Killing Machine (20 page)

Senator Carl Levin of Michigan had not been happy with the general’s response on the first day to a question about whether he supported the president’s determination to start withdrawing troops in the summer of 2011; Petraeus had indicated that he did support the president, but also that he was wary about timetables. On the second day Levin, who stood in for the administration in these hearings as a defense attorney confronting Republicans who sought to turn the hearings into an indictment of the White House’s timetable, pressed Petraeus for a stronger affirmation of his support. The general came prepared with a statement that he did “support and agree” with the decision to begin drawing down the surge as planned, with the pace determined by security conditions a year from now. Satisfied, Levin said he was glad to hear Gen. Petraeus express his support for the timetable. “I strongly believe it is essential for success in Afghanistan that everyone understand the urgency with which the Afghans need to take responsibility for their own security.”
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Admiral Mike Mullen added a note of caution. “We all have angst” about Afghanistan, he said, but “I think we will know by the end of the year, obviously, where we are with respect to reversing the momentum.” What happened next, however, sent a tremor through the entire war front, from Afghanistan all the way to the Pentagon and then to the White House. A
Rolling Stone
article, “The Runaway General” by Michael Hastings, set it off. Even before it appeared in print on June 25, 2010, the shock wave from leaks had reverberated around the world, and General McChrystal was on the verge of being relieved of his command. In an almost dreamlike sequence of rambling comments delivered around a Paris dinner and during interviews with Hastings, McChrystal and his closest aides had vented their anger about the White House’s idea of how to run a war.

McChrystal started by saying his meetings with the president left him feeling Obama did not really have any inclination to understand the problems Afghanistan presented. When McChrystal got the job, Obama gave him ten minutes. “It was a 10-minute photo-op,” one of the general’s advisers was quoted as saying. “Obama clearly didn’t know from anything about him, who he was. Here’s the guy who’s going to run his fucking war, but he didn’t seem very engaged. The boss was pretty disappointed.”
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The general and his aides then joined in on a verbal strafing of the president’s top advisers, from Vice President Biden on down through the list. McChrystal and his aides believed that no one on the civilian side was really up to his or her job. National Security Advisor Jim Jones, a retired four-star general, was called a “clown” stuck in a 1985 Cold War mind-set; Richard Holbrooke was intelligent enough but behaved like a wounded animal because he was afraid of being fired. And Biden? Months earlier, while the surge decision was supposedly still up in the air, McChrystal had responded to a question about Biden’s opposition by saying that was a surefire way to get “Chaos-istan”—a comment that had not pleased Obama. Now, in the interview, McChrystal speculated about what he would do if he got another Biden-like question. As Hastings reported:

“I never know what’s going to pop out until I’m up there [at the podium], that’s the problem,” [McChrystal] says. Then, unable to help themselves, he and his staff imagine the general dismissing the vice president with a good one-liner.

“Are you asking about Vice President Biden?” McChrystal says with a laugh. “Who’s that?”

“Biden?” suggests a top adviser. “Did you say: Bite Me?”

These throwaway lines were a culmination of sorts to a longstanding feud with the civilians in the administration. McChrystal had been unhappy ever since it had been leaked to the press that Ambassador Eikenberry had sent cables opposing sending more troops to Afghanistan. The general felt that since he had “won” the
debate, Eikenberry should have stepped aside; instead, his continued presence in Afghanistan indicated to McChrystal the president’s skepticism about the mission. The general blamed civilians, especially the State Department, for failing to provide the necessary resources for reconstruction purposes. “If we lose,” said an American at NATO headquarters in Kabul, “it’s going to be because of civilians.”
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Why had McChrystal allowed Hastings, a reporter for a left-leaning magazine, to record all of those statements? No completely clear explanation has emerged yet. On Hastings’s side, his purpose was clear: he wanted to get McChrystal. “I’d liked hanging out with McChrystal and his team, yet I hated the war. . . . [T]hey were an unchecked force, steamrolling the civilian leadership. . . . What they told me, I realized, revealed the attitudes behind one of the most brazen assaults on civilian control of the military that the Pentagon’s generals had ever attempted.”
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Like many others who voted for Obama in 2008, Hastings believed that what the Democratic candidate said about Afghanistan was really more of a slap at George W. Bush than any real conviction about Afghanistan. “Obama resisted doing so [tripling the number of soldiers], but the military leadership pushed hard and played dirty to get the war in Afghanistan they wanted.” Hastings apparently believed that he was offering the president a way out of a bad decision that had been forced on him. The problem with that interpretation of what had happened to Obama on the way to the Oval Office was that at the outset of his campaign in 2007 he had endorsed counterinsurgency in his opening speech on foreign policy at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. It might well be that he now rued having listened to Robert Gates and Hillary Clinton, but Obama’s problems were not the result of a supine surrender to a bullying military.

After the article appeared, Obama accepted McChrystal’s apologies, but also his resignation. Hastings recounts that Gates and Clinton urged Obama to scold the general and then send him back to duty to complete the mission. Instead—with Hastings’s help (at least in Michael Hastings’s opinion)—Obama stood up to the military.
Within minutes of announcing the firing of General McChrystal at a National Security Council meeting, Obama summoned Petraeus to the Oval Office. According to Hastings, the general had been in the White House basement mulling over who might replace McChrystal if the decision was to fire him.

As Petraeus walked up the stairs he passed CIA director Leon Panetta, as well as Secretaries Gates and Clinton, all of whom avoided eye contact “like physicians about to give a grim diagnosis.” Once Petraeus was seated in the Oval Office, Obama asked him to take over command in Afghanistan, and Petraeus agreed to do the job for thirteen months.
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Few noticed that the end of that thirteen-month period coincided neatly with the target date for withdrawal.

Journalist Tom Ricks wrote in the
Washington Post
that the new commander would have a hard time repeating the success of the Iraq surge because Petraeus could not count on the same degree of teamwork and cohesion as he had in Iraq. Obama had not taken the critical next step in firing Eikenberry and Holbrooke, Ricks argued, “so it is likely that the same nettlesome quarrels that exasperated McChrystal also will fatigue his successor.”
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Ricks then predicted, “The president of the United States may have signaled the beginning of the end of the war in Afghanistan. In a year or two, President Obama will be able to say that he gave the conflict his best shot, reshaping the strategy and even putting his top guy in charge, the general who led the surge in Iraq—but that things still didn’t work out.” The problem, according to this thesis, was that the civilians in Washington had failed to hold up their end of the counterinsurgency endeavor. The idea that Afghans might well resent what was happening in their country, and even blame Americans for the misery inflicted upon them by Taliban outrages, was not to be entertained by the once skeptical journalist who now filled the end seat in the pew of Petraeus rooters.

Republicans in Congress took up the charge against civilian incompetence as well, with Senator Christopher Bond of Missouri saying on Fox News that he agreed Eikenberry and Holbrooke should be ousted—and “a muzzle put on the vice president when it
comes to this war.” South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham said Obama should tell Biden to “shut up.” Here was a chance to put new people on the ground, but if they had to drag old baggage around, the results would be the same, “and if we don’t change quickly we’re going to lose a war we can’t afford to lose.”
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Before leaving for Afghanistan, Petraeus told Congress that the war must be won, as doing so was “vital” to United States security. Yet he also tried to allow no daylight to appear between himself and the president on the timing of the beginning of the end of the surge. It was an uncomfortable perch, to say the least. The U.S. commitment to Afghanistan would be “enduring,” he promised Congress. No territory must be available for al Qaeda to use in another attack on the American homeland. “July 2011 is the point at which we will begin a transition phase. . . . July 2011 is not a date when we will be rapidly withdrawing our forces and switching off the lights and closing the door behind us.”
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He promised the legislators that he would look very carefully at the issue of whether McChrystal’s implementation of a counterinsurgency strategy put American soldiers at greater risk of being wounded or killed. “I want to assure the mothers and fathers of those fighting in Afghanistan,” he told a Senate Committee holding hearings on his confirmation, “that I see it as a moral imperative to bring all assets to bear to protect our men and women in uniform.” He felt so strongly about this point that he had already consulted with President Karzai and other Afghan leaders, “and they are in full agreement with me on this.” And he went on to emphasize, “I mention this because I am keenly aware of concerns by some of our troopers on the ground about the application of our rules of engagement and the tactical directive.”
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In a sense, by joining the crowd that had criticized McChrystal’s efforts to implement counterinsurgency and put special ops under tight control, Petraeus was backing away from the approach he had fathered at Fort Leavenworth half a decade earlier and which was enshrined in Field Manual 3-24. What was at the heart of the debate was whether counterinsurgency was actually a workable strategy.

Arriving in Kabul, Petraeus used remastered Cold War rhetoric to describe a war reaching its “critical moment.” “We must pursue the insurgents relentlessly. . . . We must demonstrate to the Afghan people, and to the world, that al Qaeda and its network of extremist allies will not be allowed to once again establish sanctuaries in Afghanistan from which they can launch attacks on the Afghan people and on freedom-loving nations around the world.” He had not come to Afghanistan to negotiate a surrender. Speaking to American soldiers, he repeated what he had said to Congress about protecting them from unnecessary risks: “We must demonstrate to the people and to the Taliban that Afghan and ISAF forces are here to safeguard the Afghan people, and that we are in this to win. That is our clear objective.”

Although he had begun by saying what had happened was only a change of personnel and not strategy, it was impossible to ignore the repudiation of the Marja approach—that is, of counterinsurgency. Petraeus went on to suggest that there had been less than full cooperation from the civilian side, just as McChrystal had claimed. “To our diplomatic and international civilian partners here today: We are all—civilian and military, Afghan and international—part of one team with one mission. Indeed, we all recognize the grave threat that the Taliban, al Qaeda, and the associated ‘syndicate’ of extremists pose to this country, to this region, and to the world.” Here was a coded reference to Pakistan’s support of various Taliban offshoots—and the dawn of the drone age.

5

THE WAR OF THE DRONES

The problem with the drone is it’s like your lawn mower. You’ve got to mow the lawn all the time. The minute you stop mowing, the grass is going to grow back
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—Bruce Riedel, quoted in the
Washington Post
, October 24, 2012

Whatever part frustration with the ground war in Afghanistan played in the decision to go hard with UAVs, it also remains the case that real public attention to President Obama’s stepped-up drone campaign did not come into focus until the firing of Gen. Stanley McChrystal. But thereafter things moved quickly. Upon replacing McChrystal, David Petraeus immediately assured the troops that he had not been sent to lose the war: “We are in this to win. That is our clear objective.” He also reaffirmed the commitment to counterinsurgency: “My assumption of command represents a change in personnel, not a change in policy or strategy.”

When he arrived in Afghanistan, however, in the dismal after math of Marja, Petraeus was already under pressure from Congress to show progress and hold down American casualties. And with midterm elections just ahead, the president’s expectations for Petraeus centered on relieving pressure on the White House. As Spencer Ackerman would later write, “By the time President Obama tapped Petraeus to run the Afghan War in 2010, something had changed. Petraeus’ mouth was saying ‘counterinsurgency,’ with its focus on protecting civilians from violence, but in practice, he was far more reliant on air strikes and commando raids. He was even touting body counts as a measure of success, which was completely
antithetical to counterinsurgency doctrine, and his staff’s insistence that nothing had changed sounded hollow.”
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In July 2011, after only a year in Afghanistan, Petraeus was re called to head the Central Intelligence Agency (though the job he had been coveting was chair of the Joint Chiefs). After thirty-seven years in an army uniform, Petraeus appeared in a civilian suit for the swearing-in ceremony. His first order of business, he announced, was to have the civilian analysts pay more attention to the opinions of soldiers in the field about how the war was going. But even as he spoke about more input from the front lines, Petraeus must have known that was really past history. One former CIA official told the
Washington Post
the agency had already been transformed into “one hell of a killing machine.” Since 9/11, he said, it had had a new role launching drone strikes and engaging in other paramilitary operations. Then, noted the reporter, the official “blanch[ed] at his choice of words” and “quickly offered a revision: ‘Instead, say “one hell of an operational tool.”’ ”
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