The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan (35 page)

Duncan had spoken to the men the night before as well. Was that what he had learned from talking to them? Did the men tell Duncan that because he was on McChrystal’s staff? Was Duncan asking the right questions? Or did Duncan know that’s what Charlie Flynn wanted to hear, so that’s why he told him the lie? Everything’s fine, they all love it here. Because of the dozen soldiers I’d interviewed the night before, I knew McChrystal was about to speak in front of a bunch of very angry men who felt like their sacrifices were a complete waste, who thought they were losing, and who weren’t shy about expressing that feeling. McChrystal’s staff always credited themselves with an ability to face hard truths, yet here the hard truth was being avoided. Or it wasn’t understood. Or the bubble was so powerful that they couldn’t see what McChrystal was about to walk into.

I told Duncan that Ingram should be called Corporal Ingram, not sergeant, as that’s what the men knew him as. It would give McChrystal credibility with them. He passed this information on to Charlie.

Underneath a tent, McChrystal gathered about twenty soldiers.

“I ask you what’s going on in your world, and I think it’s important for you all to understand the big picture as well,” McChrystal started. “How’s the company doing? You guys feeling sorry for yourselves? Anybody? Anybody feel like you’re losing?”

“Sir, some of the guys here, sir, think we’re losing, sir,” said Hicks.

McChrystal nodded. He held a black marker in his hand. He had two whiteboards set up behind him.

McChrystal said they weren’t losing. He started talking about leadership.

“Strength is when you’re not sure. Strength is when you don’t feel like you’re being strong. Strength is leading when you just don’t want to lead.
Sometimes you don’t. All of us have those days. You don’t want to listen or talk to anyone. You don’t want to lead. You’re leading by example, everybody is watching you. That’s what we do. Particularly when it’s really, really hard and it hurts inside.”

He spent twenty minutes talking through counterinsurgency, diagramming his concepts and principles on the whiteboard. “We are knee-deep in the decisive year,” he told them, insisting the Taliban no longer had the momentum, “but I don’t think we do, either.” It was similar to what he’d done in Paris and in Berlin, but the soldiers weren’t buying it.

“This is the philosophical part that works with think tanks,” McChrystal joked. “But doesn’t get the same reception from infantry companies.”

During the question and answer period, the frustration from the soldiers boiled over. They complained about “catch and release” (insurgents they detained who got freed), about not being able to shoot as freely as they liked, about how they haven’t been able to use force.

“We haven’t put enough fear into the people,” one soldier said. “I don’t think we’ve accomplished much.”

“Winning hearts and minds in COIN is a cold-blooded thing,” McChrystal said. “But you can’t kill your way out of this war. The Russians killed one million Afghans, and that didn’t work.”

“I’m not saying go out and kill everybody, sir, that’s not what I’m saying. You say we’ve stopped the momentum of the insurgency. I don’t believe that’s true in this area. I’ve seen the insurgency gain momentum in this area. The more we pull back, the more we restrain ourselves, the stronger it’s getting.”

“One, I agree with you,” McChrystal says. “In this area, we’ve not made progress, probably. You have to show strength here, you have to use fire. What I’m telling you is fire costs you. What do you want to do? You want to wipe out the population and resettle it?”

The soldiers felt like they weren’t being heard, that he didn’t understand. They wanted to be able to fight—like they did in Iraq, like previous units had done in Afghanistan.

“Don’t do anything here that you don’t want to look at your wife and kid when you get home,” McChrystal said. “Don’t make any moral judgments that the ends justify the means. At some point, you’re going to have to live with everything you’ve done. Don’t get cynical.”

“That doesn’t bother me as much as my soldier being killed,” the soldier who’d been questioning him responded. “We’d rather err on the side of caution. Ninety percent of the people are not friendly. All they want to do is kill us. Everybody else is just watching the way we come in to put in the IEDs.”

“We make many more mistakes than you imagine, more mistakes than you think,” McChrystal said. “I see the whole thing.”

“When they don’t have weapons but we know they’re insurgents, they become a civilian casualty,” the soldier answered.

“That’s the way this game is,” McChrystal said. “It’s complex. I can’t just decide: It’s shirts versus skins and we’ll kill all the shirts. These people have been here doing this long enough. They know the deal. We’re not the first people here.”

The discussion wound down—there was no real resolution, no clapping, no photos taken with the general.

“I got a note from Sergeant Arroyo inviting me to Corporal Ingram’s memorial service,” McChrystal said. “That was one of those when it suddenly hits you. It hits you up close. There’s no way I can make that easier. No way I can pretend it won’t hurt. No way I can tell you not to feel that. Because if you don’t feel that, that’s not the kind of organization you happen to be in. There’s no stronger bond than in a rifle company. I will tell you, you’re doing a great job. Don’t let the frustration get to you.”

Duncan and I stood next to each other. Charlie Flynn came up to us.

“Man, he did great,” Charlie said. “He’s so good in situations like this.”

The convoy of MRAPs rolled out. The soldiers down at the burn pit stared up at us, sullen and smoking. At FOB Wilson, we rushed over to the helicopters. We landed at Kandahar Airfield twenty minutes later. McChrystal had a meeting with the regional commander. I saw him talking
to Duncan before he went inside the tactical operations center. I hadn’t seen him like this before—he looked worried, shaken.

McChrystal walked past me, stopped, then pulled me aside. Over the past few weeks, he’d been comfortable with allowing almost everything to be out there, transparent and open. He’d never tried to take anything back or personally spin me. Even if his staff thought he’d nailed it, McChrystal knew that what I’d just seen, and what he’d just been through, wasn’t good.

“That was a raw wound back there,” McChrystal told me. “You’ve been around, I don’t have to tell you.”

“Yes, sir, they all seemed pretty frustrated.”

He went into his meeting.

Duncan came up next to me, in damage control mode.

“We’re a little concerned with what just happened,” he said. “We don’t want you to write a story saying those soldiers don’t get counterinsurgency. That they don’t get it.”

I said I wouldn’t write that, and I wouldn’t. The soldiers didn’t get counterinsurgency? Jesus. I had the exact opposite view. I felt the soldiers understood exactly what was being asked of them. It was McChrystal and his staff who failed to understand the soldiers—or if they did, they knew they couldn’t say so in the words the soldiers wanted to hear. The soldiers, from what I could tell, actually didn’t want to hear anything—they just wanted someone to listen. The talk had been an outright disaster. Israel Arroyo, the soldier who’d invited McChrystal down, had been evacuated with another soldier for post-traumatic stress. Mikie Ingram, the soldier he had gone on his well-publicized patrol with, had been killed. The platoon was borderline mutinous. Yet McChrystal and Duncan were worried that I was going to write that the soldiers didn’t understand the war.

I tracked down Israel Arroyo by phone a few weeks later. The twenty-five-year-old was back at the base in Fort Carson, Colorado. He was suffering from post-traumatic stress. I asked him about Ingram. I asked him if he remembered Ingram’s last words.

“I can’t tell you what he said, I can’t tell you that,” Arroyo told me. “What he said before he died… He…”

He started talking again. He told me what Ingram had said. He asked me to swear that I would never repeat it.

Before hanging up, Arroyo told me he had bad dreams of “the things I could have done better” to save Ingram’s life. But there was nothing he could do, and that was the nightmare.

NOVEMBER 2009 TO PRESENT DAY, KABUL

Lieutenant General William B. Caldwell IV arrives in late 2009 at Camp Eggers to take over what’s considered the most crucial mission in the war: training the Afghan army and police. Camp Eggers is home to the NATO Training Mission Afghanistan, Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan, known as NTM-A CSTC-A (pronounced
see-stick-uh
). It’s an $11.6 billion a year operation. The idea is to create a formidable security force to hand the country over to as the NATO forces withdraw. As the Afghans stand up, the Americans stand down. Or so goes the theory.

Eggers is a crowded complex in downtown Kabul, about six square blocks of space housing some fifteen hundred servicemen and -women. The space is tight, with senior officers bunking often four to a room. It’s impossible to throw a brick without smacking a colonel in the face, hard to turn a corner without running into a shoulder of stars.

Caldwell is a three-star general from a military family—his father was a general (like McChrystal’s father and Petraeus’s father-in-law—to become a general, it helps to have a general for a dad). He’s had a fairly
undistinguished career. No big mistakes, no great achievements—“a nice guy,” says a West Point classmate, “just not much gray matter.” He’s charming up to a point.

Post–September 11, Caldwell hooks up with Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. Wolfowitz is the man who notoriously dismissed estimates that the Iraq War would cost billions, claiming the Iraq “can really finance its own reconstruction.” Wolfowitz conspires with others in the Bush administration to fix the intelligence to justify an invasion; he holds meetings with top columnists and media figures before the war to figure out what’s the best way to sell it to the American public. After Wolfowitz leaves his post in government, he ends up becoming head of the World Bank. He gets forced out after he promotes his girlfriend to a top job.

Wolfowitz, Caldwell says, is one of his mentors. Under Wolfowitz, Caldwell soaks up how to play the game. “The lessons I’ve learned by just watching [Wolfowitz] in action and seeing how he makes decisions will be extremely beneficial and useful to me as I continue my career,” Caldwell gushes in 2003. In 2006 and 2007, Caldwell serves as the spokesperson for U.S. forces in Iraq, where he regularly makes statements that challenge the truth. As early as the fall of 2006, commanders on the ground in Iraq tell Caldwell Iraq is in a “civil war,” a charge he denies from his podium for the duration of his term, even as hundreds of bodies get dumped each morning on the streets.

After Saddam Hussein’s botched execution in December 2006, Caldwell says that the United States had no role in the execution—despite the fact that the Americans had brought the Iraqi execution team, including the man who taped the execution on his cell phone, to and from the gallows on Blackhawk helicopters, picking them up and dropping them off in the Green Zone.

Surrounded by a cadre of highly paid media advisors, Caldwell tries his best to convince a skeptical public that the war in Iraq is being won. He renames press briefings “media roundtables,” and he ditches the
typical podium and microphone in favor of an earpiece and a round wooden table. Cosmetic changes to the format to help convince journalists to buy the message.

Retreating from Baghdad, he spends the next two years as commander of Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, a training academy, occupying a position that had been held by General David Petraeus. Caldwell needs an issue to make his own: What Petraeus does for counterinsurgency, Caldwell wants to do for “information operations,” a military doctrine that focuses on how to influence a potentially hostile foreign audience’s perception. Caldwell wants to take information operations and combine it with public affairs, the branch of the military focused on influencing the domestic audience. He calls the combination of the two “information engagement.”

One of his concerns is to figure out ways to bypass U.S. media outlets in order to reach Americans directly. He exits Baghdad during a period of violence that leaves more than one hundred thousand dead and is convinced the “good news” just didn’t get out. He turns to YouTube to speak directly to the public. “It eliminated the [media] gate-keeper,” he says.

(“A You-who?” he asks the staffer who brings up the idea. Within six months, Caldwell claims his video “was in the top ten of all YouTube sites visited in the world.”)

In 2008, Caldwell sings the merits of information operations—echoing General David Petraeus’s assertion that information operations helped turn the tide in Iraq. But he still, at least in public, sticks to a distinction: “Public affairs is there to inform [domestic audiences],” he says in April 2008. “Information operations is there to influence foreign audiences.” In 2009, he also tries to rewrite the official doctrine on information operations, though that effort ultimately fails.

Caldwell gets the chance to put his theories to the test. Obama gives him the job to train the Afghan security forces.

Arriving in Afghanistan in November 2009, Caldwell soon realizes
he’ll need a steroid-sized dose of spin to convince Americans the mission is worth it, and to explain how creating a highly trained Afghan army is an even plausible goal. The truth actually works against him: The Afghan army, in his own words, “just wasn’t working.” The “entire focus [was on] quantity, not quality,” he claims of his predecessors, referring to the types of recruits.