The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan (10 page)

“How’s things, old chap?”

“Pretty good; this is really cool. By the way, Jake just threatened to kill me.”

Duncan’s face dropped. “What?”

“No, no worries, dude, I took it as a joke, and it’s not the first time.”

“He should not have said that,” Duncan said. “That’s not how to deal with the press.”

“You warned me; you said he was a dick.”

I could tell Duncan was pissed off by the development.

Back inside the bar, the toasts were still going on. McChrystal was standing outside the circle.

“It’s a great group of guys you’ve got. I mean, the team is very impressive,” I said.

“You see, they don’t care about Afghanistan,” he said.

I waited. They don’t care about Afghanistan? I didn’t think that was what he wanted to say, exactly, though it was true. It could be Iraq or Fiji or Canada. The country didn’t matter. The mission mattered.

“No, let me take that back. They care about Afghanistan. It’s each other. That’s what it’s about. All these men,” he told me, “I’d die for them. And they’d die for me.”

Jake staggered up to us.

“This is a dangerous man,” he said, pointing to me. “Watch what you say to him.”

McChrystal took his advice. Our conversation ended.

At two
A.M.
, we exited the bar. Casey took care of the bill—about three hundred euros’ worth of whiskey and beer, he said. Mike Flynn came out the door, still singing what sounded like “Suspicious Minds.” McChrystal tripped over the curb, nearly face-planting in the street. The manager of the bar ran out behind us, telling us to be quiet and not to wake the neighbors. The boozy foot patrol continued down the street, back into the Westminster lobby.

Jake wobbled up the stairs in the lobby, a glass of beer he’d taken from the bar still in his hand. Charlie collapsed in a chair in the lobby, checking his BlackBerry.

“That’s dangerous to do while drunk, sir,” I said to him.

“C. is coming back down,” he said.

“Are you guys still going out?” I asked. He nodded yes.

Casey grabbed my arm and pulled me aside.

“Mike,” he said. “You have to understand. I’d do anything for General McChrystal. We’d do anything for him. You’re privileged to be here.”

I agreed.

“Remember the end of
Saving Private Ryan
?” Casey asked. “Remember what Tom Hanks said to Matt Damon?”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said.

“What Tom Hanks said to Private Ryan. He saved his life. He said ‘Earn it.’ ” Casey paused. “With your story. Earn it.”

I started to walk back to my hotel. Before falling asleep, I typed up what happened that night, down to the last detail.

The team woke at seven
A.M.
the next day. McChrystal allegedly got his seven miles of running in. The staff went up the Eiffel Tower. The generals were worried that other tourists in the elevator car could smell the beer on them.

   JUNE 2009, WASHINGTON, DC, AND KABUL

On June 12, Charlie Flynn takes a bus from the Pentagon to Andrews Air Force Base. There are twelve people on the bus. They’re taking off for Kabul.

Thank God, Charlie thinks—the hiring is done, the confirmation is complete, and no more desk job at the Pentagon. What a relief to get back to the war, he thinks.

After a twenty-hour flight, Casey is at the headquarters to meet the two Flynns and McChrystal. (Casey and Pitta went out a few days before.) He hands them the keys to their hooches. He takes them on the grand ISAF tour.

They walk into the Joint Operations Center in the headquarters. It’s the room where McKiernan had commanded from only ten days before. It’s dead silent. It is the tactical and operations focal point for the entire country, and there is nothing going on there, says Casey. The Flynns flank McChrystal, who doesn’t say much, just observing. The Flynns are horrified by the lack of activity—in total disbelief—and
they start machine-gunning questions. They are wired to shake things up, says Casey. They start looking for walls to knock down—literally.

There’s some Italian guy with an office—the chief of staff of ISAF. He gets kicked out. Dave knocks down the wall and makes it a COMISAF planning room. The Dutch have a DSOC room—Division Support Operations Center—and they’re out, too. Command Sergeant Major Michael Hall, McChrystal’s choice for top enlisted man in the country, will get an office on the second floor.

There’s friction. You’re talking territory on the base, and the whole thing becomes emotional. If you’re taking space away from a foreign country, well, they take it as a national slight, says Casey.

The welcome party for McChrystal is at the Milano, which used to be called Club 24. It’s an on-base club and restaurant next to the Destille Garden, also known as the beer garden. To get to the party, McChrystal passes through the beer garden. There’s a bunch of dudes in uniform sitting around, sipping coffee, a whole civilized affair.

Casey is watching The Boss for his reaction—it’s just a glance, but he knows that McChrystal is fired up. He’s not showing it—no burst blood vessels, he’s not yelling and screaming. That’s not his style. He is just profoundly unimpressed. He doesn’t say much directly—he just asks questions, Socratic style, says Casey.

How many resources are used to bring that coffee in? How many planes per latte? How many man-hours are lost by the drinking of alcohol? How do these people have jobs where they can come down here and sit for an hour? How would you feel if you’re out there fighting the war and the headquarters staff is taking a leisurely morning sipping espresso? How often is this place filled up? How many hangovers equal mission failure?

McChrystal wants to tear down the beer garden. He says he wants to put in a firing range instead.

The beer garden represents something much larger—a countrywide phenomenon. A complacency, as McChrystal sees it. It’s been eight years.
These motherfuckers are acting like the war started yesterday. Plenty of time to go. The complacency is represented in the sprawling military bases, with street sign names like Disney Drive. (It’s not named after the cartoon wonderland, but after a specialist named Jason A. Disney who’d lost his life at Bagram in a heavy-equipment accident in 2002.) Entire American towns transplanted to Afghanistan, complete with Baskin Robbins Ice Cream, NFL football on flat-screen TVs, and lobster dinners on Sundays. There’s the Burger King and Taco Bell and a T.G.I. Friday’s in Kandahar.

What that means to McChrystal: Flights that could be bringing in supplies to support those out in the field are getting wasted shipping in burgers and ice cream and Xboxes. There are Marines in Helmand getting blown up every day, living on MREs, while fobbits (like a hobbit who lives on a forward operation base, or FOB) are whining that the marinara sauce for their cheese sticks is too salty. It’s a waste of critical resources.

Then there’s the booze. It’s especially bad on Thursday nights. In the first few weeks in Kabul, McChrystal’s staff will leave the office at four
A.M.
and come across drunk and stumbling Europeans (and American civilians) who’ve been partying all night. American soldiers aren’t allowed to drink—they have to follow General Order Number One, which prohibits both booze and pornography—but that rule doesn’t apply to all of our NATO allies. The booze has got to go, McChrystal thinks; he just needs an excuse.

He’ll get it in September. A NATO bomb kills seventy Afghan civilians in Kunduz. Headquarters doesn’t hear about it until the afternoon—the people who are supposed to tell them about it were hungover and didn’t make it into the office on time. McChrystal bans alcohol from the base, and later, he bans Burger King and tries to close T.G.I. Friday’s, too.

The European allies don’t appreciate the alcohol ban. It goes over “like a fart in church,” says Dave.

McChrystal then tackles the identity of the American military itself. Not only does he want to change the culture of NATO, of Afghanistan,
but of his own U.S. Army. He extols the virtues of counterinsurgency. He questions what he sees as the outdated culture of shoot-first-and-blow-shit-up soldiering, the default attitude of most infantry personnel. He shifts the emphasis away from killing the enemy and toward “protecting the civilian population.” He issues a series of new directives. “We must avoid the trap of winning tactical victories—but suffering strategic defeats—by causing civilian casualties or excessive damage and thus alienating the people,” he writes. “I expect leaders at all levels to scrutinize and limit the use of force like close air support against residential compounds and other locations likely to produce civilian casualties in accordance with this guidance.” He writes that “air-to-ground munitions” and “indirect fires” against homes are “only authorized under very limited and prescribed conditions.” Other orders: Fly less recklessly and shoot less recklessly. He is praised in the media and among COINdinistas for “curtailing convoys’
reckless driving.” “Following this intent,” he writes, “requires a cultural shift within our forces—and complete understanding at every level—down to the most junior soldiers.”

He doesn’t stop there. He offers a not-so-subtle rebuke of every general who’d come before him. “We need to think and act
very
differently to be successful,” he writes (the italics are his). He implores his troops to focus “95 percent” of their energy on helping the people of Afghanistan build schools and roads and solve land disputes. “Empower those [Afghans] who display competence, care, and commitment to their people,” he says.

The new guidance is greeted as a revelation. No one, his supporters claim, has ever done this before. “McChrystal Really Gets It,” gushes one blogger on
The Huffington Post
.

This isn’t quite true: The previous general, David McKiernan, had a set of tactical directives that are remarkably similar. He had also called on commanders to apply “the utmost discrimination in our application of firepower.” “Respect for the Afghan people, their culture, their religion, and their customs is essential,” he wrote. He, too, had cracked down on reckless driving. “On the road and in vehicles, ISAF personnel will demonstrate respect and consideration for Afghan traffic and pedestrians,” he said.

What is different is that McChrystal and his team are committed to selling the idea that what he’s doing is a radical departure from what had been done. Taking his cues from General Petraeus’s wildly successful cultivation of the press corps to craft a narrative of victory in Iraq, McChrystal and his team will try to do the same in Afghanistan. He is, so the story goes, finally bringing counterinsurgency to Kabul. This conveniently ignores the fact that every general for the past five years has claimed to be doing a counterinsurgency strategy. (General Barno in 2004: “What we’re doing is moving to a more classic counterinsurgency strategy.”) The media play along, mistaking style for substance: McChrystal is the savior, and he’s doing what no one else has done before. When McChrystal speaks of the principles of COIN, his words are not empty, as his predecessors’ were. He really means it. (One stat reveals what a senior military official calls McChrystal’s “smoke and mirrors”: After McChrystal takes over, there’s actually an overall jump in civilian casulaties.) McChrystal makes for a good story; he feeds the desire among the public to have a hero arrive to save the day in a war that looks increasingly hero-less.

  APRIL 17, 2010, PARIS

I woke up Saturday morning to find the world in crisis.

The details had been out there, a low hum of media noise that follows any major natural disaster. They had been peppering television screens I’d glanced at. I’d caught the gist of it from the headlines on newsstands, radio snippets in taxi rides, the papers on the table in the lobby. Scrolling headlines or brief glances on the Internet. I’d overheard a few conversations, mentions of some nasty ash cloud. Like any normal citizen in the developed world, warmly wrapped in my own beautiful life, the disaster didn’t break through my consciousness. I viewed it as I would an earthquake in Peru, a forest fire in Santa Barbara, a flood in Pakistan, a cyclone in Bangladesh: It sucked, but it didn’t have much to do with me.

A volcano in Iceland had erupted. Then Western civilization came to a standstill.

Downstairs in the lobby of my shitty hotel, five people crowded the front desk. They were stranded, they said. They’d gone to the airport and come back.

“The airport is closed,” the desk clerk told me.

“When will it be opened?”

“Tomorrow at noon.”

This natural disaster had taken on a decidedly personal dimension. I had a flight back to DC tomorrow. It looked like the flight would be canceled.

It still seemed a little odd, and I couldn’t quite believe it. How could an ash cloud in Iceland stop all flights to and from Europe?

I called Continental Airlines. I was on hold for forty-five minutes before I hung up. I accessed the bad wireless from the lobby. Continental’s website didn’t allow me to change my ticket, either. I read up on the volcano on the web. One hundred thousand flights were canceled. The airlines were estimated to lose $1.7 billion. Seven hundred fifty tons of ash had spewed into the air. It was the first time the volcano had erupted since 1821.