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

by Hastings, Michael

  If the COINdinistas had stopped at Iraq, perhaps the charade would have held up over time. But they couldn’t help themselves. With careers made by the prestige and money that can be achieved only through continuing their campaign elsewhere, the COINdinistas start talking about GCOIN, or global counterinsurgency, a worldwide fight to perform nation-building under the rubric of the War on Terror. Petraeus and the COINdinistas, with a new leading figure in the guise of General Stanley McChrystal, would soon push their theories on Afghanistan in full force. Iraq becomes the blueprint for success. The COINdinistas would, in other words, make the time-honored mistake of trying to fight the last war. “The entire COIN strategy is a fraud perpetuated on the American people,” says Douglas Macgregor, a retired colonel and leading critic of counterinsurgency who attended West Point with McChrystal. “The idea that we are going to spend a trillion dollars to reshape the culture of the Islamic world is utter nonsense.”

  Counterinsurgency, its proponents in Afghanistan claim, is the only way to prevent “terrorist safe havens.” Like “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq, the “terrorist safe haven” phrase becomes the buzz-worthy and fear-inducing phrase to justify their plans. Though this doesn’t make sense—a terrorist safe haven can be anywhere, as the September 11 attacks were planned in Hamburg, Florida, and San Diego, among other places—in order to sell COIN to the broader public and foreign policy community, terrorist safe havens become another necessary fiction. (“It’s all very cynical, politically,” says Marc Sageman, a former CIA case officer who has extensive experience in the region. “Afghanistan is not in our vital interest—there’s nothing for us there.”) Only counterinsurgency can win the War on Terror, the COIN supporters testify. “Losing wars is really expensive,” John Nagl will say, adding, “And sons of bitches flying airplanes into buildings is really fucking expensive.” Petraeus links the two ideas: “The intellectual construct for the War on Terror… needs to be a counterinsurgency construct, not a narrow counterterrorism construct.”

  The escalation in Afghanistan is on an entirely different scale from the escalation in Iraq, however—it creates a new war. The surge in Afghanistan triples the number of forces and more than quadruples the cost of the conflict. Its chances of success are low, almost nonexistent. Another RAND study, “How Insurgencies End,” examined eighty-nine insurgencies and pointed out that the success rate for counterinsurgencies where the government is an “anocracy”—that is, a democracy in name only, as we have in Afghanistan—has only a 15 percent success rate. “External sponsors,” like Washington is to Kabul, “sometimes back winning causes but rarely emerge with a clear victory.” The average counterinsurgency campaign lasts ten years—the mark this war hit in October 2011. We are now left with an entire strategic framework inspired by French failures in Algeria, an imperial war in the Philippines, a British colonial war in Malaysia, and the humiliation of Vietnam. Its proponents remain undeterred—they think it works. As General McChrystal would remind an audience in Europe, “I keep Galula by my bedside.”

  31 BAD ROMANCE

  APRIL 27, 2010, KABUL

  The flight attendant informed me that they didn’t serve alcohol. It was an Islamic restriction. I knew this, but asked again anyway.

  “Not even beer? Wine?”

  “No, sir, we don’t have beer,” the flight attendant whispered. “Or wine.”

  He was in his early thirties, dark skin and gelled hair. He looked very clean and perfumed. He spoke quietly as a courtesy, not wanting me to embarrass myself in front of the other passengers if they heard I’d asked for alcohol. I felt rough and brain-dead, the booze from the three days in Dubai seeping out through my blue blazer, teeth caked in nicotine, stomach queasy. I remembered why I swore off drinking ten years ago—a poison, I thought.

  I sat in the front of the plane. It gave me extra space to pass out in semiprivacy. The ticket cost around $700 round-trip.

  Safi Airways was one of the four commercial airlines that flew into Afghanistan. It was the only one worth flying. The other three—Pamir, Ariana, and Kam Air—had slightly frightening track records. Ariana—the national government-funded airline for Afghanistan—had planes that looked like they were hijacked from Pan Am in the early eighties. Pamir always seemed on the verge of a catastrophic crash—in May, a Pamir flight slammed into a mountain, killing forty-four. Safi, on the other hand, leased its planes from Lufthansa and had a team of German mechanics to service them. Since Safi flew to Frankfurt and had upgraded to a new terminal in Dubai, it had to meet European safety standards, and to keep its space at the terminals, it meant the flights had to be consistently on time. American officials flying commercial into Kabul weren’t allowed on either Pamir or Ariana. Not safe enough.

  I looked back to the coach cabin, separated from business class by a flimsy red curtain. The passengers were packed in tight, six to a row, each overhead compartment jammed shut and the space underneath the seats crammed with enough carry-ons to cause a half-dozen blood clots. There was a different look to the passengers from when I last flew to Kabul, eighteen months earlier. At that time, the war still hadn’t become entirely Americanized. The travelers had looked like they were going to a night-club in London or a reggae festival in southern Vermont—European metrosexuals, most likely diplomats or aid workers, Canadian humanitarians in polo shirts, and American aid workers with a backpacker feel to them. The Westerners were a minority on that flight—it was mostly made up of Afghan businessmen in surprisingly nice suits.

  The demographics had changed completely since McChrystal’s escalation. Americans were the majority of passengers now, many with the hardened and sunburned look of private contractors, as if they’d just been pulled off a sales lot in Midland, Texas, before putting a new John Deere tractor on layaway—blue jeans, guts for men, muffin tops for women, baseball caps. The younger Americans on the flight now had one-week-old buzz cuts and no fashion sense—camouflage, combat boots, tan badge holders swinging around their necks. These men and women were the beneficiaries of the $206 billion in private contracts that the military had handed out to companies like Kellog, Brown, Root, known simply as KBR, a well-connected all-purpose government contractor, and DynCorp. They wore what passed as a uniform for contractors in a war zone: martial regalia bought in PXs, Harley-Davidson and NFL logos, and names of American military facilities plastered on T-shirts and patches on backpacks (BALAD, CAMP VICTORY, FOB SALERNO, ROCKET CITY ). It was a style easily transferable to any of the 813 American military installations that pockmarked the globe, whether in Baghdad, Kabul, Kuwait, Djibouti, or Manas.

  Security contractors hired to protect all the new arrivals were another noticeable addition to the flight. PSDs, as they were called, for private security detail, better known simply as mercenaries. Almost all of them wore scruffy desert beards with steroid physiques. Over the past decade, mercenaries had become the easy villain in war zones. Criticizing the troops was off-limits; mercenaries were a more convenient target for the Afghan and the U.S. government to hammer. They got paid three or four times more than an average soldier and were regularly involved in debauchery and scandal—most recently, throwing wild parties in Kunduz where they had hired Afghan boys to dance for them. One private security contractor from Blackwater had punched a photographer friend of mine in the nose at the last party I’d gone to at the BBC bureau—he had it coming, but still. The Karzai government accused the mercenaries of corruption, drug running, and taking the best recruits away from the Afghan army and police—the security companies offered more cash to Afghans working for them as hired guns than the government did, the AK-47 equivalent of a brain drain. A number of the security companies had connections to the insurgency, with an estimated 10 percent of the hundreds of millions in cash paid to contractors that ended up being used as payoffs to insurgent groups, fueling the very insurgency the United States had vowed to stop. An audit by the special inspector general’s office of the $70 billion given to Afghanistan in aid money fro
m 2002 to 2009 found at least $18 billion unaccounted for.

  Karzai had talked about banning the mercenaries entirely from the country, which terrified the Americans and Europeans who knew they couldn’t operate there without them. It was too dangerous to move or build without heavily armed bodyguards. It was a fact they didn’t like to publicly acknowledge. The mercenaries laid the underlying dynamics of the war bare—it was all about money and violence for them. That made policy makers uneasy as they tried to push the user-friendly, humanitarian aspect of the conflict.

  The mercenaries deserved much of the criticism they got, but there was a definite hypocrisy to how they were officially looked down upon. They’d become an essential part of the war effort, necessary for both the government and nongovernmental organizations to do their jobs, as critical to American plans as any combat soldier. Yet policy makers and politicians and journalists did not hesitate to use them as scapegoats in a way they’d never do to soldiers or aid workers. They pretended the mercenary behavior, and all it represented, was an aberration and not the norm.

  A planeload of contractors and mercenaries and other assorted sketchballs.

  Afghanistan was losing its cool, I thought.

  The war there was once much hipper than the war in Iraq. Iraq was brutal and negative and always too hot, a country we’d turned into an ugly nationwide construction site filled with righteously ignorant Americans and pissed-off Iraqis, a force field of resentment guarding every interaction. In Iraq, the United States had clumsily and savagely imposed its will on an unwilling host, and the signs were visible everywhere, from the seven security checkpoints needed to get into the Green Zone to the hateful stares in Baghdad neighborhoods, both rich and poor. Afghanistan had been the Good War—a boutique conflict with an internationalized flavor, a capital city where Westerners were welcome to smoke hash and drink booze freely. The locals, at least in relatively cosmopolitan Kabul, were a more colorful, wacky, and stylish bunch—young men listened to Jay-Z cassette tapes, watched an American Idol–like rip-off on Afghan television, and pieced together outfits of Levi’s jeans, flowing orange and red scarves, and knockoff Ray-Bans. The fighters painted their assault rifles with flowers. The landscape was beautiful: scenic, snowcapped mountains and romantic red sands in the desert, travel magazine–quality images. As the war grew, so did the mechanisms of occupation required to sustain it. Megabases, mercenaries, KBR, and a degenerate class of expatriate war junkies who’d been gone from home for way too long. The cool had worn thin, replaced by a darker and grim absurdity that was impossible to ignore.

  I took Safi’s in-flight magazine out of the seat-back pocket. Two stories were noted on the cover: “Fighting Dogs: Warriors for the Masses,” and “Art Dubai: It Smells like Blood.” Inside there was another story headlined HEROIN HELL KABUL AND THE WAY OUT and a picture of an Afghan man who lost his arm in a NATO air strike.

  This wasn’t typical in-flight magazine material. There were no advertisements about frequent flier miles or profiles of B-list celebrities or recommendations for an up-and-coming chef’s new restaurant in Chicago. Reading it, I had to stop myself from laughing—the magazine was clearly insane. Whoever published it must be insane, whoever’s reading it must be insane, and whoever didn’t take the next flight back to Dubai must be totally fucking nuts. It read like a guidebook about a war zone theme park, something the Mad Hatter would give Alice to speed-read on her journey down a Central Asian rabbit hole.

  I turned to page fifteen. Live Entertainment in Kabul, read the slug at the top. The dogs “are usually pulled apart before they can inflict serious damage on each other.” Any nation’s airline with an in-flight magazine that extolled the virtues of dogfighting, smelling blood, and an exhibit on civilian casualties in Kunduz was clearly a nation that any rational human being would limit their involvement with. We’d done the exact opposite. According to the magazine, Safi Airways online ticket sales had grown 43 percent since September 2009, thanks to the escalation. Next month, Safi planned to open a new route to Doha, Qatar, three times a week.

  I stood up to stretch my legs. The young flight attendant was preparing meals in the area behind the cockpit. We started talking.

  He told me his name was Hekmatullah Rahimi, and that he was thirty years old. He worked for a company that ran a catering service for the flights. I asked him, as a young, motivated Afghan—the kind of Afghan whom America and its allies, in theory, needed to make the strategy successful—how he felt about McChrystal’s plan and Obama’s policy.

  “It’s not going to work,” he said. “We learned from the election that if you are a good man, like Abdullah Abdullah, and you stick your head up, you will get it chopped off. There are thousands of young Abdullah Abdullahs out there, but they all want to leave.”

  Hekmatullah told me he was planning just that: to make enough money to move to Canada where he could join his family, who already lived there. He didn’t know how long it would take. He didn’t know if he’d get a visa. He said he knew the Americans would leave—and he wanted to leave before the bailout. It was the same feeling that Khosh had described and that the Afghan immigration official in Berlin had acted on. Getting out, joining the Afghan diaspora that now numbered close to 50,000 in Canada alone. There was no place in Afghanistan for him, he said. He was honest, he felt, at least more honest than the criminals running the government. His catering business was doing well, but he wasn’t sure how long that would last. He lived in a strange world, a house in Kabul, shuttling back and forth to Dubai. Every day, he’d look at the Afghan government officials and businessmen who bought business-class tickets, stuffing their faces with pita bread and couscous, making their fortunes in Kabul, then taking their fortunes with them as soon as they could. Working on a commercial jet, the Dubai–Kabul line, the possibility of escape was always in front of his eyes, yet just out of sight.

  I sat back down in my seat and looked out the window. We were flying over Iran, then across the border into western Afghanistan. Kipling and other noteworthy imperialists had fallen in love with this spectacular terrain. They’d fallen in love with the country and its aura—what it represented as a proving ground for glory and greatness for the empire, an arena for men, an exciting adventure among the savage little fuckers with turbans and flashy swords. It’s barely worth pointing out that, with the hindsight of history, the civilized imperialists matched the uncivilized natives in savageness, pound for pound. The side with the technology would continue to convince themselves of the nobility and moral superiority of their efforts—if it wasn’t love, it bordered on regularly scheduled enchantment. During the eighties, Americans romanticized the Islamic extremists as freedom fighters: pure, Allah-fearing people fighting the scourge of Godless communism. We gave the Islamic radicals weapons to kill Soviet boys, and cheered when they did so. Now a new generation of closeted Orientalists had popped up since the war began in 2001, penning memoirs about the beauty of the place, the generosity of the people, the intoxicating flavor of the food, the harmonious bleating of goats, and the untapped potential hidden beneath the rubble. Three Cups of Tea, The Bookseller of Kabul, Kabul Beauty School, The Punishment of Virtue. A kind of politically correct imperialism. Explaining why, for the sake of the Afghan people, brute force from the Americans was required—just not so brutally, if possible, please. All determined that Afghanistan, too, could one day be another outpost of progress. All describing how they were seduced and fell in love with the nation’s simpleminded otherness. I wasn’t there—I’d much sooner fall in love with a landfill in East Lansing than a minaret in Kandahar. For me, Afghanistan wasn’t the stuff of romance, but a country of nightmarish fantasy.

  Maybe I just had a bad attitude. My experience with the country had been one, so far, of extreme violence. On my last trip, within a period of a month, I’d witnessed a suicide bombing and a rocket attack followed by a forty-five-minute gunfight along the Pakistani border. A few days later, two more suicide bombers entered the ministry of cu
lture office next to my hotel in Kabul. The bombers killed five people. The hotel I was staying at, called the Serena, was designed as a luxury property, five stars. It was a distinctly post-Taliban landmark in the city, opened in 2005. It was a hangout for Afghan elites and Westerners—with the added irony that regular Afghan citizens weren’t allowed inside the building for security reasons. It cost $356 a night and boasted three restaurants, none of which served alcohol. It was a frequent target of attack—most devastatingly in January 2008, when Taliban fighters linked to the Haqqani network ran into the hotel, detonated a suicide bomb, and killed seven. They shot one hotel worker in the health club; a Norwegian journalist was killed in the lobby. The vicious attack on the Serena was the reason that I’d actually chosen to stay there—I figured the hotel would have pretty tight security after having a few of their guests slaughtered. I was correct: The new layers of security were worth the $356 a night.

  That autumn in 2008 was a violent time in Afghanistan, with some of the worst violence the war had seen up to that point. I’d gone there to do a story on the Forgotten War. Afghanistan had not been getting regular media attention for years, overshadowed by Iraq. The soldiers I spoke to would go on leave and tell their friends they were fighting in Afghanistan, and would be told: I didn’t even know we were in Afghanistan anymore. Kabul at that time had the sense of a city under siege, with the Taliban operating a shadow government in districts surrounding it. After spending a month in the country, the contours of the impending disaster became fairly clear: With Obama’s election and Iraq winding down, the war was about to take center stage in the foreign policy world, the grumblings on the ground for more troops would get louder, and the Forgotten War would soon be remembered with tragic consequences.