The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan (45 page)

I dressed up like a native, with a salwar kameez—which look to Westerners like pajamas—and a small cap on my head. I purchased a messenger bag from a local store to carry my notebook and recorder in. I didn’t carry any identification with me. I’d fail any close inspection, but there were enough mixed bloodlines in Afghanistan that even with blue eyes and brown hair, I didn’t necessarily scream American. More likely Turkish, or perhaps from another part of Central Asia.

“There are the most suicide bombers and IEDs around here,” Ahmad told me as we passed a stretch of road about ten minutes outside the city. These were the kinds of details Ahmad regularly provided, like the narration of a tour guide whose ass-backwards goal was to get the visitor to call off the tour and flee the country for his life. An IED went off there, a targeted killing here, a particularly corrupt checkpoint up ahead.

Two American convoys passed us, ten giant MRAPs in total, lumbering along the other way. A series of new checkpoints had been set up to provide security, around thirty in all around the city, manned by Afghans lounging about on concrete barriers. The checkpoints were part of the massive U.S. offensive that had been under way since the summer.

The meeting is with a militia leader named Mohammed Nabi, a man the mayor of Kandahar would later describe to me as a “warlord.” Nabi was officially part of Petraeus’s new program to start arming and training Afghan Local Police, or ALP.

We took a right off the main road, entering a quiet countryside, dust and stone paths between brown and dried-up grape fields. Without the hectic activity of the main road to give us a false sense of safety in numbers, it dawned on us—me, my driver, my translator, and my Afghan bodyguard—that we were out there now on our own, beyond the narrow bounds of government or Coalition control. I realized that I might have made a horrible fucking mistake.

It was one thing to hear the president of the United States proclaim there was progress in Kandahar; it was another to be putting that progress to the test sitting in a shitty white Toyota waiting for a stranger to arrive to take us to a warlord’s hangout.

A boy about sixteen years old drove up to us on a motorcycle. He was our contact. It immediately became clear to everyone else in the car that we might be walking into a kidnapping. Things might or might not soon go terribly wrong. I should have heeded the warnings from our security company, I thought—whatever you do, do not go to Arghandab, they had told me. I had made the decision to go, and once you start this kind of thing, it becomes almost impossible to stop. The truly important decision is to go or not to go—once you go, you’re gone, no backing out, no turning back. We’ve come this far, we’re almost there, I’ve spent $400 dollars on a car and bodyguard for the day. Dice rolled, fates tempted. Two possible outcomes: You’re fucked or not fucked. Scrape by, I’m a hero. Don’t scrape by, I’m a beheaded fuckup.

The motorcycle took off down a one-lane road, with a drainage ditch to the left, an eight-foot-high mud wall to the right. It was a road where we could be easily ambushed, with no way to turn around or escape. Were we about to meet the Taliban or the militia? Or was the militia Taliban? How greedy were they? How desperate for cash? Would they risk snatching me? It felt funny, a tight spot, a jolt of fear and adrenaline—and I thought, If this ends in a kidnapping, which I’m putting at about a 20 percent probability at that moment, I’m going to feel, among other things, pretty stupid.

We pulled into a dirt lot next to a grape field behind another small wall. A group of ten men sat cradling their AK-47s. There were about eight motorcycles and a green Ford Ranger truck parked there as well. My translator introduced me to the leader, Mohammed Nabi.

Nabi was sitting cross-legged on a carpet spread out over the dirt. His silver AK-47, decorated with green and silver on the grip, was resting up against the wall. It didn’t take much prompting before he started bitching about the Afghan government, the Canadians, and the Taliban.

First, the Taliban tried to kill him, he said, by blowing up a suicide bomber at his cousin’s wedding. It was in retaliation for the militia he had formed with U.S. backing. Over a thousand members of Mohammed Nabi’s tribe had gathered in a field to celebrate the event last summer. Mohammed said he saw the bomber slip past the guards, pull the pin on the suicide vest, and detonate. “Blood everywhere,” he said, the bomber killing eighty and injuring three hundred. On a late September evening, the Taliban tried again—this time Nabi heard the shooting, called up one of his guards on his cell phone, then rushed over to join the fight. He claimed a victory that night: thirteen Talibs dead, while only losing three of his own.

Nabi wanted to go on the offensive against the Taliban, but he was, at least temporarily, prevented from doing so. That was why he was so pissed at the Canadians.

“The Canadians stopped us when we would try to go on operations in other villages,” he told me. “Two or three times they stopped us, and we could have made this entire area secure.” The outpost where we were sitting was one of twelve checkpoints he commanded over seven villages. Tribal elders from other villages also didn’t appreciate his incursions and claimed he was overstepping his bounds. Nabi had ninety members in his militia and said with the proper funding he could easily increase that number to three or four hundred. He’d been paying his men out of his own pocket, seven thousand afghani a man, and wished the Afghan government would soon start chipping in. The youngest member was a
fourteen-year-old, who I watched walk around the outpost, cleaning up and serving tea.

Thankfully, Nabi said, two months ago the U.S. Special Forces came to offer him more support. His advisors—who go by the names Chip and Rob, he said—gave him eight new AK-47s. They provided his militiamen with government identification for the ALP—the ID has an Afghan flag and an American flag with a picture and serial number on it. The Special Forces soldiers have promised to pay him regular visits. He also received the new Ford Ranger, because the new police chief of Kandahar is from his tribe.

Razzi paced back and forth around the perimeter, making chitchat with the militiamen. He gave me a thumbs-up and a smile—his sign saying that it was all clear, for now. I would have liked to have stayed longer, but after twenty minutes, I figured it was time to go. I took pictures with the militia members, made sure I hadn’t dropped my cigarettes or recorder, and as casually as possible got back in the car.

We pulled out on the dirt road. Everyone in the car was quiet. We took a left on the other dirt road. We arrived back at the main road.

Everyone in the car started laughing hysterically.

Ahmad turned around in his seat.

“I admit, after I saw that motorcycle, I thought we were in trouble,” he said.

“On the main fucking road my ass,” I said.

“We are not doing that again,” Razzi said definitively. I agreed.

“Those are not good people,” my translator explained. “They are not people who good Afghans want their children and teenagers to be around.” The militias, Ahmad explained, have a reputation for having teenage boys around to have sex with. Like the fourteen-year-old who was hanging out there, Ahmad said.

“Glad to see we’re putting our faith in these guys,” I said.

JULY 2010 TO JANUARY 2011, KABUL

Dave Petraeus takes over the morning briefings. It’s his war now. He asks more questions than McChrystal, according to a senior military official who sits in on over a dozen briefings that summer. McChrystal was quieter—Petraeus interrupts, peppers the briefer with questions.

Almost every morning he lasers in on one of his favorite topic: information operations. How to spin the Afghans and how to spin the Taliban. How to convince them that we’re actually winning this thing—that they can trust us, that we’re on their side. It worked in Iraq, he has said: “We amplified [the insurgents’] atrocities and broadcast them and saturated the media throughout Baghdad, using TV, radio, billboards, Internet, you name it.”

In August, he gets a briefing that “makes him almost giggly,” according to a senior military official who attended the briefing. The Taliban have written a book about how to treat the local population—a book whose principles they violate pretty regularly. It’s the Taliban who kill the majority of Afghan civilians—usually a breakdown of about 20 percent killed by NATO, 80 percent killed by the Taliban. Sure, the Taliban are
doing operations in areas because NATO is there, but the theory still holds—the Taliban are abusing their own worse than the international community, which may or may not matter.

Petraeus thinks it matters. An enterprising colonel has developed what Petraeus thinks is a clever response. It’s called “Throw the Book at Them,” a presentation which compares the Taliban’s alleged principles to their alleged deeds.

This, Petraeus exclaims, is what we need more of. This guy gets it! (“If you say the wrong thing, you’re skunked,” says a senior military official. “He hit it off, thought it was a great idea, asked the officer to send him his résumé.”)

Petraeus goes on a tour of the country. In July, he stops by the IJC to say hello to Rod, Lieutenant General David Rodriguez. Rod is a McChrystal holdover, a boots-and-mud kind of general, who in private has the habit of stringing multiple
fucks
and
fuckers
together. Petraeus works the room. He asks the Dutch soldiers to stand. He mentions his Dutch ancestry. Then he says, poorly but a nice try,
thank you
in Dutch:
dank u wel
.

Petraeus, according to those who work with him, has received something of a shock in Afghanistan. It’s not Iraq. He knows it’s not Iraq, he has said it’s not Iraq, but regardless, his experience is forged in Baghdad; his entire framework is hard to shake. “He brings up Iraq every five minutes,” says an Afghan official. Earlier in the year, he was on a plane with Holbrooke coming back from a ROC drill to discuss plans for Kandahar. In one conversation, according to a senior U.S. administration official, “He must have said Iraq twenty-one times in fifteen minutes.” Iraq is on the brain. It’s in Iraq where Petraeus made his name—mostly good, a little bit of bad, depending on who you ask.

Petraeus was born in Cornwall, New York, a town on the Hudson near West Point. His father is a Dutch merchant marine. His first nickname is Peaches—easier to pronounce than Petraeus. He goes to West Point, class of ’74. He gets set up on a blind date with the superintendent’s
daughter—he bluffs his way into a football game. It’s love, but the haters will hate on him for that, too, noting that it’s quite convenient for him to have married into a general’s family. He excels at West Point and excels at everything that follows—ranking in the top of his class at Ranger School, an incredibly difficult feat.

He doesn’t get his war, though. Petraeus misses Vietnam. He deals only in Vietnam’s ghosts. He writes his dissertation in Princeton about it: “The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam.”

He misses almost everything big. In the Gulf War, he is a major, a staff aide to a top general—he “looked more concerned with keeping the two VIP generals on schedule for their next celebrity visit in the desert” than an upcoming attack that seemed “a distant possibility,” according to one account from an officer who was his contemporary. A superior of his, Admiral William Fallon, reportedly puts it less delicately: He’s an “ass-kissing little chicken shit.” He comes close to losing his life in a training accident in 1991—shot through the chest, ignores the doctor’s orders and does push-ups just days after. He breaks his pelvis jumping out of a plane in 2000.

The invasion of Iraq launches his public career. He seizes the moment. He gets to lead the 101st Airborne and he’s accompanied by historian Rick Atkinson. He serves up a quote that will define his legacy there: “Tell me how this ends.”

Brilliant—like he can already see the upcoming debacle. He’ll set himself up to answer that question five years later.
Tell Me How This Ends
becomes the title of one of the first biographies written about him—he’ll later bring the journalist/biographer to work for him as a senior advisor down at CENTCOM.

He arrives in Baghdad in 2003 and runs into an old friend from West Point. “Can you believe it took us thirty years to get our Combat Infantry Badges?” Petraeus tells him. It took him a long time to get his war. He gets awarded a Bronze Star for valor—though his critics will raise questions about whether he should have gotten a Bronze Star for meritorious
service instead of valor, claiming he didn’t appear to have done anything valorous while under fire. This sounds like nitpicking, but it also might fit a pattern. “Petraeus was handing out Bronze Stars to all his boys,” a military official tells me.

He earns the nickname King David while up in Mosul, ruling over the ancient Iraqi city. Within months of his leaving Mosul, the city collapses—not his fault, he explains, things were great when he was there. His next gig is heading the organization that trains and equips the Iraqi security forces, both army and police, called MNSTCI.

He gets a different nickname this time. He’s taking over from General Paul Eaton. Petraeus arrives in Baghdad on a day that Eaton happens to be up at the Kirkush Military Training Base. Eaton has a nice office in Saddam’s Republican Palace—the palace, like most of Saddam’s architecture, resembles a McMansion dipped in gold. It’s Petraeus’s office now. Without Eaton’s permission, according to military officials who were at the embassy, Petraeus sends his men in to move all of Eaton’s stuff into a broom closet–sized office down the hall. U.S. military officials working at the palace are stunned when they see Eaton sitting in there—why is Eaton in a tiny office? Eaton, says one military official, “was incensed.” (When I ask Eaton about the incident, he declines to comment, though he insists he had a “very positive” transfer of power with Petraeus.)