by Jake Tapper
Gates also had one private mission: to ask General McKiernan to retire early. But McKiernan wouldn’t do it. “You’re going to have to fire me,” he said. So Gates did.
On May 11, back at the Pentagon, Gates spoke at a hastily convened press conference, talking about President Obama’s decision to draw down the war in Iraq and instead focus on Afghanistan, where, the defense secretary declared, “we must do better.” Gates insisted that McKiernan had done nothing wrong; it was just that “a fresh approach, a fresh look in the context of the new strategy, probably was in our best interest.” Added Mullen, “I just didn’t think that we could wait until 2010”—when McKiernan’s rotation was scheduled to end—to make the change. Gates said he would recommend to President Obama that McKiernan be replaced by McChrystal, the former commander of Joint Special Operations Command and currently serving as director of the Joint Staff—the three-star officer who assists the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
In addition to having supervised some highly successful commando special operations in Iraq—including the capture of Saddam Hussein and the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq—McChrystal was considered by some of his colleagues to be a shrewd and canny political operator. Some of his contemporaries thought he was manipulative, and some officers from conventional forces viewed him as being typical of the “unaccountable” Special Forces ilk, not used to playing nice with other branches of the military, accustomed solely to getting his own way. Others saw him as brilliant. The president deferred to Gates.
President Obama had already ordered twenty-one thousand more troops to Afghanistan, fulfilling a campaign promise and bringing the total number of U.S. troops in that country to sixty-eight thousand. On June 2, during his Senate confirmation hearings, McChrystal suggested in his prepared remarks that President Obama might need to send even more. He was then asked by Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina if he would feel “constrained at all” about asking for even more troops if he thought them necessary.
“Sir, I’m not on the job yet, so I—you know, I’m speculating on that,” McChrystal said. “Yesterday, in a meeting, Admiral Mullen said that if I was confirmed to ask for what I need—almost quote, unquote. He looked me in the eye said that. So, I believe that if I have a requirement, I can look Mullen in the eye and tell him that’s what I need.”
“Do you think that’s true of the administration also?” Graham inquired.
“Sir, I don’t know,” McChrystal replied. At the White House, the general’s comments were perceived as an announcement to the world that he didn’t know whether the president would support him if he needed more troops—and even a suggestion that the commander in chief might not want him to speak candidly about what he thought was necessary to succeed in Afghanistan. Senior White House officials believed that McChrystal—and, they assumed, the Pentagon—were trying to roll them, putting the president in an untenable situation wherein he would have no defensible way to refuse the military when it publicly requested more troops.
McChrystal would later say that his remarks were not aimed at the White House in any way, that he had intended merely to convey that he was trying to stay in his own lane and answer only to his chain of command—in this case, Gates and Mullen.
The broader view from the Pentagon was more complex. From the beginning, generals thought, President Bush had not provided sufficient troops to do the job effectively in Afghanistan. As a result, Americans were dying, and the mission wasn’t succeeding. As to the new president, the generals had been infuriated by a series of leaks, seemingly coming from Vice President Biden’s office since March 2009, suggesting that the United States should actually start withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, abandoning the counterinsurgency program and pursuing a strategy that was being called CT-plus—consisting of a smaller counterterrorism force focused primarily on taking out bad guys, with some training of Afghan security forces but otherwise not much of an emphasis on nation building. Right or wrong, the generals considered the proposals that were being fed to reporters ill informed and counterproductive. In particular, this notion that their troops could conduct counterterrorist strikes against the enemy without enough troops on the ground to win the support of the Afghan people, and thus help gather intelligence, stirred deep ire. So, yes, the generals were willing to put a little pressure on the suits in D.C.
Such behavior was predictable to senior officials inside the White House—it was common to the Pentagon/White House dynamic—but that didn’t mean they were happy about it. President Obama’s national security adviser, James Jones, called Gates to make it clear that the generals ought to back off. Jones, a retired Marine Corps general, had been brought in to the administration in part to serve as a liaison between the White House and the Pentagon. Gates assured him that the generals weren’t trying to jam the president in any way; they were just being candid, he said.
On June 8, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell announced that Secretary Gates had asked McChrystal, should he be confirmed (as he indeed would be, on June 30), to “go over to Afghanistan to undertake a sixty-day review of the situation on the ground there,” and to report on “what changes in the strategy should be made, and particularly from a personnel standpoint, from a manpower standpoint.”
This review, too, became something of a controversy. McChrystal saw himself as approaching the task modestly. He would later insist that he hadn’t gone in to Afghanistan thinking that more troops were needed; he said he was in fact initially inclined to believe that what was necessary was a new strategy and more talented officers, not more bodies. He attempted deference: to try to understand his brief, he scrutinized the president’s campaign pledges and the remarks he had made upon sending in the new surge of troops. He knew there was concern in the White House over the direction of U.S. policy in Afghanistan, but he didn’t think there was absolute clarity as to the president’s concerns versus his goals.
In Kabul, on June 15, McChrystal was interviewed by the Washington Post’s Greg Jaffe, and he described in detail the broad assessment of the war that he was about to begin, suggesting that he wanted to focus troops on Afghan population centers and pull them from more remote areas such as the Korangal Valley. The general’s informal sixty-day survey was rapidly morphing into something more significant—and more public. Besides doing boots-on-the-ground research, McChrystal invited a number of think-tank folks, such as the conservative Fred Kagan, one of Petraeus’s advisers on the Iraq surge, to offer him advice; Kagan began publicly pushing for additional troops to be sent to Afghanistan.
The McChrystal report was much anticipated and, when it was completed, made a momentous impression—which came as something of a surprise to the general himself, he would later say. A number of other assessments had already been done—by Central Command, by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and by the White House—and McChrystal’s had started out as an informal evaluation of the situation. McChrystal didn’t think it was the Washington Post story or even the Pentagon-versus–White House angle that created the hype so much as it was the way events just happened to play out: as he arrived in Kabul, the United States’ position in the war was deteriorating rapidly, so his report came to be seen as something of an emergency prescription for the illness.
Storm clouds began forming when Jaffe’s colleague Bob Woodward, traveling with Jones in Afghanistan, reported on the front page of their newspaper that a conflict was brewing over troop levels, with the Pentagon pushing for more and the White House pushing back. An issue that President Obama thought he had temporarily put to rest with twenty-one thousand new troops and a completed assessment—finished weeks earlier by a team that included one of America’s foremost experts on Al Qaeda—now seemed anything but settled. From the White House’s point of view, McChrystal had managed to place himself in a position where he would be telling the president what he needed, and the world would see how this new, untested president would respond. While the sniping and suspicions
and rhetorical missives fired within the newsprint of the Washington Post might have seemed, to the men of 3-61 Cav, to be taking place in another dimension altogether, all of these machinations would have a tremendous impact on them.
In early 2009, as Colonel George and Lieutenant Colonel Brown prepared to deploy to Afghanistan, they refined their plan to close Camp Keating and the other small outposts. Brown was committed to counterinsurgency, which he viewed as a process of creating a series of security bubbles at the local level—connecting Afghans in hamlets and villages to their government through security and economic opportunity—and then expanding those individual bubbles until they merged with others. But the security bubbles at Combat Outposts Keating and Lowell were isolated, and they were not expanding. George and Brown were convinced, in fact, that the various security bubbles in Nuristan were never going to “spread” and link up—there just weren’t enough forces to make that happen, and the mountainous land in between was too easy for the enemy to control. Most of the communities in Nuristan Province were separated from one another and from the provincial and national governments by chasms of instability and Taliban violence.
Brown believed there were areas in the region where counterinsurgency was working—from Naray north to Barikot, for example. With more troops—the ones from the remote outposts they wanted to close—they could link the Naray–Barikot security bubble to other security bubbles in the south of Kunar Province. His and George’s realignment plan was all about this kind of focus: the idea was to stop spending scarce resources on things that weren’t working and start reinforcing success.
Brown and George worried in particular about Combat Outpost Lowell, which they thought most vulnerable. Observation Post Mace, located near Gawardesh and manned by only twenty-four U.S. troops who shared space with a dubious crew of ANA soldiers, was next on their list of concerns. Combat Outpost Keating ranked third.
So they would pull out. But how? And when? George pushed his staff to think hard about what the enemy would do if the United States did pull out. What groundwork would the Americans have to lay beforehand? What would be the most appropriate timeline for leaving? The team concluded that the withdrawal wouldn’t greatly increase the overall flow of men and materials over the Pakistan border into Afghanistan, since the U.S. presence wasn’t affecting that very much anyway. A withdrawal would have a moderate impact on the estimated two thousand residents of Kamdesh Village, some of whom—most likely those who had been working with the Americans—would relocate farther south to be closer to the remaining U.S. troops, at great expense to themselves. They anticipated there might be a slight increase in the number of attacks against Forward Operating Base Bostick and a nearby CIA camp.
The whole team was aware that from the highest general to the lowliest private, members of the military were extremely reluctant to see any base that troops had fought for, that men had died for, shut down. Indeed, to some it was tantamount to surrender, and all the more so when the base bore the name of one of their brothers: Ben Keating, Jacob Lowell, Ryan Fritsche. But the doctrine of counterinsurgency made it fairly clear to George, Brown, and their team that there was no longer any good reason for Americans to be at those bases. No need for more fallen heroes, more names to honor.
The team presented a preliminary proposal to their commanders in February 2009, at division headquarters at Fort Bragg. George, along with other aides, met with Major General Curtis Scaparrotti and Brigadier General William Mayville, Jr., and laid down the framework for their realignment plans. To many attendees, Scaparrotti seemed lukewarm, but Mayville—the deputy commanding general for operations—was wholly in favor.
They agreed that they would try to close Camp Keating by July 6 or 7, 2009. The exit—or exfil, in military lingo, short for “exfiltration”–would by necessity be by air: forty full helicopter loads over several weeks, rotated in and out, one after another, until everyone and everything was gone. Weapons, ammunition, batteries, fuel—these would go in the last six to ten loads.
Yet while Mayville continued to send George and his team positive feedback, as did others, the official go-ahead was never given. George could do nothing without the signoff of the commanding general of ISAF. The firing of McKiernan and subsequent appointment of McChrystal would make getting that approval more complicated.
Sergeant First Class John Breeding, thirty-eight, from Amarillo, Texas, had been in the Army for twenty-one years and had witnessed terrible things in that time—all of them in the previous five years. In September 2004, he’d been in Ramadi, Iraq, for only three days when the Humvee he was in was blown up by an IED. Three pieces of shrapnel went through his calf, though luckily none of them hit bone. He was laid up for eight weeks, at the end of which, with his wounds bandaged up and gauze in the holes, he took his antibiotics and painkillers and went back to work. Then, in March 2005, during a clearance operation outside Ramadi, one of his company’s scout trucks got hit by an IED that had been planted underground. All four guys on the truck were killed.68 A soldier in Breeding’s unit later found one of the victim’s heads in a nearby pond.
You couldn’t train for that kind of thing, and you couldn’t know how you’d handle it until you lived it, Breeding believed. The more carnage he witnessed, the more he felt himself becoming numb to it all.
Breeding was the platoon sergeant for Black Knight Troop’s mortar team, and like everyone else in the company, he had been flown to Combat Outpost Keating in darkest night. At first light the next morning, he opened the barracks door and couldn’t believe what he was seeing: there was nothing but high ground surrounding the base. Being at the bottom of a fishbowl meant the guns would be less effective—instead of being able to reach a distance of 7,800 yards, they’d fire only up to about 5,500 yards. Whoever was in charge of putting the base here is the dumbest officer in the world, Breeding thought. And lo and behold, within ten minutes of his walking up to the mortar pit, the men of Black Knight Troop were engaged in their first enemy contact.
That was May 27. Throughout that summer, some weeks they’d been attacked once or twice, other weeks every day, and sometimes even twice daily. To be sure, the attacks were all fairly minor ones: Breeding suspected that the enemy was probing, seeing how the Americans would react.
His team had a concrete bunker in the mortar pit with two bunk beds, and that was where they lived, a tight group made up of Breeding, Private First Class Kevin Thomson, and Specialist Daniel Rodriguez. Breeding also had four more men and 120- and 60-millimeter mortars up the mountain at Observation Post Fritsche.
Breeding had served with Rodriguez in Iraq and considered him to be an outstanding soldier. He didn’t know much about Thomson, just that he seemed like a nice kid from Nevada, a hard worker who hadn’t had an easy life. A substantial six foot four, Thomson had been overweight when he first tried to enlist; the recruiter told him he had to lose a hundred pounds before the Army would take him. So that was what Thomson did, running and panting until he weighed just under two hundred pounds—determined to make something of himself, to prove himself to the ne’er-do-well father who had abandoned him when he was a child, a local policeman who’d impregnated three women in town virtually simultaneously.
Private First Class Kevin Thomson and Sergeant First Class John Breeding at the mortar pit. (Photo courtesy of Debbie Routson)
At fourteen, Kevin had tried to commit suicide by drinking carpet cleaner, which he thankfully vomited out in the kitchen sink. His suicidal tendencies were subsequently replaced by self-mutilation; he would cut himself, then lie to his mother about it, saying the carvings were scratches he’d gotten from some bushes. One night, he finally told her that he needed help. She took him to the hospital, where doctors diagnosed him with manic depression. He was prescribed Paxil, but he took himself off it when he turned eighteen and decided the Army offered him a better, disciplined path out of his misery.
He was calm, Thomson. Rodriguez always joked with him that he was too dumb to be scared
.
The mortar pit—or “Mortaritaville,” as they called it, in homage to Jimmy Buffet’s “wastin’ away” locale—was not a fun place to be. Its occupants were often fired upon from the relatively close high ground of the Switchbacks and from the looming boulder they dubbed RPG Rock. In a constant state of agitation, the mortarmen would hit golf balls or shag baseballs into Urmul, just to screw with the locals. Their boss, Lieutenant Stephen Cady, was sent a water-balloon launcher by his father, which he then gave to his men for fun; they’d use it to bombard the Afghan National Police station, the villagers, and U.S. soldiers standing guard. Their commander, Captain Porter, didn’t know about all of this; as far as the men could remember, he’d been to the mortar pit only once.
The doubts about and resentment toward Captain Porter that had begun during predeployment were exacerbated at the outpost. Some of the animus was unfair. Porter, for instance, ordered the men of 3-61 Cav to wear full gear every time they stepped outside. The troops found this inconvenient and cumbersome—a helmet weighed roughly three pounds, the full armored vest about ten times that—but given the constant threat of indirect fire, it was a wise measure to take. Porter wasn’t alone in enforcing this rule; First Sergeant Ronald Burton, who’d been hit by some of the same shrapnel that had so seriously wounded Shane Scherer69 in May, was perhaps its most ardent enforcer.
Some of the hostile feelings toward Porter were based on strategic differences. The captain was not a strong proponent of the “show of force,” whereby mortars, for example, were fired into the hillside to remind everyone in the neighborhood that the United States had superior weaponry. Porter believed there were at least two issues with such displays. First, they were antithetical to the aims of counterinsurgency. If Black Knight Troop were to constantly drop mortars around local homes, killing goats and possibly even residents, it would only reinforce the Kamdeshis’ perception of the Americans as hostile occupiers and turn the valley against them even more. Second, whenever the United States used deadly force, there ought to be a reason behind it. The unit was in a location that was very hard to resupply with anything, let alone a pallet of 120-millimeter mortar rounds weighing forty pounds apiece, and Porter didn’t want to expend ordnance for show when it might well be needed for real at a later date.