The embassy official isn’t buying it: For the one day he’s in Baghdad, no matter how tired, how stressed, Obama should suck it up. He shouldn’t have bitched about taking a photo. Obama is the “crankiest CODEL”—short for “congressional delegation”—that he’s had visit Baghdad, says this State Department official. And he has handled dozens of them. Embassy staffers gather afterward: Is it me, or were you all not impressed with Obama? The staffers agree: I thought I was the only one! The State Department official votes for Obama anyway. On the same trip, Obama meets with General Petraeus, and the presidential candidate tries to pin the general down on how fast he can get the troops out of Iraq.
These are the kinds of stories that fuel the suspicions high-ranking officials in the military have about Obama: He’s one of the most talented and natural politicians in a generation, but he doesn’t really understand them. Doesn’t get their culture, doesn’t get their wars. The wars, to Obama, are campaign issues. His primary relationship to the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan is how they affect his electoral fortunes—his opposition to the Iraq War gave his candidacy the spark that set it off, allowing him to separate himself from the other two Democratic candidates who had supported Iraq. He wants to firm up his national security credentials, so he says he’ll focus on Afghanistan, the “right war.” Promising to focus on that war makes a good line on the campaign trail. He didn’t serve—so what that Reagan didn’t, so what that Bush didn’t really? They played the part. They are hooah, and the troops love hooah. Bush gave the generals what they wanted, and the generals like to get what they want.
Obama’s aware of the vulnerability, writing in his second memoir how “Republicans increasingly portrayed Democrats as weak on defense.” That decades-old problem for Democrats, allegedly soft on national security ever since Truman was accused of “losing China.” Bullshit, naturally, and historically self-destructive, but it has had major consequences, as three generations of Democratic leaders have fallen over themselves to prove that they can play tough. Truman can’t run for reelection because he’s not winning in Korea (Truman had to go into Korea because we couldn’t lose Korea!); Kennedy has to out–Cold Warrior Richard Nixon to get the job. Johnson has to prove he won’t “lose Vietnam,” so he digs an even deeper hole, destroying his presidency. (“I don’t think it’s worth fighting and I don’t think we can get out. It’s the biggest damn mess I ever saw,” Johnson says in 1964, a year before he commits hundreds of thousands of troops to Saigon.) Carter—shit! He gets pushed around by the Iranians, while Reagan cuts a secret deal with them, gives them weapons, no less—but forget that. Clinton proves the military’s worst fears: He wants to let fags in, dodged the draft, smoked dope, and gets mocked when he tries to kill Bin Laden with missile strikes.
Obama, his advisors believe, has to prove he isn’t really antiwar. That he’s serious. That he can keep America safe. (Remember Hillary’s three A.M. phone call ad?) That he’ll play by the bipartisan conventions of the national security community. During the presidential campaign, he stresses that we “took our eye off the ball” in Afghanistan and have to refocus our efforts there. Obama goes out of his way to say he “doesn’t oppose all wars.”
That January, McKiernan’s request for more troops is waiting on Obama’s desk. With three reviews just complete, Obama orders up his own review. Bruce Riedel, a terrorism expert, is called in to write up the draft. On February 17, a month after visiting the Pentagon, Obama releases a statement, the first major comment he’s made on the war while in office. He says he’s sending seventeen thousand troops to Afghanistan, that he’s approving a “months-old” troop request, pinning the blame for the delay and increase on the previous administration. Obama expands the war into Pakistan, too, upping the number of drone strikes in the first year of his presidency to fifty-five, almost doubling the number that Bush had ordered in the previous four years.
What Obama and his top advisors don’t realize is that the seventeen thousand troops are just the beginning. Seventeen thousand becomes twenty-one thousand a month later. McKiernan still has a request in for nine thousand more, part of his original ask. But he will tell military officials close to him that it’s all he needs to do the job. He doesn’t think Afghanistan can support too many more American troops. McKiernan, an ally of the president, is not going to press for another massive troop increase. Inside the Pentagon, other senior military officials don’t see it that way. Twenty-one thousand isn’t enough, nor is thirty thousand, for the war they have in mind. The Pentagon wants more troops, and sets out to find a way to get them.
5 ARC DE TRIOMPHE
APRIL 15, 2010, PARIS
McChrystal’s entourage waited outside the Westminster. A gray minivan pulled up. The staff poured in, getting seats. A navy blue Peugeot parked behind it. A French general stepped out, wearing a fancy light gray uniform with gold epaulets. McChrystal and his wife, Annie, an outgoing and fit brunette just on the other side of fifty who had joined him in Paris for the weekend, ducked inside.
I walked up to the minivan. There wasn’t enough room.
Duncan waved down a taxi. “We’ll follow them,” he said.
Duncan and I jumped into the cab.
“Arc de Triomphe, s’il vous plaît.”
The cabdriver hit the gas and started weaving through traffic, starts and stops.
“It’s sort of fun to be following that car, especially when it’s filled with American military uniforms,” Duncan said.
“Like something out of the Cold War,” I said.
Duncan checked his BlackBerry.
“Two French journalists have been kidnapped outside of Kabul,” he told me. “They were supposed to have an interview with McChrystal and got kidnapped the day before. It’s a bit of a problem. The French are willing to pay ransom, and the Taliban know that.”
“Has it come up in discussions?”
“Yes, briefly.”
The French’s willingness to pay ransom was an irritant to the Americans. By paying off the kidnappers, the Americans believed the Europeans were incentivizing kidnappings, a sin on a par with negotiating with terrorists. The French had lost ten soldiers in one incident in 2008 because they had stopped paying protection money to the Taliban, U.S. officials believed. So the Taliban surrounded them and attacked. It was symptomatic of the long-standing gripe Americans had with their European allies: They just didn’t seem like they wanted to fight the war.
Duncan rattled off a list of national “caveats”—the restrictions countries put on their forces operating in Afghanistan. I’d heard it before. NATO originally imposed some eighty-three restrictions on their troops, creating a deep resentment among American and British soldiers. U.S. military officials claimed that most of the NATO allies needed someone back in Brussels to give them approval for the simplest operations, including calling for a medevac flight, Duncan said. The rules had a weird, cultural-stereotype-reinforcing absurdity. The Dutch resisted working more than eight hours a day. The Italians and the Spanish were discouraged from taking part in combat operations. Another country refused to do counternarcotics; yet another would only take part in counternarcotics; a few wouldn’t fight after a snowfall; the Turks wouldn’t leave Kabul; another nation wouldn’t allow Afghan soldiers on their helicopters. The Danish troops’ tour lasted only six months. The Germans weren’t allowed to leave their bases at night, and in Berlin, the leadership refused to call it a war. It was a “humanitarian mission.” American soldiers had a list of derogatory nicknames for the International Security Assistance Force acronym ISAF—I Suck at Fighting, In Sandals and Flip-flops, and I Saw Americans Fight.
“So what’s the purpose of this event?”
“It’s one of the things that generals have to do,” Duncan said. “He’s an introvert. This kind of thing makes him very uncomfortable. Honestly, he’d much rather be back in Afghanistan.”
Formations of French soldiers were standing in the courtyard in front of the Arc de Triomphe—French
navy, marines, army, and police. A French military band started to play when McChrystal stepped out of the car to inspect the formations and lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. A crowd of tourists gathered across the street to watch. The band played “La Marseillaise.”
Not much happened worth writing about, I thought. Well, there was always Normandy.
Duncan and I started to walk back to the hotel.
“The trip to Normandy is off,” Duncan told me.
Fuck. That was the entire reason for me to be there—to get a scene at the beaches of Normandy.
“With the wives here, and the high tempo of operations in Afghanistan, it’s been decided that it would be better just to stay in Paris.”
“Oh, okay,” I said. “That’s cool with me.”
Normandy was off. It wasn’t actually cool with me, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it. Par for the course, really. In my experience, reporting trips rarely went according to plan, especially when the military was involved. There was almost always a fuckup, a logistics disaster, a lengthy delay, or an interview that was promised that would never come through. The only option was to roll with it and try to scramble to find material to take its place.
Back at the hotel, Duncan brought me up to the third floor, room 314.
The suite had been converted to an operations center, set up to run the war on the go, and McChrystal’s traveling staff of about ten was gathered there. Ray, the communications guy, had set up about fifteen silver Panasonic Toughbooks across the tables, crisscrossing blue cables over the hotel carpet, hooked into satellite dishes to provide encrypted and classified phone and e-mail communications.
Duncan pointed out the other members of the team.
Major General Mike Flynn was considered within the military as one of the most brilliant intelligence officers of his generation. This was the fourth time he’d worked as McChrystal’s number two. He was of Irish descent, wiry, with black hair and a touch of gray, “a rat on acid,” as one of the staffers called him, pointing to what his staff jokingly called a severe case of attention deficit disorder. (“You would never want to be his assistant,” Duncan warned. “He goes through them very quickly.”) He’d partied hard growing up in a family of nine, regularly getting out-of-control drunk while narrowly avoiding serious trouble. He followed in the well-established career path of youthful screwups: He joined the Army, finding his home in the military intelligence branch. He kept his interests varied throughout his career: He took up surfing on a stint in Hawaii and got a master’s degree in telecommunications in the mideighties. Since the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had started, he’d become a reservoir of the country’s most critical secrets, a walking database of highly sensitive intelligence in the War on Terror—whom we wanted to kill, whom we killed, and what country we killed them in. His colleagues, though, also considered him somewhat indiscreet; he felt that information should be widely shared, a shift from the traditional bureaucratic practices within the intelligence community of hoarding the choicest intelligence morsels. While he worked at the Pentagon, he didn’t even bother to lock the doors to his car—“a used, beat-up, crappy car,” as his wife described it. He didn’t think anyone would bother trying to steal his old cassette tapes, he said. When he talked to me, I could almost see the sparks fly inside his skull from the clash between the classified and unclassified halves of his brain.
Duncan pointed to Mike Flynn’s younger brother, Colonel Charlie Flynn, who was leaning over Ray’s shoulder, staring at a laptop screen. It was pretty unusual to have two brothers as part of the same general’s staff. I started to get the sense that McChrystal viewed his staff as an extension of his family, surrounding himself with men from whom he could expect absolute loyalty. While Charlie looked like a shorter and thicker version of his older brother, their personalities were diametric. Mike came across as flighty and imaginative, a man who could go from point X to Z to Y, outlining the insurgent network of the Pakistani Taliban, then wondering where he placed his ham sandwich. Charlie was a stickler for going from point A to point B, so hurry the fuck up. Charlie joined the infantry rather than military intelligence, choosing the physical over the cerebral, and he was now McChrystal’s executive officer, meaning his primary job was keeping The Boss on schedule. Charlie would be the one to tell me when my interview with McChrystal was finished. You’ll notice it’s over, Duncan told me, when a vein on Charlie’s forehead starts to pop.
A middle-aged fellow in a startlingly white Navy uniform was sitting quietly, reading over some papers. Maybe late forties, early fifties. He was Rear Admiral Gregory Smith, director of communications for ISAF. His face reminded me of the cartoon dog Droopy. Duncan explained Smith was his internal rival in determining McChrystal’s media strategy. Duncan was a civilian contractor; Smith was military public affairs. They regularly clashed over the best way to handle the press. In recent years, the Pentagon had moved from relying on military public affairs officers toward civilian experts like Duncan who had real-world media experience. (The traditional military style of public relations—a combination of stonewalling, poorly written press releases, and making demonstrably false claims—had become such an embarrassment during the Iraq War that the Pentagon had launched a searching, multibillion-dollar effort to overhaul and reshape its media strategy, which included hiring guys like Duncan, who at one time worked as a producer for CNN. The Pentagon had about twenty-seven thousand people working on public relations, spending $4.7 billion in a single year.) Nowadays, it was normal for each general to have his own personal media handlers—sometimes numbering as many as a half dozen within an entourage—to raise his profile in the press.
I knew Smith’s name from newspaper stories—whenever ISAF had to respond on the record to a top media outlet like The Washington Post or The New York Times, his name would be attached to the typically banal quotes. He’d also just gotten involved in a nasty exchange with a popular freelance journalist named Michael Yon. Yon, considered very military-friendly, had been kicked off an embed. He retaliated by calling Smith and his public affairs staff a bunch of “crazy monkeys” and Smith in particular “another monkey.” Yon accused Smith of being part of a “smear campaign” against him. “Next time military generals talk about poor press performance in Afghanistan,” Yon wrote on his Facebook page that April, “please remember that McChrystal and crew lacked the dexterity to handle a single, unarmed writer… How can McChrystal handle the Taliban?”
The younger staffers on McChrystal’s team came in and out of the suite: Major Casey Welch, thirty-two, with a classic Midwestern look, was McChrystal’s aide-de-camp. Khosh Sadat was an Afghan Special Forces commando and the other aide-de-camp. He was brought along on the Europe trip to provide good visuals during meetings and photo ops. (McChrystal wanted to show that the Afghans were part of the war, too, so they deserved a high-profile slot on his staff.) Then there was Lieutenant Commander Dave Silverman, a Navy SEAL; he’d worked under McChrystal in Baghdad, running a Special Forces team to capture and kill Al-Qaeda in Iraq.
An older white guy in a suit and tie walked by without saying hello. He had thinning hair and a bitter aura, his wardrobe unfamiliar with an ironing board.
“That’s Jake,” Duncan said. “He’s kind of a dick.”
Jake McFerren, a retired Army colonel, was McChrystal’s longtime friend and confidant. They’d been roommates at West Point, and McChrystal hired him to be his top political advisor.
McChrystal walked into the room through the connecting door. He’d ditched his uniform and was now wearing a blue shirt and tie—off-the-rack civilian casual. He sat down at the table.
“General, do you have time for Michael to ask a few questions?”
“Let’s do it.”
I hit record on my tape recorder.
“Is this an open line?” McChrystal asked, pointing to a phone that Ray had installed.
“Ray, is this an open line?” Duncan repeated.
“Yes, sir,�
� he said.
“Do you need it open? I want to make sure we’re not talking in front of a telephone.”
Duncan hung up the receiver.
I sat down next to him and started fumbling with my questions. I wanted to begin with his career and family life. First, I asked him if he’d gone for a run that morning. One of McChrystal’s defining characteristics, according to all the biographical material I’d read about him, was his obsession with fitness. He regularly would go on jogs for six or seven miles. When he briefly lived in New York to work at the Council on Foreign Relations, he’d run to the office from his place in Brooklyn. His running fetish had become a staple in every profile about him—journalists seemed to view it as a measure of his toughness and drive that translated directly into the ability to win a war.
“I actually like touring by running. I went this morning down past the Louvre at the end, then down the river, and came up by Voltaire’s old house,” he said.
He described his relationship with his father, Herbert, who had fought in Korea, then been a battalion and brigade commander in Vietnam. Herbert had graduated from West Point in 1945; McChrystal had graduated in 1976. He explained his own notion of his career: “We really felt we were a peacetime generation,” he said, comparing his father’s generation with his own. “I never thought I was going to be a general, and I certainly never thought I’d be fighting a war as a general.”
Duncan interjected, cleverly trying to dictate the direction of the interview.
“Michael is going to come to Kabul for a week, the first week in May,” Duncan said. “He’s going to hang out with us. Some of the piece is in the next few days. We’re originally hoping to bring him up to Normandy, but obviously that sort of changed. But your advice: What are the questions he should ask your team in the next few days, because he’ll be spending time with them as much as you?”
The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan Page 3