Eide is starting to lose his shit, says Galbraith. The two thirty A.M. text messages are followed by an e-mail to a UN political officer threatening to fire him over the anonymous quote. Eide’s evidence? The Guardian is a British newspaper, and the UN political officer is also British. It must have been from him, Eide concludes, out of a staff of hundreds. The tension between Galbraith and Eide is about to become very public; Eide blames Galbraith for bringing the fraud to light too quickly, while Galbraith blames Eide for what he sees as legitimizing a fraudulent election.
The American response to the election is, in general, confused.
The U.S. military trumpets the success of the election as the most significant operation the Afghans have organized and pulled off to date. NATO is encouraged by how the Afghans have handled the complexities of democracy.
The White House doesn’t know how to play it. They seem to want a runoff election between Karzai and Abdullah. This pisses off Karzai. Karzai is going to win a runoff election anyway, so why piss off Karzai?
Obama doesn’t back Holbrooke. Holbrooke is a longtime Clinton loyalist—he’d supported Hillary rather than Obama during the campaign and, after Hillary Clinton was selected as secretary of state, making him the special envoy was her idea. But on the election issue, it doesn’t look like Hillary is going to stand behind Holbrooke, either. Karzai, reading the political signs, doesn’t think Holbrooke has much clout. National Security Advisor Jim Jones tells Holbrooke: You might as well resign; you’ve lost the faith of the president. And so Holbrooke—considered America’s überdiplomat, forty years of experience—is no longer in the game in Afghanistan. He can’t get a meeting alone with President Obama. (“Richard Holbrooke expected everyone in the White House to treat him like Richard Holbrooke,” says a White House official. “But they didn’t care who he was. It was his fault, too, for not recognizing that.”) This leaves Galbraith exposed in Kabul—if Dick Holbrooke doesn’t have the juice, then neither does Peter Galbraith. At a meeting in September, Hillary Clinton will tell Eide that the U.S. isn’t going to get involved in a United Nations dispute—a signal to Eide that Galbraith doesn’t have her support.
On October 28, armed gunmen storm a guesthouse in Kabul where UN election workers are living. The workers have been brought to Kabul specifically to work on the runoff vote. Six UN employees are killed. An American guarding the compound is also killed by an Afghan army soldier. It’s an odd coincidence that the attackers happened to target those particular UN staff.
Dr. Abdullah Abdullah is the second-highest vote-getter. The campaign against him is starting to get bizarre and dirty—there’s an e-mail getting bounced around among Afghan elites, called “The Truth About Abdullah Abdullah.” It’s a wild e-mail from the Karl Rove school of campaigning: It calls Abdullah a bisexual, accuses him of sleeping with prostitutes in Dubai, calls him an Iranian agent, lists the cost of his “designer suits.” The e-mail lists Abdullah’s supposed “allies,” many who just happen to be opponents of Hamid Karzai.
Dr. Abdullah Abdullah drops out of the election. The runoff vote is canceled.
Ashraf Ghani, America’s favorite, gets 3 percent of the vote.
Holbrooke gets sidelined—he ends up looking weak, which translates to the Americans as ending up looking weak in Karzai’s eyes. The White House doesn’t force Karzai to do anything.
Karzai wins by fraud.
Karzai’s half brother Ahmed Wali Karzai, the provincial council chief in Kandahar, tells one of Eikenberry’s deputies not to worry about it. In a State Department cable headlined “Elections: What’s the Point?” the president’s half brother explains to the Americans that “the people in this region don’t understand having one election, let alone two.
“The people do not want change,” says Ahmed Wali Karzai. “They think the president is alive, and everything is fine. Why have an election?”
19 TEAM AMERICA
ROLLS THE RITZ
APRIL 20, 2010, BERLIN
The lobby of the Ritz-Carlton was packed with Germans and Israelis. A tight security perimeter was in place outside. A legion of cops dressed in black—a few with shaved heads—stood guard under the glass awning that jutted out from the towering gray facade of the ten-story hotel. Police vehicles with flashing lights parked diagonally at the end of Potsdamer Platz alongside metal barricades to block off the street. A red carpet was laid out for the arriving dignitaries—Israeli embassy officials, German military officers and diplomats, wealthy businessmen with their wives—leading into a receiving line to a reception on the mezzanine.
The purpose of the gala was to promote friendship between the two countries. That explained the tight security—the German government’s paranoia to avoid not-so-random acts of anti-Jewish violence, fearful of a new generation of skinheads who hadn’t gotten the memo that the Nazis lost.
The spectacle fit with my experience of Berlin so far: an entire city where the brutal history of the twentieth century couldn’t be avoided. Even its übermodern, globalized, cosmopolitan hipness failed to disguise the most savage century on record. Remnants of war acted like the city’s second skyline: memorials to dead Germans in World War I, memorials to remember the Holocaust, a memorial to the Soviets who died fighting them, government buildings identified by whether they were leveled in massive bombing runs or rebuilt later, and a partial chunk of the Berlin Wall, a Cold War memento less than a block away from the Ritz. The city of three million appeared to have taken on the responsibility to remember the approximately one hundred twenty million, both victims and perpetrators alike, who’d perished in the world wars of the past hundred years.
This was the task McChrystal would confront: to convince the German political elite that they should continue to send troops to fight in Afghanistan, no matter how unpopular the war had become. Polling showed that some 80 percent of Germans opposed involvement in Afghanistan. Absurdly, the country’s leaders tried to convince their public that they weren’t really in a war, anyway—they were involved in “networked security” and “humanitarian action.” Germany’s president was forced to resign after he implied that the forty-five hundred German troops in northern Afghanistan were actually at war. A series of incidents had brought the absurdity of the government’s claim to the forefront: After the air strike in Kunduz that killed seventy civilians, the German defense minister took responsibility and resigned—something that would have been unheard of in the United States. The German officer who had called in the air strike was subjected to a highly publicized hearing within months—again, something Americans would never do. (In the past ten years, no high-ranking American officer has ever been severely punished for killing civilians.) In the past few weeks, the country had suffered seven combat deaths in Afghanistan, one of its worst losses of life in fighting since 1945. McChrystal had recently ordered an American brigade to join the German contingent in the north of the country, an escalation that was undoubtedly going to mean more deaths for the Germans.
It was around seven P.M. I sat in the corner of the lobby drinking espresso, occasionally popping outside to smoke a cigarette. I wanted to capture the scene of McChrystal and his staff rolling into the Ritz. Team America—the name McChrystal’s staff called themselves, referring to the comedic film about U.S. cluelessness—-arrives in Berlin. A four-star general arrives at the five-star hotel.
I hadn’t heard from Duncan or anyone else on the team all day. I worried that they’d hit a snag. In the past twenty-four hours, I’d started to get a strange kind of separation anxiety, a fear that I wouldn’t be able to continue the story. I’d scrapped my plan to go back to DC. My plan now was to push on to Kabul. My trip was originally going to be about two or three days. Now it looked like it might last a month.
I had downtime to digest the reporting. A question persisted: What was the motivation behind McChrystal’s decision to have me tag along? Was it that Rolling Stone would reach a demographic of young officers and recruits whom they wanted to impress? Would
it confirm the view that the team held of McChrystal—that he was “a rock star,” as they regularly called him? Dave explained that Special Forces operators had a healthy disrespect for authority; Rolling Stone fit this self-styled image perfectly. They were building Brand McChrystal—ballsy, envelope-pushing, risk-taking. New York Times Magazine cover? Done. Time cover? Check. Atlantic cover? Too easy. 60 Minutes profile? No worries. Rolling Stone? Boom. It was a natural evolution of a very aggressive media strategy to establish McChrystal as a contender for the greatest general of his generation, on a par with Petraeus.
My presence with them was a physical, real-time manifestation of their entire attitude. How do you jump out of an airplane at thirty thousand feet, or sneak into an enemy compound in the middle of the night, or swim in hypothermic ocean waters, without a willingness to take risks? McChrystal’s team lived for risk. Up the risk; tell risk to go fuck itself. What General Mike Flynn had told me kept going through my head: Shock the system. Get as much attention as possible. Love it or hate it.
Sir Graeme Lamb once said, to roughly paraphrase: You have a pond and you keep throwing rocks in the pond, and you keep throwing big rocks in, and you keep making bigger waves, and eventually you see what you’re looking for. Eventually you can see the bottom of the pond—the ecosystem has been unsettled, and everything becomes clear.
I didn’t quite get it, but then no one quite got what Graeme Lamb was saying. Wisdom is like that. It all fit, though—whether the pond was in Kabul or Washington, just start tossing in rocks, increase the size of the rocks, decrease the size of the rocks. Make an improvised explosive device with the rocks.
Perhaps I was a rock to throw, part of some larger strategy I didn’t see.
I noticed another smaller group of American and German officers in uniform. They didn’t look like they were part of the Israel–Germany gala. They stood to the left of the stairs, near the open entrance to the bar. I assumed they were there to welcome McChrystal. That was a good sign.
After forty-five minutes of waiting, a large bus pulled up outside. It had purple lettering on the side.
Dave came through the door, followed by Ray and a few others. They were carrying American military gear in camouflage bags along with trash bags filled with top secret material. Due to security regulations, the classified material that was printed on the trip needed to be disposed of in the appropriate manner and place, which meant burning it back in Kabul. Even their trash was top secret.
Dave went up to the front desk with Ray and Master Sergeant Rudy Valentine, McChrystal’s personal cook and body man. Rudy was a gentle, quiet soul—he’d served twenty-plus years in the Army. He’d grown up poor in a town in Michigan. (“Ask him about the rabbits,” Dave told me. I did: He raised and killed rabbits to feed his younger siblings.) He didn’t drink or swear. The repeated deployments over the past decade had put a heavy burden on his marriage. He was devoted to McChrystal—each trip, he’d make sure the general’s luggage was in his room, and prepare his uniforms for the day.
They started the check-in process. Rudy got the thirty or so plastic room keys made up. Dave made contact with the welcoming party, telling them McChrystal was on his way in. A few moments later, McChrystal entered with Mike, Charlie, and Jake.
“Hope this isn’t all for me,” McChrystal said, acknowledging the gala.
It wasn’t.
The welcoming party of German and American defense attachés swept McChrystal and the other generals into the Ritz’s bar area. Waitresses started passing out small appetizers and beer.
Dave and Casey conferred.
“We need to get The Boss out of there,” Dave said.
“We’ll bring him up to his room and let him and Annie do their thing,” Casey said.
The team was frazzled from the trip. They’d spent fourteen hours on the bus, commandeered from a company that usually took Japanese tourists around France. There were two bus drivers. Originally, the drivers were under the impression they would be driving to Italy. Dave told them that morning in Paris they were mistaken. The plan had changed. Get with the program. The two drivers resisted—they had been told Italy, and they were adamantly opposed to going to Berlin. After a few minutes of argument, they conceded to Dave. Not happily—they remained French and surly, taking their revenge through a daylong exercise in passive resistance. European Union labor regulations allowed the bus drivers to take a break every two and a half hours to smoke a cigarette, the drivers claimed.
“We were going sixteen miles an hour, I swear to God,” Dave said. “Guderian made it to Paris faster than we made it to Berlin.” A reference to the German general who led the invasion of France in World War II, who developed a strategy of deploying fast-moving and heavily armored tanks to overwhelm the enemy—a strategy infamously known as blitzkrieg.
The bus crawled. The team started drinking. Beers were opened. They cracked a bottle of schnapps. For lunch, they stopped on the side of the road at a gas station. Mike Flynn ate his meal on top of a trash can. At each stop, as the bus drivers sucked down Gauloises, Ray set up the communications equipment to download the e-mails and other materials that had arrived during the two hours they were out of contact. The Japanese tourist bus wasn’t equipped for mobile telecom.
I saw Duncan.
“Delta Bravo, what’s up, man?” I said. “I was worried you guys weren’t going to make it.”
The ash cloud, at this very moment, was hovering over Germany. No one yet knew if or when flights would resume. Days, weeks, a month. I asked Duncan what tipped the balance for them to come here. It would have been safer to fly out of Italy, cut their losses, and return to Kabul early.
“The implicit risk is it gets worse, and we get stuck,” Duncan said. “But this is very much the attitude of our General McChrystal—into the ash cloud.”
The bar at the Ritz was in the back corner of the lobby. It had three open-air entranceways divided by three stubby rectangular walls, the marble floor changing to carpet; there were lounge seats, tables, and a counter against the back wall where a bartender stood serving eleven-euro drinks.
I mingled in the crowd around the bar for a few minutes. Mike Flynn and Jake pounded a few beers. Flynn had received word over e-mail that the top insurgent leader in Iraq had been killed. He was satisfied. “He was a guy we’d been looking for for a while,” he said.
A tall blond woman in a green sweater tightly covering a sizable chest walked by. I took note.
I went upstairs to room 915. I wanted to capture the scene of Ray, the communications specialist, setting up the operations center.
In room 915, Ray was rolling out the cables, organizing the Toughbooks, and setting up the printer. Even though they’d only been there fifteen minutes, they were almost done.
Admiral Smith, McChrystal’s communications director, was sitting down, looking over notes. He and Duncan started discussing talking points, what McChrystal needed to say to convince the Germans that they could return to their more comfortable role—away from fighting. The Germans had a number of restrictions placed on their forces, including not being allowed to go out at night. (“With the Germans, though, it’s like my British friend told me,” said Dave. “Maybe it’s good that they aren’t allowed to go out at night, if you know what I mean.”)
“National agendas… And the public polling. Low support… And adopt the strategy over time to start a security effort to support more of a government development role,” Smith said.
They discussed the think-tank event scheduled for tomorrow.
“We have a small change. We have sixteen RSVPs for the think tank down from twenty late adds. A lot of these folks are based in Berlin,” Duncan said.
Casey worked on the speech, printing it out this time in 32-point font.
Rudy brought up the bags. Annie McChrystal entered the room.
“We ate junk food the whole way,” she told me about the bus trip. She looked happy, keeping the upbeat public attitude that was a job req
uirement for being the wife of a four-star general. She carried her responsibilities well, though her demanding partnership of stress and solitude had left its visible scars, like an attractive middle-aged woman from Florida who’d spent too much time in the sun. “I was waiting for the Ranger songs. We were having too much fun. I can’t remember the last time I spent fourteen hours with him awake! I loved every minute of it. He was stuck on the bus and he couldn’t go anywhere.”
Mike Flynn walked in. “Shit, they had all kinds of nice chow as soon as we walked in,” Flynn said, looking around the room. “Jesus Christ, what the hell did you guys do? You missed it—”
“We had to get the bags—”
McChrystal blasted in.
“Hey, don’t bitch about how working for me is a tough time,” he announced. He saw me and froze for a second. He continued. “They had a little party. They were pouring beer down there. I was going to come up here, they grabbed me, gave me beer, more beer, then they gave me pizza. I’m like, ‘Hey, I’m here. I’m German. Screw the French.’ ” He winked at me. “I’ll tell you one thing,” he said. “I’m glad we came. It’s a good call. As long as I don’t screw it up. I’m prepared to take that risk.”
I went back downstairs. A defense attaché’s wife was in a heated discussion with the French colonel over le seduction. The French colonel was convinced the Americans didn’t understand seduction. She agreed. She was wasted and loud, wearing a blue raincoat. She was about ten years younger than her husband. She swung her martini glass back and forth at high velocity without spilling a drop.
She cornered me outside while I was smoking a cigarette. She told me she and her husband got invited to sex parties all the time in Berlin. “Daz boom, boom,” she said. Her husband came up to her and pried the martini glass from her hand. They left the party.
The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan Page 11