The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan (6 page)

Eikenberry is a three-star general. He’s done two tours in Afghanistan, with his second in 2005 as the commander of all U.S. forces there. While other military officials were crowing about success in Afghanistan, Eikenberry had been warning that the Taliban was making a comeback.

He’d been in the Pentagon on September 11 when the plane struck—almost killed him, he recalls; he was protected only by the reinforced Mylar glass. He finds a secretary who points to another general’s door. It’s locked! she screams. He kicks the door down and rescues the general. Hollywood-style shit. He doesn’t quite look like a hero, though. Parted hair, nervous, like a door-to-door
Encyclopædia Britannica
salesman in Topeka who knows Wikipedia is about to put him out of business. He has a reputation as an intellectual—brainy, with master’s degrees from Harvard and Stanford and an advanced degree in Chinese history from Nanjing University.

McKiernan tells the White House that he doesn’t think Eikenberry is a good choice. Eikenberry would have to retire from the military to take the job, and McKiernan doesn’t think having two military officers—one active duty, one recently retired—will work. He thinks that might lead to unnecessary clashes and battles of ego. He thinks the U.S. ambassador should be a civilian career diplomat. Karzai, too, doesn’t like Eikenberry—they’ve spent “thousands of hours” working together, according to a U.S. embassy official, and they didn’t get along the last time he was in charge there.

On January 27, 2009, the White House announces their choice, leaking the name of the next ambassador to
The New York Times
: Karl W. Eikenberry.

In retrospect, military officials close to McKiernan say overruling him on the choice of Eikenberry was a worrying sign that McKiernan had lost support in Washington. (They ignore it, though, because really, anybody is better than Wood.) McKiernan is shocked by how little time he’s gotten with the new president—during the first three months of 2009, while the White House is conducting its first Afghan policy review, McKiernan speaks to Obama only twice.

That spring, McKiernan makes the
Time
100, a list of the people the magazine believes are the most important and influential in the world. The accompanying article, written by retired NATO commander Wesley Clark, describes him as “extraordinarily calm under stress, a clear thinker, tough, and morally courageous.”

It’s the last good press McKiernan gets. In the Pentagon, the rumblings to remove him are getting louder. There are those within the Pentagon who aren’t satisfied with McKiernan’s demand for only thirty thousand troops. The general also doesn’t have the right style. In March, McKiernan briefs Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gates in a video teleconference. His responses don’t impress them, or so they claim. “He was weak,” a Pentagon official close to Gates and Mullen tells me. “He wasn’t high-energy. This is a war fighter’s game, and McKiernan had some of the right concepts, but he didn’t have the creativity and energy.”

Mullen’s number-one choice to replace McKiernan is Stanley McChrystal. He’s known him for years and has personally groomed him, giving him entrée to an elite crowd—Mullen, for instance, introduced McChrystal to New York mayor Mike Bloomberg at a dinner party a few years earlier. (McChrystal would later model his command center in Afghanistan after Bloomberg’s office in New York.) For the past year, McChrystal has worked down the hall from Mullen in the Pentagon as
the director of his staff, impressing the admiral with his work ethic. “He wasn’t strolling in at 0630 with fucking mocha lattes,” the Pentagon official tells me. Mullen and Gates agree on McKiernan, and Petraeus, the CENTCOM commander who was once his subordinate, backs the move.

Gates takes the decision to the White House in April. Gates carries a big stick. He’s the most important holdover from the Bush administration, the man Obama has come to heavily rely on for advice in foreign affairs.
What does Bob Gates think?
is a question the president often asks. Insiders in the White House call him Yoda, the Pentagon his Dagobah system—squat-looking, round face, finely combed gray hair. Obama defers to Gates’s judgment and respects his three decades’ worth of experience in the defense and intelligence communities. Obama signs off on McChrystal, taking Mullen’s and Gates’s word that he’s the best choice.

Mullen flies to Kabul to give McKiernan the news in late April. Mullen is another throwback, an officer and a gentleman. He wants McKiernan to save face; just resign, he tells him, that’s the way to go. McKiernan tells him no way: You’ll have to fire me. McKiernan is stunned—mainly because he hasn’t done anything wrong. There’s no dereliction of duty, no screwups on the battlefield, no insubordination. Mullen tells him he’s just not the right man for the job anymore. The next day, McKiernan goes on what had been a long-scheduled vacation—his first in ten months. He spends the days worried if he’s really going to get fired.

On Wednesday, May 6, over a dinner at Camp Eggers, the headquarters for the Afghan training mission, Gates again asks McKiernan for his resignation. McKiernan again refuses to give it. He tells the defense secretary that he made promises to Afghans and his NATO allies that he’d serve with them the full two years. Gates says he’ll fire him if he doesn’t resign. He doesn’t, and Gates fires him. “Firing a four-star general like that,” a Pentagon official tells me. “It was a violent act. You couldn’t point to some fuckup, like he was negligent in battle, or invaded Pakistan—it was a series of performances in briefs that slowly eroded [Gates’s and Mullen’s] confidence in him.”

At McKiernan’s headquarters in Kabul, the word slowly leaks out. On Saturday, May 9, he gathers his staff in a meeting room at the Yellow House—the nickname for the building where he has his office. There are about thirty of his staff in the room. No one knows what’s coming; McKiernan has to fly to Pakistan in the morning, so they think maybe it has something to do with that, military officials who attended the meeting tell me.

McKiernan walks into the room. “I’m being relieved from command,” he tells the staffers. He speaks for about five minutes. As he thanks his staff for their service, he has to stop. He starts to choke up. He chooses to say a last thanks and leaves the room. “We all sat there shocked,” according to a military official who was in the room. “No one said a word. For two minutes.”

On Monday, May 11, Gates is asked at a press conference whether this ends McKiernan’s career. “Probably,” he responds. It’s a brutal answer after the general’s thirty-seven years of service. Gates piles on with a few more veiled criticisms: Afghanistan needs “fresh eyes” and “fresh thinking,” he says. “We have a new strategy, a new mission, and a new ambassador. I believe that new military leadership is needed.”

It’s the “first sacking of a wartime theater commander,” notes
The Washington Post
, since General Douglas MacArthur was fired by Truman at the height of the Korean War.

The media’s response to McKiernan’s firing is vicious and swift. The man who weeks earlier had been considered one of the hundred most influential people in the world is now a loser, a dud, someone who
doesn’t get it
. The meme forms quickly in the press and on blogs: McKiernan is old-school, McKiernan doesn’t understand how to be a general these days. McKiernan doesn’t comprehend counterinsurgency. This is his greatest crime.

Counterinsurgency (COIN) is a set of tactics for fighting the Taliban that have become very popular within the military’s new generation of leaders. The accusation that
he doesn’t get COIN
is both damning and false. McKiernan had been employing a counterinsurgency strategy for
his entire tenure, setting up local police forces and pushing his soldiers to live among the population. McKiernan, though, doesn’t get how to suck up to the media, doesn’t pucker up to the senators, doesn’t play the bureaucratic game as well as his rivals. McKiernan gives too much of a shit about Europe and NATO. McKiernan isn’t shaking things up enough, not taking enough risks. McKiernan is no Dave Petraeus—the father of modern counterinsurgency, who in 2006 oversaw the writing of a new Army manual called FM 3-24, the COIN bible for American officers; McKiernan is no Stan McChrystal, another rising star and COIN alcolyte. Both Petraeus and McChrystal are COINdinistas, the nickname given to the faction within the military community that has embraced the counterinsurgency doctrine with an almost evangelical fervor. There’s a feeling among these men that McKiernan
isn’t a true believer
.

McKiernan is the B-Team, and as Admiral Mullen would later say, McChrystal is “the A-Team.” McChrystal had served loyally as a Pentagon spokesperson; he’d been successful at waging a counterterrorism campaign in Iraq; he’d ingratiated himself first with Rumsfeld, Bush, and Cheney and later with Mullen and Gates. Stan McChrystal
gets counterinsurgency
, and he’ll soon get his chance in the spotlight.

On June 2, McKiernan boards a plane to leave Kabul. His top staff goes with him, a gesture of loyalty he appreciates. He’s given a warm send-off among the soldiers on base, who line up for over an hour to shake his hand and say their good-byes. His supporters in the military firmly believe he’s gotten a raw deal. Where the conventional wisdom has suddenly turned to say that McKiernan doesn’t get it, doesn’t understand, a few military officials see something else. It has very little to do with ability, senior military officials will tell me. It’s bureaucratic infighting and office politics. “McKiernan was on the wrong team,” a senior military official says. “He isn’t on Petraeus’s team; McChrystal is. All of these top leaders are dynamic and adaptable—the idea McKiernan didn’t understand COIN is laughable.” McKiernan went to William & Mary, not West Point, the military academy that had produced the tight-knit clique
of powerful generals who had begun to seize control of the Army, which included Petraeus, McChrystal, and General Ray Odierno in Iraq, all West Point graduates. Privately, McKiernan will tell friends that it was Petraeus who was behind getting rid of him. (Petraeus denies to colleagues that he had a hand in McKiernan’s dismissal—but “of course that’s what Petraeus would say,” observes a senior Pentagon official. “Petraeus supported the move.”)

There’s a little blowback within the ranks, grumbling that Gates hasn’t shown McKiernan enough respect and the reasons for letting him go don’t really add up. “McChrystal is a Special Forces guy; he’s never commanded an army this big. It could be a problem,” a senior military official tells me at the time. McKiernan’s firing, another U.S. official says, is a “dirty” move to get a public relations bump that comes from the “strong move of switching generals to win the war.”

Senior military and Pentagon officials would describe yet another dynamic at work. The Pentagon secretly (and not so secretly; talk to any COINdinistas, and they’ll say the same thing) wants more than the twenty-one thousand troops Obama has given McKiernan. They’re still well short of the hundred thousand American troop number that COIN supporters within the Pentagon think is the minimum that needs to be in Afghanistan. McKiernan wasn’t going to ask for tens of thousands of more soldiers and Marines—he’d already gone to the mat once, and he felt if he was eventually given the additional nine thousand troops he had requested, he’d have enough to win. On the other hand, by firing McKiernan, the Pentagon had a chance to “reset,” says one U.S. military official. The COINdinistas felt they couldn’t get all the soldiers they had wanted with McKiernan in charge, but a “new mission” and a “new military leadership” would give the Pentagon another shot to escalate. A new general, in other words, presents a new opportunity to ask for more boots on the ground. “Gates was the mastermind behind this whole thing,” a military official with knowledge of the events would tell me. (Gates will deny this.) Maybe Obama’s Yoda has a bit of Vader in him after all.

APRIL 15, 2010, PARIS

Duncan, Dave Silverman, his wife, and I headed to a small Italian restaurant for dinner. Dave’s wife was a restaurateur in Washington, DC, and she had chosen the place.

Dave was about five feet eight with a blond crew cut. He was a thirty-three-year-old naval officer trained as a Navy SEAL. The others on the team jokingly called him the Admiral—although he was outranked on the senior staff, his input on larger strategic questions was taken seriously. He arranged logistics for the general’s travel and played a key role in shaping McChrystal’s communication strategy. He spoke in quick and compact bursts, compressing complex ideas into an insanely efficient militarized syntax. One of his jobs was to handle the Sync Matrix, or as Dave explained it, “to map out what the general is trying to accomplish, then put that on a time chart and functionally organize what we’re doing by his end states and objectives at certain dates and times, and then identify what events are missing based on his goals, plug those events in, and then leverage existing events as the forums we use to articulate our message.”

The Europe trip was one of those events.

Dave joined the Navy SEALs, he told me, because it was the closest experience to a “high-performing sporting environment” that he could get in the military. He’d been a star water-polo player in San Francisco, where he’d grown up. The camaraderie, the eliteness of it, the chance to serve his country—his father had been a pilot in Vietnam, his grandfather fought in Patton’s army.

Dave was hilarious. Dave made gay jokes—everybody in the military made gay jokes all the time, but Dave was a liberal from San Francisco, so it was okay. When Dave talked about one of his friends’ toddlers, a real hyperactive kid, he said the only way to deal with the kid was to put him in the pool. Dave described the water in the pool as a “tactical neutralizer.” He didn’t find that description odd.