The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan (49 page)

Over the next few months, Biden quietly presses the president to change the mission in Afghanistan, to get as far as possible away from the decade-long nation-building commitment that Petraeus wants and to the counterterrorism proposal he’d advocated for two years earlier. White House officials start to make the case: The surge worked, let’s declare victory and go home.

There’s an increasing confidence within the White House. They help to rehabilitate Stanley McChrystal’s image, appointing him to lead a high-profile initiative supporting military families—no need to have a potential voice criticizing the administration in the upcoming election, either. McChrystal spends his first fall out of the United States military teaching at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. The students love him. One morning, as he gets off the train, he bumps into a professor who’s jogging. The professor recognizes him. “General McChrystal,” the professor says. “Don’t call me general. I’m Stan, I got fired,” McChrystal jokes. There is a controversy when a screening of a documentary about Pat Tillman is scheduled to air; the Yale College Democrats back away from endorsing it. He starts up a consulting company, the McChrystal Group. He names Dave Silverman as his cofounder and CEO. He signs up with a speaker’s bureau, and he’s reportedly getting $60,000 a speaking engagement. He gets a slot on the board of JetBlue. He allows another profile of him to be written by a
Yale Daily News
reporter, giving her full access to his classroom. The profile opens with McChrystal arriving at the classroom an hour and twenty minutes early, now as fully dedicated to his new teaching gig as he was to the missions he commanded in war.

In February, he gives a speech with Greg Mortenson at Yale. In March, he gives another speech at the prestigious TED conference in Long Beach, California. He talks about leadership and the Middle East. He gets a standing ovation.

On April 8, the Defense Department investigation into McChrystal and his staff is completed. The investigators didn’t talk to McChrystal or
Rolling Stone
. The investigation reads comically—no one the investigators spoke to admits to saying what they said, but they also don’t admit to the quotes not having been said. It also contradicts the findings of the earlier Army investigation. “In some instances, we found no witness who acknowledged making or hearing the comments as reported. In other instances, we confirmed that the general substance of the incident at issue occurred, but not in the exact context described in the article,” the report states. McChrystal says he doesn’t remember hearing the “bite me” response (though he laughed when he heard it). Jake McFerren doesn’t admit to saying it. Witnesses deny that McChrystal shared his private interactions with Obama, offering that McChrystal considered the “contents of his discussions [with the president] sacrosanct.” (Though I had witnessed him share the contents of those discussions with his staff, and he’d shared them with me as well.) Charlie Flynn wouldn’t admit to McChrystal having given him the middle finger, though if he had, “it would not have been a failure by GEN McChrystal to treat his executive officer with dignity or respect,” the report says. Dave Silverman wouldn’t admit to calling the French “fucking gay,” though the report concludes “witnesses testified the comment was not directed toward any French official, or toward French government or military.” The report found “insufficient evidence” that they called themselves “Team America.” (Though Dave, Casey, Duncan, and a few others on his staff had called themselves that.) In a section of the report titled “Conduct at Kitty O’Shea’s,” the report concludes: “Our analysis of witness testimony led us to conclude that the behavior of GEN McChrystal and his staff at Kitty O’Shea’s, while celebratory, was not drunken, disorderly, disgraceful, or offensive.”

It is the last whitewash of McChrystal’s military career.

Two days after the report is finished, the White House announces that President Obama appointed McChrystal as an unpaid advisor to military families. Mary Tillman, Pat Tillman’s mother, is outraged. “It’s a slap in the face to all soldiers,” she says of the choice. “He deliberately helped
cover up Pat’s death. And he has never adequately apologized to us.” In the following months, McChrystal will sit down and give off-the-record interviews to a number of high-profile journalists. He’ll tell one television pundit that the generals in the Pentagon don’t trust the White House. In another talk, he’ll say that if he were Obama, he’d have fired himself “several times,” while describing Afghanistan as stuck “in some kind of post-apocalyptic nightmare.” In the fall of 2011, on the tenth anniversary of the war, he tells the Council on Foreign Relations the war is just “a little better than 50 percent” done. General Michael Flynn takes a job in intelligence analysis back at the Pentagon, and gets his third star. His brother Charlie gets a promotion to general, too. Duncan Boothby moves to DC, determined to continue his career. The family of Sergeant Michael Ingram will set up a foundation in his honor called Mikie’s Minutes, which donates calling cards to troops serving in Afghanistan.

In Afghanistan, both the UN and International Red Cross say that violence is the worst it has been in nine years, and security across the country is deteriorating. A group of highly respected academics and Afghanistan experts publish an open letter to President Obama, saying that negotiating, not an increase in military operations, is the only way out. “We are losing the battle for hearts and minds,” the experts write. “What was supposed to be a population centered strategy is now a full-scale military campaign causing civilian casualties and destruction of property.”

On July 12, Ahmed Wali Karzai is assassinated. Military officials try to put a positive spin on it, saying now a “more constructive local leadership” can take his place. Fifteen days later, Mayor Ghulam Hamidi, who I had interviewed months before in Kandahar, is also killed.

In Washington, political pressure to get out is building. According to the latest poll, 64 percent of Americans—a record level—don’t think the war is worth fighting. On Capitol Hill, 204 congressmen voted against funding for the war last year, up from 109 in 2010. A host of think tanks express serious doubts: The left-leaning Center for American Progress is calling for an “accelerated withdrawal,” and the bipartisan Council on
Foreign Relations has concluded that “at best, the margin for U.S. victory is likely to be slim.”

In late February, President Obama meets with his national security team in the White House room. Hillary is there, Doug Lute is there, Tom Donilon, Bob Gates, Admiral Mullen. The topic of discussion: negotiations with the Taliban. They want to start with secret, high-level talks as quickly as possible. Lute says that the current strategy is no longer tenable. They discuss possible places to negotiate: Turkey and Saudi Arabia are the two biggest contenders. They can’t make the missteps of the past summer, when they were duped into giving millions to a Taliban impostor. It signals a significant change—finally, after years of expensive and fruitless fighting, plans to negotiate. At the meeting, Vice President Joe Biden comes in with about five minutes left, according to sources familiar with the meeting. He’s exuding confidence, White House officials tell me, sure that he’s been proven right by history. The plan Biden had called for a year earlier is the plan that the Pentagon is going to be forced to adopt.

It only took an additional 711 American lives and 2,777 Afghan lives for the White House to arrive at this conclusion.

July 2011 is approaching. That’s the date Obama promised to start bringing troops home. In June, he holds a series of meeting with Petraeus. Obama tells Gates and Mullen to warn Petraeus—no leaks this time, no getting fucked by the press. No repeat of the “Seven Days in May dynamic” of 2009, says one national security official to a reporter—a reference to the film about American military generals staging a coup against the president. Petraeus is playing nice. Obama meets with Petraeus three times—he wants options for the drawdown. Petraeus suggests keeping the thirty thousand troops until the end of 2012. Petraeus wants to move the troops to eastern Afghanistan, where the fighting has gotten worse. Obama shuts the door on the plan. He says he’s going to bring ten thousand home by the end of the year, and twenty thousand more home by the end of the summer of 2012. Petraeus’s allies complain
to the press, and the next general in charge of the war, General John Allen, will go on the record to say that the president isn’t following the military’s advice. What the president decided, says Allen, “was a more aggressive [drawdown] option than which was presented,” and “was not” what Petraeus had recommended.

This time, though, the charges don’t stick. Obama has regained control of his policy from the Pentagon. The war is too unpopular, the myth of progress too obviously a lie.

Obama gives a speech on June 24, 2011, announcing his decision to start the drawdown. “The tide of war is receding,” he says. “It’s time to focus on nation-building here at home.”

MAY 1, 2011, WASHINGTON, DC

The car horns sounded like victory. I could hear them blaring from my apartment. Osama Bin Laden was dead. We’d killed him.

I sent a message to a friend in the intelligence community who’d been working on finding Bin Laden for the last five years. “God Bless America and God bless those who kept up the vigil,” he replied. A former soldier who’d lost both his feet in Iraq texted me: “We got Bin Laden!” I went on Twitter and sent my congratulations to the president and his staff who’d pulled off the operation. A few blocks from my apartment, crowds gathered in front of the White House to cheer. I didn’t join them.

The details of Bin Laden’s killing would trickle out over the days ahead. The White House would lift its curtain to provide reporters with the dramatic scenes of bureaucratic decision making. On Sunday morning, Obama plays only nine holes of golf, nervous about the mission he ordered the previous night. In the afternoon, he gathered in the situation room at the White House with his national security team. Biden played with a rosary ring he had in his pocket; Admiral Mullen had his own. Hillary put her hands up over her mouth as the White House photographer
took pictures—her face is an expression of terror, what she later claimed was allergies. After they had been watching the video feed for forty minutes, the Navy SEAL team sent back the word for success: Geronimo. Obama turned to his team: “We got him.”

I was in New York City on September 11, 2001, a senior in college. After the towers collapsed, I walked ninety-five blocks to get as close to Ground Zero as possible so I could see firsthand the destruction that would define our future. By the time I got to Baghdad four years later, very few Americans believed that the people we were fighting in Iraq posed a threat to the United States. Even the military press didn’t bother lying about it anymore, referring to our enemies as “insurgents” rather than “terrorists.” A woman I loved was killed in Baghdad in January 2007—Al-Qaeda in Iraq took credit for it—and my younger brother fought for fifteen months as an infantry platoon leader, earning a Bronze Star. Other friends—both Americans and Iraqis—suffered their own losses, living without limbs, loved ones, and in exile without homes.

By the fall of 2008, when I had moved on to Afghanistan, Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda were barely footnotes to what we were doing there. “It’s not about Bin Laden,” a military intelligence official told me. “It’s about fixing the mess.” If it wasn’t about Bin Laden, then what the fuck was it about? Why were we fighting wars that took us no closer to the man responsible for unleashing the horror of September 11? When I traveled with McChrystal, I was shocked when General Michael Flynn had told me that he didn’t think we’d ever get Bin Laden. Yet each time our presidents and generals told us why we were still fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, they always used Bin Laden and September 11 as an excuse. As long as they insisted on fighting these wars we didn’t need to fight, the wound to the American psyche wasn’t allowed to heal.

Right from the start, the idea of the War on Terror was a fuzzy one at best. We were promised there would be no “battlefields or beachheads,” as President George W. Bush put it. It would be a secret war, conducted mostly in the dark, no holds barred. And that’s how it might have played
had we gotten Bin Laden early on, dead or alive. But that’s not what happened. Instead, we went on a rampage in the full light of day. We got our battlefields and beachheads after all. Kabul, Kandahar, Baghdad, Fallujah, Ramadi, Najaf, Mosul, Kirkuk, Basra, Kabul and Kandahar again—the list went on and on. We couldn’t find Bin Laden, so we went after anyone who looked like him.

Bin Laden’s death revealed the biggest lie of the war, the “safe haven” myth, Afghanistan’s version of WMDs. The concept of waging an extremely expensive and bloody counterinsurgency campaign to prevent safe havens never truly made sense. Terrorists didn’t need countries. Bin Laden had been killed in Pakistan, an American ally and recipient of $20 billion in foreign aid since 2001. He had lived out in the open in a suburb of Islamabad, a five-minute walk from a Pakistani military training academy. The majority of terrorist attacks against the West had been planned over the past decade not from Afghanistan, but from other countries and our own—Yemen, Nigeria, Somalia, Indonesia, Pakistan, Connecticut, Texas, and London. Worse, rather than decreasing the threat of terrorism, our large-scale troop interventions spawned an unprecedented level of suicide bombers—there were more than twenty times more suicide bombings in the past ten years than there had been in the previous three decades. We’d been fighting the wrong war, in the wrong way, in the wrong country.