The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan (15 page)

At Palace 7 the next morning, Eide has a breakfast meeting with Holbrooke. They sit around the ten-mile-long table. Eide looks tired, stressed out. Holbrooke mentions that it looks like there are “a bunch of fraudulent results.”

“These results aren’t fraudulent,” Eide says.

“Talk to your deputy,” Holbrooke says, looking at Galbraith.

Galbraith thinks: Gee, thanks, Richard.

Eide starts to get angry, agitated. Because of the massive fraud, Holbrooke suggests that they have a second-round runoff. Eide is opposed to the idea. Eide wants to avoid a runoff, which means Karzai has to get over 50 percent of the vote. Eide wants to count the fraudulent votes to get Karzai over the top, says Galbraith. Eide, on the other hand, is worried that the country is on the brink of serious unrest, “violence in the streets,” he’ll later recall in an interview.

“I’m warning you, be very careful, this is very dangerous,” Eide tells Holbrooke. “You should not tell Karzai that.”

Holbrooke and Galbraith believe that the entire credibility of the mission is at stake. Counterinsurgency requires a legitimate partner, and a fraudulently elected leader is, by definition, illegitimate. It’s too big to ignore, Holbrooke tells Eide; we have to say something. Holbrooke leaves the breakfast—he’s got a meeting with Karzai in a few hours.

Eide gets on the phone to Karzai right after Holbrooke leaves. Holbrooke doesn’t want to declare you the winner, Eide tells Karzai. Holbrooke wants a runoff. But you can ignore Holbrooke, Eide explains, because he doesn’t represent the Obama administration. (It’s a sentiment
he repeats to Galbraith: Holbrooke doesn’t have the backing of the White House, so screw Holbrooke.) According to Galbraith, Eide would later tell Karzai that he was “biased” toward the Afghan president because “those who are out to get you are out to get me”—meaning Holbrooke. “Holbrooke’s first objective was to get rid of Karzai, which I thought was completely unacceptable interference in Afghanistan’s internal affairs,” says Eide.

When Holbrooke shows up at Karzai’s palace, the president is “loaded for bear,” says Galbraith. Karzai is furious. The sixty-eight-year-old Holbrooke is an experienced statesman—he’s in his element when he’s confronting heads of state head-on, as he did with Slobodan Milošević in Serbia. He treats conflict like “it’s jazz music,” says a State Department official close to him, improvisational and exciting, the sounds of the clashing motives and voices and agendas and intrigues that make life worth living. He’s also got a sizable personality, which has rubbed the Afghans (and Eide and the White House) the wrong way.

This day, Holbrooke doesn’t even have a chance to bring up having a second-round runoff. Eide’s tip-off pays dividends—Karzai is apoplectic. Karzai ends the meeting “acrimoniously,” according to a U.S. official familiar with the encounter. Eide’s gambit works: He keeps his relationship with Karzai tight while undermining the American special envoy, explains Galbraith. Later that night, Eikenberry has to go to the palace and smooth things over with Karzai.

On August 24, Galbraith meets up again with Holbrooke, in Istanbul. He tells Holbrooke what the UN position is going to be: Ignore the fraud. At the same time,
The Guardian
writes a story quoting an unnamed UN official saying there is fraud. Eide hears from Afghan officials that Galbraith had criticized him at a visit to the elections commission before he’d left for Istanbul.

At two thirty
A.M.
, Galbraith gets a text message from Eide saying that an Afghan minister had told him Galbraith criticized him. Galbraith gets another text message from Eide about the
Guardian
story.

Eide is starting to lose his shit, says Galbraith. The two thirty
A.M.
text messages are followed by an e-mail to a UN political officer threatening to fire him over the anonymous quote. Eide’s evidence?
The Guardian
is a British newspaper, and the UN political officer is also British. It must have been from him, Eide concludes, out of a staff of hundreds. The tension between Galbraith and Eide is about to become very public; Eide blames Galbraith for bringing the fraud to light too quickly, while Galbraith blames Eide for what he sees as legitimizing a fraudulent election.

The American response to the election is, in general, confused.

The U.S. military trumpets the success of the election as the most significant operation the Afghans have organized and pulled off to date. NATO is encouraged by how the Afghans have handled the complexities of democracy.

The White House doesn’t know how to play it. They seem to want a runoff election between Karzai and Abdullah. This pisses off Karzai. Karzai is going to win a runoff election anyway, so why piss off Karzai?

Obama doesn’t back Holbrooke. Holbrooke is a longtime Clinton loyalist—he’d supported Hillary rather than Obama during the campaign and, after Hillary Clinton was selected as secretary of state, making him the special envoy was her idea. But on the election issue, it doesn’t look like Hillary is going to stand behind Holbrooke, either. Karzai, reading the political signs, doesn’t think Holbrooke has much clout. National Security Advisor Jim Jones tells Holbrooke: You might as well resign; you’ve lost the faith of the president. And so Holbrooke—considered America’s überdiplomat, forty years of experience—is no longer in the game in Afghanistan. He can’t get a meeting alone with President Obama. (“Richard Holbrooke expected everyone in the White House to treat him like Richard Holbrooke,” says a White House official. “But they didn’t care who he was. It was his fault, too, for not recognizing that.”) This leaves Galbraith exposed in Kabul—if Dick Holbrooke doesn’t have the juice, then neither does Peter Galbraith. At a meeting in September, Hillary Clinton will tell Eide that the U.S. isn’t going to get involved in a
United Nations dispute—a signal to Eide that Galbraith doesn’t have her support.

On October 28, armed gunmen storm a guesthouse in Kabul where UN election workers are living. The workers have been brought to Kabul specifically to work on the runoff vote. Six UN employees are killed. An American guarding the compound is also killed by an Afghan army soldier. It’s an odd coincidence that the attackers happened to target those particular UN staff.

Dr. Abdullah Abdullah is the second-highest vote-getter. The campaign against him is starting to get bizarre and dirty—there’s an e-mail getting bounced around among Afghan elites, called “The Truth About Abdullah Abdullah.” It’s a wild e-mail from the Karl Rove school of campaigning: It calls Abdullah a bisexual, accuses him of sleeping with prostitutes in Dubai, calls him an Iranian agent, lists the cost of his “designer suits.” The e-mail lists Abdullah’s supposed “allies,” many who just happen to be opponents of Hamid Karzai.

Dr. Abdullah Abdullah drops out of the election. The runoff vote is canceled.

Ashraf Ghani, America’s favorite, gets 3 percent of the vote.

Holbrooke gets sidelined—he ends up looking weak, which translates to the Americans as ending up looking weak in Karzai’s eyes. The White House doesn’t force Karzai to do anything.

Karzai wins by fraud.

Karzai’s half brother Ahmed Wali Karzai, the provincial council chief in Kandahar, tells one of Eikenberry’s deputies not to worry about it. In a State Department cable headlined “Elections: What’s the Point?” the president’s half brother explains to the Americans that “the people in this region don’t understand having one election, let alone two.

“The people do not want change,” says Ahmed Wali Karzai. “They think the president is alive, and everything is fine. Why have an election?”

  APRIL 20, 2010, BERLIN

The lobby of the Ritz-Carlton was packed with Germans and Israelis. A tight security perimeter was in place outside. A legion of cops dressed in black—a few with shaved heads—stood guard under the glass awning that jutted out from the towering gray facade of the ten-story hotel. Police vehicles with flashing lights parked diagonally at the end of Potsdamer Platz alongside metal barricades to block off the street. A red carpet was laid out for the arriving dignitaries—Israeli embassy officials, German military officers and diplomats, wealthy businessmen with their wives—leading into a receiving line to a reception on the mezzanine.

The purpose of the gala was to promote friendship between the two countries. That explained the tight security—the German government’s paranoia to avoid not-so-random acts of anti-Jewish violence, fearful of a new generation of skinheads who hadn’t gotten the memo that the Nazis lost.

The spectacle fit with my experience of Berlin so far: an entire city where the brutal history of the twentieth century couldn’t be avoided. Even its übermodern, globalized, cosmopolitan hipness failed to disguise
the most savage century on record. Remnants of war acted like the city’s second skyline: memorials to dead Germans in World War I, memorials to remember the Holocaust, a memorial to the Soviets who died fighting them, government buildings identified by whether they were leveled in massive bombing runs or rebuilt later, and a partial chunk of the Berlin Wall, a Cold War memento less than a block away from the Ritz. The city of three million appeared to have taken on the responsibility to remember the approximately one hundred twenty million, both victims and perpetrators alike, who’d perished in the world wars of the past hundred years.

This was the task McChrystal would confront: to convince the German political elite that they should continue to send troops to fight in Afghanistan, no matter how unpopular the war had become. Polling showed that some 80 percent of Germans opposed involvement in Afghanistan. Absurdly, the country’s leaders tried to convince their public that they weren’t
really
in a war, anyway—they were involved in “networked security” and “humanitarian action.” Germany’s president was forced to resign after he implied that the forty-five hundred German troops in northern Afghanistan
were actually at war
. A series of incidents had brought the absurdity of the government’s claim to the forefront: After the air strike in Kunduz that killed seventy civilians, the German defense minister took responsibility and resigned—something that would have been unheard of in the United States. The German officer who had called in the air strike was subjected to a highly publicized hearing within months—again, something Americans would never do. (In the past ten years, no high-ranking American officer has ever been severely punished for killing civilians.) In the past few weeks, the country had suffered seven combat deaths in Afghanistan, one of its worst losses of life in fighting since 1945. McChrystal had recently ordered an American brigade to join the German contingent in the north of the country, an escalation that was undoubtedly going to mean more deaths for the Germans.

It was around seven
P.M
. I sat in the corner of the lobby drinking espresso, occasionally popping outside to smoke a cigarette. I wanted to capture the scene of McChrystal and his staff rolling into the Ritz. Team America—the name McChrystal’s staff called themselves, referring to the comedic film about U.S. cluelessness—-arrives in Berlin. A four-star general arrives at the five-star hotel.

I hadn’t heard from Duncan or anyone else on the team all day. I worried that they’d hit a snag. In the past twenty-four hours, I’d started to get a strange kind of separation anxiety, a fear that I wouldn’t be able to continue the story. I’d scrapped my plan to go back to DC. My plan now was to push on to Kabul. My trip was originally going to be about two or three days. Now it looked like it might last a month.

I had downtime to digest the reporting. A question persisted: What was the motivation behind McChrystal’s decision to have me tag along? Was it that
Rolling Stone
would reach a demographic of young officers and recruits whom they wanted to impress? Would it confirm the view that the team held of McChrystal—that he was “a rock star,” as they regularly called him? Dave explained that Special Forces operators had a healthy disrespect for authority;
Rolling Stone
fit this self-styled image perfectly. They were building Brand McChrystal—ballsy, envelope-pushing, risk-taking.
New York Times Magazine
cover? Done.
Time
cover? Check.
Atlantic
cover? Too easy.
60 Minutes
profile? No worries.
Rolling Stone?
Boom. It was a natural evolution of a very aggressive media strategy to establish McChrystal as a contender for the greatest general of his generation, on a par with Petraeus.

My presence with them was a physical, real-time manifestation of their entire attitude. How do you jump out of an airplane at thirty thousand feet, or sneak into an enemy compound in the middle of the night, or swim in hypothermic ocean waters, without a willingness to take risks? McChrystal’s team lived for risk. Up the risk; tell risk to go fuck itself. What General Mike Flynn had told me kept going through my head: Shock the system. Get as much attention as possible. Love it or hate it.

Sir Graeme Lamb once said, to roughly paraphrase: You have a pond and you keep throwing rocks in the pond, and you keep throwing big rocks in, and you keep making bigger waves, and eventually you see what you’re looking for. Eventually you can see the bottom of the pond—the ecosystem has been unsettled, and everything becomes clear.

I didn’t quite get it, but then no one quite got what Graeme Lamb was saying. Wisdom is like that. It all fit, though—whether the pond was in Kabul or Washington, just start tossing in rocks, increase the size of the rocks, decrease the size of the rocks. Make an improvised explosive device with the rocks.