Killing Machine (17 page)

McChrystal had given a pep talk two weeks before to more than a hundred American and Afghan officers. “Now we are real partners and fighting this war together,” he said. For years there had been a struggle to get people to pay attention to Afghanistan. “Now everyone is paying attention. The people of Marja will watch this operation carefully. People from every corner of Afghanistan . . . will watch this operation carefully. There will be people in [the Taliban’s high command in] Quetta who watch what happens carefully. And in every capital of the world, they will watch what happens carefully. What they will see is a complete change from what they have seen in the past.”
¹²

These brave words once again put the Afghan War at the center of world events, with momentous outcomes at issue. It seemed that the American military spent a great deal of effort simply to convince itself that the war was crucial—no matter what the rest of the world, including NATO allies, thought about the American obsession with “credibility.” Things had indeed changed, however—but not quite the way McChrystal imagined would happen. Instead of the usual “softening up” by bombing, McChrystal had given plenty of warning that he was coming. Brigadier General Ben Hodges explained in an interview with National Public Radio’s Judy Woodruff that there were indicators the senior Taliban leadership had left town. “The insurgency, really, you need to think about that as 80 percent little-
t
Taliban, 20 percent capital-
T
Taliban. In other words, a fifth or less are probably full-fledged, ideologically motivated Taliban insurgents.” Well, that was what Field Manual 3-24 said about
insurgencies, and that was what Hodges and his superiors wanted to believe—sort of a reverse transubstantion, wine to water. But not everyone in the Pentagon agreed. A writer for
Time
magazine interviewed one planner—anonymous as usual—who thought that the Marja Taliban were local and less easy to sort out from the population. “It’s harder to separate the enemy from the people,” he said, “when they are the people.”
¹³

Such warnings were rare, however. “The Afghan forces all have Marine haircuts right now,” McChrystal quipped as the troops began the assaults.
¹⁴
At the outset there were plenty of flag raisings over “captured” territory. But officers warned their soldiers that, unlike what often happened in Iraq, there were to be no American flags raised, only Afghan flags, and no end zone touchdown dances. As early as February 26, Admiral Mike Mullen, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, declared that the offensive had transformed the Marja area from the “clear” phase to the “hold” phase. “The raising of the [Afghan] flag is a significant symbol that’s changed.” And he praised McChrystal’s “playbook” strategy of announcing the impending attacks in order to warn civilians and to allow low-level Taliban to flee. “We clearly informed the population before the operation,” he said. “One of the signature events, as far as I’m concerned, was a meeting of 450 Afghan elders from the area, and they all signed up to this.”
¹⁵

By “this,” he apparently meant American strategy. Deputy defense secretary William Lynn III said Marja had emerged as an area where hope was returning. “Because of our new strategy, and President Obama’s deployment of additional troops,” Lynn told an American Legion assembly in Washington, “Marja is one of many cities in Afghanistan that has begun to have hope.” Now the focus will change, said Mullen: “Kandahar will be next.”
¹⁶

But after the early days, the fighting got tougher, with many casualties from improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. “We’re not through Marja,” Mullen said, tempering his optimism. “It’s been a very tough operation, [and] will continue to be.”
¹⁷
While the Taliban had melted away in large numbers, as hoped, there were snipers. The biggest and most enduring problem was that the locals did
not really trust the Americans to protect them, especially not so long as they feared going out for their normal everyday activities for fear of being shot. The offensive “had frightened and disoriented them.” The Taliban were cruel (or at least strict), but they were predictable. Americans swooped down into the mud-walled compounds in pursuit of the elusive enemy that had disappeared into the shadows. “We are innocent people,” complained one elder in a meeting with Marine officers. “We have a lot of expensive things in our homes. Please do not break our things or take them.”
¹⁸

Worse was to come. Twelve people—five children, five women, and two men—were killed in a rocket attack on a house. Marine battalion commander Lieutenant Colonel Brian Christmas stood with a local elder, a relative of the victims. “I bring my deepest condolences and will provide all of my support,” he said, referring to the problem of getting the bodies buried quickly according to Afghan custom when so many routes had been sealed off by the fighting and destruction of bridges. American helicopters were used to transport the bodies, while ISAF and Afghan authorities investigated the “incident.” There were hints that a poorly trained Afghan unit had fired the rockets. At a news conference, however, the Afghan interior minister claimed that only nine of the twelve killed were civilians; the other three were Taliban insurgents who had forced their way into the house. The minister quoted a local tribal leader, who, he said, was saddened but not angry: “If nine civilians have died, hundreds of thousands will get freedom.” Skeptical reporters who wrote the story of the rocket attack and the aftermath commented that the Marines found no weapons in the house and that the Marja area had a population of only eighty thousand.
¹⁹

American military brass from Washington visited Marja and declared that its markets were open and people could feel safe on the streets. As for the government in a box, Hodges said that the goal had been to bring in a district governor and district chief of police who could deliver basic services, “like water, roads, some health care,” and other things to help an agricultural economy be able to get its goods to market. The reporter with whom Hodges spoke sounded skeptical: wasn’t Karzai bringing in as officials men who
had lived outside Afghanistan for years, such as one who had been in Germany for fifteen years? “The selection of who is coming in to take government positions, of course,” replied the general, “is the decision of the Afghan government.”
²⁰

Whatever Hodges thought about Karzai’s decisions, or whatever the elders had previously told Mullen, the locals were not happy about what they found wrapped inside the box. McChrystal and Eikenberry had persuaded Karzai to come to Marja for a “victory lap.” Several hundred residents crowded into a mosque to hear the president talk about how he was restoring security to the country. But the speech did not go down well, and neither did his choices to run the local government. “We will tell you,” thundered one elder, “that the warlords who ruled us for the past eight years, those people whose hands are red with the people’s blood . . . they are still ruling over this nation.” Another screamed at Karzai that the new police chief’s minions preyed on young boys. “You sent these people here!”
²¹

Not only did the mosque audience call out Karzai, but there were shouts about the Americans as well. Farmers were being arrested by the Americans. Schools and homes had been taken over by American troops. They destroyed irrigation canals. “You have said on the radio that you wanted our children to be educated,” said a local leader, apparently not one of the 450 Mullen talked to who supposedly approved the campaign. “But how could we educate our children when their schools are turned into military bases? The Taliban never built their military bases in the schools.”

Karzai attempted to cut off the “dialogue” with a warning. Afghanistan cannot shun the Americans, he said, or the country would fall under the influence of neighboring states. “We need their help to rebuild ourselves,” Karzai explained. “As soon as we rebuild ourselves they will leave.” A man shouted from the crowd, “Are they promising to leave?”
²²

As tempers simmered in Marja—and Washington—McChrystal faced another setback. Military officials in Kabul let it be known that American and NATO troops firing from passing convoys and military checkpoints over the past year had killed thirty Afghans
and wounded another eighty—but in no instance had the victims proven to be a danger to the safety of the ISAF. The number was actually larger because private security contractors hired by the military did not keep tabs on how many Afghans they shot over the same period of time. “We have shot an amazing number of people,” confirmed the American commander, “but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat.” The persistence of these shootings had turned villages firmly against what Richard Oppel of the
New York Times
now called “the occupation”—not a term used about friendly territory in any previous American war. ISAF public relations officers could not have been very happy reading such articles. Embedding reporters had been thought to be the solution to the negative stories filed by reporters during the Vietnam War, but apparently that strategy did not always work.

Quickly, then, the symbol of flag raising promising independence turned into the reality of an alien force controlling events. Alas, McChrystal was caught in the middle, seemingly in a lose-lose situation. He had tried bringing the special operations forces in Afghanistan under his direct control in an effort to minimize such errors. Special ops units staged night raids, knocked down doors, and searched private quarters hunting for Taliban. One unit could be doing counterinsurgency properly, McChrystal admitted during a videoconference, while another carried out “a raid that might in fact upset progress.”
²³

That was one way of describing the situation facing the general, a former special ops guy now trying to carry out the population-friendly mandates of the counterinsurgency manual. He had headed the team that discovered Saddam Hussein hiding away in his “spider hole” in December 2003. He was also credited with getting the number two al Qaeda man in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Along with these feats, however, he had come under fire for abetting the false story of Pat Tillman’s death and had been implicated in stories of torture in Iraq (see
chapter 2
).

While McChrystal had dodged those earlier bullets, now in Washington the general’s critics complained that the new rules McChrystal had instituted put American soldiers at greater risk of
being wounded or killed. With Marja beginning to backfire, the president decided he must call on Karzai in person to set things going again. In a lightning visit to Kabul on March 28, Obama met with the Afghan president during the evening hours before going on to Bagram Air Base to address American soldiers and then flying out at dawn. Karzai had been given less than a week’s notice that he was expected to host the American president and his entourage. Obama had sent word ahead, moreover, that he expected to meet not only with President Karzai but also with the major players in the Afghan president’s cabinet. The “request” conveyed in private what Obama’s national security advisor James L. Jones told the press immediately after the meeting broke up. The American president, Jones said, wanted Karzai to understand “that in his second term, there are certain things that have not been paid attention to, almost since Day One.”
²⁴

Standing alongside Karzai, Obama had not praised the Afghan leader or talked much about “progress.” Yes, there had been military gains, but “we also want to make progress on the civilian process.” What Obama had said in private about the continuing corruption rampant in Kabul, the failure to appoint effective members to the Afghan cabinet, the constant issue of opium revenue funding for the Taliban, and failures to achieve results in improving local governments, we do not know. Transparency International had ranked Afghanistan 176th out of 180 countries in corruption among public officials. Only Haiti, Iraq, Myanmar, and Somalia ranked lower. In his briefing, Jones stressed that Karzai needed “to be seized with how important that is . . . We have to have the strategic rapport with President Karzai and his cabinet to understand how we are going to succeed this year in reversing the momentum the Taliban and opposition forces have been able to establish since 2006.”

One member of the parliament, Noor ul-Haq Ulumi, who headed the defense committee, agreed that it was a critical moment. He hoped, however, that Obama would focus less on big military operations. “Our problem needs a political solution,” he said. “Karzai became president through fraud, and it’s still a corrupted government inside Afghanistan.”
²⁵

As Obama stood beside Karzai that day, the Afghan leader may well have been smiling at the suberterfuge going on behind the rhetoric. For over a decade he had been receiving private funds from the CIA totaling tens of millons of dollars to pay off warlords; when finally questioned about the money, he said he also used it to help out other people in dire need. Asked about these payments later, Karzai treated them as purely matter-of-fact transactions, not worthy of serious concern. As Matthew Rosenberg reported in the
New York Times
,

Asked why money that was used for what would appear to be justifiable governing and charitable expenses was handed over secretly by the C.I.A. and not routed publicly through the State Department, Mr. Karzai replied: “This is cash. It is the choice of the U.S. government.”

He added, “If tomorrow the State Department decides to give us such cash, I’d welcome that, too.”
²⁶

Which U.S. government was in command: the White House or the CIA? When it came to Karzai, it appeared the intelligence agency had its own policy—either that or Obama felt he had to play the role of plausible deniability for the audience at home.