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

by Hastings, Michael

  McChrystal the Goat. The Goat is the name for the cadet who graduates last in the class. There are famous Goats—like George Armstrong Custer and George E. Pickett. The Goat excels in “mischief,” as one historian puts it, in fraternization, in extracurricular escapades along Flirtation Walk down by the Hudson. There is a two-century-long tradition of Goatism. Custer graduates last—726 demerit points!—yet is known as one of the most “dynamic” commanders in the Civil War. He becomes the Union’s youngest general. He earns his place in history, though, eleven years after the Civil War ends: His career spectacularly flames out in the massacre at Little Bighorn, a misstep in the U.S. government’s campaign to wipe out America’s native population. Other Goats went on to win silver stars, great victories, and rise to the highest ranks. It is General Dwight D. Eisenhower who will later say, “If anybody recognized greatness in me at West Point, he surely kept it to himself.”

  Part of a photo spread

  from The Pointer

  McChrystal embodies the Goat ethos, though he’s far from last in the class. McChrystal ranks 298 out of a class of 855, according to an official at West Point, a serious underachievement for a man widely regarded as brilliant. This puts him in the league with Sherman and Grant and Eisenhower and Patton—not quite scholars, but destined for history. His more compelling work is his writing, the seven short stories he produces for The Pointer. They are works of fiction and satire, which read like a cross between The Naked and the Dead–like war fiction and the amusingly subversive writings of a college student. The stories reveal a creative imagination that is obsessed with war, conflict, terrorism, and bucking authority.

  One story, written in November 1975, titled “Brinkman’s Note,” is a piece of suspense fiction. The main character, an unnamed narrator, first appears to be trying to stop a plot to assassinate the president. It turns out, however, that the narrator himself is the assassin. He’s able to infiltrate the White House. “I had coordinated these plans routinely the day before with another member of the president’s staff, and everything was set. The main door to the plant opened. The president strode in smiling. From the right coat pocket of the raincoat I carried, I slowly drew forth my .32 caliber pistol. In Brinkman’s failure, I had succeeded.”

  Other stories eerily foreshadow the issues he’d have to deal with thirty years later in Afghanistan and Iraq, including the difficulties training the Afghan security forces and the civilian casualties during insurgencies. In a story called “The Journal of Captain Litton,” the main character is a British officer in the Middle East who writes, “commanding these North Africans is a noxious prospect at best… I’m hopeful that once they are out and moving amongst the enemy troops they will steady somewhat and we will have reasonable chance of success.” The story hinges on the captain’s aide, an Arab named Abu, who eventually betrays all of the captain’s secrets to the enemy. Another story, “In the Line of Duty,” also set in the Middle East, is about a unit of Americans that accidentally opens fire on a local boy. With Vietnam looming in the backdrop, McChrystal the cadet confronted the issues of getting dragged into an open-ended counterinsurgency in a foreign land. His fictional character, a young lieutenant named Gewissen, would oppose a policy that the real McChrystal, later as a general, would have to embrace. “The troops, on constant alert for expected guerilla activity, had apparently mistaken the boy for a terrorist approaching the wire and had opened fire with a .50 caliber machine,” the story reads. Gewissen visits the scene of the incident and the following exchange with his commander occurs:

  “I was told what happened, LT, don’t worry too much about it and tell the guard he can rest easy, too. We’ll put in a report that it was strictly in the line of duty. After all, what can the country expect when they put a nineteen-year-old kid over here on such an important mission?”

  “Duty sir? Just what the hell is our duty? Wouldn’t you say we had a duty to that kid?”

  Harris hardened, his voice growing colder. “Your duty is to the country, LT.”

  “Which country, sir, this one or the one that sent us?” Gewissen was shouting now. “What about our duty to ourselves?”

  One of McChrystal’s last pieces for The Pointer best gets at the psyche of the young cadet—chafing at bureaucracy, a dry sense of humor, and the willingness to flip the giant bird to his superiors. It’s about a student who sneaks into the registrar’s office to destroy Honeywell 635, a computer that has kept track of all the cadet’s “1,672 demerit hours in two months” and his poor academic performance. “The bombs are in place and in minutes vengeance will be mine,” the story opens. “At first I attributed my constant bad fortune to some sadistic captain in the tactical department who, probably for some very good reason, bore a grudge against the family. Later, I thought that the CIA, FBI, SLA, or PTA might have sent a killer agent out to cause my slow, painful death, and at one point I even started attending chapel three times a day to cover all possibilities.”

  27 “THE JERK IN GREEN”

  APRIL 22, 2010, BERLIN

  The next morning, I checked out the local papers to see the kind of coverage they gave McChrystal’s visit. He was on the front page of the three major German dailies. I bought copies of all three newspapers from the newsstand in the lobby. I headed up to the ops center on the ninth floor, the papers folded under my arm.

  Charlie, Jake, and Admiral Smith were in the room. They were discussing McChrystal’s next speech.

  “You’re going to talk about Marja, so that’s a major military operation. Obviously you have to lead toward Kandahar,” Jake said. “I like him saying it’s already going on. It’s not going to be D-Day, not a big assault. He used the term yesterday. It’s a process.”

  The Marja offensive had started two months earlier, dispatching some ten thousand NATO soldiers and five thousand Afghan security forces to regain control over a town of about fifty thousand Afghans. Marja was located in Helmand province—the very place McChrystal had been concerned about committing forces to when he took over a year earlier. But now McChrystal had hyped it as the most important battle to date. It had not gone well. McChrystal claimed that expectations for a clean and neat resolution were unrealistic. There were also no results to show. To deflect the criticism, the military used a variety of phrases to indicate the distinct lack of resolution in counterinsurgency operations—“rising tide of security” was one of them, “process” another. What was happening in Marja didn’t bode well for the next major offensive planned for Kandahar. Marja was supposed to be a “proof of concept,” as military officials put it, for Kandahar, and the concept looked like a failure.

  While the team worked on the speech, they continued to game-plan a way back to Kabul. There was a NATO conference for foreign ministers in Tallinn, Estonia. NATO and State Department officials had suggested McChrystal put in an appearance there. Charlie tried to figure out why.

  “They’re fucked up,” Charlie said. “They want him to go talk to the foreign ministers, but they don’t know if the foreign ministers are going to be there?” Charlie shook his head. “They’re fucked up,” he said again.

  McChrystal walked in the room. “Hey,” he said.

  “Sir.”

  “This is our recommendation for the five-to-seven-minute intervention,” Jake said. (Intervention: what NATO ministers call speeches.)

  Admiral Smith handed him an outline of notes. They wanted McChrystal to focus on “the training mission,” as it sounded less like “war.” They suggested he use phrases like “mentoring the Afghans.” Any questions about Kandahar should also be spun back to the larger point about the training mission, his advisors said.

  “Five to seven minutes?” McChrystal said, skeptically, after looking over the speech.

  “Is it more?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  Dave sketched possible travel scenarios out on a whiteboard.

  “Hey, Mike, how are you this morning?” McChrystal asked.

  “Great, sir,” I sai
d. “You see the papers?”

  I took the three papers that were under my arm and put them on the desk. “You’re all over them, man,” said Jake.

  Dave in Berlin

  “None of us speak German, do we?” McChrystal asked. “They could be going, ‘This asshole, look at the jerk in green.’ ”

  “How was your run this morning?” I asked.

  “We lifted. Getting a touch of plantar fasciitis. I’ve had it for ten years. Just a touch.”

  Jake, who was stationed in Berlin in the eighties during the Cold War, remembered a little bit of German. He started to translate the papers.

  “You’re here, you’re the commander, and you were giving the overall strategy in the north,” Jake said.

  Charlie was getting pissed about the small talk. He wanted to get the Estonia trip straightened out. He tried to interrupt.

  “This FM and the agenda for it is completely fucked up,” he told McChrystal. “No one has got control of it. They don’t know what foreign ministers are going to be there.”

  “We just talked to Tallinn,” Jake said, referring to an advisor who was currently in the Estonian capital. “He’s walking into the meeting, he says, ‘I don’t even know who is in this meeting.’ ”

  “Here’s the option—” Charlie tried interrupting again.

  McChrystal was still looking at the papers. “This says essentially I am handsome and well hung,” McChrystal said.

  “In German,” said Dave, looking up from his scribbling on the whiteboard.

  “This one, too,” said Jake, laughing.

  “That’s our story,” McChrystal said.

  “We’re sticking to it,” said Jake.

  They wanted McChrystal to either go to Estonia or sit in on a meeting via video teleconference. The possible plan: to leave at 0530, arrive at 0830, stay on the ground for four hours, back on Ocean 11 at 1345, and 1445 on to Kabul. The wives were going to the train station tomorrow. They would just tell them good-bye.

  “Where’s my body double?” McChrystal said about the video teleconference. He’d have to sit for two hundred forty minutes in front of a camera to broadcast his image onto a screen in a meeting room in Estonia.

  “We’ll just have to get a sock-puppet cutout of you,” said Jake.

  “If they come back and say they want you for three hours, an option would be, leave here at five in the morning. Five thirty is takeoff,” Charlie said. “The pilots can make this.”

  “I think so,” said Dave, laughing—the fucking Air Force.

  “What’s your recommendation?” McChrystal asked.

  “I recommend: One, we don’t know on the agenda,” Charlie said, predicting the Estonians would react in the same positive way as the Germans. McChrystal, though, was concerned his presence might overshadow other NATO delegates.

  “He would be beside himself if you showed up,” Jake said, not as concerned, referring to the Estonian foreign minister.

  “Like, ‘Wow, the guy has actually made the effort to get here,’ ” Charlie said.

  “We know Clinton is there,” Jake said. “But they don’t know who else.” Getting possible facetime with Clinton, an ally in his policy battles with the White House, was an incentive.

  “Do they have a seat for me?” McChrystal asked.

  “We’ll make sure they do. I told them we’re looking at timing and would brief you,” Jake said. “They got kind of, ‘Okay, please keep us informed.’ ”

  “If it’s three hours, I’d rather do it in person,” McChrystal said, rejecting the VTC option.

  Okay. The room went silent. McChrystal gave his orders.

  “Course of action: One, we need to get there an hour ahead of time—”

  “We don’t have badges, we don’t have shit,” Charlie said.

  “Can you give me a place to shower and change?” McChrystal said. “I’d rather not ride in uniform.”

  “Or you want to do it in ACUs,” said Charlie. The ACU, or Army Combat Uniform, was the style of outfit McChrystal wore while in Afghanistan. It wasn’t a dress uniform; it was like a camouflaged jumpsuit with sand-colored boots.

  “Good idea,” said Jake on the ACUs. “All the way back to the fight.” It would remind the civilians at the foreign minister conference, Jake explained, that McChrystal was a combatant commander from a live war zone.

  “Oh hell yeah,” McChrystal said. “Just find me a shred of reason to do it.”

  “That would take away the shower part,” said Dave.

  “Here’s my guidance,” McChrystal said. “I want to go. I’ll do that as the primary, assuming that’s what they want. I want to make sure. I don’t want to show up here and people say, ‘Why’d you do this?’ ”

  “They’re all VTCing in now,” Jake said.

  “Why couldn’t they fly out?”

  “They got diverted. One of them got as far as Dubai and flew back.”

  The volcano, again ruining plans.

  “Okay, so that’d be course of action two,” McChrystal said. “It’s easier to go there. I can have a bigger impact face-to-face.”

  “You’d have a big impact on Rasmussen,” said Jake, referring to NATO secretary-general Anders Fogh Rasmussen.

  “That’s the point. He’s the one I’m really worried about. But I just want to make sure—”

  “You’d made the effort to see him going back into Kabul, and made the gigantic fucking effort with the meeting in Tallinn—” said Jake.

  “Of course, last time I went to the foreign minister, I got an ugly note from Colin Powell,” McChrystal said.

  “Really?” said Jake.” He’s not even there.”

  “He’s not even in government,” McChrystal said.

  “What was his point?” Jake said.

  “What were you doing in Clinton’s territory? I sent him a note right back, I said, ‘The secretary-general directed me to be there.’ I got a chain of command.”

  “Which [FM] was that, sir?” Dave asked.

  “The one in December [2009]. It was at the height of all the foolishness,” McChrystal said. McChrystal had gotten the note at the end of Obama’s strategic review, and he didn’t appreciate the unsolicited advice from Powell.

  “He thought I was fighting our government, which I wasn’t,” McChrystal said. “What are you doing going there? I was fucking ordered there.”

  “Like we want to get on a plane,” Dave said.

  “Like you’re just looking for reasons to get there,” said Jake.

  “I didn’t know if you knew him well,” Dave said.

  “I think his thinking was DC thinking,” McChrystal said. “That was early December, prior to my testimony. Everybody was accusing us of trying to do the political thing.”

  McChrystal tabled the decision on Estonia for later in the day. I left the control room. I had an appointment at the Afghan embassy to get an entry visa to Afghanistan.

  28 WHO IS STANLEY

  MCCHRYSTAL? PART II,

  1976—PRESENT DAY

  Lieutenant Stanley McChrystal enters an army in the late seventies that is broken, riddled with drugs and race problems. The soldiers aren’t very good: a collection of drunks, dirtbags, junkies, and scammers. He graduates from Special Forces school in 1979, eventually becoming the regimental commander of the elite 3rd Battalion, 75th Ranger regiment, in 1986—a dangerous position, even in peacetime, as nearly two dozen Rangers are killed in training accidents during the eighties. It is also an unorthodox career path—most soldiers who want to climb the ranks to general don’t go into the Special Forces.

  He revolutionizes the training regime for the Rangers—a habit he would develop, trying to transform systems in place that he felt were outdated. According to Command Sergeant Major Michael Hall, a longtime friend who would serve with him as the highest noncommissioned officer in Afghanistan, McChrystal introduces mixed martial arts, like jujitsu, to the hand-to-hand combat training and changes the drills on the rifle range (requiring everyone to
qualify with night-vision goggles), and forces soldiers not just to run, but to build up their endurance with weekly marches carrying heavy backpacks. He checks a few more boxes on his career in the late nineties, spending a year at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and then the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City, where he coauthors a treatise on the merits and drawbacks of humanitarian interventionism. (“I didn’t want to write anything at first,” he says, playing the anti-intellectual card. “But I ended up enjoying it.”)

  What McChrystal learns at West Point—and reinforces as he climbs the ranks in the Special Ops world—is how to walk a very fine line in the rigid military hierarchy and yet still succeed. He sees exactly how far he can go without getting tossed out. Being a highly intelligent badass can get you ahead. He was, after all, managing editor of The Pointer, and graduating two hundred ninety-eighth isn’t really that bad. His behavior demonstrates his capacity for risk and his willingness to put his views out there, consequences be damned. “He was very focused,” says his wife, Annie. “Even as a young officer he seemed to know what he wanted to do. I don’t think his personality has changed in all these years.” His personality is perfect for the “Rules be damned” ethos that takes hold after September 11. He does his first tour in Afghanistan as the chief of staff of the XVIII Airborne Corps. In 2003, he serves as a Pentagon spokesperson alongside Victoria Clarke at the start of the Iraq War. The stint is memorable for quotes that would have acted as albatrosses to most others, like backing up Donald Rumsfeld’s infamous remark about looting in Baghdad—“Stuff happens.” As Pentagon spokesperson, McChrystal gave his take on the chaos: “Looting is a problem, but it is not a major threat. People are not being killed in looting.” He also, rather unfortunately, mentions that major combat operations in Iraq are over, a week before Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech.