My Share of the Task

by General Stanley McChrystal

  * * *

  Two weeks later, on May 12, 2010, President Karzai arrived to the United States for four days to meet with President Obama and other U.S. leaders. At President Karzai’s request, Karl Eikenberry and I made the trip as well. It closely followed a visit by General Kayani and other Pakistani leaders to Washington, D.C., a few weeks earlier, and was meant to strengthen our partnership with President Karzai and his government. Both relationships, with Afghanistan and with Pakistan, needed improvement.

  By May 2010, the wounds created by the August 2009 Afghan elections had healed somewhat, although scars remained. President Karzai’s support of operations Moshtarak and Hamkari, though more lukewarm than enthusiastic, had made us feel more aligned than we had in the fall. President Obama had briefly visited Afghanistan on March 28, in an effort to tighten the relationship between the nations and leaders. Even so, underlying tensions remained.

  The most poignant moments of the stay involved visits President Karzai made to Walter Reed Army Medical Center to visit wounded soldiers and to Arlington National Cemetery to recognize the fallen. At Walter Reed, Karzai was visibly moved by the courage of badly wounded American soldiers. When several amputees said they’d been wounded in Arghandab, he seemed sobered by the ferocity of the fighting they described. In Arlington Cemetery we walked among the markers of the recently fallen and when I came upon headstones of soldiers I knew, I described the men to Karzai.

  * * *

  On May 26, I met with the latest group of “Afghan hands” to arrive for duty in Afghanistan. The program, conceived by Scott Miller in my office in the Pentagon over a year earlier, had graduated its second round of officers and dispatched them to theater. Although I was frustrated with what appeared to be half-hearted service support for the program—they sent a number of nonvolunteers and noncompetitive officers—it still represented a step forward, and I spoke during an orientation course we conducted before sending this contingent forward to specific duty positions around the country.

  After almost a year in command, I was more convinced than ever that a cadre of language-trained professionals, steeped in the culture and assigned for multiple tours to establish genuine relationships, would be the single most powerful asset we could field. This most recent group—which included my former TF 714 aide-de-camp, then-Major Donny Purdy, now fluent in Dari—could begin to provide a more educated, nuanced capability to complement our already overwhelming conventional military power.

  * * *

  As I navigated the first month of my second year in Afghanistan, I recognized that we were a different team than the one I’d joined the previous June. Rod’s IJC had matured into a headquarters capable of executing a nuanced counterinsurgency campaign across a collection of very different regional commands. Leavened by the arrival of additional combat-experienced U.S. forces, these commands were approaching the 2010 fighting season with resolve. It would be brutally violent, we knew. Already, in stark rejection of Mullah Omar’s layha from the previous year, it appeared insurgents had turned toward targeting civilians in order to defeat our attempt to protect them. Since January, the enemy had wounded and killed more Afghan civilians than it had during the first six months of 2009, using more IEDs, suicide bombs, and a ramped-up assassination campaign. While the insurgents killed and wounded more civilians, ISAF and Afghan security forces were responsible for fewer civilian casualties than we had been during the first half of 2009. But we were still killing far too many Afghans, particularly at checkpoints, and needed to better shield them.

  I wasn’t satisfied with where we were; that’s not my nature. But I was fiercely proud of the effort so many people had put forward to get us this far. We thought if we didn’t blink, we would come out in a better position than we had been in the previous year.

  On Monday, June 21, we gathered again at Kandahar’s convention center. Afghan and ISAF military and civilian leaders convened in a large room outfitted with tables facing a briefing screen. As we mingled before the session began, familiar faces engaged in animated conversation: Karl Eikenberry, Mark Sedwill, Abdul Rahim Wardak, Dave Rodriguez, Sher Mohammad Karimi, and Richard Holbrooke—who’d flown in from the United States for the session—and a host of key planners and staff.

  Eight days earlier, Karzai had held a second shura in the same location. Smaller than the April shura, it brought together only a few hundred elders. As before, Karzai brought Mark and me. There, as I’d anticipated, after some discussion the elders had voiced their support for the operation. We now collected to rehearse the specifics of Hamkari. Under Rod’s patient guidance, we drilled into almost every aspect of the complex plan. More interesting than the operation, to my eye, was the interaction between Afghans, Americans, Brits, and Australians. Relationships, now scuffed and dented by regular use, had the power of familiarity among comrades that was so vital, yet took so long to develop. If Hamkari succeeded, it would owe less to any brilliance of concept than to the sinew of trust.

  * * *

  That night, at about 10:30 P.M. I went to my room above the operations center and read, as usual, for about twenty minutes before drifting off to sleep. My PT clothes were arranged to work out early before the day’s activities began full bore. About 2:00 A.M. Charlie Flynn woke me.

  “Sir, we have a problem,” Charlie said in the darkness of my room. “The Rolling Stone article is out, and it’s really bad.”

  How in the world could that story have been a problem? I thought, stunned. But I replied simply, “Thanks, Charlie. I’ll be right down.”

  I put on my PT clothes and went quickly downstairs to where Charlie and Rear Admiral Greg Smith, our director of strategic communications, waited and handed me a printed copy. The article was the work of a reporter writing for Rolling Stone magazine who had interacted with my command team several times over the previous few months, including during parts of our April trip to Europe. This story, one of a number we’d done over the year in Afghanistan, was designed to provide transparency into how my command team operated. But, beginning with the provocative title “The Runaway General,” the article described a hard-driving general, a struggling U.S. policy, and attributed a number of unacceptable comments to my command team.

  I was surprised by the tone and direction of the article. I thought back to the night of Annie’s and my thirty-third wedding anniversary in Paris. At the end of the evening Annie had said she was glad the reporter had been present to see what she had seen: the command team, including American, British, Afghan, and French officers, all together. Annie felt the brotherhood among the soldiers, each a veteran of multiple combat tours over the past decade, was evident and was something the reporter needed to see and understand. I had agreed with her. The printed story cast it in a very different light.

  For a number of minutes I felt as though I’d likely awaken from what seemed like a surreal dream, but the situation was real. Regardless of how I judged the story for fairness or accuracy, responsibility was mine. And its ultimate effect was immediately clear to me.

  After an hour or so of meeting with key staff and making several phone calls, including one to Annie, I went outside to run. When faced with something frustrating, frightening, or confusing, I’ve found it is often the best thing I can do. Well before normal physical training time, I ran alone in the darkness around the inside of ISAF’s small compound. It was a good opportunity to think, and I needed to. For thirty-four years I’d served knowing many fates were possible. But I’d never anticipated the one before me now.

  That evening, as the controversy swelled, I was directed to fly back to D.C. for meetings the following morning with the secretary of defense and the president. The flight provided hours for reflection, free from the cacophony of opinions I knew were filling the media. A number of e-mails came in. One in particular struck me. A member of Staff Sergeant Arroyo’s platoon who’d been present at the meeting described in the Rolling Stone article expr
essed frustration with the account, and his support.

  From the moment I’d seen the article, I’d known there were different options on how to act, and react, to the storm I knew I would face. But I knew only one decision was right for the moment and for the mission. I didn’t try to figure out what others might do; no hero’s or mentor’s example came to mind. I called no one for advice.

  It was light when we landed at Andrews Air Force Base and we drove to my quarters to shower and put on dress green uniforms before going to the Pentagon to meet with Admiral Mullen and then Secretary Gates. Two hours later I left the White House after a short, professional meeting with President Obama and drove to Fort McNair to tell Annie that the president had accepted my resignation.

  Entering our quarters, I met Annie, who had been waiting. I told her that our life in the Army was over.

  “Good,” she said, clear-eyed and strong. “We’ve always been happy, and we’ll always be happy.”

  Looking into her blue eyes, I knew she was right—and why.

  Epilogue

  He went like one that hath been stunn’d,

  And is of sense forlorn:

  A sadder and a wiser man

  He rose the morrow morn.

  —SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

  In the late afternoon of July 23, 2010, Secretary of Defense Bob Gates came to our quarters on Fort McNair, and we sat briefly in the living room before walking across the street to McNair’s parade field. We had moved into the large brick quarters in the summer of 2008 after leaving TF 714. For the first year I’d run each morning alongside the field as I headed out the wrought-iron gates of the post, along the Potomac River, and across Memorial Bridge to the Pentagon. On weekends I’d cross the field to McNair’s gym, often passing soldiers practicing drill.

  Today the field was uncharacteristically crowded with a formation of 3rd Infantry “Old Guard” soldiers and a setup of chairs and bleachers on either side of the brick reviewing stand. In and around the seating were a sea of family and friends who’d gathered. My father, the now-old soldier, was too weak to travel, but my four brothers and a group of classmates from West Point, one of whom had flown from his farm in North Dakota, were on hand. Importantly, some of the men and women with whom I’d shared the fight of the last decade were there. I wanted to thank them. The occasion was simultaneously happy and sad, a beginning and an end. I’d been to countless retirement ceremonies in thirty-four years, but never my own.

  We walked out the door and to our designated seats. Although we’d set the ceremony for early evening, it was still blazing hot. I’d asked an old friend, Major General Karl Horst, commander of the Military District of Washington, if the Old Guard could do the ceremony in army combat uniforms, ACUs, instead of the normal dress blues. Although it was uncommon, he’d readily agreed. I wanted the last uniform I’d ever wear to be the one I believed most reflected the soldier I’d been. And in the heat, I hoped it was more comfortable for the troops that stood on the field.

  As I stood on the field, I thought about the future. In a few days Annie and I would clear our quarters and make what I assumed would be our last of so many moves. Everything else was unclear.

  I had no idea that a few days later I’d get a note from Jim Levinsohn, the director of Yale University’s Jackson Institute of Global Affairs, and in September begin an extraordinary experience teaching young people.

  Life would go on. In April 2011, the Department of Defense inspector general’s office would release a summary of its review into the allegations outlined in the Rolling Stone article. The investigations could not substantiate any violations of Defense Department standards and found that “not all of the events occurred as portrayed in the article.” These conclusions came out quietly, almost a year after the tornado of controversy the article created, but they were important to me. Maybe more important, also that month, I would accept First Lady Michelle Obama’s request to serve my country again, this time on the board of advisers for Joining Forces, a White House initiative for service members and their families.

  That evening on the field, as they were supposed to, every part of the ceremony went smoothly. The precision of the soldiers on the field, the sequence of speeches and awards, and even the emotional appearance of old friends, projected a sense of orchestrated perfection. It was life, as we might have once hoped it would be. No friction, no mistakes, and no casualties.

  But my life hadn’t been like that. Instead it had been a series of unplanned detours, unanticipated challenges, and unexpected opportunities. Along the way, more by luck than design, I’d been a part of some events, organizations, and efforts that will loom large in history, and many more that will not. I saw selfless commitment, petty politics, unspeakable cruelty, and quiet courage in places and quantities that I’d never have imagined. But what I will remember most are the leaders.

  I remember events through the personalities who shaped or responded to them. The examples they set, the decisions they made, and sometimes the price they paid are the lens through which I view the sliver of history I shared. The leaders I studied inspired me. The leaders whom I knew, those who touched me directly, share a special place in my mind, and often in my heart.

  As a child I’d been fascinated with heroes, first fixating on their talent, bravery, and commitment. I read again and again of the new American John Paul Jones on the deck of the Bonhomme Richard declaring he had “not yet begun to fight,” and of the Scot Robert Bruce regaining lost hope by watching a spider spinning a web fail six times without giving up. I’d listened to my father’s letters from Vietnam and seen occasional photographs of his lean frame in green jungle fatigues and combat gear. It was a romantic, sometimes two-dimensional model of leadership, embodied in heroism, wrapped in service, most often in uniform.

  Over the years, through age, experience, and example, my model of a leader matured. My mother was raised in the south and deeply admired Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, stubborn leadership of the civil rights movement. She made me understand how someone breaking the law and disrupting an orderly way of life could represent leadership, while those in uniform holding water cannons might not. She taught me that leadership is not command. Some of the greatest leaders commanded nothing but respect. And I learned of, and sometimes saw, commanders who never tried to lead.

  So, after a lifetime, what had I learned about leadership? Probably not enough. But I saw enough for me to believe it was the single biggest reason organizations succeeded or failed. It dwarfed numbers, technology, ideology, and historical forces in determining the outcome of events. I used to tell junior leaders that the nine otherwise identical parachute infantry battalions of the 82nd Airborne Division ranged widely in effectiveness, the disparity almost entirely a function of leadership.

  “Switch just two people—the battalion commander and command sergeant major—from the best battalion with those of the worst, and within ninety days the relative effectiveness of the battalions will have switched as well,” I’d say. I still believe I was correct.

  Yet leadership is difficult to measure and often difficult even to adequately describe. I lack the academic bona fides to provide a scholarly analysis of leadership and human behavior. So I’ll simply relate what, after a lifetime of being led and learning to lead, I’ve concluded.

  Leadership is the art of influencing others. It differs from giving a simple order or managing in that it shapes the longer-term attitudes and behavior of individuals and groups. George Washington’s tattered army persisted to ultimate victory. Those troops displayed the kind of effort that can never be ordered—only evoked. Effective leaders stir an intangible but very real desire inside people. That drive can be reflected in extraordinary courage, selfless sacrifice, and commitment.

  Leadership is neither good nor evil. We like to equate leaders with values we admire, but the two
can be separate and distinct. Self-serving or evil intent motivated some of the most effective leaders I saw, like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. In the end, leadership is a skill that can be used like any other, but with far greater effect.

  Leaders take us where we’d otherwise not go. Although Englishmen rushing into the breach behind Henry V is a familiar image, leaders whose personal example or patient persuasion causes dramatic changes in otherwise inertia-bound organizations or societies are far more significant. The teacher who awakens and encourages in students a sense of possibility and responsibility is, to me, the ultimate leader.

  Success is rarely the work of a single leader; leaders work best in partnership with other leaders. In Iraq in 2004, I received specific direction to track Zarqawi and bring him to justice. But it was the collaboration of leaders below me, inside TF 714, that built the teams, relentlessly hunted, and ultimately destroyed his lethal network.

  Leaders can call to the best in us. I thought often of the inspiring flag signal Horatio Nelson sent on the eve of Trafalgar. “England expects every man will do his duty.” The flags above the Victory didn’t ask or demand obedience in the upcoming fight; they expressed Nelson’s unshakable admiration for and faith in the sailors and patriots he knew them to be. And I remembered the effect Major General Bill Garrison’s faith had on me when I was a major.

  Leaders are empathetic. The best leaders I’ve seen have an uncanny ability to understand, empathize, and communicate with those they lead. They need not agree or share the same background or status in society as their followers, but they understand their hopes, fears, and passions. Great leaders intuitively sense, or simply ask, how people feel and what resonates with them. At their worst, demigods like Adolf Hitler manipulate the passions of frustrated populations into misguided forces. But empathy can be remarkably positive when a Nelson Mandela reshapes and redirects the energy of a movement away from violence and into constructive nation-building.