Verbatim quotes from Americans soldiers on Afghans: They are high as fuck. Their eyes are always bloodshot. One ANA shot himself in the chest twice and leg once. He was high as shit. The ANP were high off their asses. The ANA were always high on hash. A police officer was shot. His tolerance for morphine was astronomically high due to heroin use. We were on patrol and they stopped the patrol so they could start smoking in front of us. They are totally infiltrated by insurgents. You just could not trust them. One of them at a base in Pech got caught working for the Taliban. [They] drew down on U.S. soldiers a few times. [An] ANA locked and loaded on a U.S. civilian contractor because he accidentally bumped into him even though he had apologized right away. A U.S. soldier then locked and loaded against the ANA to emphasize the point of the apology. We do everything for them. It’s like a kid you have to spoon-feed… but you have to put on an Afghan face. We even got training at JRTC [with role players] who acted like stupid and lazy ANA. That set us up for what we found there. This is a lazy ass culture; they won’t do anything unless they have to. They are constantly showing up for duty or missions late, even thirty minutes late. They make excuses… but nothing changes. Their leadership is hot garbage. Many of their soldiers are much better than their leaders. It’s like the commercial of the big bulldog and the small yipping dog bouncing around; you take away the big bulldog and the small dog hides its tail and slinks away. Whenever we made contact they would just hide. Others refuse to patrol if it is at all dangerous. If they are afraid, they won’t do anything. Theft among [them] is bad; they have local kids steal things for them. [They] are garbage, shit. These guys are not soldiers; they are a ragtag bunch of thugs and civilians dressed in uniforms. I would never like to admit that Iraqis are smarter, but they are Einsteins compared to Afghans. They talk on their cell phones, yell into them on missions. They learned to be helpless and that is partly why they are so fucking bad. They are always on their cell phones during patrols. They are worse than teenage girls. They don’t plan ahead for fuel and water. We just give them shit so they stop bothering us. They are completely dependent on the U.S. They are turds. We are better off without them. The “Afghan Face” strategy doesn’t work. They fucking stink. We all had to take cover while they were returning fire. They would spray and pray. They listened to local mullahs and were pretty radical. The ANA use culture and religion as a shield to hide their incompetence. We had a big clearing mission during Ramadan. They just lay down and fell asleep. The ABP killed a couple of our dogs. They were strays but we fed them. Slowly they started disappearing. They killed them. We received no training for trainers. We got one part day cultural training. It was crap. We do not socialize outside of operations. I’d just as soon shoot them as work with them. Interaction with ANA was minimal. The only time was to go see what they had stolen. The people don’t want us here and we don’t like them.
“U.S. soldiers perceived that 50 percent of the ANA were Islamic radicals,” the report states. Afghan soldiers “were more likely to think a suicide bomber in Afghanistan would see salvation than a U.S. soldier killed in action.”
NATO has already spent more than $30 billion training the Afghan security forces. Police officers regularly accept bribes; it’s the least trusted institution in a land of mistrusted institutions. The training courses are completed again and again by the same Afghan soldiers to get a $240 stipend without actually having to fight. And fighting-wise, though the Afghan army is allegedly getting better, they are still years away from being able to “take the lead,” says Caldwell.
Caldwell’s plan to fix the debacle? To teach the Afghan security forces how to read. Only then, Caldwell believes, can they fight. “You can’t expect a soldier to account for his weapon if he can’t even read the serial number on his rifle,” Caldwell says. In briefing after briefing, he goes on at length about the “literacy problem” in the security forces. He needs to “educate an entire generation of Afghans,” he says, for his plan to succeed.
Despite the $11.6 billion allocated to the training program in 2011 year, he doesn’t feel that it’s enough. He takes to the media to complain. He doesn’t have enough trainers (nine hundred short), he doesn’t have enough Afghan recruits (he needs to add seventy thousand more), and he doesn’t have enough money—he wants $2 billion extra, on top of the billions spent on the training over the previous decade. The $2 billion will put them over the top, he claims. Three times as many Afghan troops drop out as stay—to increase the forces by 56,000, Caldwell explains, he needs to recruit 141,000 Afghans.
To keep retention up, Caldwell will soon start to charter commercial planes for Afghan soldiers and police to go on vacation to their homes in the southern part of the country. Despite his own statements that information operations are for “foreign audiences,” he’ll assign a team of American information operation specialists to target the U.S. public. IO teams are typically trained in electronic warfare, psychological operations, military deception, among other skill sets, to “influence, disrupt, corrupt, or usurp adversarial human and automated decision making while protecting our own,” according to the Department of Defense. This IO team, which had received training in conducting psychological operations, is tasked with convincing visiting senators and other VIPs to give Caldwell more funds. It’s unclear if the information operations team’s efforts have any effect, but at the end of the year, leading senators will endorse his call for $2 billion more. Serious legal questions are raised by a whistleblower under Caldwell’s command about whether he directly violates the law banning the Department of Defense from propagandizing its own citizens, as well as other government rules. However, a subsequent Pentagon investigation into the program, prompted by a story I published in Rolling Stone, will find that Caldwell has done nothing wrong. The Afghan training mission continues.
38 IN THE ARENA
APRIL 30 TO MAY 8, 2010, KABUL
Duncan’s office was on the second floor in a building hidden in the back of the headquarters campus. The floor housed the ISAF media center, an open newsroom filled with computers and telephones, where military public affairs pumped out an endless stream of press releases and photographs.
Duncan decorated his office carefully with a pattern of ironic mementos. There was a photo of Hamid Karzai, snapped in a way that made it look like the Afghan president was giving the middle finger to the audience. There was a picture of McChrystal, Photoshopped into the famous Obama “Hope” campaign photo, red and white coloring over the general’s face. There was a political cartoon from October 2009, drawn during the lengthy troop review process—it showed McChrystal calling the White House and being put on hold. (“How long have you been on hold?” a soldier asks. “At the top of the hour, it will be about three months,” McChrystal says.) An Onion headline: U.S. CONTINUES QUAGMIRE BUILDING EFFORT IN AFGHANISTAN. A copy of a book called Selling War to America was stacked atop a pile of books on the floor.
The pièce de résistance of the office was a handwritten note on a yellow Post-it. It was a message from a Pentagon spokesperson named Bryan Whitman that had been left for Duncan and Lieutenant Colonel Tadd Sholtis, the public affairs officer Duncan shared his office with. The Pentagon spokesperson had telephoned from Washington, and when no one could take his call, he had an ISAF staffer transcribe his message verbatim:
“I’m calling the bullshit flag on this,” the message said. “What the fuck is going on over there? What the fuck is wrong with that public affairs office there? I know exactly what you are doing to me there. Get him to answer my fucking questions. Go get him on the phone.”
Duncan and Tadd saved the note for posterity. They didn’t really get along with the Pentagon press office, Duncan explained. Sholtis, an aspiring writer turned public affairs officer, had a weirdly subversive streak, too, keeping a personal blog called The Quatto Zone, named after the Martian rebel leader from the movie Total Recall. On the blog, he regularly slammed the media for seeing the war through “shit-colored glasses” and complai
ned about press coverage—he said it was a blog for him to “think and write.”
I was back at ISAF headquarters to do my final interviews with McChrystal’s top advisors. I had a sit-down interview with Sir Graeme Lamb, the British Special Forces commando; General Mike Flynn; Command Sergeant Major Michael Hall, the top-ranking enlisted man in the country; and a few other members of the team.
I met with Lamb in the Italian café and pizza shop within the complex. He looked the part of the wild commando: tanned, well-built, fraying gray hair on a balding head, hairy chest peeking out beneath his olive button-down shirt, top buttons undone. Among the staff, he had a reputation as a mystic, a violence-prone Buddha offering trippy wisdom that started to make sense only after much thought.
They nicknamed him Lambo, like Rambo. He described himself as a “science fiction sort of a guy.” He had an old leather jacket like Harrison Ford, rode a motorcycle, and was inspired by The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy—“just give me an improbability drive,” he tells me, “all will be well.” If McChrystal’s team were the Rolling Stones, he said, “Oh hell, I’d be Keith Richards. About three separate doctors told him what he needed to stop doing. He went to all their funerals.”
In McChrystal’s command, Lambo’s style represented an unprecedented departure from previous U.S. military history—a command made up of elite Special Forces soldiers who’d climbed the ranks through secret operations and daring raids. Generally, they’d been in charge of a few thousand of the most brilliant people in the service, and they were now running an army that numbered in the hundreds of thousands. It was the largest military force Special Forces operators had ever commanded. A drawback: McChrystal and Lamb were used to dealing with the best of the best, high IQs, not the dumbness of the hated Big Army.
“This is crap retirement,” he said. He could have been in Chile snowboarding, or riding his motorcycle to a chalet in Switzerland. But it was hard to leave the comradeship behind. “A lot of people say, Graeme, you don’t seem to have many friends. I say, that’s no surprise. If people don’t really like me, I don’t really give a shit. But the truth is, I have quite a number of acquaintances. Most people in life are like that. They mistake the word acquaintance for friend. A friendship that I would understand is companionship, a comrade. That is forged in difficult circumstances where his or her endeavors have given you a chance that otherwise wouldn’t have been there, because they believed in what you are doing and who you were. Those sorts of relationships are hard-forged. But those friendships are few and far between.”
He started off the interview quoting Kipling and Apollo 13: “Savage wars peace,” he called the war in Afghanistan, describing the situation as “like Apollo 13, heading out to the moon, with a bloody great hole in the side, bleeding oxygen.” He talked about McChrystal and his disdain for politicians. “The soldier’s lifetime experience is command and leadership. You tend not to be a comedian or a clown. You tend to be a pretty straight shooter. We are not politicians. I think it was General Sherman’s brother who wrote him: Will you take up politics? Sherman wrote back: Why would I? He who’s not a dollar in debt will never be a politician.” We live in politics, he said, we operate around politics—but, he said, if as Clausewitz wrote, war is an extension of politics—“he didn’t finish his sentence: To politics you must return.”
He said men like himself and McChrystal were never driven by money—like a bloke from Goldman Sachs—but by something “mightier than the self, a great endeavor undertaken by men who knew what it meant to be in the arena.”
The arena: It was a favorite concept for men like Lamb, capturing a dangerous and seductive worldview when applied to war. The idea came from Theodore Roosevelt’s famous speech, trashing critics and valuing the experience of risk over all else. “It is not the critic who counts… The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs, and who comes up short again and again…” I’d heard other generals use the quote in Iraq. What mattered wasn’t what the war was about, or what might or might not be accomplished; what mattered was that there was an inherent value in being a man, in going into action, in bleeding. There was little difference in victory or failure. The sacrifice of blood had an almost spiritual value beyond politics, beyond success, beyond good and evil; blood and sweat and pain made up its own ideology, existing within its own moral universe of a very narrowly defined concept of honor and bravery. It was as brave and honorable to take a bullet for the brotherhood as it was to cover up a bullet’s mistake. It didn’t matter that in Afghanistan, the U.S. military had come up short again and again. What mattered is that they tried. The simple and terrifying reality, forbidden from discussion in America, was that despite spending $600 billion a year on the military, despite having the best fighting force the world had ever known, they were getting their asses kicked by illiterate peasants who made bombs out of manure and wood. The arena acted as a barrier, protecting their sacrifices from the uncomfortable realities of the current war—that it might be a total waste of time and resources that historians would look back on cringing, in the same way we looked back on the Soviets and the British misadventures there.
“I’ll be here as long as it takes,” he told me. “Just don’t tell the wife that. This is high-stakes poker, this is a world-class game here. We’re playing for these chips: blood and treasure. The grim reaper is absolutely going to get us all. So why slow down?”
I saw what the guys meant about Lamb—his freewheeling thought process didn’t lend itself to sound bites. Lamb kept hitting an idea that McChrystal had first mentioned at the bar in Paris, and then I’d seen it in action at JFM. The loyalty to McChrystal—the desire to make him happy and to please him—often ended with the general getting an inaccurate picture of what was actually taking place. Men like Lamb and McChrystal told themselves they operated within a strict code of honor. A brotherhood and friendship, unique to the warrior brand, trumped all other values. And this is where I saw the flaw. How could they, at the same time, be involved in cover-ups—with Tillman, with torture, with endless allegations of reckless civilian killings? How did those actions fit into the images they had of themselves as honorable men? The answer, I believed, was that they considered the loyalty that they felt for one another as the highest measure of integrity. Any crime or transgression, any acts of immorality they committed or ordered were excused, in their own minds, by the high principles that guided them. Any act of violence, any atrocity, any action they were called upon or felt compelled to do in order to complete the mission and protect their own pack—whether it was leaking to the press or forcing a president down a path he didn’t want to take—they saw as acceptable.
The military culture was by nature authoritarian, and it was there they were most comfortable. Even if, as Special Forces operators, they pushed against its rigidness, they still felt more at home among their brothers on the inside than on the outside. In fact, with the Special Forces, the element of separateness, the insulated feeling of superiority was even greater. They could do things that other men couldn’t do, and had done them. Good or bad—if it was the mission, then it was permissible. If it was for us against them, it was inherhentyly right. If it took place in the arena, it was sublime. What wasn’t permissible was breaking trust, or what they viewed as trust—straying outside the pack. The decade of war had hardened these feelings, creating an almost insurmountable boundary between them and the rest of society. The media just didn’t play up this romantic image of warriors; the men held dearly to the romantic image themselves. They were willing to protect one another, to die for one another. That was the value that they cherished. And if you weren’t part of the team, your motives were immediately suspect—impure, like the motives of politicians or diplomats. The base reasons that drove others—money and power—were not what drove them, or so they told themselves. They yearned for a pure relationship—it was a kind of love that could only be found
in a world they saw reflected in themselves.
The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan Page 26