The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan (4 page)

I stayed in the lobby and ordered another espresso.

JANUARY TO FEBRUARY 2009, WASHINGTON, DC

It’s the first ten days of his presidency, and Obama goes to the Pentagon. He walks into a room on the second floor known as the Tank. The Tank is sacred. The Tank is where the serious matters of state are discussed—“the highly classified conversations,” says a U.S. military official. The Tank gets its name from where it started, in the basement,
Dr. Strangelove
–like, but now it’s upstairs in the E ring with a blond wood table and big leather armchairs. It’s legendary. Secretary of Defense Bob Gates makes sure to go to the Tank once a week. (Rumsfeld didn’t; Rumsfeld made the generals come to him. Gates is wiser; he goes to them like he’s “coming to kiss the ring of the Godfathers,” says a Pentagon official.)

The president works the room, speaking to Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen and about ten other senior military officials, including a three-star general named Stan McChrystal. Gates follows behind him. Obama doesn’t seem quite right, McChrystal will recall, he isn’t
acting like a strong leader. He seems “intimidated by the crowd,” a senior military official who attended the meeting will tell me. He’s acting “like a Democrat who thinks he’s walking into a room full of Republicans,” the senior military official added. “You could tell he was tentative.”

Obama’s mistake: Despite being very impressive, he’s not comfortable with the military, McChrystal thinks. He made a “bad read,” continues the senior military official who attended the meeting. “We wanted to be led; we would have been putty in his hands.” (McChrystal would share similiar feelings with his staff, telling them that Obama seemed “intimidated and uncomfortable.”)

Obama doesn’t get the military culture, military officials will say privately. They don’t think he likes them or supports them. They sense weakness. Obama doesn’t have the feel. There are questions, from the highest to lowest ranks. He’s a wimp, Barack
Hussein
Obama. One Marine unit teaches a local Afghan kid to call an African-American female Marine “raccoon” or “Obama”; I’ve heard other white soldiers refer to him as a nigger, maybe for shock value. There’s that race thing. There’s his Nobel Peace Prize. Some soldiers say they love him, of course, that he’s the best, that everyone should have voted for him. It’s mixed.

In the upper ranks of the brass: Obama is a Democrat, always a question mark. The Pentagon is filled with Republicans—it’s been a long eight years, and the last three defense secretaries have all been in the GOP. A popular joke: A soldier walks into an elevator with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Osama Bin Laden. Third floor, going up. He has two bullets in his pistol. Doors open: Pelosi is shot twice, Reid and Bin Laden are strangled.

A CBS sports announcer tells that joke back home in a magazine story, and he gets condemned for it. He has to issue a public apology. He tells the joke overseas on a USO tour: The troops think it’s hilarious. I tell the joke once on an embed to test it out: The troops laugh hard.

Still, Democrats: easier to push around.

Obama was against the Iraq invasion, calling it a “dumb war.” He’s correct, of course, and opposing it was the smart decision, the right decision,
yet… He didn’t support Iraq, ergo he doesn’t support us. Or something like that. His perceived antimilitary vibe is a political vulnerability; McCain tries to exploit it during the campaign, pushing a story that Obama snubbed wounded veterans on a trip to Germany. The story is false, but maybe there’s something there.

As a candidate, Obama visits Afghanistan and Iraq during the summer of 2008. In Kabul, he’s greeted as a hero, he goes to the embassy, goes to ISAF; the word at camp gets out that Obama is there, and by the time he gets to ISAF, dozens of soldiers are out to see him. He works the rope line, poses for pictures; he’s a big hit, according to a U.S. military official who helped arrange the trip in Kabul. Then he heads to Baghdad, stopping at the U.S. embassy in Saddam’s old palace. Embassy officials and military officials in Iraq are wary—they think he’s using this as a campaign stop. The Baghdad embassy—this is still Bush country, this is John McCain territory. This isn’t, necessarily, Obama’s base.

At the embassy, he gives a talk in the main palace hall, where there’s a Green Beans Coffee stand. The hall is packed, one of the biggest turnouts State Department officials can remember. After the talk, out of earshot of the soldiers and diplomats, he starts to complain. He starts to act very un-Obama-like, according to a U.S. embassy official who helped organize the trip in Baghdad. He’s asked to go out to take a few more pictures with soldiers and embassy staffers. He’s asked to sign copies of his book. “He didn’t want to take pictures with any more soldiers; he was complaining about it,” a State Department official tells me. “Look, I was excited to meet him. I wanted to like him. Let’s just say the scales fell from my eyes after I did. These are people over here who’ve been fighting the war, or working every day for the war effort, and he didn’t want to take fucking pictures with them?”

I push back: Look, it’s a brutal schedule. I’m sure he was tired, stressed out, venting.

The embassy official isn’t buying it: For the one day he’s in Baghdad, no matter how tired, how stressed, Obama should suck it up. He shouldn’t
have bitched about taking a photo. Obama is the “crankiest CODEL”—short for “congressional delegation”—that he’s had visit Baghdad, says this State Department official. And he has handled dozens of them. Embassy staffers gather afterward: Is it me, or were you all not impressed with Obama? The staffers agree: I thought I was the only one! The State Department official votes for Obama anyway. On the same trip, Obama meets with General Petraeus, and the presidential candidate tries to pin the general down on how fast he can get the troops out of Iraq.

These are the kinds of stories that fuel the suspicions high-ranking officials in the military have about Obama: He’s one of the most talented and natural politicians in a generation, but he doesn’t really understand them. Doesn’t get their culture, doesn’t get their wars. The wars, to Obama, are campaign issues. His primary relationship to the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan is how they affect his electoral fortunes—his opposition to the Iraq War gave his candidacy the spark that set it off, allowing him to separate himself from the other two Democratic candidates who had supported Iraq. He wants to firm up his national security credentials, so he says he’ll focus on Afghanistan, the “right war.” Promising to focus on that war makes a good line on the campaign trail. He didn’t serve—so what that Reagan didn’t, so what that Bush didn’t really? They played the part. They are hooah, and the troops love hooah. Bush gave the generals what they wanted, and the generals like to get what they want.

Obama’s aware of the vulnerability, writing in his second memoir how “Republicans increasingly portrayed Democrats as weak on defense.” That decades-old problem for Democrats, allegedly soft on national security ever since Truman was accused of “losing China.” Bullshit, naturally, and historically self-destructive, but it has had major consequences, as three generations of Democratic leaders have fallen over themselves to prove that they can play tough. Truman can’t run for reelection because he’s not winning in Korea (Truman had to go into Korea because we couldn’t lose Korea!); Kennedy has to out–Cold Warrior Richard Nixon to get the job.
Johnson has to prove he won’t “lose Vietnam,” so he digs an even deeper hole, destroying his presidency. (“I don’t think it’s worth fighting and I don’t think we can get out. It’s the biggest damn mess I ever saw,” Johnson says in 1964, a year before he commits hundreds of thousands of troops to Saigon.) Carter—shit! He gets pushed around by the Iranians, while Reagan cuts a secret deal with them, gives them weapons, no less—but forget that. Clinton proves the military’s worst fears: He wants to let fags in, dodged the draft, smoked dope, and gets mocked when he tries to kill Bin Laden with missile strikes.

Obama, his advisors believe, has to prove he isn’t really antiwar. That he’s serious. That he can keep America safe. (Remember Hillary’s three
A.M.
phone call ad?) That he’ll play by the bipartisan conventions of the national security community. During the presidential campaign, he stresses that we “took our eye off the ball” in Afghanistan and have to refocus our efforts there. Obama goes out of his way to say he “doesn’t oppose all wars.”

That January, McKiernan’s request for more troops is waiting on Obama’s desk. With three reviews just complete, Obama orders up his own review. Bruce Riedel, a terrorism expert, is called in to write up the draft. On February 17, a month after visiting the Pentagon, Obama releases a statement, the first major comment he’s made on the war while in office. He says he’s sending seventeen thousand troops to Afghanistan, that he’s approving a “months-old” troop request, pinning the blame for the delay and increase on the previous administration. Obama expands the war into Pakistan, too, upping the number of drone strikes in the first year of his presidency to fifty-five, almost doubling the number that Bush had ordered in the previous four years.

What Obama and his top advisors don’t realize is that the seventeen thousand troops are just the beginning. Seventeen thousand becomes twenty-one thousand a month later. McKiernan still has a request in for nine thousand more, part of his original ask. But he will tell military officials close to him that it’s all he needs to do the job. He doesn’t think
Afghanistan can support too many more American troops. McKiernan, an ally of the president, is not going to press for another massive troop increase. Inside the Pentagon, other senior military officials don’t see it that way. Twenty-one thousand isn’t enough, nor is thirty thousand, for the war they have in mind. The Pentagon wants more troops, and sets out to find a way to get them.

APRIL 15, 2010, PARIS

McChrystal’s entourage waited outside the Westminster. A gray minivan pulled up. The staff poured in, getting seats. A navy blue Peugeot parked behind it. A French general stepped out, wearing a fancy light gray uniform with gold epaulets. McChrystal and his wife, Annie, an outgoing and fit brunette just on the other side of fifty who had joined him in Paris for the weekend, ducked inside.

I walked up to the minivan. There wasn’t enough room.

Duncan waved down a taxi. “We’ll follow them,” he said.

Duncan and I jumped into the cab.

“Arc de Triomphe,
s’il vous plaît
.”

The cabdriver hit the gas and started weaving through traffic, starts and stops.

“It’s sort of fun to be following that car, especially when it’s filled with American military uniforms,” Duncan said.

“Like something out of the Cold War,” I said.

Duncan checked his BlackBerry.

“Two French journalists have been kidnapped outside of Kabul,” he told me. “They were supposed to have an interview with McChrystal and got kidnapped the day before. It’s a bit of a problem. The French are willing to pay ransom, and the Taliban know that.”

“Has it come up in discussions?”

“Yes, briefly.”

The French’s willingness to pay ransom was an irritant to the Americans. By paying off the kidnappers, the Americans believed the Europeans were incentivizing kidnappings, a sin on a par with negotiating with terrorists. The French had lost ten soldiers in one incident in 2008 because they had stopped paying protection money to the Taliban, U.S. officials believed. So the Taliban surrounded them and attacked. It was symptomatic of the long-standing gripe Americans had with their European allies: They just didn’t seem like they wanted to fight the war.

Duncan rattled off a list of national “caveats”—the restrictions countries put on their forces operating in Afghanistan. I’d heard it before. NATO originally imposed some eighty-three restrictions on their troops, creating a deep resentment among American and British soldiers. U.S. military officials claimed that most of the NATO allies needed someone back in Brussels to give them approval for the simplest operations, including calling for a medevac flight, Duncan said. The rules had a weird, cultural-stereotype-reinforcing absurdity. The Dutch resisted working more than eight hours a day. The Italians and the Spanish were discouraged from taking part in combat operations. Another country refused to do counternarcotics; yet another would
only
take part in counternarcotics; a few wouldn’t fight after a snowfall; the Turks wouldn’t leave Kabul; another nation wouldn’t allow Afghan soldiers on their helicopters. The Danish troops’ tour lasted only six months. The Germans weren’t allowed to leave their bases at night, and in Berlin, the leadership refused to call it a war. It was a “humanitarian mission.” American soldiers had a list of derogatory nicknames for the International Security Assistance Force
acronym ISAF—
I Suck at Fighting
,
In Sandals and Flip-flops
, and
I Saw Americans Fight
.

“So what’s the purpose of this event?”

“It’s one of the things that generals have to do,” Duncan said. “He’s an introvert. This kind of thing makes him very uncomfortable. Honestly, he’d much rather be back in Afghanistan.”

Formations of French soldiers were standing in the courtyard in front of the Arc de Triomphe—French navy, marines, army, and police. A French military band started to play when McChrystal stepped out of the car to inspect the formations and lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. A crowd of tourists gathered across the street to watch. The band played “La Marseillaise.”