My Share of the Task

by General Stanley McChrystal

  * * *

  One of the actions I was involved with should have given us pause. In the fall of 2002, John Abizaid called me to his office and issued guidance to begin working with selected Rumsfeld staffers to build, train, and ultimately deploy a force of Iraqi expatriates. That force was to assume a role a bit like that of the Free French Army units that led the liberation of Paris.

  The concept was straightforward. Iraqi expatriates would be recruited by a network of Iraqis, supported by American money, and transported to a location where they would be organized, equipped, and trained to participate in the liberation of their homeland.

  But the expatriate community could not, or would not, produce. In what should not have been a surprise, both the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a main Shiite opposition group exiled in Iran, and the anti-Saddam Kurds refused to contribute to the Free Iraqi Forces. Ultimately, instead of thousands of stalwart freedom fighters, only seventy-four Iraqis volunteered. In Hungary my classmate then–Major General Dave Barno and a team of U.S. Army advisers worked to mold them into a force. Despite great effort and ninety million dollars, little meaningful came from it, and their employment in Iraq proved inconsequential. Over time, I came to believe the inaccuracy of Iraqi expatriates’ claims about their ability to marshal opposition to Saddam should have made us question their overall credibility.

  * * *

  When hostilities were clearly imminent, I received two unexpected assignments. The first was to conduct briefings to Congress six days each week. The Armed Services Committees of the House and Senate hosted the briefings, about ninety minutes each, but any member of Congress who had sworn a confidentiality oath was invited to attend. Along with Ambassador Ryan Crocker, an experienced diplomat I’d come to admire deeply in the years ahead, and Colonel William Caniano, an army intelligence officer, we’d brief members in a secure room on the latest developments in Iraq.

  The briefings were part of an effort to maintain better relations with Congress, keeping it informed and providing a venue to ask questions on request information. I came to admire the way Senator John Warner of Virginia and Senator Carl Levin of Michigan maintained a seemingly bipartisan friendship and a supremely professional environment, despite the fact that Warner had voted for war in Iraq, while Levin had not. I found this relationship helpful later when commanding both in special operations and the war in Afghanistan.

  The second task was to periodically perform the role of Pentagon military spokesman for briefings to the Pentagon press corps. I wanted that role about as much as I wanted a root canal. As VDJ3, I was normally up to speed on operational details, but there was every opportunity to misspeak or to appear a buffoon on national television.

  I lucked out. The Joint Staff’s public-affairs office assembled a team of young officers with extensive experience who labored to keep me prepared, since I still had my normal duties as VDJ3. I was fortunate enough to be paired with the assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, Torie Clarke. Torie’s easygoing manner and mastery of media issues helped me avoid serious damage, and her propensity for colorful clothing sometimes distracted the press from my obvious nervousness.

  * * *

  From my vantage point in the Joint Staff, I also observed a small sideshow in the march to war. Although we did not know it at the time, at least one actor in that sideshow would soon take center stage in Iraq.

  I arrived in the Pentagon to find the military mulling plans to attack a small mountain-bound training camp in Kurdistan, in northern Iraq. Fifty-five miles south of the lower limit of the no-fly zone policed by American and British jets, the camp was in a place called Khurmal and run by a little-known Kurdish jihadist group called Ansar al-Islam. The group, with ties to bin Laden, had enacted a mini Talibanized society in its ungoverned enclave in Kurdistan. It forced the men to wear beards and pray at the mosque five times a day; it outlawed music, television, movies, and alcohol. Recently, a small, bedraggled group of Al Qaeda members, who had fled American bombs in Afghanistan and made their way across Iran, sought refuge with Ansar. Most troubling, however, was solid intelligence that at Khurmal, Ansar was manufacturing potent chemical and biological weapons—including ricin—and intended to use them in Europe and perhaps beyond.

  CENTCOM and Joint Staff planners had developed several options to destroy the camp. One set of plans, which did not include a ground force, involved sending a volley of missiles or dispatching American bombers. Another option—which the Joint Chiefs advocated to the White House—involved inserting a ground force after degrading the camp with air strikes. Putting “boots on the ground,” as it was called, would allow us to confirm that we had destroyed the target and follow up on the intelligence reports on the chemical and biological weaponry.

  A concept was developed, but ultimately, as the march to war accelerated, President Bush and his National Security Council waved off the raid. Some have surmised they did so because eliminating the camp and Al Qaeda–linked terrorists—whom some in the administration believed were aided by Saddam Hussein—would have removed a pillar of their rationale for attacking the Hussein regime.

  I drew a separate lesson from the experience. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) had been tasked to develop a plan for the ground option and had passed the mission to a subordinate task force. The concept that came back to the Pentagon received little enthusiasm and drew informal criticism. It called for weeks of planning and a considerably larger force package than envisioned.

  “Stan, this isn’t a special operations mission,” one senior officer complained to me. “It’s big enough to be an invasion. You were in special operations—can’t they do anything small anymore?”

  Despite being relatively popular within the Pentagon and in D.C. overall, special operations forces (SOF) had generated a growing frustration among officials. People who viewed SOF as a low-cost, simple solution to all problems were inevitably disappointed. I recognized it was critical for SOF to engage, educate, and communicate effectively with the people—including, at times, the president—who would ultimately make decisions on the most sensitive missions.

  It wasn’t until after the full American invasion in March 2003 that U.S. Special Forces attacked the Khurmal camp. After a significant firefight, they found traces of ricin and cyanide and the hazard suits, manuals, and equipment Ansar al-Islam had used. Unfortunately, one of the top Al Qaeda operatives who would have been a target of a preinvasion attack had long since fled. It would be some months before the man, an itinerant terrorist named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, would reappear.

  * * *

  In the months following the invasion of Iraq, I watched as initial satisfaction at the success of operations gave way to concerns over looting, as well as frustration over our inability to capture Saddam or to locate his suspected weapons of mass destruction. At the same time, we were challenged to repair infrastructure and suppress a growing, ill-defined resistance. We worked to establish metrics that would clearly reflect conditions and, we hoped, progress. But in the relatively chaotic conditions of Iraq, it was hard to collect accurate data that could effectively communicate the situation or drive necessary actions.

  Additionally, we found it difficult to field the necessary forces to stabilize the country. We’d tried but failed to secure at least three divisions from other nations to help with the occupation. So the U.S. burden would remain high. I worked with action officers on countless iterations of force rotation plans to determine how best to distribute the requirement between the Army and Marines. But even in the summer of 2003, we could see that the endeavor was clearly going to stretch the force.

  I was particularly concerned about our ability to fill positions on the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) staff and similar political and reconstruction positions on the ground. These roles were being filled slowly and often by inexperienced people. Rotations were too short to allow even good professional
s to be effective. I’d see the damaging effect of this later when I was in Iraq.

  During the summer of 2003, I could sense growing disquiet in D.C. over the situation. In mid-July, the 3rd Infantry Division, which had participated in the initial invasion, was extended, to the deep dissatisfaction of the Fort Stewart soldiers and their families. A large parade to celebrate their return, planned for New York City’s Canyon of Heroes, was quietly canceled. Meanwhile, Saddam’s two sons had been killed by U.S. forces, but terrorist attacks in Baghdad and Saddam’s continued freedom made policy makers palpably uneasy. By late August, more Americans had died in the postinvasion occupation than in the initial combat operations to unseat Saddam’s regime. No one was panicking yet, but the way ahead was unclear to me.

  * * *

  That September, after fourteen months on the Joint Staff, I headed back to Fort Bragg. I hadn’t volunteered for Pentagon duty and was happy to leave. But understanding the politics, processes, and personalities in the Pentagon, and in the wider U.S. government, proved indispensible for my later service in Iraq and Afghanistan. What would have seemed unreasonable and ludicrous viewed only from downrange had logic and meaning because I knew the environment in Washington or the individuals involved. Similarly, knowing the secretary of defense, the chairman and vice-chairman of the the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and other key players and—as important—having them know me would be essential when I was faced with sensitive operations easily misunderstood from afar.

  All that said, when the time came, Annie and I loaded the car quickly and headed south. We were eager to come “home” to Fort Bragg, and I didn’t want to give anyone in D.C. a chance to change his or her mind.

  Part Two

  The eagerness of our search for firewood turned us all into botanists.

  —George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

  | CHAPTER 7 |

  Through the Hourglass

  October–November 2003

  On a dry night in February 2004, I was likely standing less than a block from Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. I did not know he and I were that close, nor did the Army special operators who, in a darkened house half a block away, were nearer to him than I was. We were all in the northeastern Askari neighborhood of Fallujah, just south of where the city ended and emptied into sun-caked yellow dirt fields. This was the nicer area of town. The row houses, rectangular with flat rooftops, each stood back from the walled street, with small courtyards in front and dented, rusting metal gates. Constructed with low-grade concrete, the homes and walls were streaked and stained with ocher dust. Half a block away, I stood watch at the corner with Gabe, a major in the special operations task force I was commanding.* Through night-vision goggles, we watched the one courtyard gate that hung half open. Inside, Green operators quickly, deliberately cleared the house’s unlit rooms.

  If Zarqawi was in fact there, he got away, we think by jumping out of a second-floor window. He would have dropped down into the alleyway around the corner from us, hidden by townhouses. It would have been hard to hear him land on the ground. There wasn’t debris for him to disturb, as the houses were still intact then. And, this being Iraq, unseen stray dogs yelped from all corners of the neighborhood. That would all change in a month, when a crowd at the opposite end of the city murdered four American private security contractors, stringing two of their charred bodies from the beams of the green trestle bridge that spanned the Euphrates. That display spurred the Bush administration to order two massive Marine operations, the second of which, in November of that year, would leave over twelve hundred dead insurgents and the city they had hunkered down in a hollowed shell.

  Had Zarqawi’s stop at the townhouse that night been a visit for him to motivate his troops, he might have dressed in all black, his signature look. More likely he wore bland Iraqi garb, the type he donned before passing undetected through countless American checkpoints over the next two years. Regardless, he would have been unlikely to bump into anyone else on the street; everyone had retired behind their walls hours earlier and remained there even if our flashbang grenades and shouting woke them. Not once during the scores of raids I went on over the next four years in Iraq did I see anyone stir behind the darkened windows above a street, nor did curious onlookers ever appear on the streets. After decades of Saddam’s brutal control, Iraqis seemed to instinctively avoid anything that could bring attention to themselves during night operations by security forces. The process was one they knew well and feared.

  Zarqawi was fitter that night than he was in the final months of his life, when he grew heavy and pale from staying indoors to avoid our surveillance. Between the uninterrupted barking, the darkness, and the empty streets, he could have slipped north over the railroad tracks into the open fields to wait us out. Or he could have turned the other way and disappeared into the denser city that sprawled beneath Fallujah’s motley minarets. Or he may not have been there at all.

  Earlier that evening I had joined the operators at our compound at Baghdad International Airport (BIAP). They came from an Army special mission unit known as “Green,” one of the units that formed the core of the globally deployed special operations task force I now led, Task Force 714 (TF 714). After the team briefed the operation, we drove out of the heavily guarded northwest gate of the airport’s perimeter. We weaved through a serpentine maze of obstacles, laid out like bumpers on a pinball board in order to slow approaching vehicles that might contain car bombs or shooters. Above our vehicle’s windows, dark barrels of machine guns protruded over the security light-bathed HESCOs, refrigerator-size wire baskets filled with earth and rock that served as protective walls.

  As we left the relative security of the airport, our small collection of specially outfitted armored vehicles and Humvees got onto Highway 10, which ran west from Baghdad along the Euphrates and out all the way to Jordan. The drive took an hour on the unlit and eerily quiet freeway. At the eastern edge of Fallujah, our single-file convoy slowly exited the highway using the cloverleaf off-ramps. We passed under the same green highway signs with white text and arrows you’d find in any city in the United States. It felt like we were commuting to war.

  These operators were unlike other soldiers. They were painstakingly selected, exquisitely trained warriors. Calm but intensely focused, they did not display any nervousness in the vehicle, nor did they engage in the idle chatter shown in war movies. I heard only the low groan of the engine and the periodic electronic beep of the radio set on the dash.

  I had worked with operators from their unit on training events and during the first Gulf War, and many of the commissioned and noncommisioned officers were former Rangers with whom I had served. I respected them and wanted their respect. But only four months into my command of TF 714, I was still unsure of where I stood with them. Their demeanor around me was correct but cautiously stiff. I did not lead the operations I went on—and did not try to insert myself into the action. As on this night, I went to observe. Accompanying operators on these missions was essential if I wanted to understand what was happening on the ground in our war against an ever-shifting and increasingly wise network. Critically, in this fight, which only got harder from that night forward, these were opportunities to build relationships and mutual trust with the men and women I led.

  We searched and cleared a number of houses that evening. As I climbed the stairs to the second floor of one of those homes, my head came into view of the Iraqis above the landing. Grouped together in the corner and partially illuminated, they turned from watching the operators comb through their belongings to look at me. I’ll never forget their stare. It was controlled, but I sensed pure anger, radiating like heat. Perhaps they understood from watching how the operators reacted when I entered that I was the one who had sent these men with lights and guns to their house that night. Maybe theirs was a more instinctive response of indignation and fright to someone invading their homes. That we were foreigners made the process worse. Theirs was a
look I would see repeatedly in the years to come.

  The Green operators were being as sensitive as anyone could be when searching someone else’s house. Poise came naturally to them: They were older, in their thirties and forties, and they were seasoned. They did not need to smash things to prove their manhood or to feel powerful. Most were fathers, and that night, as on the hundreds of raids each went on during the war, they couldn’t help but see their own children in the young Iraqis who hid behind their parents’ legs.

  But the operators’ care mattered little to the Iraqis, who never ceased glowering. We were big men, made bigger with body armor, it was one o’clock in the morning, and our searching their home was as humiliating to them as if we had stripped their bodies. They had no way of knowing that we too were fathers; without language, there was no chance even to attempt human connection. I knew we needed to do these raids, but I also knew these searches—on top of the lack of electricity and the backed-up sewage and the lack of jobs in a chaotic, post-Saddam Iraq—were producing fury, understandably directed at us. With calculated barbarism, Zarqawi was already at work exploiting our failures, making us look powerless or sinister or both. His disappearance into the dark that night was troubling, but I was consumed with this Iraqi family. Watching them watch us, I realized this fight was going to be long and tough.

  Less than a year after the initial U.S.-led invasion, the beginning of 2004 had brought new sobriety to our mission in Iraq. A month earlier, the number of Americans killed in the war had risen from 497 to the grim figure of 500 when explosives stuffed inside two artillery shells and hidden beneath the ground killed three soldiers as they drove through a field in Taji. At this point few could foresee that the war would grind on until that figure of 500 Americans killed would be reached another eight times over. This was before Iraq became truly hellish as it turned into a civil war, before driving through Baghdad at night in 2006 and 2007 and 2008 meant viewing scenes from a postapocalyptic movie, with masked men illuminated by the fires they lit at the checkpoints they manned. And this was before each new morning brought more bodies floating in the city’s brown, soupy irrigation canals. Those images were the grisly markers of Iraq’s civil war, a war Zarqawi helped ignite through a ruthlessly efficient campaign of murder. Sometimes his bombs killed Iraqis a crowd at a time. Sometimes his victims died in lonely torture cells in obscure corners of the country.