I’d seen another side of his personality. I didn’t quite know why they had shown it to me. Perhaps, I thought, because I was with Rolling Stone and they wanted to play the part of rock stars? (“On the cover of the Rolling Stone!” the Flynns had yelled.) Or maybe the side I’d been shown was there all along, and no one else had decided to write about it?
We’d grown accustomed to seeing the general as a superman—and the press rarely challenged this narrative in their coverage. We’d been bombarded with hagiographic profiles and heroic narratives of almost all our military leaders. When there were criticisms of generals, it usually came too late: after they’d left command, in score-settling books, sanitized magazine stories, and agenda-driven tell-alls.
Here, I realized, was a chance to tell a different story, to capture what the men running the war actually said and did. What I’d been seeing and hearing was distinctly human: frustration, arrogance, getting smashed, letting off stress. The wars had been going on for nearly ten years, and it had clearly taken its toll. I’d interviewed dozens of top military officials—including General David McKiernan, General Ray Odierno, General Peter Chiarelli, General George Casey. But McChrystal appeared to represent a new kind of military elite, a member of a warrior class that had lost touch with the civilian world. He’d spent much of the last decade overseas consumed by the conflict, preferring war zones to Washington. He’d seen his wife, Annie, fewer than thirty days a year since 2003. When he and his men did have to deal with civilians, they were accustomed to the ritual genuflections of awe. As one State Department official who worked with McChrystal had told me, “First, I wondered why McChrystal was so hard on his military staff, but not on his civilian staff. I figured it out… He doesn’t really understand civilians—he doesn’t truly understand what their purpose is, doesn’t see how they are useful.”
The military itself was an isolated society—less than 1 percent of the U.S. population served or had any connection to the ongoing wars. It had its own culture and moral code. A recent survey of over four thousand active-duty military officers found that 38 percent believed civilians shouldn’t have control over military decisions during wartime. The American public—with an overwhelming apathy—had lost touch with the military, too. We started to mistake putting “Support Our Troops” bumper stickers on our cars and watching F-16s doing flyovers at the Super Bowl for civic participation. The guilt that many felt for not serving was covered up by an uncritical attitude toward those who did. No one wanted a repeat of the hatred shown toward veterans after Vietnam—a fear that had been regularly exploited to the government’s advantage as a way to shut down all criticism of its military adventures.
As a country, we’d changed since Vietnam—the ghost McChrystal and his generation of military leaders desperately wanted to exorcize. The fear that their wars, too, could end in disgrace: “It’s not going to look like a win, smell like a win, or taste like a win,” Major General Bill Mayville, McChrystal’s director of operations, would tell me. “This is going to end in an argument.” An argument they were determined to win. One of the first books McChrystal read after arriving in Kabul was Stanley Karnow’s Vietnam: A History. McChrystal called the author to ask if there were any lessons he could apply to Afghanistan. “The main thing I learned is that we never should have been there in the first place,” Karnow reportedly told him. It wasn’t what the general wanted to hear. In the Vietnam War, McChrystal’s story would have been told as one of a deadly killer, devoid of the heartwarming tales of sacrifice and dedication and jogging that politicians and journalists had wrapped him in. In our cultural memory, he would have landed the role of Colonel Walter E. Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, the true killer in self-imposed exile, a reminder of the hypocritical morality of the nation, hiding along the banks of the river fighting an illegal war in Cambodia.
“Every man has a breaking point,” the general explains to Captain Willard in Francis Ford Coppola’s movie, briefing him on his mission to exterminate Kurtz. “You and I have one. Walter Kurtz has obviously reached his. And very obviously, he has gone insane.” Willard pauses, hungover. “Yes, sir, very much so, sir. Obviously insane.”
The lesson our leaders took from Vietnam was not, it turns out, how to avoid another Vietnam. It was how to seal off the horror: to ensure that only a small group felt and saw it. An all-volunteer military, and a further reliance on the most elite, specialized soldiers to do the nation’s work we prefer to ignore. Entering houses at midnight and shooting unarmed men while they sleep. A widespread acceptance of drone strikes, killings committed by remote control—McChrystal watched a man on a video feed in his headquarters for seventeen days before he ordered the strike on a compound to kill Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. He went to see the dead man’s body; the pictures of the corpse were displayed at a press conference, a modern-day version of putting a man’s head on a spike. Compartmentalize the horror, then embrace it. No need to leave Kurtz on the riverbank when you can give him the job running the war.
“He’s a poet-warrior in the classic sense,” says the photojournalist, played by Dennis Hopper. “I mean, sometimes he’ll, uh, well, you’ll say hello to him, right? And he’ll just walk right by you, and he won’t even notice you… If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you, if you can trust yourself when all men doubt you—I mean, I’m no—I can’t—I’m a little man, I’m a little man, he’s, he’s a great man. I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across floors of silent seas—I mean…”
So far, I’d sensed an aura of recklessness around McChrystal and his men. From my conversations with them, it seemed they were sure that McChrystal was fighting the war on his own. They had convinced themselves that only he truly understood the stakes—stakes civilians like the vice president, who had dared to question the wisdom of McChrystal’s plan, didn’t get. Or the president himself, who had visited the front only once, couldn’t comprehend. And if McChrystal and his men believed they were indispensable to the war, then those who could be easily replaced—ambassadors, special envoys, presidents, civilians, journalists—could be dismissed with casual disdain and contempt. McChrystal, on the contrary, deserved only reverence for his sacrifices—which he regularly received from the press and his subordinates, among others—giving them a feel of the untouchable. “McChrystal,” as a State Department official would tell me at the time, reflecting on this attitude, “can’t be fired.”
I’d put enough time in Baghdad and Kabul to gain the credibility to be there, in Paris, with them—and a strange twist of fate might keep me in place.
Every reporting instinct I had said, “Don’t blow it.” Hold tight. Stay with them as long as possible. Go to Berlin. Forget Washington.
I texted Duncan at noon.
Hey man, can I join you all in Berlin? Fucking volcano!
14 WE’RE ACTUALLY LOSING
JUNE TO AUGUST 2009, KABUL AND BRUSSELS
On June 26, Gates asks McChrystal to write a strategic assessment of the war. McChrystal gets sixty days to do it, starting July 1. He decides to bring in a group of outside military experts to help write it.
The thinking is twofold: to get ideas so they’re not “drinking our own bathwater,” as McChrystal tells me, and, more important, to bring in influential Washington voices who’ll be able to help sell the plan back home.
About a dozen civilians get the invite, including Catherine Dale, Andrew Exum, Fred Kagan, Kimberly Kagan, Jeremy Shapiro, Stephen Biddle, Terence Kelly, and Anthony Cordesman. They are all well-known inside the Beltway’s foreign policy community.
It’s short notice. They want them in Afghanistan by the first week of July. Exum is the youngest member of the team at thirty-one. Exum did two tours in Afghanistan, the first when he was twenty-two. “I was back to save the war,” he tells me. Cordesman is the oldest, at seventy-one. Biddle, based at the Council on Foreign Relations, is perhaps the most influential: He’s planned a vacation at the Basin Harbor Club in V
ermont, and he has to reschedule the two weeks he’s supposed to teach in July.
They’re looking for problems, and they find them. The team gets ferried around the country—Kabul and Khost and Kandahar. They get briefs from intel officers. The intel people tell them about the Quetta Shura—the name for the Taliban’s leadership council hiding in the city of Quetta, Pakistan. They show them PowerPoint slides with key leaders and map out insurgent networks with aplomb.
But those aren’t the answers the team wants. In one meeting, Exum drills down on the briefers. Who controls the water? Who are the local power brokers? Tell me how they are related to the insurgency.
The intel officers shrug. The questions “scare the hell out of them,” says Exum.
Another member of the team grills a Special Forces commander: Who owns this land? What are the disputes? What tribes do they belong to? More shrugs: We don’t know.
The assessment team raises another big question: Why are we fighting in Helmand? It’s a question McChrystal has as well. Helmand is a province in southern Afghanistan. The ongoing offensive in Helmand is costing an American or allied life every four days. What’s it getting us? Helmand has no major population centers. Its primary source of agricultural income is poppy plants. The people are not educated. Helmand is Pashtun, so inclined to support the Taliban. The priorities should be Khost in the east and Kandahar down south, the assessment team determines.
Helmand represents the warped logic of the war: We’re there because we’re there. And because we’re there, we’re there some more. It’s too late to abandon Helmand—McNeill started it, McKiernan put resources there, and McChrystal has to finish it. It’s the momentum; the military has a “fetish for completion,” says one member of the assessment team. It is against every martial instinct to withdraw, to retreat, to leave land where blood has been spilled. Even when that land has very little strategic significance, leaving is traumatic. The least significant places like the Korengal and Wagyal valleys will be abandoned to concentrate forces elsewhere in the upcoming year. It’s painful to do so. “It hurt,” one soldier lamented. “We all lost men. We all sacrificed.” Another soldier: “It confuses me why it took so long to make them realize that we weren’t making progress up there.” A U.S. military official will tell me: “What were we doing there, anyway?” It’s almost more painful to realize that leaving those valleys is as meaningless as staying in those valleys—no impact on our national security or the stability in Afghanistan whatsoever.
(McChrystal doesn’t think fighting in Helmand is a good idea, he tells U.S. military and civilian officials. No one seems to think fighting in Helmand is a good idea yet… They keep fighting in Helmand, and within nine months McChrystal launches another major operation there.)
Back at ISAF, the assessment team gets put into a small office room, next to the headquarters. There’s a midsize table, with computers along the wall and computers in the middle. The text of the paper is blasted up on a small screen, like a movie theater. The computer processors are making heat. It’s hot as fuck outside. The air-conditioning doesn’t work. It’s a miserable place to work.
There’s a clash of political perspectives. The Kagans are neoconservatives, a husband-and-wife team, a dual-headed beast. The Kagans like to take credit for the Iraq surge and are the most hawkish in the group. The Kagans are close to General Petraeus. Kim Kagan runs a joint in Washington called the Institute for the Study of War.
Exum, on the other hand, is part of the Center for a New American Security, or CNAS—the differences in name reflect the difference in political style. Not so much a difference in substance—they’re all for the war—just the pose they take while endorsing it.
CNAS is for the Democrats—reluctant warriors, “middle of the road,” cerebral pride, lots of hemming and hawing. You’d never catch a Democrat opening up a place called the Institute for the Study of War. It’s too direct, it’s too obvious; it suggests a politically incorrect passion for conflict. The Center for a New American Security is just the kind of serious-sounding name to appeal to the liberal hawks. It’s the hottest think tank in town, and they’ve stocked up on influential reporters—one journalist, David Cloud, joined CNAS, went to advise Ambassador Eikenberry, then returned to cover the Pentagon for the Los Angeles Times. Tom Ricks is on the payroll, Robert Kaplan is on the payroll, joined by a rotating cast of other prominent national security journalists, including New York Times Pentagon correspondent Thom Shanker.
The sticking point is how to deal with corruption in Afghanistan. McChrystal doesn’t really care either way on corruption. He doesn’t view it as a pressing issue and thinks it can be tolerated. The Kagans are passionate about fighting it; Shapiro doesn’t think it should be a high priority.
Stephen Biddle notices a distinct absence. He’s been on these kinds of teams before, helped Petraeus write up an assessment in Iraq in 2007. In Iraq, the State Department was well represented, foreign service officers providing their input. In Kabul, they’re not around.
Where’s the U.S. embassy in Kabul? Where is Ambassador Eikenberry? Biddle takes his concerns to McChrystal’s staff: He thinks it’s a problem that Eikenberry isn’t involved. If the diplomatic and military sides aren’t getting along, “it jeopardizes the mission,” Biddle says.
Eikenberry doesn’t want to be involved, a senior U.S. official tells me. He doesn’t want Stan coming in there and taking over the whole thing. It’s an “out of my sandbox” kind of attitude, this official tells me. Worse, the embassy scraps a civil-military program that ISAF has set up. (McKiernan set up the program, so there’s also an “anything but McKiernan” attitude among McChrystal’s planners.) So although counterinsurgency depends on a hand-and-glove civilian-military partnership, and the strategy will call for that, from the beginning that relationship barely exists.
The biggest question for the assessment team, though, is: Can we win? Is this even worth doing? On this question, the assessment team is split. “There were several of my colleagues who weren’t persuaded,” says Biddle. “I thought it was a close call, and on balance, the right thing to do.” Others on the team think the whole exercise has been a public relations stunt—“McChrystal knew about 80 percent of the strategy he wanted,” says one member of the team. “We were just for show.”
The assessment team stays for three weeks. They write eight drafts, according to members of the assessment team. Four times, McChrystal comes in and goes over it with them. He vets each line in the paper. The paper the civilians write gets tossed to another staff member, Colonel Chris Kolenda, to finish; he’ll work with McChrystal to finalize the draft.
While working on the assessment, McChrystal gets a visitor from the White House. General Jim Jones, the national security advisor, comes over to Kabul, with Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward along to cover the trip. Jones has a message from the White House: If you’re thinking of asking for more troops, don’t. Jones tells another general at Camp Leatherneck the same thing: Hold the line. Jones explains that the White House already is feeling a bit singed—they’d given them seventeen thousand. Then they came back for four thousand more. And now the generals are going to come back to the bar yet again? If more troops are asked for, Jones tells a briefing room full of colonels and generals, Obama is likely to have a Whiskey Tango Foxtrot moment, or WTF, or What the fuck? Jones insists that unlike Bush, President Obama isn’t just going to give the generals anything they ask for. It’s what Obama has said publicly: “My strong view is that we are not going to succeed simply by piling on more and more troops.”
There’s not much respect for Jones in Kabul. He doesn’t have much clout in DC, either—he’s been the victim of a series of leaks attempting to undermine him. He is a safe pick for the NSA job, a way for Obama to signal he was serious and bipartisan about his national security. Jones is chosen because he still gets respect on the Hill from the likes of John McCain—Jones and McCain are close friends.
The White House isn’t too
impressed with him, either. The rap against Jones inside the White House: He’s not pulling the fourteen-hour days with the rest of the staff. He’s on “retired general time,” a White House insider will tell journalist Richard Wolffe. In truth, people on his staff think he’s a joke, too. He starts one of his first all-hands-on-deck NSC meetings by reading a poem. Not some “rah-rah” poem, “some doggerel bullshit about fairies or something,” says a White House official who was at the meeting when the poem was read. “He’s like Ron Burgundy in Anchorman—you put anything on his cards before a briefing, and he’d read it. You could put ‘I’m a fucking asshole’ on his briefing cards and he’d say that.” At another meeting, he took out a diary from a relative who had served in World War II and started reading it out loud. “It was pretty weird,” says another U.S. official.
For McChrystal, not asking for more troops is a problem.
By early August, the assessment is close to being complete.
McChrystal flies to Chièvres in Belgium, a NATO airbase, for a secret meeting with Gates, Mullen, and Petraeus. He stops in Brussels and takes his close staff out to dinner. Casey has to pick a restaurant. He chooses a pizza place. It’s the most low-rent place he can find, but there are candles on the table. McChrystal isn’t pleased; it’s “too Gucci,” he tells Casey. Sir, it’s Brussels, Casey says. It’s either pizza or some taco stand on the street.
Over the unfortunately candlelit dinner, McChrystal asks his staff questions, the big questions. Why are we here? He doesn’t mean Belgium. He means the war. Why are you fighting? he asks Casey. For the next three hours, they go over every angle. “Is this a modern Crusade?” McChrystal asks his team. “Are we fighting an ideology, a fanatical extremism? Is this really something we should invest our time in? Is it going to hurt or help the region? Can we win?”
The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan Page 8