The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan (16 page)

Perhaps I was a rock to throw, part of some larger strategy I didn’t see.

I noticed another smaller group of American and German officers in uniform. They didn’t look like they were part of the Israel–Germany gala. They stood to the left of the stairs, near the open entrance to the bar. I assumed they were there to welcome McChrystal. That was a good sign.

After forty-five minutes of waiting, a large bus pulled up outside. It had purple lettering on the side.

Dave came through the door, followed by Ray and a few others. They were carrying American military gear in camouflage bags along with trash bags filled with top secret material. Due to security regulations, the classified material that was printed on the trip needed to be disposed of in the appropriate manner and place, which meant burning it back in Kabul. Even their trash was top secret.

Dave went up to the front desk with Ray and Master Sergeant Rudy Valentine, McChrystal’s personal cook and body man. Rudy was a gentle, quiet soul—he’d served twenty-plus years in the Army. He’d grown up poor in a town in Michigan. (“Ask him about the rabbits,” Dave told me. I did: He raised and killed rabbits to feed his younger siblings.) He didn’t drink or swear. The repeated deployments over the past decade had put a heavy burden on his marriage. He was devoted to McChrystal—each trip, he’d make sure the general’s luggage was in his room, and prepare his uniforms for the day.

They started the check-in process. Rudy got the thirty or so plastic room keys made up. Dave made contact with the welcoming party, telling them McChrystal was on his way in. A few moments later, McChrystal entered with Mike, Charlie, and Jake.

“Hope this isn’t all for me,” McChrystal said, acknowledging the gala.

It wasn’t.

The welcoming party of German and American defense attachés swept McChrystal and the other generals into the Ritz’s bar area. Waitresses started passing out small appetizers and beer.

Dave and Casey conferred.

“We need to get The Boss out of there,” Dave said.

“We’ll bring him up to his room and let him and Annie do their thing,” Casey said.

The team was frazzled from the trip. They’d spent fourteen hours on the bus, commandeered from a company that usually took Japanese tourists around France. There were two bus drivers. Originally, the drivers were under the impression they would be driving to Italy. Dave told them that morning in Paris they were mistaken. The plan had changed. Get with the program. The two drivers resisted—they had been told Italy, and they were adamantly opposed to going to Berlin. After a few minutes of argument, they conceded to Dave. Not happily—they remained French and surly, taking their revenge through a daylong exercise in passive resistance. European Union labor regulations allowed the bus drivers to take a break every two and a half hours to smoke a cigarette, the drivers claimed.

“We were going sixteen miles an hour, I swear to God,” Dave said. “Guderian made it to Paris faster than we made it to Berlin.” A reference to the German general who led the invasion of France in World War II, who developed a strategy of deploying fast-moving and heavily armored tanks to overwhelm the enemy—a strategy infamously known as blitzkrieg.

The bus crawled. The team started drinking. Beers were opened. They cracked a bottle of schnapps. For lunch, they stopped on the side of the
road at a gas station. Mike Flynn ate his meal on top of a trash can. At each stop, as the bus drivers sucked down Gauloises, Ray set up the communications equipment to download the e-mails and other materials that had arrived during the two hours they were out of contact. The Japanese tourist bus wasn’t equipped for mobile telecom.

I saw Duncan.

“Delta Bravo, what’s up, man?” I said. “I was worried you guys weren’t going to make it.”

The ash cloud, at this very moment, was hovering over Germany. No one yet knew if or when flights would resume. Days, weeks, a month. I asked Duncan what tipped the balance for them to come here. It would have been safer to fly out of Italy, cut their losses, and return to Kabul early.

“The implicit risk is it gets worse, and we get stuck,” Duncan said. “But this is very much the attitude of our General McChrystal—into the ash cloud.”

The bar at the Ritz was in the back corner of the lobby. It had three open-air entranceways divided by three stubby rectangular walls, the marble floor changing to carpet; there were lounge seats, tables, and a counter against the back wall where a bartender stood serving eleven-euro drinks.

I mingled in the crowd around the bar for a few minutes. Mike Flynn and Jake pounded a few beers. Flynn had received word over e-mail that the top insurgent leader in Iraq had been killed. He was satisfied. “He was a guy we’d been looking for for a while,” he said.

A tall blond woman in a green sweater tightly covering a sizable chest walked by. I took note.

I went upstairs to room 915. I wanted to capture the scene of Ray, the communications specialist, setting up the operations center.

In room 915, Ray was rolling out the cables, organizing the Toughbooks, and setting up the printer. Even though they’d only been there fifteen minutes, they were almost done.

Admiral Smith, McChrystal’s communications director, was sitting down, looking over notes. He and Duncan started discussing talking points, what McChrystal needed to say to convince the Germans that they could return to their more comfortable role—away from fighting. The Germans had a number of restrictions placed on their forces, including not being allowed to go out at night. (“With the Germans, though, it’s like my British friend told me,” said Dave. “Maybe it’s good that they aren’t allowed to go out at night, if you know what I mean.”)

“National agendas… And the public polling. Low support… And adopt the strategy over time to start a security effort to support more of a government development role,” Smith said.

They discussed the think-tank event scheduled for tomorrow.

“We have a small change. We have sixteen RSVPs for the think tank down from twenty late adds. A lot of these folks are based in Berlin,” Duncan said.

Casey worked on the speech, printing it out this time in 32-point font.

Rudy brought up the bags. Annie McChrystal entered the room.

“We ate junk food the whole way,” she told me about the bus trip. She looked happy, keeping the upbeat public attitude that was a job requirement for being the wife of a four-star general. She carried her responsibilities well, though her demanding partnership of stress and solitude had left its visible scars, like an attractive middle-aged woman from Florida who’d spent too much time in the sun. “I was waiting for the Ranger songs. We were having too much fun. I can’t remember the last time I spent fourteen hours with him awake! I loved every minute of it. He was stuck on the bus and he couldn’t go anywhere.”

Mike Flynn walked in. “Shit, they had all kinds of nice chow as soon as we walked in,” Flynn said, looking around the room. “Jesus Christ, what the hell did you guys do? You missed it—”

“We had to get the bags—”

McChrystal blasted in.

“Hey, don’t bitch about how working for me is a tough time,” he announced. He saw me and froze for a second. He continued. “They had a little party. They were pouring beer down there. I was going to come up here, they grabbed me, gave me beer, more beer, then they gave me pizza. I’m like, ‘Hey, I’m here. I’m German. Screw the French.’ ” He winked at me. “I’ll tell you one thing,” he said. “I’m glad we came. It’s a good call. As long as I don’t screw it up. I’m prepared to take that risk.”

I went back downstairs. A defense attaché’s wife was in a heated discussion with the French colonel over
le seduction
. The French colonel was convinced the Americans didn’t understand seduction. She agreed. She was wasted and loud, wearing a blue raincoat. She was about ten years younger than her husband. She swung her martini glass back and forth at high velocity without spilling a drop.

She cornered me outside while I was smoking a cigarette. She told me she and her husband got invited to sex parties all the time in Berlin. “Daz boom, boom,” she said. Her husband came up to her and pried the martini glass from her hand. They left the party.

SEPTEMBER TO OCTOBER 2009, ZABUL, KABUL, NEW YORK, WASHINGTON, DC, AND VERMONT

Matt Hoh has seen enough. He’s living in Zabul in a run-down building with twelve guys and one shower. He likes the job, but no longer believes in the mission. He’s in a small room with a makeshift wooden bed on the second floor. The Provincial Reconstruction Team, or PRT, is across from the governor’s office. He takes out a Panasonic Toughbook. He starts to write his letter of resignation. He writes it over three days. He sends a draft to two of his friends: What do you think? He sends the final version to Frank Ruggiero, the senior civilian representative in southern Afghanistan. I’m quitting, he tells Frank. He goes to Kandahar to talk to Frank. Frank tells him to think it over. Hoh goes back to Zabul, finalizes the letter on September 11, 2009, but changes the date to September 10, because he thinks the other date is too dramatic. He sits tight in Zabul.

In Kabul at the embassy, Holbrooke comes into the meeting Monday morning with Hoh’s letter. It’s all Holbrooke talks about for the hour. Holbrooke passes the letter to Hillary and to Obama.

Hoh gets an e-mail from the assistant to the ambassador: Come to Kabul to discuss it. He meets with Eikenberry three times. Eikenberry
suggests he work as his personal representative over at ISAF with Stan McChrystal. Hoh crosses the street, meets with Dave and Charlie, has pizza with them. Good guys, he thinks, but he doesn’t want the job. Before he leaves, he talks to Eikenberry again. Eikenberry is sympathetic, Eikenberry agrees with his letter, and Eikenberry doesn’t want to lose any staff if he can help it. He offers Hoh a job in the embassy, and tells him that at the end of his tour, Hoh can publish his letter and he’d even publicly endorse it. Eikenberry tells him it’s one of the clearest analyses he’s read of the war. Another diplomat at the embassy confides to Hoh that if he had children of military age, he wouldn’t want them serving in Afghanistan. As the letter is forwarded around, Hoh receives messages of support from his counterparts in six other provinces.

Hoh leaves Kabul, stops overnight in Dubai.

Holbrooke is back in New York for a UN General Assembly meeting. Holbrooke is staying at the Waldorf; he asks Hoh to meet with him. He goes into the Waldorf, and Holbrooke’s staff is there, along with a douche bag from the CIA. Matt is friendly, introduces himself; the CIA dude is cold, says, “I work for another agency,” playing the spy card, wanting to show off his covertness.

Holbrooke comes into the Waldorf, packing up. He’s got a meeting with the Egyptian foreign minister. Holbrooke and Hoh talk for an hour and a half.

“I agree with you,” Holbrooke tells him, “but I’m not going to tell you how much.”

Holbrooke agrees with the letter about 95 percent, another diplomat tells Hoh. He speaks to others on Holbrooke’s staff—they seem to be talking about a completely different war from the one he sees. How can you say they don’t want freedom, if we just get the right ingredients, the right mixture of counterinsurgency and the right amount of time? one staffer asks Hoh. It reminds him of the talk in Iraq back in the day, the disconnect between reality and what the believers believed. Holbrooke asks him to join his team; Hoh thinks about it for a few days, then declines.

Hoh gets back to DC. He’s living in an apartment in Arlington, on an air mattress, not really settled. It takes the State Department six weeks to process his resignation. He’s back home, feeling a little paranoid, a little dark, typical PTSD stuff, wanting to avoid crowds. It’ll last a couple of weeks. He skips a U2 concert. He’s in a bar on Monday night, watching
Monday Night Football
. Broncos versus Chargers. He’s sitting next to a guy who turns out to be an editor at
The Washington Post
. They talk Afghanistan: He tells the editor that he’s just resigned. What’s your problem? Are you some kind of malcontent? You have a drug problem or something? the editor asks him. Are you not credible? The editor tells him to call the
Post
the next day. He does. Forty-five minutes later, a
Post
reporter calls back. Over the next two days, they do six hours’ worth of interviews. Hoh provides the reporter with his Marine fitness reports: This is no malcontent, this guy is a fucking hero, this guy risked his life to try to save another Marine from drowning during a helicopter crash, this guy was singled out for his reconstruction work in Iraq…

Next Monday, he’s in the bar again, Eagles versus Redskins. The
Post
reporter e-mails: Here’s the story. Hoh’s Facebook page starts to light up. He wakes up Tuesday at eight
A.M
. There are fifteen voicemails on his phone. There are seventy-five media requests. There are television crews waiting outside his apartment. CNN, ABC, CBS.

His letter of resignation is published in full on the
Post
’s website. It reads, in part:

“To put [it] simply: I fail to see the value or the worth in continued U.S. casualties or expenditures of resources in support of the Afghan government in what is, truly, a 35-year old civil war… If the history of Afghanistan is one great stage play, the United States is no more than a supporting actor, among several previously, in a tragedy that not only pits tribes, valleys, clans, villages and families against one another, but, from at least the end of King Zahir Shah’s reign, has violently and savagely pitted the urban, secular, educated and modern of Afghanistan against the rural, religious, illiterate and traditional… I have observed that the bulk
of the insurgency fights not for the white banner of the Taliban, but rather against the presence of foreign soldiers… Our support for [the Afghan] government, coupled with a misunderstanding of the insurgency’s true nature, reminds me horribly of our involvement with South Vietnam; an unpopular and corrupt government we backed at the expense of our Nation’s own internal peace, against an insurgency whose nationalism we arrogantly and ignorantly mistook as a rival to our own Cold War ideology… If honest, our stated strategy of securing Afghanistan to prevent al-Qaeda resurgence or regrouping would require us to additionally invade and occupy western Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, etc. Our presence in Afghanistan has only increased destabilization and insurgency in Pakistan… More so, the September 11th attacks, as well as the Madrid and London bombings, were primarily planned and organized in Western Europe; a point that highlights the threat is not one tied to traditional geographic or political boundaries… I realize the emotion and tone of my letter and ask you [to] excuse any ill temper… Thousands of our men and women have returned home with physical and mental wounds, some that will never heal or will only worsen with time. The dead return only in bodily form to be received by families who must be reassured their dead have sacrificed for a purpose worthy of futures lost, love vanished, and promised dreams unkept. I have lost confidence such assurances can anymore be made. As such, I submit my resignation.”