: This is the first time in eight years anyone has asked me for my permission to launch a military operation.

They meet for forty-five minutes.

McChrystal leaves the meeting excited, seeing it as a triumph, a “watershed moment,” according to Charlie Flynn, that “history will look back on.”

Karzai “goes back to bed,” says Flynn. “But he’s got to be kind of thinking in bed, I’m kind of responsible for this.”

McChrystal is asked to check in with his own commander in chief. President Obama wants to talk to him before the Marja invasion. A video teleconference is arranged.

After the call with Obama, McChrystal isn’t impressed—what he thought was going to be a man-to-man phone call ends up having dozens of other officials along to listen in. McChrystal finds the move somewhat cynical—something, he tells me, Obama’s political advisors must have cooked up to make it seem like he’s engaged in the war. Someone must have reminded him that “hey, this is the biggest military operation you’ve ever launched as president,” as one of his staffers tells me. Casey reads his boss closely: “I think he still wished it was a little more candid,” he tells me, wanting Obama to have spoken more directly about the importance of the mission.

The operation in Marja goes off. Twenty-five Americans are killed in the first three months. In May, McChrystal will describe it as “a bleeding ulcer.” The White House will view it as a failure. The phrase “government in a box” is roundly mocked. Says Afghan expert Andrew Wilder from Tufts University, “We’ve been there nine years and the best they can come up with is ‘government in a box’?” A joke goes around: Yes, Afghanistan does have a government in a box. That box is Kabul.

  FEBRUARY TO MARCH 2010, ZHARI AND KABUL

On February 27, 2010, at 6:27
P.M.
, twenty-five-year-old Staff Sergeant Israel Arroyo sends an e-mail to General Stanley McChrystal.

  Four hours later, Staff Sergeant Israel Arroyo receives a response from General Stanley McChrystal.