The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan (3 page)

Palin and Biden agree: more troops and resources to Afghanistan. What they don’t agree on is McKiernan’s name. Palin keeps calling him “McClellan”; two times she says it. (The staff breaks out laughing, incredulous; a McKiernan advisor pings an e-mail to the general, joking about how Palin got his name wrong.) Biden resists the urge to correct her. Instead, he points out that McCain, her running mate, has said, “The reason we don’t read about Afghanistan anymore in the paper [is that] it’s succeeded.”

Afghanistan: an American success story. The media dub it the Forgotten War. The nightmare in Iraq overshadows the conflict. The United States regularly declares success in Afghanistan, despite mounting evidence to the contrary. A year doesn’t pass without public declarations of progress. In 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld says, “It’s not a quagmire.” In 2003, the commanding general in Afghanistan says that U.S. forces should be down to 4,500 soldiers by the end of the following summer. After that summer, General John P. Abizaid says the Taliban “is increasingly ineffective.” In 2005, the Taliban is “collapsing,” says General Dave Barno. In 2007, we are “prevailing against the effects of prolonged war,” declares Major General Robert Durbin. In 2008, General Dan McNeill claims that “my successor will find an insurgency here, but it is not spreading.” That same year, Defense Secretary Robert Gates assures us we have a “very successful counterinsurgency,” and we won’t need
a “larger western footprint” in the country. The United States is spending every three months in Iraq what they’d spend in an entire year in Afghanistan; there are over thirty thousand troops in Afghanistan, about one quarter of the number deployed in Iraq.

McKiernan recognizes the trend lines aren’t great. Since 2006, violence has spiked dramatically, from two thousand annual attacks to over four thousand in 2008. American and NATO soldiers are getting killed at a rate of nearly one per day. Civilian casualties have tripled over the past three years, killing a total of approximately 4,570 people. The more U.S. and NATO troops added, the worse the violence gets. The Taliban has regained control over key provinces, including those surrounding the country’s capital. On October 13, a
New York Times
reporter writes a story suggesting we’re losing. McKiernan dismisses it; the guy “was only in town for a week.” But yes, things aren’t good. McKiernan gets a classified report from America’s seventeen intelligence agencies saying the prognosis is “grim.” McKiernan wants those troops to hold the line—who’s going to be the next commander in chief?

A few weeks after the vice presidential debate, Lieutenant General Doug Lute, head of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan policies at the White House, visits McKiernan in Kabul. A White House staffer nicknames Lute “General White Flag”—he likes to surrender. It’s not a nice nickname. He didn’t want to surge in Iraq, and he’s skeptical on Afghanistan. He tells McKiernan that Obama has it locked up; it’s a foregone conclusion, Lute says. Obama is going to be the next president.

Which is fine with McKiernan. During the campaign, Obama announces after he returns from a visit to Kabul that he’d give McKiernan “the troops he needed.” McKiernan is impressed when he meets Obama that summer; he speaks to the senator in a phone call again before the election. He wants to build the relationship, quietly. And—let’s face it—McCain is an asshole, thinks he’s a military genius. Palin can’t even get his name right. McKiernan, although he would never say so publicly, is pulling for Obama, a senior military official close to him tells me.
McKiernan is suspicious of McCain, too, because McCain views Petraeus as some kind of godlike figure. Anyone so close to Petraeus can’t be good for McKiernan. He’s waiting for the full attention to get back to Afghanistan.

On November 4, 2008, Obama wins the election. McKiernan is working up a new strategy to get to the president—three strategic reviews are going on, one at ISAF, one at CENTCOM, and one in the Bush White House. Lots of wacky ideas are being thrown about: The CIA has a plan to just withdraw everyone and go total psyops—like broadcasting horrible atrocities of ISAF soldiers to scare the shit out of the Taliban. McKiernan’s plan calls for a comprehensive counterinsurgency strategy. It’s heavy on training Afghan security forces—he puts the date of how long it’s going to take at 2014, at the earliest. He sees the country’s limitations: “There’s no way this place is going to be the next Switzerland,” he tells me during an interview that fall in Kabul.

APRIL 15, 2010, PARIS

The hotel
Rolling Stone
put me up in sucked.

“How can you not have wireless access?” I asked the woman at the front desk of the Hotel SynXis Pavillon Louvre Rivoli. It was a modest/shitty/overpriced tourist ghetto with a do-it-yourself espresso maker in the lobby.

“We have wireless,” she said.

“What’s the password?”

“There is not a password. You pick up the signal from our neighbors.”

“Getting a signal from somebody else doesn’t count as wireless access.”

“Perhaps it is because you are on the fifth floor.”

“Can I move to another room?”

She typed a few things into her computer.

“There are not other rooms.”

I was supposed to meet Duncan in twenty minutes at the Hotel Westminster. McChrystal was staying there, too. According to Google Maps, it was a ten-minute walk.

It was April in Paris, a beautiful afternoon. The French citizens were typically hip and metropolitan, walking specimens from Chanel and Christian Dior inserts. I was in basic Brooks Brothers: navy blue blazer, navy tie with gold flowerish-looking things, and gray flannels. It was what I wore when I reported, a habit I started in Baghdad in 2005. I was relatively young then, twenty-five, and a polo shirt, jeans, and sneakers didn’t get me very far. It showed disrespect to the Arabs and pinged me as an even bigger asshole American than I actually was. If I dressed nicely, I didn’t get searched as often in the dozen or so security checkpoints I would pass through on a typical day. The Iraqis would think I was a VIP, a diplomat, an engineer. The illusion of respectability.

I turned down
Rue de la Paix, passing the eight-hundred-euro-a-night Grand Hyatt and a Cartier jewelry boutique, a diamond necklace in the window selling for over ten thousand euros. The Westminster was right next door under a discreet gold-and-black entranceway.

The lobby was four-star: plush red chairs and couches, marble floor, table service. The Ritz Hotel—the one where Princess Di’s last security camera footage was taken as she passed through the revolving door—was around the corner. I texted Duncan that I was in the lobby. I ordered an espresso and a Perrier.

In the lobby, there was a glass display for an expensive pen (Blanc-pain, ballpoint, €150) and a pile of international newspapers: the
Financial Times
,
The Guardian
,
Le Monde
. A wealthy Italian in a Brioni suit was on the phone, yelling loudly enough so whoever he was talking to could hear him, which meant I could hear, too. “I have a meeting with the Kuwaitis now,” he screamed. There was a late-middle-aged American couple with matching black Tumi luggage checking in.

I took out my notebook. I started making a numbered list. Memory was unreliable, as they said, and I’d learned that I never really knew what material I was going to need for a story until later. I tried to discipline myself to write down ten details about any scene. I had gotten to number four (1. chandelier, 2. blancpain, 3. montblanc, 4. wedged btw cartier on rue de la paix) when the elevator doors to the lobby opened. I slipped my notebook into my inside blazer pocket. A man in a gray suit and red tie and white shirt walked out.

“Duncan? Michael Hastings.”

We shook hands.

I still couldn’t place his accent—slightly British, though he was an American. He had doughboyish smooth skin, white with any easy sunburn, cheerful. He was in his late thirties or early forties, one of the new kind of public relations experts the Pentagon had employed: the beneficiary of the government’s aggressive push to privatize many functions in the war that had been done by uniformed military in the past.

“We have the Arc de Triomphe ceremony in an hour or so. I’ll introduce you to members of the team,” he said. “That’s Ray.” Duncan pointed to a twenty-eight-year-old Hispanic man in jeans and a T-shirt talking to the desk clerk.

Ray told me he set up communications for General McChrystal. He was a staff sergeant, and he’d worked for other generals. All the communications were encrypted, he told me, so they could send and receive top-secret information when they were traveling.

“We have to prevent against attacks,” he said. A number of foreign governments—both friendly and enemy—viewed trips like this as opportunities to spy, he explained. “We’re always getting attacked.”

“No shit?”

“Yeah, you should have seen the look on their faces at the desk when we told them we had to switch all the rooms yesterday. We couldn’t get the right satellite reception.” The French, or perhaps some other government, Ray suggested, had probably rigged the rooms that the hotel had reserved for them in order to spy on the general. It was an old trick: Book the Americans in the hotel room where the listening devices are set up. The South Koreans, in the eighties, were notorious for it; they’d book journalists on top of one another in the same hotel so the bugging wire
just had to run up and down one part of the building. A friend of mine, an American State Department official, had recently traveled to Islamabad, Pakistan. The official had wondered why he always got the same room in the luxury Serena Hotel—he initially thought it was because they liked him.

The doors to the lobby opened. A troop of green uniforms entered. It was jarring—American military uniforms in a European capital, in color, not black-and-white. Although military officials often traveled in civilian clothes when outside a war zone, they put on their most impressive outfits when they had official business to conduct. Dark forest-colored pants and blazers decorated with shiny gold buttons and colorful pins on the lapels, an inscrutable kaleidoscope of middle-aged merit badges—tiny silver parachutes, rifles, a rainbow’s worth of ribbons. I recognized McChrystal, with four gold stars on his shoulder.

As advertised from his press clippings, he was gaunt and lean. His slate blue eyes had this eerie capacity to drill down into your brain, especially if you fucked up or said something stupid. He reminded me of Christian Bale in
Rescue Dawn
, if Bale had spent a few more years in Vietcong captivity. McChrystal was unique, the first Special Forces soldier to have taken such a prominent battlefield command. Special Forces guys like him were called “snake-eaters.” It was considered a compliment.

For five years, McChrystal was America’s top hunter/killer, responsible for the deaths of hundreds of enemies, maybe terrorists, maybe a few civilians. He oversaw a network of prison camps in Iraq where detainees were regularly tortured—kept out in the cold, naked, covered in mud, with the occasional beating. He’d been credited with taking one of the biggest terrorist scalps of them all, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Zarqawi was killed in a strike in the summer of 2006 near Baqubah, Iraq. McChrystal’s teams had obsessively pursued him. “If we don’t get Zarqawi, we will be failures,” he had told his men a year earlier. After the attack killed
Zarqawi and seven others, McChrystal showed up at the destroyed safe house to inspect the damage himself. There wasn’t much left, just a couple of burnt pages from a copy of the Arabic edition of
Newsweek
and enough of a fingerprint to confirm it was the most wanted man in Iraq. President George W. Bush publicly thanked McChrystal, saying he had done excellent work, marking him as the nation’s most respectable assassin. Thanks to McChrystal’s dynamic reputation, President Obama had selected him for the top job in Afghanistan a year earlier, despite a number of other controversies in his career.

I got an adrenaline kick from meeting my subject.
Time
magazine’s runner-up for Person of the Year. The commanding general of the biggest war currently going on Earth. Stanley McChrystal, aliases Big Stan, the Pope, COMISAF (Commander of the International Security Assistance Force), The Boss, M4, Stan, General McChrystal, Sir. A “rock star,” as his staff liked to call him.

Duncan made the introduction.

“Michael is writing the article for
Rolling Stone
,” Duncan said.

“Thanks for having me, sir, it’s a real privilege,” I said.

“I don’t care about the article,” McChrystal said. “Just put me on the cover.”

I paused. He was joking, sort of. I wanted to come back with something funny. Or at least make an attempt at humor. I didn’t have a clue who was going to be on the cover, though. A writer rarely has a say in those decisions. The name Bono flashed through my mind. I reached for something a little more current…

“It’s between you and Lady Gaga, sir.”

His top staff stopped the cross talk. The moment had the potential
to get awkward. Had I stepped over the line? Was I being disrespectful? What was my deal? Who is this kid? How’s The Boss going to respond?

McChrystal looked at me and smiled. “Put me in the heart-shaped bathtub with Lady Gaga,” he said. “Maybe some rose petals. I just want to get on the cover so I can finally gain my son’s respect.” (His son was in a band.)

Everyone laughed.

McChrystal and the other generals headed upstairs to get ready for the ceremony, one hour away.