The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan

by Hastings, Michael

  The July 2011 line about beginning to withdraw from Afghanistan is supposed to be heard by the antiwar left, too. It’s not. They hear the other message: that Obama is going to triple the scope of the war, an unprecedented escalation that will create an almost entirely new conflict. (The surge in Iraq was only a one-sixth increase in the number of troops; Obama has, in under a year, tripled the number of Americans in Afghanistan, while doubling the total number of NATO troops.)

  The Afghans are supposed to take another message from Obama’s speech: that we’re going to be in with them for the long haul. The Afghans don’t hear that, though. They hear that the United States is getting the fuck out in July 2011.

  The Pentagon hears July 2011 and its response is: Hmmm, how about 2014? Even the choice of July 2011 is suspicious. “It was clearly a political decision,” says one Pentagon official. “Anyone who knows anything about Afghanistan knows that it doesn’t make sense to start withdrawing troops in the middle of the fighting season.” (The summer is traditionally when fighting spikes in Afghanistan.)

  In Kabul, McChrystal’s staff reacts negatively to the speech.

  “It was a terrible speech,” says Dave Silverman. “It was written by a fucking twenty-five-year-old.” (Actually, a thirty-two-year-old.) Dave’s feelings are echoed through McChrystal’s command and throughout the military at large. Doesn’t Obama understand that this isn’t one of those issues where you can split the difference? By putting July 2011 in there, Obama is making it harder to get support among the Afghans for the strategy, Pentagon officials complain. In a way, Obama is getting the worst of both worlds. He’s paying the domestic political costs for escalating, but he’s not gaining the confidence of the Afghans, which the strategy is supposed to rely on. The Afghans sense we’re just looking for the exit. This sense is reinforced by lines like “If I did not think that the security of the United States and the safety of the American people were at stake in Afghanistan, I would gladly order every single one of our troops home tomorrow,” and “That’s why our troop commitment in Afghanistan cannot be open-ended—because the nation that I’m most interested in building is our own,” and “America will have to show our strength in the way that we end wars.”

  The speech isn’t well received, really anywhere. The West Point audience is relatively subdued. The press trashes it. To tell a group of cadets that the war they are fighting is a huge waste of resources doesn’t engender confidence. And what Obama is saying—that he doesn’t want to nation-build—is exactly the opposite of what the counterinsurgency doctrine he’s adopting calls for.

  McChrystal gets almost all of his forty thousand troops. He’s due back in DC to testify before Congress in December. He flies back with Eikenberry, and they don’t talk much. Bad blood over the leaked cables.

  McChrystal prepares for his testimony. McChrystal’s lawyer, Colonel Richard Gross, plays the role of the affable southern senator; Mike Flynn plays the role of the hard-questioning liberal type. When McChrystal arrives in Washington, he’ll confide to a few reporters that he never once questioned his own strategy during the three months of the review. A senior U.S. official talks to Pakistan’s ambassador in Washington: I need to know, the ambassador says, is this July 2011 deadline legitimate? Don’t worry about the deadline, the official says.

  Afghan officials are already complaining to McChrystal: Are you leaving or not?

  During his December testimony to Congress, McChrystal makes sure to keep mentioning Al-Qaeda—even though in the original briefings on his strategy Al-Qaeda was barely mentioned. McChrystal gives shout-outs to most of the members of his team, including their names in the Congressional Record: Dave, Jake, Casey, Charlie, and the others. One congressman, Representative Ted Poe from Texas, characterizes Obama’s plan as “the surge and retreat policy.”

  The congressman continues: “So we will start bringing troops home, but we won’t necessarily bring them all home, then. Is that what you understand?”

  “Exactly, Congressman. There will be some slope, some pace that is determined by conditions.”

  “And if the conditions are worse, what happens then?”

  “Sir, the president can always make decisions based upon conditions on the ground.”

  The loophole for an indefinite stay is kept wide open.

  25 WORSHIPPING THE

  GODS OF BEER

  APRIL 21, 2010, BERLIN

  I walked back to the Ritz. I was bummed. I would have liked to have seen McChrystal address the German parliament. But I figured I’d take the downtime to go back to my room and write up some of my notes from the morning.

  I entered my room on the sixth floor. There was a note under the door. It was in a Ritz-Carlton envelope. I opened it. It was written on the hotel’s letterhead. It read:

  Hello Michael:

  Was too lazy and still drunk at 6 am so decided to take the train this afternoon. If you would like to have a drink, give me a call. (Shall be here until about 5 pm.)

  Kerina

  The spy. She’d left her number. Was this the behavior of a high-class prostitute? I hesitated. I was on dangerous ground here. Should I call? If she really was a spy, could I confirm she was a spy? That would be useful for my story. But if anyone on McChrystal’s team saw me talking to her, they would not be pleased that I was hanging out with a possible secret agent.

  To be continued.

  A few hours later, I went down to the lobby. Duncan, Khosh, Dave, and his wife were waiting. We had reservations at a Japanese restaurant in East Berlin. Two German reporters were going to join us for the meal.

  Khosh and I started chatting.

  I looked over to the front desk. Kerina was checking out of the hotel. She looked at me and smiled.

  “Dude, that’s the woman Duncan and Charlie think is a spy,” Khosh said. “Weird.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  We arrived at the trendy Japanese restaurant. The two German reporters were jet-lagged and zonked out and mildly traumatized. They’d just returned from Afghanistan a few hours earlier, accompanying the German defense minister and four dead German soldiers. The trip had taken three days longer because of the volcano.

  I spoke to one of the reporters, a young man named Julian. He was in his early thirties and a star in German media. The experience of traveling with the caskets had affected him. He told me he’d been one of the more outspoken voices in the German press supporting the war, putting him in a small minority. That’s funny, I said. In the United States, only a minority in the media were opposed to escalating in Afghanistan.

  “I supported this, and what if it doesn’t work?” he asked. “I know these soldiers; I have spent time with them in combat. So to have it be a waste… What would that mean?”

  It was interesting: Julian was prepared to take ownership of the position he took and the consequences of it. I’d rarely heard an American journalist express any such regrets or take responsibility for the policies they had promoted. Maybe it was a European thing.

  Maybe Julian’s trip home with the four caskets had given him doubts, perhaps revealing the acute German sensitivity to war. Over the past decade, the United States liked to mock Europeans for their unwillingness to get involved in armed conflict—Rumsfeld famously decried them as “Old Europe,” expressing a widespread feeling across the media and foreign policy establishment. Rather than respect from America’s elite, the hesitancy to avoid bloodshed brought derision.

  Most media types, though, hadn’t spent a few days stuck with dead soldiers in Uzbekistan.

  The sake and beer kept flowing.

  At the other end of the table, Dave and Duncan were talking about Fred and Kimberly Kagan, the two neoconservative experts who’d been on the assessment team last summer. The Kagans, Duncan explained, wanted to come over to Kabul to do another tour of the war zone. Duncan had been putting them off, much to the Kagans’ displeasure. Duncan was worried that if he didn’t give the Kagans access—shuttling them around to bases, set
ting up interviews with military officials—they would write a critical op-ed of McChrystal’s strategy.

  “The Kagans are making threats,” Duncan said.

  “Fuck the Kagans,” Dave said.

  After dinner, we headed to meet up with McChrystal and the senior staff. I was in a cab with Dave and Duncan and Dave’s wife. We were driving through East Berlin.

  “This place does have a communist feel to it,” Dave said. “Is that a statue of Hitler—”

  “Dave. Stop talking,” his wife said.

  “It’s a statue of Frederick the Great,” said the cabdriver.

  Dave looked at the cabdriver. “I want to tell you that Germany has a proud military history from the Prussians to von Clausewitz,” he said. “You guys should be proud of it. Prussians. Rommel.”

  From the backseat, I asked the cabdriver what he thought of the war in Afghanistan.

  “Afghanistan is in a civil war,” the cabdriver said. “Germany shouldn’t be a part of it. It’s very unpopular here.”

  Dave went silent. He looked hard at the driver. “Sir, as a representative of the American government, I want to tell you. We’re here to convince Germany that we can win.”

  We pulled up outside a Mexican restaurant, a few blocks from the Ritz. McChrystal, the Flynns, Jake, Admiral Smith, Khosh, Lori, and Annie were sitting at a large table in a corner of the restaurant. A couple of massive pitchers of beer—held in a strange upside-down pyramidal contraption with a tap at the bottom, a unique specialty of the restaurant—were in the middle of the table.

  We took our seats around the table.

  McChrystal was nursing his glass of beer. He wanted to take it easy tonight, he said. His favorite beer was Bud Light Lime, but the bar didn’t serve it.

  General Flynn had other ideas. “I worship the god of beer,” he said, laughing as he pretended to prostrate himself across the table when the waitress brought another pitcher.

  “How the hell did you ever get your security clearance?” Jake asked.

  “I lied,” Flynn said.

  The guys around the table greeted his answer with an uproarious laugh.

  Security clearances were an important status symbol in Washington. The clearances went from secret to beyond top secret. To get a top-secret clearance, it usually took three to six months, which entailed intensive interviews with your friends and family. Contracting companies had made tens of millions of dollars providing employees with clearances to the government—and keeping a clearance once you were out of the government meant you could make more money in the private sector. Over the past ten years, the government had acquired a secrecy fetish, classifying over 2.6 million new secrets. Analysts had pointed out that one of the main reasons the government tried to hold on so tightly to its documents wasn’t that their release would hurt national security, the catchall justification to classify, but that the government wanted to prevent embarrassment. An unspoken reality in Washington—which Flynn had hit on with his gibe—was that if people actually told the truth during interviews for their security clearances, they probably wouldn’t get them. Everybody lied about drug use, but more bizarrely, if you spent time in dodgy places around the world and lived abroad for any length of time—Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza, Pakistan—that often ended up being used against you, which ensured keeping out most people who actually had intimate knowledge of these places. “The more you know, the greater the risk you are to national security,” as one former U.S. official put it, ironically.

  I stepped outside with Duncan and Julian to smoke a cigarette. Julian asked me how the story was going so far.

  “Have you ever seen the Werner Herzog movie Grizzly Man?” I asked them.

  They neither confirmed nor denied, so I continued. The movie, I explained, was about a radical environmentalist named Timothy Treadwell. Treadwell was obsessed with grizzly bears. He made it his life’s work to study them. He studied them in a way that wasn’t really academic. He lived with them in the wilderness in Alaska and videotaped them constantly. He stuck his hand in bear shit and believed he was communing with the animals. His stand-ups before the camera had a hypomanic feel. He was convinced he was the savior for the bears. He viewed park rangers and hunters as his sworn enemies.

  It quickly became clear to the audience that Timothy Treadwell was insane.

  There was one person, though, who didn’t recognize Treadwell’s insanity: the director and narrator, Werner Herzog. This is because Herzog is insane, too. It’s what makes the movie work. Crazy recognizes crazy.

  “So yeah, I kind of feel like Herzog around these guys,” I told them. “Especially since we’re in Germany.”

  An hour later, Team McChrystal left the bar. Highly buzzed, they walked back to the Ritz. I followed.

  26 WHO IS STANLEY

  MCCHRYSTAL?

  PART I, 1954—1976

  Right from his first days at West Point, McChrystal exhibits the mixture of brilliance and contempt for authority that would follow him throughout his career. He gets over one hundred demerits, earning the title of a “century man,” wearing it as a badge of honor. He parties hard. He writes a series of provocative articles and stories for the school’s literary magazine, including one piece of fiction where he imagines assassinating the president of the United States. He learns to thrive in a very rigid environment while still pushing the envelope every chance he gets.

  Born on August 14, 1954, he grows up in a military family. He moves around to different bases. He’s a very good athlete. Baseball is his sport, and even in Little League he would call out strikes to the crowd before whipping a fastball down the middle. He has five siblings, one sister and four brothers. All would be involved in the military, either joining it or marrying into it. His brother Scott is an Army chaplain in the Assemblies of God Church; his eldest brother, Herbert J. McChrystal III, also a chaplain, writes a book called Spiritual Fitness: An Imperative for the Army Chaplaincy. McChrystal’s mother dies when he is fourteen. His father, Herbert, a West Point grad of ’45, would retire as a two-star general, having fought in Korea and Vietnam.

  McChrystal enters West Point in 1972, while the Vietnam War is still going on. The U.S. military is close to its all-time low in popularity at the time—there is “tremendous anti-military sentiment” throughout the country, according to General David Barno, one of McChrystal’s classmates. On trips to the outside world, the cadets are briefed on what to do if riots break out and they get attacked. Barno recalls having eggs thrown at him on a trip to Syracuse, New York, for a football game.

  It’s a wild time at West Point, a mix of testosterone, hooliganism, and reactionary patriotism—the class of ’76 is the last class to have graduated before the institution becomes coed. The all-male academy is known as the Prison on the Hudson. One football season, there’s a mess hall rally where ten tables are stacked atop one another during a massive, balls to the wall food fight, which happens three or four times that year. Paintings are ruined, chairs and tables destroyed. On training trips to Camp Buckner, where Vietnam-like conditions are simulated (living in Quonset huts, for instance), one cadet is notorious for lighting his jacket on fire with lighter fluid and throwing himself into a lake. Birthdays are celebrated by a tradition called “rat fucking”—a gang of cadets rush into a room, grab the birthday boy, and fuck him up. Tie him, tape him, drag him through snow or mud, covered in shaving cream. “It was pretty out-of-control,” says Barno, who would later serve as commander in Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005. The class, filled with “huge talent” and wide-eyed teenagers with a strong sense of idealism,” says Barno, goes on to produce the top generals of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including Barno and General Ray Odierno, who would command all U.S. forces in Iraq for two years.

  The Pointer’s editorial board,

  featuring McFerren and McChrystal

  An editorial in The Pointer from the class of ’76

  McChrystal is a dissident ringleader on campus. One classmate, who asked not to b
e named, describes finding McChrystal passed out in the shower after he drank a case of beer he’d hidden under the sink. He views the tactical officers, sort of like glorified residential advisors at West Point, as the enemy.

  The troublemaking puts a serious crimp on his social life: In 1973 he starts to date Annie, whom he’d met at Fort Hood, Texas, but usually when she visits she barely gets a chance to see him. “I’d come visit and I’d end up spending most of my time in the library, while Stan was in the Area,” she tells me. McChrystal’s roommate, Jake McFerren, remembers having to keep Annie company in the library while Stan marched away his Saturday afternoons. “I remember going down to the Area, all the cadets were marching one way, back and forth. Stan sees me and Annie, and he breaks away, marches completely perpendicular to the formation, comes up and says, ‘This is bullshit.’ ”

  McChrystal’s most notorious achievement—immortalized in a description underneath his yearbook photo—is the raid on Grant Hall, a gray stone building that was used for social engagements, a place for females visiting the all-male school to hang out.

  McChrystal and five others borrow old weapons from the campus museum, including a French MAT-49 submachine gun and dummy hand grenades made from socks. At 2215 hours, dressed in full commando gear and with painted faces, they storm Grant Hall. The main intent, says Barno (who didn’t participate in the raid) was to “create chaos.” McChrystal writes a satirical piece about his experience for The Pointer, the West Point literary magazine where he serves as managing editor. He describes the scene: “We moved swiftly to the… heavy brown doorway. Our hearts beating wildly… there were five of them blissfully unaware of the anger which lurked so near.… [L]ed by the sergeant, we burst out firing rapidly, dashed down the ramp, the light of Grant Hall cast a pallid glow on all of us. The rest is history.” A postscript to the story, which is accompanied by a cartoon of the raid with a soldier sneaking up on a busty coed and a photo of the five cadets in commando gear, says: “Delinquency: Extremely poor judgment, i.e. horse play with weapons in public at 2215 hours, frightening female visitors, and causing MP’s to be summoned 10 May 1974.” McChrystal headlined the article: “Where Goats Dare.”