The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan (53 page)
Read The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan Online
Authors: Michael Hastings
Page 132
:…
all Eikenberry does is “whine”
: Author interview with White House official, October 2010.
Page 134
:…
Senator Lindsey Graham has to remind
: Bob Woodward,
Obama’s Wars
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010), p. 155.
Page 135
:
Press reports quote other unnamed
: Nancy A. Youssef, “Military Growing Impatient with Obama on Afghanistan,” McClatchy Newspapers, September 18, 2009.
Page 135
:…
want “to sandbag his old colleagues”
: Jonathan Alter,
The Promise
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010), p. 381.
CHAPTER 23. THE STRATEGYPage 136
:
“I’m president. I don’t give a shit”
: Ibid., p. 392.
Page 137
:
On the mezzanine level of the Ritz-Carlton
: Author notes, April 21, 2010.
CHAPTER 24. “LET ME BE CLEAR”Page 138
:
I made copies of his sketches in my notebook
: As noted in the text, sketches included are my renditions of McChrystal’s whiteboard diagrams, recreated from my original notebook pages for publication in this book.
Page 149
:
“Let me be clear”
: Barack Obama, “Address to the Nation on the Way Forward in Afghanistan and Pakistan” (speech), December 1, 2009, transcript from
whitehouse.gov
.
Page 150
:
“It was clearly a political decision
: Author interview with Pentagon official, April 2011.
Page 151
:
McChrystal prepares for his testimony
: Author interview with Colonel Richard Gross, May 2010.
CHAPTER 25. WORSHIPPING THE GODS OF BEERPage 152
:
“So we will start bringing troops home”
: Congressional testimony of Representative Ted Poe before House Armed Services Committee, December 8, 2009.
Page 153
:
I walked back to the Ritz
: Author notes, April 21, 2010.
CHAPTER 26. WHO IS STANLEY MPage 157
:
“The more you know”
: Author interview with former U.S. official, April 2011.
C
CHRYSTAL? PART I, 1954—1976
Page 158
:
He writes a series of provocative articles and stories for the school’s literary magazine
: Michael Hastings, “The Runaway General,”
Rolling Stone
, June 2010.
Page 159
:
Barno recalls having eggs thrown at him
: Author interview with General Dave Barno, May 2010.
Page 160
:
“I remember going down to the Area
: Author interview with Jake McFerren, April 2010.
Page 161
:
There are famous Goats—like George Armstrong Custer and George E. Pickett
: James S. Robbins,
Last in Their Class: Custer, Pickett, and the Goats of West Point
(New York: Encounter Books, 2006).
Page 161
:
The Goat excels in “mischief”
: Ibid.
Page 162
One story, written in November 1975, titled “Brinkman’s Note”
: Stanley McChrystal, “Brinkman’s Note,”
The Pointer
, 1975 (copy obtained by author).
Page 162
:
In a story called “The Journal of Captain Litton,” the main character is a British officer
: Stanley McChrystal, “The Journal of Captain Litton,”
The Pointer
(copy obtained by author).
Page 163
:
Another story, “In the Line of Duty”
: Ibid.
CHAPTER 27. “THE JERK IN GREEN”Page 163
:
“The bombs are in place and in minutes vengeance will be mine,” the story opens
: Ibid.
CHAPTER 28. WHO IS STANLEY MPage 165
: …
I checked out the local papers
: Author notes, April 22, 2010.
C
CHRYSTAL? PART II, 1976—present day
Page 171
:…
introduces mixed martial arts, like jujitsu, to the hand-to-hand combat training
: Author interview with Sergeant Major Michael Hall, May 2010.
Page 174
:
“We are soldiers, God, agents of correction”
: Dick Cheney,
In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), p. 464.
CHAPTER 29. REALITY CHECKS INPage 174
:
. . . “the mortally wounded Zarqawi pulled”
: Donald Rumsfeld,
Known and Unknown: A Memoir
(New York: Sentinel, 2011), p. 694.
INTERLUDE: DUBAIPage 176
:
The Afghan embassy was in an upscale neighborhood on the city’s west side
: Author notes, April 22, 2010.
Page 185
:
“There is danger here! A dry brown vibrating hum or frequency in the air”
: William S. Burroughs,
Interzone
(New York: Viking, 1989), pp. 65, 75.
Page 186
:
I headed off to my hotel in the city
: I spent the first two nights in Dubai at Le Royal Meridien and my last night at Atlantis: The Palm. For the sake of the narrative, I’ve spared the reader events that took place at the Meridien and jumped ahead to the Palm, which was the only hotel worth writing about anyway.
Page 186
:…
the Emirates had a gross domestic product of some $261 billion
: World Bank Development indicators, via Google.
Page 188
:
He first appeared in the Crimean War in 1854
: Phillip Knightley,
The First Casualty
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), p. 20.
Page 188
:
“Exaggeration, outright lies, puffery, slander,” wrote one historian on the quality of Civil War coverage
: Ibid., p. 21.
Page 189
:…
“Why, once Jakes went out to cover a revolution”
: Evelyn Waugh,
Scoop
(New York: Little, Brown, 1937), p. 92.
Page 189
:
“Fuck my shit,” he said privately, using a dropped expression picked up from GIs
: William Prochnau,
Once Upon a Distant War
(New York: Crown, 1995), p. 345.
Page 190
:
“Ernie got it,” he heard
: Robert Capa,
Slightly Out of Focus
(New York: Henry Holt, 1947), p. 230.
Page 190
:
“There’s absolutely no reason for me to get up”
: Ibid., p. 30.
Page 190
:
“I would say the war correspondent gets more drinks, more girls, better pay”
: Alex Kershaw,
Blood and Champagne: The Life and Times of Robert Capa
(New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2003), p. 20.
Page 193
:
In October of 2008, I’m in Afghanistan for the first time
: Author notes, originally published in “Obama’s War,”
GQ
, May 2009.
CHAPTER 30. A SHORT HISTORY OF A HORRIBLE IDEAPage 197
:
Two hours later, I stumbled through airport security
: Author notes, April 27, 2010.
Page 201
:…
that Arabs have a “notorious inability to organize”
: David Galula,
Pacification in Algeria, 1956–1958
(Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2006), p. 18.
Page 201
:
“I sound no doubt terribly colonialist”
: Ibid.
Page 202
:
In 1960, Galula takes a position at the Armed Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Virginia
: Ann Marlowe,
David Galula: His Life and Intellectual Context
(Charleston, SC: CreateSpace, 2010).
Page 202
:
In 1962, Vietnam War architect General William Westmoreland
: Ibid.
Page 202
:
tries to help him get a job at Mobil Oil company
: Ibid.
Page 203
:…
and the controversial Phoenix Program
: Ibid.
Page 203
:
COIN had been “overblown and oversold”
: Ibid.
Page 203
:
Caspar Weinberger pens what is seen as official repudiation
: Andrew Bacevich,
The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism
(New York: Macmillan, 2009), p. 129.
Page 203
:…
definitively replaced by a new fad of the moment
: Andrew Bacevich,
Washington Rules
(New York: Macmillan, 2010), p. 178.
Page 203
: “
Never Send a Man When You Can Send a Bullet”
: Colonel David H. Petraeus, Major Damian P. Carr, and Captain John C. Abercrombie, “Why We Need FISTS: Never Send a Man When You Can Send a Bullet,” July 1997.
Page 204
:
Kilcullen, too, views the decision to invade Iraq as “fucking stupid”
: Spencer Ackerman, “A Counterinsurgency Guide for Politicos,”
The Washington Independent
, July 27, 2008.
Page 205
:…
explicitly points out that the best way to defeat terrorist networks
: Seth Jones “How Terrorist Groups End,” RAND Corporation, 2008.
Page 206
:…
that “JSOC was a killing machine”
: Author interview with General Bill Mayville, April 2010.
Page 206
:…
he would have “worked with the devil” to beat Al-Qaeda
: Lieutenant Colonel Daniel L. Davis, “The Spark, the Oxygen and the Fuel,”
Armed Forces Journal
, September 2010.
Page 206
:…
about $360
million spent in just one year
: Erica Goode, “U.S. Military
Will Transfer Control of Sunni Citizen Patrols to Iraqi Government,”
The
New York Times
, September 1, 2008.
Page 207
:
“They are true Iraqi patriots”
: Author interview with senior military official, Baghdad, January 2011.
Page 207
:…
“graduate level of war”
:
FM 3
-
24:
Counterinsurgency
, December 2006.
Page 207
:…
the key is “perception”
: Major David Petraeus, “American Lessons in Vietnam,”
Parameters
, 1987.
Page 208
:
COIN strategy is a fraud perpetuated
: Author interview with Douglas Macgregor, May 2010.
Page 208
:
It’s all very cynical, politically
: Author interview with Marc Sageman, former CIA analyst, May 2010.
Page 208
:
“Losing wars is really expensive”
: Tara McKelvey, “The Cult of Counterinsurgency,”
The American Prospect
, November 2008.
Page 208
:
“The intellectual construct for the War on Terror”
: Hearing of the Military Construction, Veterans Affairs, and Related Agencies Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, witness General David Petraeus, Commander, U.S. Central Command, Washington, DC, April 24, 2009.
Page 209
:…
examined eighty-nine insurgencies and pointed out
: Ben Connable and Martin Libicki,
How Insurgencies End
(Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2010), pp. 2–11.
CHAPTER 31. BAD ROMANCEPage 209
:…
“I keep Galula by my bedside”
: Author notes, April 2010, from a talk at the École Militaire.
Page 212
:…
$206 billion in private contracts
: Congressional Research Services Report, Department of Defense Contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, May 13, 2011.
Page 213
:
A number of the security companies had connections to the insurgency
: Aram Roston, “How the U.S. Funds the Taliban,”
The Nation
, November 30, 2009.
Page 213
:…
from 2002 to 2009 found at least $18 billion unaccounted for
: Billions in Afghanistan Aid unaccounted for, AFP, October 28, 2010.
Page 213
:
Karzai had talked about banning the mercenaries
: Joshua Partlow, “Karzai Wants Private Security Firms Out
,” The Washington Post
, August 17, 2010.
Page 215
:
“It’s not going to work”
: Author interview with Hekmatullah Rahmini, April 27, 2010.
