The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan (47 page)

Petraeus and his staff are squaring off against a handful of key players in the White House—“the optimists versus the pessimists,” as one U.S. official who worked on the review puts it. The metrics used to judge progress in Afghanistan are classified, U.S. officials familiar with the review say. Petraeus is focusing on a few key statistics to make his case: the growing number of Taliban commanders being killed and captured, the drop in average age of a typical Taliban commander (meaning they were killing more of them), evidence that the local population is becoming more receptive to U.S. troops, and signs that more Taliban fighters are joining the government. Military commanders in Afghanistan also stress what they see as security gains in Kandahar and Helmand provinces.

The intelligence community isn’t buying Petraeus’s spin about progress, and its new national intelligence estimate (NIE)—a document that distills the insights of the nation’s seventeen intelligence agencies—threatens to repeat the “grim” assessment it had offered two years earlier to General David McKiernan. So the general sets out to remake the NIE to his liking. “Petraeus and his staff completely rewrote it,” says a U.S. official with direct knowledge of the assessment, which remains classified. Every time the CIA or the NSC cited something negative, Petraeus pushed to include something positive. “There was much more back and forth between the military and the intelligence community than usual,” says another
official who has read the NIE. “The draft I saw reflected this debate.”

Petraeus wants more time. He continues to walk back from the July 2011 deadline. Petraeus says it’s not a “sure thing” that the war would be over by 2014.

Petraeus steps up the violence. He drastically ups the number of airstrikes, launching more than 3,450 between July and November, the most since the invasion in 2001. He introduces U.S. tanks into the battle, unleashes Apache and Kiowa attack helicopters, and triples the number of night raids by Special Forces, killing and capturing thousands of insurgents. At the briefings every morning, Al-Qaeda, says one senior military official, is almost never mentioned. More shockingly, Petraeus signs off on the total leveling of a small town in southern Afghanistan, Tarok Kolache. Commanders on the ground will claim that it is “Taliban infested” and that it required forty-nine thousand and two hundred pounds of bombs to level it. They say there were no civilian casualties, as all the residents had been cleared before the explosives went off. They say they are going to rebuild the town immediately. The pictures of the village reveal a before and after like the war has never seen, a mini–shock and awe. An entire village wiped out, and then given one million taxpayer dollars to rebuild it. A blogger who accompanies the unit will dismiss one Afghan man’s complaints about the destruction of his house as a “fit of theatrics.” This blogger is a Petraeus protégé and is also working on a biography about him.

Petraeus is looking to find his groove on the diplomatic side. He’s not getting much help from Eikenberry. Eikenberry tells his staff in December that he’s on his way out. Eikenberry is extremely unpopular within the military and within the embassy, and has been almost totally ineffective. He’s been a constant critic of Petraeus’s plan, and U.S. officials familiar with the relationship between the general and the ambassador describe it as “lukewarm” and “so-so.” Eikenberry is in a downward slide that began after two top secret cables were published in January 2009 in
The New York Times
, followed by the release of WikiLeaks cables later in the year in which he criticizes Karzai, as well as calling Karzai “off his meds” and a possible manic depressive in Woodward’s book. One State Department official in Kabul describes the atmosphere at the U.S. embassy as “rudderless,” with many of Eikenberry’s top deputies operating in a “micromanaged culture of fear.”

Even Eikenberry’s own people have been telling the White House he’s useless. In October, a senior official from the embassy met in Washington with General Doug Lute, a top player at the National Security Council, and told him that Eikenberry’s relationship with Karzai is “completely destroyed.” U.S. officials describe Eikenberry’s tenure as one of the great
tragedies of the war—that a man widely respected for his knowledge of Afghanistan was unable to stop a military strategy he knew was destined to fail.

In Kabul, rumors of Eikenberry’s imminent departure abound; a former U.S. ambassador came just short of publicly calling for his resignation, a sentiment that Afghan officials express privately. Petraeus needs a diplomatic partner he can work with, like he did with Ambassador Ryan Crocker in Baghdad. Petraeus needs someone to act as counterweight. He once joked that Holbrooke was his “wingman.” Holbrooke found this amusing, but thought it was also misguided: “Since when did a diplomat become the general’s wingman?” he said to his friends. “It should be the other way around.”

On December 16, President Obama gives a speech about the review. The final report, in fact, says almost nothing. We are making progress, but that progress is fragile and reversible. We have broken the momentum of the Taliban, but there will still be heavy fighting with the Taliban next year. The troops are going to start coming home soon, but they aren’t going to start coming home soon. We aren’t “nation-building,” the president says, though we’re committed to be in Afghanistan past 2014 to build its nation. It was, in the end, a nonreview review, which suits Petraeus just fine, giving him more time to shape the outcome not just in Kabul and Kandahar, but in Washington. Petraeus will tell an interviewer, he’s not looking for “a graceful exit.”

At another meeting in the fall, one of Petraeus’s top generals briefs on anticorruption in the Yellow Building at ISAF headquarters. Billions of dollars in cash, the country dominated by a “criminal oligarchy of politically connected businessman,” according to one study.

(The latest: Kabul Bank, once a highlight of progress, turns out to be one of the largest scams going, reaching the highest levels of government. The Americans know all about the scandal. They have the wiretaps and electronic intercepts of the Afghan players, “acting all like the Godfather,”
says one U.S. official who is familiar with the intelligence, “talking about payoffs and how they’re going to fuck the other partners.”)

One participant in the meeting suggests the White House has a different view of the corruption problem. “The White House doesn’t always understand the reality on the ground,” Petraeus explains to those gathered at the briefing.

Yes, only Petraeus understands the reality on the ground. It’s his reality. He wants to repeat his success in Iraq. That was a success made out of shaping the narrative as much as any tactical success. Or, as one U.S. military official put it to me, “If anyone can spin their way out of this war, it’s Petraeus.”

Petraeus keeps claiming progress, despite the fact that violence keeps going up. In 2011, February, April, May, and June all have record levels of violence. Petraeus explains that violence is going up because that’s what happens when you send soldiers to fight in areas that they weren’t in before. This is true, but it provides a convenient win-win situation: If violence goes up, it’s progress. If violence goes down, it’s progress. So sayeth Petraeus.

Petraeus is tired. How can he not be tired? How can he not feel the stress and the pressure of the grueling days? “Petraeus hates Afghanistan,” says an Afghan official who has worked with him. Petraeus is already looking for his out. He talks with Bob Gates about becoming the head of the CIA. He can get out of his uniform and get into Washington. He can be at the heart of the intelligence community; he can make the transformation of the CIA from an intelligence gathering unit to a DoD-like paramilitary organization complete. In April, President Obama announces Petraeus will become his next CIA chief. In June, he returns home, his tour in Afghanistan complete. In August, a retirement ceremony is held for him. No top White House officials attend. By nearly all accounts, Petraeus has exited gracefully.

DECEMBER 17, 2010, SPIN BOLDAK

We’d left early in the morning to get to the interview. It was a ninety-minute drive from Kandahar, heading toward the Pakistan border. I’d hired two cars for the trip—one that I’d be in, and the other to drive ahead to look out for any problems. If one car broke down, we’d have a backup, too. The two-lane road was nicely paved with very few potholes. It was the nicest road I’d ever seen in Afghanistan. My translator and bodyguard argued over the reasons for it.

“The Americans built this road,” my bodyguard, Kazzi, said, “so they can invade Pakistan.”

“The Americans built this road,” Fareed Ahmad countered, “so Pakistan can invade Afghanistan.”

We arrived in the town of Spin Boldak and pulled off into a walled compound. Originally, I had wanted to see Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president’s half brother, but he was in Dubai for the week, unsurprisingly. Instead, we’d lined up a meeting with the young warlord Abdul Razzik. An American spy balloon hovered to the east, keeping watch on the border. The United States was building a new base in the area, and there was
another small outpost that my translator mysteriously referred to as the Blackwater base, though I couldn’t figure out why—it seemed like it was just another compound for a military contracting business. Afghan guards waved us through a set of Hesco barriers and we were brought into an office to wait for Razzik to arrive. He got there fifteen minutes later.

“General Petraeus and I have very similar opinions,” Razzik said, taking a seat in his office along the wall. “I want to kill the Taliban, he wants to kill the Taliban.” At just under five feet nine, the thirty-four-year-old—turning thirty-five soon, he said—was a bundle of charisma and charm. A beard, a sly smile, camouflage desert fatigues with a head of hat hair, all vibe and innate confidence and uncanny warmth. A picture of Afghan president Hamid Karzai hung above a desk empty of papers, and there was a black desktop Dell computer that was switched off—Razzik didn’t know how to read anyway, so paper and the Internet would just get in the way of his work, which was basically kicking Taliban ass by any means necessary. From most accounts, he’d been doing a pretty bang-up job of it lately, leading a series of operations around the country’s most dangerous province. “We don’t take prisoners—if they are trying to kill me, I will try to kill them. That’s how I order my men,” he tells me. He paused, perhaps his recent American public relations training kicking in. “If they submit, and say they made a mistake, then yes, we will take them prisoner.”

Razzik ran Spin Boldak, the Afghan border town, which also happened to be one of the most lucrative spots to make a buck—an estimated three hundred thousand dollars passed through each day, easy money to skim for an ambitious border chief, which Razzik most certainly was. Since Petraeus took over command, his influence had expanded well beyond his hometown into Afghanistan’s second largest city, Kandahar. He’s one of the reasons for the lull in violence I keep hearing about, according to U.S. and Afghan officials. I’d scheduled an interview with him because of his skyrocketing star status, topped off with a visit
this past fall from Petraeus himself. The two men got along swimmingly, according to Razzik’s account, meeting for an hour and a half and exchanging ideas on both the security situation and the lack of potential for peace in Afghanistan. (“How can we have peace talks while the Taliban are still killing tribal elders and women and children?” Razzik tells me, another point on which he says Petraeus agreed.) It was the second time he’d met Petraeus—the first was when Petraeus was “just a three-star,” he says—and now, despite his official rank of colonel, Razzik calls himself a general, too.

Razzik is the on-steroids version of the Afghan Local Police, the name for the militia program that Mohammed Nabi is a part of. If you were going to make a movie of Colonel Razzik’s life—which actually is incredibly cinematic—you could call it
Afghanistan Gangster
, attaching Ridley Scott as the director. Razzik would be in the Denzel Washington role—maybe Petraeus or one of Razzik’s Special Forces buddies could get Russell Crowe to stand in for him. As the men’s two life stories intertwine, connected by a war that shaped their existence, giving each a rise to fame and fortune, the audience would be left pondering the differences and similarities between the two men.

The film would open with the major trauma of Razzik’s life: In 1995, his uncle was killed fighting the Taliban, and his eleven-year-old brother was taken prisoner. While many of the anti-Taliban forces fled to Pakistan, Razzik decided to stay in the country and fight, hiding in the sandy mountains south of town, taken in and hidden by shepherds of his own tribe. He then snuck up to Kabul, where he fought for a few months alongside Afghan hero Ahmad Shah Massoud before leaving town to fight in Herat against the Taliban, in western Afghanistan. In Herat, his leaders also decided to turn tail—they fled to Iran. Again, Razzik refused to leave his own country. (“Iran and Pakistan are our enemies; why would I go there?” he tells me.) He returned home in a white Toyota Corolla, which the Taliban took from him just a few miles outside Spin Boldak. He had to walk another two kilometers before a rickshaw picked him up
and took him the rest of the way to his relatives. He swore then to pick up arms and fight against the Taliban if he ever had the chance—the U.S. invasion after September 11 would give him that. It’s here where the official version of his story gets a bit blurry: How did a twentysomething Afghan become one of the most powerful figures in the province?

In 2002, he was named chief of the border police in Spin Boldak, thanks in part to his tribal connections. The Achekizai tribe had run the border for decades and had allied themselves with the Soviets during the eighties. With Hamid Karzai—and Ahmed Wali Karzai, provincial chief of Kandahar, and Gul Agha Sherzai, then governor—as his patrons, he consolidated his power, creating one of the most stable districts in Afghanistan. It was a vital district as well, as NATO supplies and other goods from Pakistan come across the border daily. (As Razzik points out, not a single NATO serviceman has been killed in Spin Boldak.) U.S. military and diplomatic officials started to believe that he had become a central figure in a large-scale drug ring, shipping illegal narcotics over the border. More disturbing reports filtered up the chain of command, concerning executions and “indiscriminate tactics against men, women, children,” as one human rights official put it.