The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan (37 page)

I met with Lamb in the Italian café and pizza shop within the complex. He looked the part of the wild commando: tanned, well-built, fraying gray hair on a balding head, hairy chest peeking out beneath his olive button-down shirt, top buttons undone. Among the staff, he had a reputation as a mystic, a violence-prone Buddha offering trippy wisdom that started to make sense only after much thought.

They nicknamed him Lambo, like Rambo. He described himself as a “science fiction sort of a guy.” He had an old leather jacket like Harrison
Ford, rode a motorcycle, and was inspired by
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
—“just give me an improbability drive,” he tells me, “all will be well.” If McChrystal’s team were the Rolling Stones, he said, “Oh hell, I’d be Keith Richards. About three separate doctors told him what he needed to stop doing. He went to all their funerals.”

In McChrystal’s command, Lambo’s style represented an unprecedented departure from previous U.S. military history—a command made up of elite Special Forces soldiers who’d climbed the ranks through secret operations and daring raids. Generally, they’d been in charge of a few thousand of the most brilliant people in the service, and they were now running an army that numbered in the hundreds of thousands. It was the largest military force Special Forces operators had ever commanded. A drawback: McChrystal and Lamb were used to dealing with the best of the best, high IQs, not the dumbness of the hated Big Army.

“This is crap retirement,” he said. He could have been in Chile snowboarding, or riding his motorcycle to a chalet in Switzerland. But it was hard to leave the comradeship behind. “A lot of people say, Graeme, you don’t seem to have many friends. I say, that’s no surprise. If people don’t really like me, I don’t really give a shit. But the truth is, I have quite a number of acquaintances. Most people in life are like that. They mistake the word
acquaintance
for
friend
. A friendship that I would understand is companionship, a comrade. That is forged in difficult circumstances where his or her endeavors have given you a chance that otherwise wouldn’t have been there, because they believed in what you are doing and who you were. Those sorts of relationships are hard-forged. But those friendships are few and far between.”

He started off the interview quoting Kipling and
Apollo 13:
“Savage wars peace,” he called the war in Afghanistan, describing the situation as “like
Apollo 13,
heading out to the moon, with a bloody great hole in the side, bleeding oxygen.” He talked about McChrystal and his disdain for politicians. “The soldier’s lifetime experience is command and leadership. You tend not to be a comedian or a clown. You tend to be a pretty straight
shooter. We are not politicians. I think it was General Sherman’s brother who wrote him: Will you take up politics? Sherman wrote back: Why would I? He who’s not a dollar in debt will never be a politician.” We live in politics, he said, we operate around politics—but, he said, if as Clausewitz wrote, war is an extension of politics—“he didn’t finish his sentence: To politics you must return.”

He said men like himself and McChrystal were never driven by money—like a bloke from Goldman Sachs—but by something “mightier than the self, a great endeavor undertaken by men who knew what it meant to be in the arena.”

The arena: It was a favorite concept for men like Lamb, capturing a dangerous and seductive worldview when applied to war. The idea came from Theodore Roosevelt’s famous speech, trashing critics and valuing the experience of risk over all else. “It is not the critic who counts… The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs, and who comes up short again and again…” I’d heard other generals use the quote in Iraq. What mattered wasn’t what the war was about, or what might or might not be accomplished; what mattered was that there was an inherent value in being a man, in going into action, in bleeding. There was little difference in victory or failure. The sacrifice of blood had an almost spiritual value beyond politics, beyond success, beyond good and evil; blood and sweat and pain made up its own ideology, existing within its own moral universe of a very narrowly defined concept of honor and bravery. It was as brave and honorable to take a bullet for the brotherhood as it was to cover up a bullet’s mistake. It didn’t matter that in Afghanistan, the U.S. military had come up short again and again. What mattered is that they tried. The simple and terrifying reality, forbidden from discussion in America, was that despite spending $600 billion a year on the military, despite having the best fighting force the world had ever known, they were getting their asses kicked by illiterate peasants who made bombs out of manure and wood. The arena acted as a barrier, protecting
their sacrifices from the uncomfortable realities of the current war—that it might be a total waste of time and resources that historians would look back on cringing, in the same way we looked back on the Soviets and the British misadventures there.

“I’ll be here as long as it takes,” he told me. “Just don’t tell the wife that. This is high-stakes poker, this is a world-class game here. We’re playing for these chips: blood and treasure. The grim reaper is absolutely going to get us all. So why slow down?”

I saw what the guys meant about Lamb—his freewheeling thought process didn’t lend itself to sound bites. Lamb kept hitting an idea that McChrystal had first mentioned at the bar in Paris, and then I’d seen it in action at JFM. The loyalty to McChrystal—the desire to make him happy and to please him—often ended with the general getting an inaccurate picture of what was actually taking place. Men like Lamb and McChrystal told themselves they operated within a strict code of honor. A brotherhood and friendship, unique to the warrior brand, trumped all other values. And this is where I saw the flaw. How could they, at the same time, be involved in cover-ups—with Tillman, with torture, with endless allegations of reckless civilian killings? How did those actions fit into the images they had of themselves as honorable men? The answer, I believed, was that they considered the loyalty that they felt for one another as the highest measure of integrity. Any crime or transgression, any acts of immorality they committed or ordered were excused, in their own minds, by the high principles that guided them. Any act of violence, any atrocity, any action they were called upon or felt compelled to do in order to complete the mission and protect their own pack—whether it was leaking to the press or forcing a president down a path he didn’t want to take—they saw as acceptable.

The military culture was by nature authoritarian, and it was there they were most comfortable. Even if, as Special Forces operators, they pushed against its rigidness, they still felt more at home among their brothers on the inside than on the outside. In fact, with the Special Forces, the
element of separateness, the insulated feeling of superiority was even greater. They could do things that other men couldn’t do, and had done them. Good or bad—if it was the mission, then it was permissible. If it was for us against them, it was inherhentyly right. If it took place in the arena, it was sublime. What wasn’t permissible was breaking trust, or what they viewed as trust—straying outside the pack. The decade of war had hardened these feelings, creating an almost insurmountable boundary between them and the rest of society. The media just didn’t play up this romantic image of warriors; the men held dearly to the romantic image themselves. They were willing to protect one another, to die for one another. That was the value that they cherished. And if you weren’t part of the team, your motives were immediately suspect—impure, like the motives of politicians or diplomats. The base reasons that drove others—money and power—were not what drove them, or so they told themselves. They yearned for a pure relationship—it was a kind of love that could only be found in a world they saw reflected in themselves.

I walked back to the headquarters building with Lamb. I waited with Duncan for my last scheduled sit-down interview with Mike Flynn. We took seats next to a tree in the beer garden. Duncan sat in on the interview with me.

“I just want to establish that this is on the record,” Duncan said.

“You don’t mind if I eat this apple, do you? On the record?” Flynn replied, taking a bite from an apple.

I asked him about the political opposition he received to his plans.

“I spend 80 percent of my day easily fighting our own system,” he said.

How about an exit strategy?

“No. I’m looking at long-term, enduring solutions.”

“A lot of people dig who you guys are, they dig your plan. But they say, hey, you should have been here six years ago.”

“Yeah, we should have left five years ago,” Flynn said. “Karzai had been elected in a free and fair election. We should have said, ‘Hey, we are ready to get the international community to help develop this country,
but you’re on your own.’ We keep plodding along, and we made huge mistakes. The government got lazy. They got lazy because we were doing too much for them.”

I’d wanted to get Flynn to elaborate on his theory of intelligence gathering. Whatever gets reported, he told me, think the opposite.

“What I want people to do is get rid of your biases,” Flynn said. “You see something occur, everything was wonderful. What’s the opposite of that?”

He paused.

“You came in here and you talk to me and you seem like a friendly guy,” he said. “Maybe you’re not.”

“I’m a friendly guy,” I said. “I’m also a reporter, and that’s a caveat.”

I had a final question: Were there any historical precedents that you look at where a foreign power accomplished something here?

“Genghis Khan,” Duncan said.

“He extended himself, he wasn’t from here,” Flynn said. “When you look at the history of the country, everyone who came here to dominate, they came here for the wrong reasons. Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, the Russians… They failed to understand that the people of Afghanistan didn’t want to be dominated. They wanted help.”

I didn’t bother pointing out that both the Russians and the British also thought they came here for noble reasons. The interview ended.

The beer garden was being taken over by the Europeans. It was Friday. The Dutch were setting up for a party. The soldiers dressed in orange colors, waving orange flags. One Dutch partier had made a burka—the traditional full-cover dress for Muslim females—all in orange. He was running around the beer garden, cheering. I resisted the urge to take a camera phone picture of the Dutchman in an orange burka—that kind of cultural insensitivity and mocking wouldn’t have played well on the Internet.

I called my security guard to come pick me up. I ran into Dave Silverman outside the headquarters. He and Duncan were going to go back to
Washington, DC, soon to do advance work. “Breaking some china,” as Duncan put it. Karzai and McChrystal had a visit planned there for the next week.

The Dutch party was picking up. I asked him what he thought.

“They’re fucking celebrating going home,” Dave said.

Over the next few days, I finished up my interviews. No big revelations, except that Command Sergeant Major Michael Hall compared McChrystal to John Paul Vann, an important American military official in the Vietnam War. Vann died in a helicopter crash in 1972. His life story would come to represent the tragedy of that war, plagued by a disturbing personal life and the embrace of ideas he once knew to be flawed. Hall had known McChrystal since the early eighties. I wondered why he would make the comparison, and figured that he didn’t really mean it.

 MAY 10–14, 2010, WASHINGTON, DC

Karzai is staying at the Willard InterContinental Hotel—he’s rolling with a big entourage and an even bigger Secret Service detail. The block in the back of the hotel is closed off, lined with black SUVs and crew-cut security guards with earpieces and concealed pistols. The entranceway has a large tent extending from it, a sniper shield, to block the visibility of seeing when Karzai arrives and leaves.

This is Karzai’s make-up tour. A month earlier, he’d threatened to join the Taliban after NSC chief James Jones had told reporters publicly that the White House was cracking down on Karzai’s corruption. That didn’t sit well with Hamid—he throws a fit. The White House backs away—this week, his first visit to the capital since Obama became president, is a way to smooth things over. To mark the new beginning of what Hillary Clinton will call a “long-term partner” and a “friend.”

McChrystal’s team has packed in a tight schedule for Karzai, and they’re getting pushback from the White House. McChrystal wants to bring Karzai to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, where he can visit with troops who are preparing to go to Afghanistan. The White House is uneasy
about this; it might make it seem that we’re fighting for Karzai—and we know how fucked up Karzai is—rather than for the greater Afghanistan and to defeat terrorists. How about bringing him to Arlington National Cemetery? the White House suggests. Duncan nixes this idea—he doesn’t think it’s too good a visual to have a Muslim president getting photographed in front of rows of white crosses.

A compromise: Send him to Walter Reed, the medical center in upper Washington, DC, Springs, Maryland, that takes care of wounded American soldiers and Marines.

It’s Karzai’s second hospital visit in a month—McChrystal had brought him out to the field hospital in Bagram, where he made the rounds, gave a few less than inspirational speeches, and posed for photos with wounded U.S. and Afghan soldiers. At Walter Reed, it’s the same pattern—though the reception from Americans is only superficially friendly, according to a wounded soldier at the hospital. (“We fucking hate Karzai,” a soldier at Walter Reed will explain to me months later. “He’s lucky none of us had guns.”) At one point, Karzai talks to three American soldiers who’ve been wounded in Uruzgan province. He looks up from the bed and shouts to McChrystal, “General, I didn’t even know we were fighting in Uruzgan!”