The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan (38 page)

The next day, Karzai visits the White House for a sit-down meeting with Obama, Biden, and their top advisors. Karzai goes on at length, reminiscing about his love for Afghanistan. He also starts defending his brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai. He’s a businessman, Karzai explains. “He’s innocent,” Karzai tells Obama. (“I was with him up until he said
innocent
,” McChrystal will tell his staff later. “I think he went a little too far with
innocent
.”) McChrystal explains to the president the plan for the upcoming operation in Kandahar. Biden is shocked: “This looks like CT-Plus,” he exclaims at the meeting. Counterterrorism plus, the plan that Biden had recommended from the beginning, which called for far fewer troops and no nation-building. White House officials are also confused: What McChrystal is doing in Kandahar doesn’t seem to be what he’d
promised the White House earlier. He doesn’t impress them—and it will be held against him a few weeks later.

After the meeting, Karzai and Obama hold a press conference. The White House press corps fills up the rows of seats, with a few additions. Afghan journalists on the trip to cover Karzai’s visit. A female Afghan reporter is excited to be there: She’s walking around, taking pictures of herself in the White House. The Washington press corps is not amused—there are a few hisses for her to sit down, to take her seat, she’s getting in the way of the camera shots.

There is nothing to shoot yet: Obama and Karzai haven’t entered the room.

A reporter from NBC News stands up, staring directly into a camera seven seats away, and delivers an unbroken monologue about what to expect.

Important visit. Mending fences. Rebuilding relationships. The reset button.

McChrystal, Hillary, Mullen, Gates, and Eikenberry come in through the side door and sit down in the front row.

The Afghan journalist is still walking around—she again tries the patience of the American press corps.

“Get down, sit down,” cameramen yell at her.

She sits down.

The two men walk in. The room erupts in the clicks and clacks of cameras capturing every step to the two podiums.

Obama—he’s gotten older. He’s aged. He’s graying. He’s different from the junior senator I saw four years ago in Baghdad. He was on his first trip to Iraq then. He’d come into the U.S. embassy and had a press conference with reporters stationed in the capital. It was January of 2006, and only a handful of reporters showed up. After the press conference, Obama asks the reporters if we want to stay and have a private chat. We agree; the journalists sit down in a semicircle around him.

“Tell me what’s really going on,” he says.

A journalist from
The New York Times
tells him that the situation is as bad as we said it is in the newspapers and magazines. He makes a personal connection with us. It works. I got a picture with him after the press conference was over.

The Obama at the podium is changed. It’s been a long four years.

Karzai stumbles as he speaks. He hasn’t prepared a speech. He thanks everyone for their hospitality and then rambles on with sentence after sentence of platitudes.

Obama gives his remarks.

He points out that he didn’t become president to have “civilian casualties,” as if his only relationship with the war in Afghanistan is how it relates to his political career, as a writer from
Harper’s Magazine
will later note.

“There is no denying progress,” he says, “as I saw lights across Kabul when I landed, lights that would not have been visible just a few years earlier.”

It’s what Donald Rumsfeld and other Republican officials used to say about Baghdad, when that war was going horribly wrong. From a few thousand feet above, the lights are twinkling and everything looks fine. “It was one of our first impressions,” one GOP official said in 2006, after landing in Baghdad at the height of the sectarian violence. “So many lights shining brightly.” So it is to the language of the Iraq War that the Obama administration has turned—talk of progress, of city lights, of metrics like health care and education. Rhetoric that just a few years ago they would have mocked.

“We are steadily making progress,” he says.

Does Obama really believe in the war? McChrystal and his team have their doubts. This press conference is a chore. No passion. One of the reasons he agreed to the escalation in Afghanistan was because he felt he would be politically vulnerable if he didn’t—he might look weak on national security, he couldn’t overrule his generals. He is allied on this issue mostly with Republicans, people who don’t like him and are never going to support him anyway. The stresses of power, the push and pull from the Pentagon had forced him, or he forced himself, to abandon his antiwar supporters. Did he really go along with a war he didn’t believe we could win so he wouldn’t get criticized for losing it?

Inside the W Hotel

The press conference ends and Karzai and Obama walk offstage.

McChrystal and his team are working out of the W Hotel, a corner suite on the tenth floor, a block down from where Karzai is staying. Earlier in the week, General Flynn and Jake had discussed the trip so far.

“You want to go meet with the NSC?” Jake asked him.

“No,” Flynn groans. “Do I have to? Is it Jones?”

“No, it’s not Jones,” says Jake.

“Then no, I don’t want to.”

Flynn leans back in his chair. He’s frustrated. Less than seventy-two hours in DC, and no one gets it.

“It’s like they don’t even know there’s a war on,” he says.

After the meeting at the White House with Obama and Karzai, McChrystal arrives at the W and takes his seat at the head of the table to confer with his staff. “Okay, guys,” McChrystal says, and the meeting begins.

McChrystal reviews a new plan to supply $200 million worth of diesel generators to Kandahar. He says that Holbrooke wants to be at the head of it, but he’d rather have his own military commander in Kandahar handle it. “Let’s not get brought into the palace politics on this one,” he says. McChrystal talks about the meeting Obama had with Karzai. He
spoke for thirty minutes about what it means to be an Afghan, McChrystal says, adding, Obama “hit every talking point they had given him.”

“How’d the press conference go?” another staffer asks.

“Obama sounded stronger in the press conference than he’s sounded before,” McChrystal says.

“Like he’s in charge,” Jake says.

“Yeah,” McChrystal answers.

At least Obama now sounded like he believed in the war, at least compared to West Point, the team thinks. More important, though, despite Obama having said in his speech that he wasn’t going to do nation-building, the U.S. policy had shifted to nation-building, of handing out generators in Kandahar, what Secretary Clinton called a long and enduring partnership. A year after taking command, McChrystal has gotten exactly what he wanted from the president. His team had filled the policy vacuum, had sensed hesitancy, and rammed through the strategy they’d dreamed up. One senior military official on McChrystal’s staff privately disagrees with the assessment on Karzai and Obama, however. He doesn’t think the relationship between the United States and Karzai is stable at all. “This is just a honeymoon period,” he tells me. “I doubt if it’s going to last two weeks.”

 MAY 14 TO JUNE 23, 2010, WASHINGTON, DC; WEST POINT; MILTON, VERMONT; AND KANDAHAR

The plan: Come interview the general. Meet us in Paris.

Volcano. Booze. Bus trip. Yikes.

New plan: Follow us to Berlin. Fuck it, let’s do Kandahar and Kabul. Join us in Washington, DC.

The vision: McChrystal on the cover of
Rolling Stone
. McChrystal holding his nunchuks. A close-up of McChrystal’s face, half in shadow, half in the light. The life lived in secrets and death etched in wrinkles. McChrystal is a rock star. McChrystal is cool. McChrystal is a warrior poet, a philosopher, a risk taker, a snake eater. McChrystal is badass. McChrystal is wild&crazy&serious&sober. McChrystal drinks hard. McChrystal pays attention. McChrystal’s kid has a blue Mohawk. McChrystal is Patton, is MacArthur, is Sherman, is Grant, is Big Man historic. McChrystal is in
Rolling Stone
to speak to the twentysomething lieutenants and captains who are out there fighting his war. How could you not fall in love with him? How could you not see what we see? How could you not swoon? How could you not write a 110 percent blowjob profile that just plainly fucking rocked? Earn it.

I’d spent the week in Washington, interviewing State Department and White House officials and hanging out with McChrystal’s staff. The deadline for my story was a week away. I’d picked up another vibe in Washington, DC: Officials in the White House weren’t as enamored with McChrystal as those in the Pentagon. They were still pissed about the leak of the strategic assessment and the failure to explain the rationale of the Kandahar offensive to the president and his staff. I had seventy pages of single-spaced notes, over twenty hours of audio recordings, and I was still riding high from the monthlong assignment. I’d rented a car in Washington and planned to drive back home to Vermont, stopping at West Point along the way to look at McChrystal’s old yearbooks.

I met with Duncan outside the W Hotel. He was on his way to pick up
New York Times
columnist Tom Friedman. Friedman was a friend of McChrystal’s, and the most influential foreign policy columnist in the country. “When I took over the job,” McChrystal had told me, “Tom said, ‘You’re going to hear a lot of criticism. Don’t pay attention to the bullshit.’ ”

As I joined him on the walk to meet Friedman, Duncan said he had a few issues he wanted to raise.

“There’s concern that you might write about the night in Paris, any offhand comments they might have made about our allies and, you know, about others in the administration and, you know, the soldiers in Kandahar.”

I told him I was going to write about all those things and that he had known that all along.

He chastised me, asking me not to go too hard.

“Remember,” he said. “We have a war to win.”

Friedman came out of his hotel. I introduced myself to him, and he told me to call him if I wanted any other perspectives on McChrystal.

I picked up a rental car at Union Station and drove five hours to West Point, near Highland Falls, New York. I spent the next day at the West Point library, where I found writings of the young Stanley McChrystal. I couldn’t believe the stories he’d written—a weird case of life imitating juvenilia. Over thirty years earlier, he’d written fictional accounts of themes that he’d find playing out in Afghanistan, like that of a young soldier yelling at his commander about the injustice of counterinsurgency. It was a scene that I’d seen replayed at JFM two weeks earlier, yet in the real-life version, McChrystal was the one getting yelled at. He’d also written an editorial about why it was a bad idea for women to be allowed at the academy and published an issue of his literary magazine all in pink to mock the decision. Before leaving, I went to get a look at “the Area,” the courtyard where cadets who’d earned demerits had to walk off their punishment. McChrystal and many others had spent hours of their lives pacing this block of concrete. A lone cadet stood there, walking back and forth.

I got home to Vermont. I wrote the first draft of the story in forty-eight hours, sending a rambling fifteen thousand words to my editor, Eric Bates. The draft expressed my conflicting feelings—I’d liked hanging out with McChrystal and his team, yet I hated the war. Everything that I’d seen and heard and knew about the war would not reflect well on them—they were an unchecked force, steamrolling the civilian leadership,
flipping them the giant bird along the way. What they told me, I realized, revealed the attitudes behind one of the most brazen assaults on civilian control of the military that the Pentagon’s generals had ever attempted. Not that I didn’t think all of their complaints were unjustified— if I were in their shoes, I’d probably be pissed if I thought that the civilians who gave the orders didn’t actually appear to be committed to the war. On the other hand, McChrystal and other military officials had pushed Obama to get the mission they wanted. In Iraq, the generals could always blame Bush and Rumsfeld for starting the war—they just followed orders. Not so here: Though Obama had pushed fixing the war in Afghanistan during the campaign as a slap at Bush, he wouldn’t have gotten much support if he had campaigned on tripling the size of the conflict. Obama resisted doing so, but the military leadership pushed hard and played dirty to get the war in Afghanistan they wanted. It shouldn’t have come as much of a shock to McChrystal and his team that after getting politically jujitsued the White House would be less than enthusiastic.