The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan (44 page)

The buttoned-up Gates is, at times, strangely subversive. He marches in a protest against Nixon’s bombing of Cambodia in 1970, during his first years at the CIA—Bob Gates in an antiwar rally! In his memoir, he reprints a flyer he’s found on a college campus, calling him a war criminal: W
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He likes to take digs at the general officers who flaunt around the Pentagon with bloated staffs—“brass creep,” he calls it. He tells folks that if you want to really know what he’s thinking, do what he did as a Soviet analyst: dissect his speeches. He is seriously, or at least as seriously as possible for a secretary of defense, going after the military’s own trillion-dollar-a-year defense budget—rare in Washington for someone to actually say, hey, we have too much power, take it away.

The White House, though, is sending signals—they’ve felt burned by the Pentagon. They are turning inward. Tom Donilon, a friend of Vice President Biden’s, is taking over as the national security advisor, a choice that Gates told Woodward would be a “disaster.” (Gates is the man Woodward talks to last, says a Pentagon official, which just shows how much power Gates truly has.) It’s a sign, subtly, of the feelings that Obama’s team has been burned by relying on outsiders, and by hiring Donilon they show they aren’t planning on making the same mistake again.

The McChrystal thing—that burns Gates up. In the days following McChrystal’s firing, he has to make calls to allied defense ministers, making nice, explaining no harm meant. He tells one NATO minister, “A journalist did in one day what the Taliban had failed to do.” It’s not a fair assessment, of course, but another sign of his frustration. Gates fires people all the time, for infractions of varying scale. He tosses McKiernan without a word of remorse. And at McChrystal’s retirement ceremony in July, Gates will bemoan the fact that Americans have lost a hero, someone
whose record of service is unmatched. (Forget Tillman, forget Camp Nama, forget the negative command climate…)

Gates will later say that he defended McChrystal so strongly because he thought doing otherwise would interrupt the flow of the mission—“the lightbulb went on—yes, [Petraeus] will work.” But more important, and what stings, is that McChrystal was
his
and Mullen’s recommendation to the president, and though he won’t say it publicly, on some level, it made him look bad. (The behavior in the story made Mullen “nearly sick,” the admiral will admit.)

Gates’s reservations about the war are privately surfacing—he’s focusing in on how to get out. Those qualms he had when looking at Afghanistan a year earlier—from the perspective of an analyst who followed the jihadists’ secret war against the Soviets there in the eighties—bubble up. That summer, the Defense Department commissions a report from U.S. military officials and diplomatic advisors to look at “end states”—in short, what the country will look like when we leave. A U.S. official who was asked for input on the document says it was “an attempt to get the withdrawal strategies.” But despite its “stay the course” rhetoric, even the Pentagon fears the war isn’t going well. One paper in the report provided to me describes a plan to split Afghanistan into seven regions, each centered around a major city, and to include both “insurgents” and “local strongmen” in the new regional governments. “This is not to sanction warlordism,” the paper explains, “but an acknowledgement that local strongmen have a part to play in the initial stage of rebalancing the state.”At a meeting in October, Gates is presented with the paper, according to Pentagon sources—they say that he reacts “positively” to the plan.

He keeps saying he’s leaving the office, but the date keeps getting pushed back. He’s finishing up his DoD bucket list. In December, he visits Afghanistan, flying around with General Petraeus. He hands out three silver stars. He consoles a unit that has just lost six men—maybe it doesn’t make a difference, maybe it does, just for the men to know that someone somewhere out there gives a shit. He hears an assessment from
a commander in the east: The fighting is heavy. Thirty-eight hundred insurgents killed or captured. Eight hundred and fifty bombs dropped. “Every single day in this valley, we are either dropping bombs or shooting Hellfire missiles, because this is a very, very kinetic fight,” a commander there tells him. He gives a speech to the soldiers: “I’m actually the guy that signs the orders and sends you over here, and I consider my highest priority to get you what you need to do the job, to complete your mission, and to come home safely,” he says. “I feel a personal responsibility for each and every one of you since I sent you here. I feel the sacrifice and hardship and losses more than you will ever imagine.” He’ll return home on the flight with soldiers finishing up their tours, something he’d been wanting to do before leaving office. He says what he’s seen has convinced him that the strategy “is working” and making “progress.”

But however the defense secretary describes what’s happening in Afghanistan publicly, every other independent assessment—by the Red Cross, the United Nations, an independent group of experts—says violence is at its worst.

In February, Gates makes one of his final trips to West Point. He is speaking to an audience of cadets, many who will be deploying to finish off the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Gates the Sovietologist spent days and nights in the seventies and eighties analyzing the Soviet leaders’ speeches, looking for clues, for signs—to divine the true mind-set of the leadership by reading between the lines. And what does Gates say in this speech? Gates, the man who has designed and overseen the last four years of the military fighting machine, the man who calls himself Secretary of War? “Any future secretary of defense who advises the president to again send a big American land army into the Middle East or Africa,” he tells the cadets, “should have their head examined.”

DECEMBER 2010, KANDAHAR

The motel in Kandahar was like a foreign language version of a Days Inn. It was called the Continental Guest House, its courtyard hidden behind a white and blue wall along one of the city’s busiest streets. I had a small room with one single bed, an old IBM desktop computer that didn’t work, and two space heaters. The shower and bathroom drain and toilet melded into one small porcelain cube. The motel provided rubber slippers to bathe in.

I felt like I was stuck in a limited release David Lynch movie—an atmosphere too strange and surreal for audiences to comprehend. A few doors down, three Filipino construction workers passed the days hanging laundry, waiting for work to start on the new American base they’d been hired to build outside the city. My Afghan bodyguard, Razzi, stayed in the room next to mine. He didn’t speak much English, but had a range of facial expressions to indicate who I shouldn’t trust. We ate each meal in a large dining room. The lighting was poor. I could barely see the food on the plate—bread, stew, rice, and cans of Diet Coke. At the meals,
none of the guests talked much, all staring down at their plates, except for an older Afghan man, an engineer.

The old man never gave me his name or his e-mail. He’d survived in Afghanistan since 1985 by giving his name to as few people as possible. In the early seventies, he’d attended a university in Florida. He hid the fact that he spoke English from most of his friends. He was in Kandahar to advise on another American construction project. He knew the score, and outlined the network of corruption during our first dinner. It all led to the local gangster in chief, Ahmed Wali Karzai—Hamid Karzai’s half brother—who lorded over Kandahar from his position as head of the provincial council.

Ahmed Wali, he explained, was a key player in the provinces’ booming drug network. Afghanistan was producing about four billion dollars of opium a year, and the industry was increasingly concentrated in the south of the country. There were all sorts of allegations, ranging from black tar heroin to hashish to opium to targeted assassinations. American military and diplomatic officials were well aware of Karzai’s business activities. They gave him a three-letter acronym, an honor given to foreigners who end up in lots of government reports. (OBL for Osama Bin Laden, AMZ for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, AWK for Ahmed Wali Karzai.) AWK was also on the CIA’s payroll. “My friend’s fourteen-year-old son was kidnapped,” the old man told me. “He went to see Ahmed Wali to get his son released. Ahmed Wali told him, I can’t help, but I can get the ransom lowered.”

Afghans I’d spoken to in Kabul believed Ahmed Wali had a hand in a string of assassinations. Finding evidence of that was difficult. However, Ahmed Wali was so blatantly corrupt that for a few months beginning in 2010, the Americans were actually thinking of arresting him or killing him. When AWK visited General Mike Flynn at ISAF headquarters, AWK “was really nervous, he thought he was going to get arrested,” Flynn told me. U.S. officials convened a series of meetings to figure out what to
do with AWK and a few others like him. Arrest them? Bring charges against him? Give him a slap on the wrist?

In the end, the Americans did nothing. Actually, that’s not quite accurate. They did do something—they fully embraced AWK and his cronies. After Petraeus took charge, he turned to a network of warlords, drug runners, and thieves known as the Afghan government to implement his strategy. Within weeks of assuming command, Petraeus had pushed through an ambitious program to create hundreds of local militias—essentially a neighborhood watch armed with AK-47s. Petraeus expanded the militia program from eighteen districts to more than sixty, and planned to ramp it up from ten thousand men to thirty thousand.

In Afghanistan, however, arming local militias meant, by definition, placing guns in the hands of some of the country’s most ruthless thugs, who ruled their territories with impunity. In the north, Petraeus relied on Atta Mohammed Noor, a notorious warlord-turned-governor considered to be one of the most powerful men in Afghanistan, to prepare militias for a long fight with the Taliban. Smaller militias in the region—which had been likened to an L.A. “gang” by their own American advisors—were also getting U.S. training. In the east, where violence had significantly increased, efforts to back local strongmen had already resulted in intertribal violence. And in Kandahar, Petraeus had given near-unconditional support to Ahmed Wali Karzai.

“The Americans have backed so many warlords in so many ways, it’s very hard to see how you unscramble the egg now,” John Matisonn, a former top UN official who left Kabul in June 2010, told me. “There has never been a strategy to get rid of the warlords, who are the key problem. The average Afghan hates them, whether they’re backed by the Taliban or the Americans. They see them as criminals. They know that the warlords are fundamentally undermining the rule of law.”

That was the reason I decided to go back to Kandahar: to try to get a sense of who those militia leaders were. What kind of men were we cutting deals with here? In Iraq, Petraeus had found weakened Sunni insurgent
leaders, gave them hundreds of millions of dollars, and pretended they were allies. What type of allies would he find in Afghanistan?

Before leaving Kabul a few days earlier, my security advisors warned me that whatever I did in Kandahar, I should stay within the city limits. I should certainly stay out of Arghandab, a district bordering the city where there was heavy fighting. After spending twenty-four hours in Kandahar, however, my translator, Fareed Ahmad, told me he’d arranged an interview with a militia in Arghandab.

Did I want to go?

“Yes,” I said. “If it’s safe.”

“It’s safe, it’s no problem. It is on the main road.”

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s do it then.”

My Afghan bodyguard, Razzi, didn’t like the plan.

“Mike,” he said, taking me aside. “Do you know this translator?”

“No,” I said. “But he’s highly recommended from a friend.”

“You trust him?”

“Trust is a strong word.”

My translator shook his head.

“He say it is safe,” Razzi told me. “It is very danger. He’s doing this for—” and Razzi made the international symbol for money, rubbing his thumb and middle finger together. (Ahmad would get twice as much per day if he traveled with me outside the city.)

“Fuck it, man, I know what you’re saying, but this is what I’m here for.”

I had reservations about going. I knew my security advisors wouldn’t be happy that within one day I was already ignoring their advice. I knew that the risks weren’t worth the payoff. But I felt the pressure to get a good story and I’d traveled down to this shithole of a city. I wasn’t just going to stay in my hotel, self-aware enough to know I was behaving in the classic war junkie fashion.

And so I found myself driving along a road from Kandahar to Herat in a white Toyota Corolla, thinking, You never put yourself in these situations, but you always seem to find yourself in them. Thinking of it as
something out of my control decreased the blame—and there is plenty of blame if things go wrong, and it’s all blame on me. I know it’s a risk, I know it’s a rush, I know it’s not a healthy lifestyle. I know it’s an addiction; I know it’s the wrong week to quit sniffing glue. As the old Afghan contractor had said—and I knew this without his saying it—if something goes wrong, if I get kidnapped, it’s my Afghan driver, translator, and bodyguard who will be immediately killed. They’re not worth the trouble of a ransom. As an American journalist, however, I was more or less a walking dollar sign.