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

by Hastings, Michael

  Petraeus thinks it matters. An enterprising colonel has developed what Petraeus thinks is a clever response. It’s called “Throw the Book at Them,” a presentation which compares the Taliban’s alleged principles to their alleged deeds.

  This, Petraeus exclaims, is what we need more of. This guy gets it! (“If you say the wrong thing, you’re skunked,” says a senior military official. “He hit it off, thought it was a great idea, asked the officer to send him his résumé.”)

  Petraeus goes on a tour of the country. In July, he stops by the IJC to say hello to Rod, Lieutenant General David Rodriguez. Rod is a McChrystal holdover, a boots-and-mud kind of general, who in private has the habit of stringing multiple fucks and fuckers together. Petraeus works the room. He asks the Dutch soldiers to stand. He mentions his Dutch ancestry. Then he says, poorly but a nice try, thank you in Dutch: dank u wel.

  Petraeus, according to those who work with him, has received something of a shock in Afghanistan. It’s not Iraq. He knows it’s not Iraq, he has said it’s not Iraq, but regardless, his experience is forged in Baghdad; his entire framework is hard to shake. “He brings up Iraq every five minutes,” says an Afghan official. Earlier in the year, he was on a plane with Holbrooke coming back from a ROC drill to discuss plans for Kandahar. In one conversation, according to a senior U.S. administration official, “He must have said Iraq twenty-one times in fifteen minutes.” Iraq is on the brain. It’s in Iraq where Petraeus made his name—mostly good, a little bit of bad, depending on who you ask.

  Petraeus was born in Cornwall, New York, a town on the Hudson near West Point. His father is a Dutch merchant marine. His first nickname is Peaches—easier to pronounce than Petraeus. He goes to West Point, class of ’74. He gets set up on a blind date with the superintendent’s daughter—he bluffs his way into a football game. It’s love, but the haters will hate on him for that, too, noting that it’s quite convenient for him to have married into a general’s family. He excels at West Point and excels at everything that follows—ranking in the top of his class at Ranger School, an incredibly difficult feat.

  He doesn’t get his war, though. Petraeus misses Vietnam. He deals only in Vietnam’s ghosts. He writes his dissertation in Princeton about it: “The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam.”

  He misses almost everything big. In the Gulf War, he is a major, a staff aide to a top general—he “looked more concerned with keeping the two VIP generals on schedule for their next celebrity visit in the desert” than an upcoming attack that seemed “a distant possibility,” according to one account from an officer who was his contemporary. A superior of his, Admiral William Fallon, reportedly puts it less delicately: He’s an “ass-kissing little chicken shit.” He comes close to losing his life in a training accident in 1991—shot through the chest, ignores the doctor’s orders and does push-ups just days after. He breaks his pelvis jumping out of a plane in 2000.

  The invasion of Iraq launches his public career. He seizes the moment. He gets to lead the 101st Airborne and he’s accompanied by historian Rick Atkinson. He serves up a quote that will define his legacy there: “Tell me how this ends.”

  Brilliant—like he can already see the upcoming debacle. He’ll set himself up to answer that question five years later. Tell Me How This Ends becomes the title of one of the first biographies written about him—he’ll later bring the journalist/biographer to work for him as a senior advisor down at CENTCOM.

  He arrives in Baghdad in 2003 and runs into an old friend from West Point. “Can you believe it took us thirty years to get our Combat Infantry Badges?” Petraeus tells him. It took him a long time to get his war. He gets awarded a Bronze Star for valor—though his critics will raise questions about whether he should have gotten a Bronze Star for meritorious service instead of valor, claiming he didn’t appear to have done anything valorous while under fire. This sounds like nitpicking, but it also might fit a pattern. “Petraeus was handing out Bronze Stars to all his boys,” a military official tells me.

  He earns the nickname King David while up in Mosul, ruling over the ancient Iraqi city. Within months of his leaving Mosul, the city collapses—not his fault, he explains, things were great when he was there. His next gig is heading the organization that trains and equips the Iraqi security forces, both army and police, called MNSTCI.

  He gets a different nickname this time. He’s taking over from General Paul Eaton. Petraeus arrives in Baghdad on a day that Eaton happens to be up at the Kirkush Military Training Base. Eaton has a nice office in Saddam’s Republican Palace—the palace, like most of Saddam’s architecture, resembles a McMansion dipped in gold. It’s Petraeus’s office now. Without Eaton’s permission, according to military officials who were at the embassy, Petraeus sends his men in to move all of Eaton’s stuff into a broom closet–sized office down the hall. U.S. military officials working at the palace are stunned when they see Eaton sitting in there—why is Eaton in a tiny office? Eaton, says one military official, “was incensed.” (When I ask Eaton about the incident, he declines to comment, though he insists he had a “very positive” transfer of power with Petraeus.)

  It’s Petraeus marking his territory. Petraeus looks out the window of the palace and sees a trailer, where some poor schmuck soldier is living. He says he wants that one—the Joe gets his ass booted out within hours. “Petraeus,” Lieutenant General John Vines will confide to colleagues, “leaves the dead dog on your doorstep. Every time.” Another U.S. military official explains, “He has the ability to make anyone who comes before him look like a total fuckup.” The U.S. military officials say it’s this kind of behavior that earned him the nickname General Betray-Us years before the Moveon.org ad campaign.

  Petraeus is getting attention in his new role, which brings out envy, those close to him will say. In August of 2004, he posed for the cover of Newsweek—CAN THIS MAN SAVE IRAQ? This does not go over well with his colleagues in the military. He is showboating, he is drawing attention to himself. It will be years before he does another photo shoot like he did for that Newsweek story.

  In the summer of 2004, at the height of the presidential election between John Kerry and George W. Bush, Petraeus writes an op-ed for The Washington Post, saying that the Americans were making progress in Iraq. It certainly didn’t hurt his relationship with President Bush, despite the fact that there is absolutely no progress being made. Under his watch, one hundred thousand weapons supplied to the Iraqi army and police go missing. More disturbingly, the army and police units he trains go on to become the death squads in Iraq’s brutal civil war—it’s men “dressed like army and police” who rampage through Baghdad, killing tens of thousands, kidnapping men in the middle of the night, and, as we will learn later, running a system of secret prisons and torture dungeons. Yes, it’s the Iraqi security forces trained and equipped by Petraeus who do these horrible things, who set the stage for the sectarian war in Baghdad. “After he leaves a legacy of shit behind because of the long-term effects of the choices he’s made, he’s never held to account,” explains a U.S. military official in Baghdad. “No one calls him out.”

  After a stint running Leavenworth, where he oversees the rewriting of the counterinsurgency manual, he’s given the chance to put his theories to work. He returns to Iraq in February 2007. He gets his surge of more than twenty thousand troops.

  In September 2007, he cements his legacy: He testifies on Capitol Hill. The morning of his testimony, he gets attacked in a way he has never been attacked. A full-page advertisement in The New York Times calling him General Betray-Us, paid for by MoveOn.org. This one stings—this one, according to those close to him, shocks him. Before having said a word, to have his integrity, honor, and patriotism questioned? He’s shocked that The New York Times even printed it. It says that he’s been constantly “at war with the facts” and “cooking the books” for the White House.

  The ad backfires, though—MoveOn.org overplays its hand. You don’t question generals like that, at least not
yet. The congressional testimony makes “him the face of the war in Iraq,” a military official close to him tells me, adding, “he didn’t enjoy that.” President Bush from there on out will repeatedly defer to General Petraeus, hanging what’s going on in Iraq around his neck.

  The mainstream press worships him, treats what he did in Iraq as an almost Mother Teresa–like accomplishment. PETRAEUS’S MIRACLE touts a headline in The Washington Post ; Petraeus is a “near miracle worker,” Newsweek will say. Petraeus convinces the Beltway that we won in Iraq. He’s a star, a historical figure. Autographed copies of Petraeus memorabilia command up to $825 on eBay. Those who know him say privately that he would never have run for president in 2012, but that hasn’t stopped speculation that he’ll be in the mix in 2016. He has joked about running for president at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-wing think tank, and PETRAEUS FOR PRESIDENT T-shirts are already available online.

  In 2009, he flips the coin before the opening kickoff at the Super Bowl. Two years later, he has the chance to watch the Super Bowl from Kabul, where he’ll help arrange the delivery of seven thousand pizzas from the United States for troops stationed there. Heads or tails? Win or lose? Can Petraeus repeat his “miracle” in Afghanistan?

  47 “TOURISM, NOT TERRORISM”

  DECEMBER 2010, KANDAHAR

  I was supposed to be convinced that we were making progress in Kandahar. The mayor of the city, Ghulam Hayder Hamidi, was supposed to do the convincing. I had an interview with him in the afternoon.

  Back in the white Toyota Corolla, we made our way across town to the mayor’s office.

  “In November and October, I didn’t leave my house,” Ahmad said. “Now it is okay.”

  Okay is a relative word. In the past five days, there had been two assassinations and one major bombing. An improvement, Ahmad said.

  Ahmad holed up for two months, fearing he’d be another victim in the widespread campaign of assassination that had paralyzed the city. Anyone who worked for the government or for a nongovernmental organization was a target. Afghan journalists, too. While the U.S. offensive in Kandahar reached its peak, there was at least one high-level assassination a day, an astonishing and unprecedented leap in violence. A source gave me a list of the names of 515 tribal elders and religious figures who’d been assassinated over the past nine years, gutting the ranks of the Afghans who Americans hoped to rely on.

  No one knew how long the relative lull in violence would last. Everybody had a theory. Afghan officials said the Taliban had fled to Pakistan. American officials said they’d killed so many Taliban, the insurgency in Kandahar was permanently damaged. The Taliban admitted that the NATO offensive had taken its toll, but promised to be back in force once the winter was over. Sources in the Taliban told me that many insurgents had just left the countryside to hide in the city until the NATO operation was over.

  The mayor’s office was in a poorly lit, dark and dank building, one of those office complexes in conflict zones that seem to be permanently under construction, with cheap building materials scattered haphazardly about beneath random coils of wires. Security there was shockingly lax, considering that insurgents had already tried to kill the mayor once this past year; they failed, killing two of his deputy mayors instead. Our car sailed through the checkpoints without even a cursory search, and any one of the people I brought with me could have easily carried in a weapon or suicide vest.

  “This has been the worst year,” the mayor told me as we sat down to talk. The mayor was a short man with glasses and trimmed gray hair, the look of a beleaguered college professor who keeps hoping against hope that he’ll get tenure one day. His deputy mayor was gunned down in the spring while praying in a mosque and his successor was gunned down in October on his way home from work. Nearly a third of his staff of seventy-six quit. (He also had to fire ten other staff members after a series of corruption investigations.) He had no luck filling the vacant slots—partly, he said, because he can only pay his employees thirty-five hundred afghani a month, or eighty dollars, half of what Mohammed Nabi’s militiamen get.

  The government in Kabul, he said, had promised to give his staff raises, but it’s been months and he hasn’t seen the extra funds. Kabul has also been slow to help get his police force in order, he said, not providing adequate funds for them, either. It was this kind of talk that prompted a U.S. official to tell me, “There’s talk of transition next year. But in Kandahar, there’s not going to be anything to transition to in a year.”

  I asked the mayor what he thought of the corruption accusations against Ahmed Wali Karzai, his friend. He responded indignantly, saying that AWK was being unfairly singled out, and that the real corruption was elsewhere—with other Afghan officials and Western reconstruction agencies. “Gul Agha Sherzai, why are you not writing that he is corrupt?” he asked me, naming the former Kandahar governor who now runs Nangarhar province.

  He rattled off a few other names of corrupt government officials. “There are killers, enemies of society, sitting in our peace jirga,” he said, referring to the conference to discuss peace that was recently held in Kandahar.

  He had few kind words for the $250 million in reconstruction funding being poured into the city. He accused a Canadian firm of blowing $1.9 million on a solar panel system that didn’t work, and a large development firm, IRD, of wasting millions on a program to harvest grapes.

  “Why has the Taliban become angry? Why are they fighting? Because of weak and corrupt government, because of the deals made with warlords and power brokers,” he said. But warlords and corruption are in the eye of the beholder—the mayor sees Abdul Razzik, a notorious human rights abuser and drug smuggler, as a “hero” and AWK as a victim of “propaganda.” (Another of AWK’s top associates, a powerful tribal elder and provincial council member named Hajji Agha Lalai, explains AWK’s bad reputation like so: “People involved in drugs and drug dealing come to [Ahmed Wali’s] house to visit and stay over at his house,” he told me, “which has given the wrong impression.”)

  The mayor was of two minds regarding the prospects of success in Afghanistan. The enemy, he said, “hasn’t lost their power.” On the other hand, his public spiritedness prompted him to say that this summer will be more peaceful than the last. He told me he wanted to promote a new slogan for Kandahar: “Tourism, not terrorism.”

  Back at the motel, I met with one of the mayor’s media advisors, a twenty-six-year-old named Berkazai. Besides advising the mayor on media, he published a newspaper and did reporting for a radio station. I asked him if things were getting better. “Better? I didn’t say better. I said there have been only two targeted killings this week. This calm will not last forever. We have had military operations again and again, and this is not a solution to the problem.”

  48 PETRAEUS DOES BODY

  COUNTS

  OCTOBER 2010 TO AUGUST 2011, KABUL AND WASHINGTON, DC

  In late October, Petraeus meets with President Karzai in a room at his palace. A dozen U.S. officials, including Ambassador Eikenberry, are there with him, sitting around a glass-topped, U-shaped table, according to one reported account of the meeting. Karzai has been pushing to ban security companies—the Americans don’t want the ban to take place. Petraeus lectures Karzai for an hour. Karzai gets frustrated. Take your troops and go home, he says. Karzai tells Petraeus he has “three main enemies”: the United States, the Taliban, and the international community. An Afghan official familiar with the meeting tells me, “He didn’t care if Petraeus took his projects or his troops home.”

  Karzai will lash out publicly two weeks later: “The time has come to reduce the presence of, you know, boots in Afghanistan,” he says. He says he might be a partner of America, but he’s no “stooge.”

  Karzai doesn’t want Petraeus’s counterinsurgency plan. Petraeus isn’t having much luck figuring him out. Petraeus tried to stand up to him, according to White House officials, and is standing up to him. He pushes through the controversial initiative to ar
m local militias, a plan that Karzai had been trying to block. It’s his first run-in with the man in the funny hat. “Petraeus is big enough,” says a senior U.S. official.“ When Karzai pushes, he pushes back.”

  In November, Petraeus flies to Lisbon, Portugal, for a conference with the NATO allies. Karzai refuses to go on the plane with him, but he does allow the speech he’s going to give to get cleared by the Americans. Obama is going to be there as well, and Petraeus isn’t supposed to steal the spotlight—he doesn’t do any press conferences over the three days, a rarity for the general when he’s surrounded by reporters at an international event.

  In February, there’s a civilian casualty incident in the eastern province of Konar. Karzai is claiming fifty civilians are dead. Karzai wants an apology. NATO pushes back: They say the Afghan governor is lying, or the Taliban is lying. Karzai insists on an apology. Petraeus is back in the palace for another meeting. Petraeus does not apologize. He accuses the Afghans of burning their own children to make it look like civilian casualties. Karzai and his staff are horrified. “I was dizzy. My head was spinning,” one Afghan at the meeting told the Post. “This was shocking. Would any father do this to his children? This is really absurd.” Says another Afghan official, “Killing sixty people, and then blaming the killing on those same people, rather than apologizing for any deaths? This is inhuman.” Another source familiar with the meeting will tell me, “I’d never heard Karzai’s people get so upset. They were truly offended.”

  As for President Obama, Petraeus’s relationship is starting to get better, according to White House officials. He’s reportedly more deferential to Petraeus’s opinion.

  That’s personality stuff—on the policy stuff, it’s a constant battle. The next strategic review is due in December. Petraeus will clash again in “daily battles with the White House,” according to a U.S. official. Staffers at the National Security Council in Washington and at ISAF headquarters in Kabul are pulling fourteen-hour days to put together a document they could agree on. Problem is, they can’t agree.