The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan (24 page)

Certainly, having friends in high places helps him skate. Cheney, in his memoir, will personally thank McChrystal, and reminisce about a dinner he had with America’s Special Operations Forces in 2008 that opened with this blessing: “We are soldiers, God, agents of correction.” Rumsfeld, in his 2011 memoir, praises the general, writing dramatically of McChrystal watching “the mortally wounded Zarqawi pulled out of the rubble before he died a short time later.” But on a more fundamental level, McChrystal’s charm, his candor, and his sheer intelligence—he is an avid reader, gets briefings on his iPod, and is constantly listening to audiobooks—are compelling to journalists, and they also help him in policy debates. If there’s a vacuum, he’s not afraid to fill it with his own ideas. Where General David Petraeus—who also is beloved in the press—
is a teacher’s pet with a Ranger’s tab, McChrystal is a snake-eating rebel. He’s cool—he didn’t care when his teenage son came home with blue hair and a Mohawk. He’s a liberal. He asks for opinions and seems genuinely interested in the answer. He’s irreverently driven, and the same characteristics that endeared him to Rummy and Cheney endear him to some in the press corps.

It’s hard for McChrystal to leave his terrorist-hunter image behind, despite the fact that the media have tried to give him a total makeover as a counterinsurgency evangelical. He’s not a killer anymore—he’s an intellectual and a philosopher who reads Winston Churchill’s 1898 account of the Boer War, looking for similarities between then and now. The killer attitude exists within him, though, just below the surface. After taking over in Afghanistan, McChrystal’s team ups the number of Special Forces units in the country from four to nineteen and puts the Taliban and insurgent networks “under extraordinary pressure,” says Mike Flynn. That comes with considerable controversy: A Special Forces night raid ends in the deaths of two pregnant Afghan women and allegations of a cover-up. McChrystal publicly apologizes for these kinds of events—“We’ve shot an amazing number of people,” he’s said—but old habits die hard. He’ll tell a Navy SEAL in the hallway of the ISAF headquarters: “You better be out there hitting four or five targets tonight,” then adding, “I’m going to have to scold you in the morning for it, though.” As Dave Silverman will tell me: “Deep down, he still…” Dave lets his thoughts trail off. “He really remembers the time before fondly.”

  APRIL 22–23, 2010, BERLIN

The Afghan embassy was in an upscale neighborhood on the city’s west side. The two-floor house, with a serene garden pathway, didn’t stand out. Only a small sign marked its existence.

I went upstairs to the second floor. An Afghan man sitting at a wooden desk opened a drawer filled with passports. He found mine. He stamped it and handed it to me.

“You are a journalist,” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

He motioned for me to walk with him. He led me down the steps and outside to the garden. He said he had a few things he wanted to tell me. He wanted, he told me, to get his voice out there. He asked that I didn’t use his name.

The Afghan official told me he’d been in Germany eight years. He’d left Kabul in 2001, after the invasion. He went first to Russia, then moved to Berlin. He told me he was depressed when he looked at his country.

I asked him what he thought of General McChrystal’s plan to make Karzai a credible leader.

“Inside Afghanistan, the politicians listen. They promise. Then, when they go back to Kabul, everything is forgotten,” he said. “Afghan people have mistrust about their politicians because they have promised so much and they have given so little. Nothing is as Karzai says. No one listens to it or cares about it. No one takes it seriously. They just consider it as another promise that will never be fulfilled.”

Did he see any chance of the Americans’ winning?

“There are people who are free from corruption, but their voices are not heard. Winning is a credible government that can enforce the law. A government that cares about the common people. How can they steal a million from this poor country? Empire collapses under the weight of corruption,” he said.

It was a dismal assessment of the prospects for any kind of success. The most important question, though, was if he would ever go back. He was one of the at least three million Afghan refugees who had fled the country over the past few decades. He was a liberal intellectual, a member of the brain trust that our strategy rested on.

“It is hard for me to imagine going back,” he said.

I thanked him and left the embassy. In Europe, so distant from the conflict, McChrystal’s confident talk of strategy and success could at times seem almost plausible. But I’d stepped outside the bubble only for an afternoon and, in only one interview, the actual reality of the war had started to seep back in.

I returned to the hotel. Later that evening, I joined Khosh and Duncan at the Ritz bar. It was going to be my last night with them in Berlin. I was heading to Dubai tomorrow.

“Did you get your visa?” Khosh asked. “How much did you pay?”

“Thirty euros,” I said.

“How many for the bribe?”

“No bribe,” I said.

“That’s impressive,” Duncan said. “It’s about $120 in the States.”

“No bribe?” Khosh said, surprised. “That’s good.”

“They were actually all really, really cool,” I said. “The embassy guy said, ‘Do you have time to talk?’ He was like, ‘I want to get my voice out there.’ He says the corruption they see now is worse than they’ve ever seen before. Do you think that’s true?”

“Who said that?” Duncan asked.

“The Afghan embassy guy,” I said.

“The Boss talks about hypercorruption,” Duncan said. “Like there’s dynamics between the international money flowing in is part of it. Also the drug money. It’s so out of control. The people who take, who benefit from corruption, are not just subsidized. It’s their main income. So it’s not even bribe money that’s getting recycled into the economy. It’s capital flight.”

“Like property in Dubai, right?”

“It’s not just that,” Khosh said. “When an Afghan thinks he is not going to be secure, he thinks about getting enough money so he can get out of the country.”

Khosh paused. He was in his early thirties. He spoke perfect English with a British accent. He’d studied at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. He’d been in the Afghan army since 2002. He was married, and he lived in Kabul. He did not walk to work in his uniform—it was too risky. He’d fought in secret operations and battles and trained with Afghanistan’s most elite commando unit. The images of the war stuck with him. Everyone has lost someone in Afghanistan, he told me, and there was no time to grieve.

One image in particular stayed with him. He told me about the dogs Special Forces soldiers took with them on raids. They’d put a video camera on the dog’s head. The dog would run in the compound first. The fighters inside would freak out—they would be expecting a human, and as a general rule, Muslims abhor dogs. The commandos would get to see the video feed from the dog. During one raid, Khosh and the commandos threw a grenade into the house first. After the explosion, they sent the
dog in to see who was inside. The dog came out, a bloody hand gripped in its teeth.

Khosh described his Kabul to me. He lived in a strange world straddling two cultures. He traveled with McChrystal, which meant he was seen on Afghan television. This was a great risk. He knew it was safer to be invisible, he said. Like the spies. Like the informants. Like those who could hide their loyalties, or whose loyalties were flexible. The spies and the informants and the collaborators all came to Kabul. He described where they met: outside a stadium, an old British fort, where the Taliban once performed their executions. Now it was spook central. You couldn’t just go to a village to meet the source, he said. If a man is seen in the village jumping in a car and meeting with you, he’s done. He’s beheaded. Khosh was in Helmand in 2006. He went to a village and spoke to the doctor. The doctor told him nothing, he just talked. The next day he was beheaded, his head put in a bag and left in the bazaar in front of his shop. He was the only doctor in the village. Experience says you don’t even go and speak to the guy, Khosh tells me. They’ll just say he is a spy and kill him. You’ve got to call them to come to a major city where it doesn’t look odd.

“Everyone tells me, don’t worry about this fight,” Khosh told me. “Don’t worry about this country. Make your money and make your life. Go to India. Go to Tajikistan. Go buy a house. Because these people are not going to be here forever.”

“You could do that, Khosh,” Duncan said. “You could make a lot of money as a contractor. You could buy your own apartment in Dubai. Why not?”

“Because I know. I know the international community is going to be here for longer. I know we are going to get better. No matter what. Because I know.”

Khosh believed. He had risked it all to be part of McChrystal’s team. A future without the Americans wasn’t a possibility he could entertain.

“It’s hard to imagine [the Americans] pulling out and leaving this country with bloodshed,” he said.

“Really?” I said. “Because we have a history of doing that.”

“Well, exactly, but not just like this. I’ll know when that time comes. I’ll pull out. I wouldn’t really even go… I know when… because I can go anywhere and I can work. I’ve got a university degree… I’ve got a Sandhurst degree…”

“And you’ve got friends,” Duncan said.

“I’ve got friends, exactly,” Khosh said. “I can go to any country in the West. I’ll just say, ‘Hey, suicide bombers are trying to come into your country. I’ll serve your fucking country.’ ”

Even Khosh, one of the most dedicated to NATO’s cause, had his own exit strategy. He’d have to deal with some racism, sure, he knew, but it would be worth it.

“It’s funny. When I was going to the UK once and I got stopped at customs, ‘You got a visa?’ the customs guy asked. We were coming in for the anniversary [party] with C.’s [the British Special Forces commando] friends. They stopped us. ‘Where are you people going?’ ‘Well, we came over to see our friends. We are coming to visit the Ministry of Defence.’ ‘What exactly do you do?’ ‘Well, we can’t tell you exactly what we do. I can’t tell you what I do. I’m not going to tell you where I am going. I have a Ministry of Defence letter from this country telling me I’m invited. Let me in.’ The guy who was asking the questions wasn’t even fucking British. He was some Pakistani or something. I shit you not. He fucking came in on an ice container on a cruise ship.”

Khosh and the embassy official were the two Afghans I’d spoken to on this trip so far, two people whose country the war was actually being fought in. The embassy official would never return, and Khosh wondered if he’d be there for longer than the next five years.

Friday, I was ready to leave. I’d meet up with them in Kabul next week. I’d spend a few days in Dubai, waiting for Duncan’s call. I went upstairs to the operations center to say my good-byes.

I saw McChrystal. I thanked him for allowing me to spend time with his team.

“I’d join up myself,” I joked. “But there’s no way I could pass the security clearance.”

“Hey, I’m here,” Jake replied.

McChrystal laughed.

I checked out and got on a train to Frankfurt.

   APRIL 24–27, 2010, DUBAI

“There is danger here! A dry brown vibrating hum or frequency in the air, like insect wings rubbing together.… There is a nightmare feeling in Interzone with its glut of nylon shirts, cameras, watches, sex, and opiates sold across the counter. Something profoundly menacing in the completely laissez-faire… The whole Zone is a trap, and someday it will close…”
—William S. Burroughs,
Interzone

I arrived Saturday morning at the Dubai International Airport, DXB, a giant duty-free shopping mall disguised as three airplane terminals. DXB was the entry point to the city that had become a central hub for the American war effort in both Iraq and Afghanistan. American government officials, Afghan government officials, Iraqi government officials, spies, aid workers, mercenaries, and journalists usually passed through Dubai on the way to the war. Mixed in were Russian mobsters, radical Islamists, Saudi sheikhs, Israeli hit squads, and wealthy businessmen from across the globe looking for a tax shelter, a blow job, or a place to launder money. Situated on the Persian Gulf, it had high-quality beaches with the year-round water temperature of a warm bath. Dubai was the
GPS point where the hypocritical and corrupt West met the corrupt and hypocritical East, ensuring that hypocrisy and cash were the only two reliable lubricants in the clash of civilizations.

The customs check were manned by young twentysomething Emiratis in white robes and red sashes stamping passports, lazily, disinterested, all slightly overweight and lethargic. Once I passed through customs, there was a good chance I wouldn’t come in contact with another Emirati for the next three days. The entire service economy of the city was based on low-skilled workers who’d been shipped in from Pakistan, India, Thailand, and the Philippines, among other places in Central Asia. The Emiratis, it seemed, were always out of sight, hiding out in air-conditioned towers, leaving the dirty work to others.