The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan (8 page)

McChrystal calls Sir Graeme Lamb himself. Lamb did Iraq with him; Lamb is a Brit, an SAS legend. “I’ve always seen myself as a bit of a martini, shaken or stirred, type,” Lamb says. British Special Forces had been integrated under the JSOC command, working closely with the Americans, and Lamb had been the key British soldier who worked with McChrystal in Iraq. Lamb had just retired—he was planning on heading down to Chile to do a snowboarding course, to get the motorcycle out of the garage and go down to Brunswick “putting some light back in his bones down in the Alps,” he says. McChrystal calls him, he comes to DC, and they go out to dinner at a Mexican restaurant. Before the second beer, Lamb is in, and McChrystal doesn’t even pay for the dinner, says Lamb. McChrystal rates high in Lamb’s world—the kind of friend, “hard-forged,” whom you can call in the middle of the night, to whom you can say, “Graeme, I have a problem. I’m in Laos.”

Petraeus had three months to put together a staff for Iraq; McChrystal has three weeks for Afghanistan, says Flynn. It’s the continuation of a rivalry between the two hotshot generals, both taking credit for the success in Iraq, and a sign of the growing sense among McChrystal’s staff that they’ll have a much harder task ahead in Afghanistan.

In the basement of the Pentagon, the core group of thirty or so men assemble: a handpicked collection of killers, spies, fighter jocks, patriots, political operatives, counterinsurgency experts, and outright maniacs, the likes of which the American military has never seen. They will soon become the most powerful force shaping U.S. policy in Afghanistan.

APRIL 16, 2010, PARIS

The next morning, Duncan invited me to sit in on a briefing as McChrystal prepared for a speech he was scheduled to give at the École Militaire, a French military academy. I was trying to get as much reporting done as possible. I planned to leave France on Sunday to head back to Washington, where I had a number of other interviews already scheduled.

In the hotel suite, I picked a spot across from McChrystal to lean against the wall, doing what is called fly-on-the-wall reporting. It is a technique originally pioneered and made popular by Theodore White, an American journalist who wrote the 1960 best seller
The Making of the President
. In the book, White had traveled and re-created scenes from President John F. Kennedy’s 1960 campaign—it put the reader, as it were, inside the room, like a fly on the wall. A bug.

Usually when reporting on powerful public figures, the press advisor and I would have had a conversation that established what journalists call “ground rules,” placing restrictions on what can and cannot be reported. But, as I’d already seen, McChrystal and his team followed their own freewheeling playbook. When I arrived in Paris, Duncan repeatedly dismissed
the idea of ground rules, telling me it wasn’t the way the team did things. McChrystal would also tell me he wasn’t “going to tell me how to write my story.” In fact, McChrystal and his staff requested to go off the record only twice during my entire time with them—requests that I honored when it came time to write my story and that I continue to honor to this day. This was great for me, an incredible opportunity for a journalist, as it gave me the freedom to report what I saw and heard.

The staff gathered in room 314. The wives were out seeing the sights—they were supposed to go check out the palace at Versailles.

“There will be no simultaneous translation of the speech,” Duncan said.

“Take care of talking in Coalition English,” a French general, also in the room, mentioned, referring to the acronym-laden military-speak.

Casey Welch handed McChrystal a set of index cards with his speech typed on them.

“Let’s bring it up to 32 font. I’ll need my glasses for this.”

Casey started to print out a new set of speech cards on the portable laser printer.

“We’ve made many mistakes in the past eight years,” McChrystal said, trying out an opening line.

He went through the talking points: From 1919 to 1929, the Afghan king tried to modernize the country and failed after his wife was photographed in Europe in a sleeveless dress. The more conservative elements of Afghan society pushed back. (“Do we know if that photo was taken in Paris? Would be good to add that detail if so.”) The life expectancy of an Afghan is forty-four years. The country has been at war for thirty years. Most Afghans don’t even remember a time before war. Even well-intentioned efforts have met with resistance in Afghanistan. The Soviets “did a lot of things right,” McChrystal said, but they also killed a million Afghans and lost. The traditional tribal order had been destroyed. Afghanistan, he said, is so confusing “that even Afghans don’t understand it.”

McChrystal flipped through the remaining cards.

“Okay. New COIN effort, minimize civilian casualties. Then I’ll talk
about how it’s going,” he said. “We’re at, what, twenty to twenty-five minutes? Is that too long?”

“We don’t want to cut the history,” said Jake, his longtime friend and top civilian advisor. “That lays the groundwork for the complexity argument.” The complexity argument was a way for McChrystal to explain that the clusterfuck called Afghanistan defied satisfying analysis. Framing the argument by its unfathomable complexity offered McChrystal protection from those in the audience who wanted to judge whether his plan was failing or succeeding. It was a way to talk about Afghanistan like it was the Bermuda Triangle of geopolitics, an inexplicable spot on Earth where countries simply vanished.

“Casey, cut all of it until ‘This is what makes this hard.’ I’ll start there.”

Casey, working on the Toughbook, put the changes into the speech. He started to print out new cards with the correct-size font.

McChrystal didn’t want to screw up the talk. Six months earlier, during a speech in London, he’d made public comments that were critical of Vice President Joe Biden. Biden hadn’t wanted to put more ground troops into the country, preferring to draw down to a much smaller number of U.S. forces who would focus exclusively on a counterterrorism mission. In shorthand, the strategy was called CT Plus, an alternative to the general’s counterinsurgency plan. McChrystal had called the strategy Biden was promoting “shortsighted” and had said that it would lead to “Chaosistan.” The comments earned him his first public smackdown from the White House. It was also the first reported instance of the mutual distrust between McChrystal and the White House that would persist throughout the next year.

To prepare for the question-and-answer session, McChrystal’s staff started to throw out the possible questions he might be asked.

“I never know what’s going to pop out until I’m up there, that’s the problem,” McChrystal said, flipping through the printouts.

“Neither do we, chief,” said Jake.

“The French might ask if you’re here for more troops, and how the French are doing,” said Duncan.

“Hey, that’s too easy. I was just down in Kandahar and I saw the colonel
from Task Force Lafayette—didn’t expect to see him there. I was like, ‘Hello, Pierre,’ ” McChrystal said, grinning.

“If you’re asked about women’s rights,” Duncan said.

“Women don’t have rights,” McChrystal answered. The joke fell flat.

“It’s true, though,” said Jake. “We shouldn’t be in there pushing our culture. It’s just going to anger the fundamentally conservative culture, like we say—”

McChrystal interrupted before Jake could go on.

“What was the Biden question we got yesterday?” McChrystal asked.

He couldn’t resist opening up the room for a few jokes at the vice president’s expense.

“Are you asking about Vice President Biden?” McChrystal said with a laugh. “Who’s that?”

“Biden?” Jake said. “Did you say: Bite Me??”

Everyone started laughing. Jake finished off the back-and-forth with another jab at the vice president.

“Are you talking about the guy who swears on television?” Jake said.

After the meeting, I waited outside the hotel for Duncan. I noticed an Arab guy, around five-feet-five, walking by in shorts and sneakers. I continued to smoke my cigarette. Duncan and I walked to the Métro to catch a train to the École Militaire. At the top of the Métro steps, I saw the same Arab guy again.

“Hey, man, do people really spy on you guys?”

“Yes, they try,” Duncan said.

“I think I just saw a guy I’d seen earlier walking by the hotel.”

“He’s not doing a very good job then, is he?”

Duncan and I arrived at the military academy, a regally styled, sand-colored complex built by Louis XV. I took a seat at the back of the auditorium. The audience was made up of French academics, military students, and active-duty military officers. I settled in to listen to the speech McChrystal had just rehearsed.

“Afghanistan is hard,” he began.

MAY TO JUNE 2009, WASHINGTON, DC

At four thirty
P.M.
on May 19, 2009, Stan McChrystal walks into the Oval Office. It’s the big time, the spotlight. He’s with Bob Gates, and the event is closed to the press, but there’s a White House photographer in the room. This is McChrystal’s first official meeting with the president, the man who has selected him to run his war. He meets Obama, shakes his hand; they’re standing in front of the president’s desk. They exchange pleasantries. The White House photographer snaps a shot: Obama, mouth open, right hand held up, frozen mid-gesture; McChrystal in full dress uniform, listening quietly. The photo ends up on McChrystal’s fast-growing Wikipedia page.

McChrystal walks out of the Oval Office.

McChrystal is let down. He is disappointed. Obama didn’t seem to even know who he was. Obama didn’t seem to get that McChrystal was
his commander
in
his war
. His war, McChrystal thinks. Obama’s war? No longer, McChrystal realizes: It’s going to be
my
war now. When the music stops in Washington, it’s McChrystal who’s going to be left standing without a chair. He knows this. “They all know it,” he says about his
team. “It’s clear to me, it’s clear to us. I’m going into this open-eyed. And of course in good company.” He knows he’s just taken on a shit-ton of responsibility. Obama just gives him a perfunctory handshake and sends him on his way.

This isn’t what McChrystal expected. He’s expecting a commander in chief who is more engaged; who is able to express concern; who is willing to give him what he needs to win. That’s what he’d told the National Security Council when they offered him the job: “I’m going over there to either win it or lose it,” he tells them. Where’s Obama’s heart in this? His head? Sure, there’s health care and the bank bailouts and the recession, but this is his war we’re talking about—and I’m his general.

How’d the meeting go?

The staff see the disappointment on The Boss’s face. “It was a ten-minute photo op,” Dave Silverman tells me. “Obama clearly didn’t know anything about him, who he was. Here’s the guy who’s going to run his fucking war, but he didn’t seem very engaged. The Boss was pretty disappointed.” Casey and Duncan agree.

At the time, they try to pass it off as an aberration—shit, Obama has got a lot on his mind, probably not worth reading too much into it. Back to work. McChrystal’s selection is playing well in the press. Everybody is mentioning the Tillman thing, but everybody is also saying that the confirmation is going to go smoothly. The hearings are scheduled for the first week of June.

McChrystal’s team knows that detainee abuse is going to come up. The allegation: He was aware of the “harsh interrogation techniques” at a place called Camp Nama in Iraq. A Human Rights Watch report released in 2006 placed him on the scene, inspecting the prison while the interrogators at the site were torturing prisoners to find out information about men like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
The New York Times
reported that soldiers there “beat prisoners with rifle butts, yelled and spit in their faces at a nearby area, and used detainees as target practice in a game of jailer paintball.” An investigation by Vice Admiral Lowell Jacoby into the unit,
called Task Force 6-26, found that detainees there had “burn marks on their back,” and “witnessed officers… punching detainees in the face to the point the individual needs medical attention.” A 2004 memo describing the abuses was passed on to McChrystal. An interrogator who was there that same year said that “most abusive” interrogation techniques needed written authorization, “indicating that the use of these tactics was approved up the chain of command.”

McChrystal’s team has a preemptive strike: They prepare a letter stating that McChrystal promises to follow the Geneva Conventions. Good thinking.

The Tillman thing: How best to handle it? Pat Tillman had been killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan in April 2004. McChrystal knew about it almost immediately, but he still went ahead and signed off on a falsified recommendation for Tillman’s Silver Star that suggested he was killed by the enemy. A week after Tillman’s death, McChrystal sent a memo up the chain of command, specifically warning that President Bush should avoid mentioning the cause of Tillman’s death. “If the circumstances of Corporal Tillman’s death become public,” he wrote, it could cause “public embarrassment” for the president.