by David Loyn
This bizarre story quickly unraveled when a reporter for The Times of London, Jerome Starkey, visited the site. What he found was that the owner of the house, Muhammad Daoud, was a highly regarded police commander, recently promoted to head of intelligence in his district. The raid was spearheaded by Afghan soldiers speaking what one witness told Starkey was Kandahari-accented Pashto. Understandably, Daoud, who was Tajik, immediately thought they were Taliban. He was one of the first to be shot when he went out to investigate the break-in. One of his brothers was a local prosecutor, another the vice chancellor of the local university. “We are a government family!” the prosecutor, Muhammad Zahir, shouted to try to stop them firing, before he too was shot dead. Seven people died, including two pregnant women. The house was filled with relatives, as they had been celebrating the naming ceremony six days after the birth of a son. Family members began to prepare bodies for burial, which includes binding the head and feet. These were the bodies seen by the American special operators when they came into the house.
The initial ISAF response to Starkey’s report was to attempt to discredit him, telling callers he was unreliable, with a background as a tabloid reporter. They put out a press release denying his report, unusually naming him. But their account quickly unraveled, as the full horror of what had happened emerged. Several witnesses told reporters they saw Americans digging bullets out of the women’s bodies with knives, and although a subsequent Pentagon investigation did not substantiate this, it quoted an Afghan investigation as saying that “an American bullet was found in the body of one of the dead women.”
Vice Admiral Bill McRaven, who had succeeded McChrystal as commander of TF-714, visited the village where Commander Daoud’s family were killed, to make amends. He slaughtered a sheep as a traditional offering. “I am the commander of the men who accidentally killed your loved ones,” he said. “I came here today to send my condolences to you and to your family and to your friends. I also came today to ask your forgiveness for these terrible tragedies.”90
It would not be enough to stop night raids happening. McChrystal admitted that the narrow focus of special operators meant they missed the bigger picture. “I can’t complain too loudly because for the first part of the war I was a Special Forces guy causing the problems.” But he took away the lesson that in future conflicts, the local commander, the “owner” of the battle space, should have total authority over activities in their area of operations. That would lessen the chance of incidents like the Garmser riot. “We always know that to be the right answer. And that’s not just true at the theater level, that’s also true down on the ground.”
If this happened, it would mark a reverse of the trend since 9/11. There were many more nonconventional operators in the field than in previous conflicts. The authority given to the CIA to conduct offensive operations by President Bush marked a watershed in the way America went to war. Special operators and CIA have moved closer together in capacity.91 As special operations TF-714 has engaged in more intelligence-gathering than previously, so the CIA have developed far more offensive capacity, with counterterrorist fighters available to carry out clandestine operations.
There were several hundred CIA operators in Afghanistan by 2010, along with many off-the-book contractors. The Obama administration had not reversed the policy, and the shadow war continued with more intensity. The CIA supported local allies who were not part of the formal Afghan force structure as Afghanistan became an increasingly dirty war. Afghan militias run by the Afghan National Directorate for Security, the NDS, lived and fought under CIA control across the country. There were five of these operations in the Pashtun south and east, including the Kandahar Strike Force, run by the president’s half brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai.92
UNDER THE ASH CLOUD
April 16, 2010, was Stan and Annie McChrystal’s thirty-third wedding anniversary. They met in Paris for dinner on one of a routine series of European trips to shore up NATO support. When Annie saw Rolling Stone correspondent Michael Hastings hanging round Team America, she said, “Has anybody vetted this guy?” She had read his previous book, unlike any of McChrystal’s political advisers and media handlers. Its title, I Lost My Love in Baghdad, was one that would not appeal to the male military jock mindset cultivated in Team America. But Annie had picked it up, and she thought Hastings had an agenda to bring people down. In the book, Hastings told the story of his fiancée, Andi Parhamovich, who had followed him to Iraq to work for a pro-democracy program, and was targeted and killed by insurgents. Hastings hated Iraq and Afghanistan, believing no good could come from either war. Only Annie saw the warning signs.
Even without this knowledge, it was surprising that Hastings was given unrestricted access. Reporters, particularly in military settings where there are security issues, routinely accept restrictions where some conversations or events are not reported as a tradeoff for access. But Hastings wrote that there were no ground rules laid down for his access.
Hastings spent far more time with McChrystal in Europe than planned, grounded by the Icelandic volcanic eruption that filled the upper atmosphere with ash for a week. He saw Team America letting their hair down. McChrystal’s strictures against alcohol did not travel outside Afghanistan.
The insults he reported were not individually serious. “Did you say: ‘Bite Me,’” when Biden was mentioned; “I don’t even want to open it,” said McChrystal when an email from Holbrooke came in on his BlackBerry, one of the staff responding, “Make sure you don’t get any of that on your leg.”
It was the cumulative effect that did the damage: “The Boss was pretty disappointed” by his treatment by Obama, Jones was a “clown,” Holbrooke “a wounded animal.” And there were other off-color comments: “Women don’t have rights”; a dinner with a French minister was “fucking gay.” Hastings did not drink, but sat and noted and recorded, listening to “the kind of banter I’d heard on the front lines, but not inside headquarters.” He continued to wonder why there were no reporting restrictions. “What exactly was I dealing with here?”93
In an interview for this book, McChrystal called the article, titled “The Runaway General,” an “assassination.” He said Hastings clearly had strong feelings about the war and had put spin on them. “Any journalist who wants to blow up a general can do that.” When the article appeared online, Hastings was in southern Afghanistan on a military embed and was quickly hustled out of the country for his own safety. At 2:00 a.m., McChrystal was woken to be told what was reported. He knew his military career was over and called Holbrooke and Biden to apologize. Holbrooke was sleeping at the embassy close by and responded with an immediate supportive email, hoping McChrystal’s resignation would be rejected, calling him a friend.94 After consulting his team for an hour, the general went running through the darkness around and around the ISAF compound through the night for the last time.
A PDF of the article was shared across thousands of laptops in Afghanistan overnight. The general response among soldiers and marines in remote forward operating bases was shock that it had been allowed to happen. “What was the public affairs office thinking?” McChrystal appeared at the 0730 meeting and said, “There’s an article out there. It’s in my lane. I’m dealing with it. Carry on as normal.” With some presence of mind, he did a PowerPoint briefing for the ambassadors of the UN Security Council who were in town before boarding a plane to Washington.
While Obama thought McChrystal had been played by the reporter, he did not have much choice when McChrystal arrived in his office to offer his resignation in the briefest of meetings the following day. His instinct was to give McChrystal the benefit of the doubt, but realized he could not. And there were wider issues after the leaks, McChrystal’s London speech, and sense of being boxed in during the Afghan review the year before. “In that Rolling Stone article,” the president wrote, “I’d heard in him and his aides the same air of impunity that seemed to have taken hold among some in the military’s top ranks during the Bush years: a se
nse that once war began, those who fought it shouldn’t be questioned, that politicians should just give them what they ask for and get out of the way.”95
In the Kabul SAR, as people gathered to watch the news screens, British lieutenant general Nick Parker, McChrystal’s deputy, made a rousing speech. “We have just lost a great commander,” but they should not lose momentum. “There are people out there putting their lives on the line tonight. We owe it to them. So if you don’t have a job to do, bugger off, go to bed and get some sleep. If you’ve got a job to do, get on and do it.”96 Parker knew the cost of war as well as any. His son Harry lost his legs fighting in Helmand.
Dominic Medley, in his fifth day as the spokesman for the NATO civilian representative in Kabul, said the loss of McChrystal was an easy win for the Taliban strategic communications team. “They must have been scratching their heads and twiddling their thumbs in a cave thinking the general who was thwacking them has just been fired for an interview in a rock music magazine.”97
Some in Washington made a rearguard attempt to save McChrystal’s job, Gates telling the president simply, “I believe if we lose McChrystal, we lose the war.”98 But McChrystal knew his resignation would be accepted. “It hit at a period when there was all this sensitivity about strong military guys pushing the president around, which wasn’t true.” He denied being part of a “triumvirate” with Gates and Petraeus.
That the military side in the Afghan war were so prominent was partly because the political and diplomatic side were so weak. Division in the UN in Kabul, Holbrooke’s maneuvering, the halfhearted, poorly funded, ill-directed civilian surge, Eikenberry’s opposition to the war plan and marginalized status—all left McChrystal more exposed than he might have been. Counterinsurgency may have been defined as 80 percent politics. But McChrystal carried more of the political weight than was comfortable and was left high and dry, in an exposed position he felt challenged the ideal relationship between political and military power as defined by Huntington.
I used to quote Huntington. I used to tell my staff in Afghanistan, particularly as we were writing the assessment and then afterwards, I said, “OK, this is the approach I want you to take. We don’t own the car. The President and decisionmakers own the car. We’re not even going to decide where it’s going; we’ve been asked to fix the car, so I want to tell them what it takes to fix the car.”
He told Lute it was not up to him whether they were in Afghanistan or what they wanted to accomplish. Those were political decisions. “You know what, it’s not my call. You tell me if you want to be in Afghanistan, and if you do, what you want to accomplish.”
PEAK SURGE
Like General Creighton Abrams, one of the outstanding commanders of the twentieth century, who took over from Westmoreland in Vietnam at the worst time in 1968, McChrystal arrived with a stellar reputation and, like Abrams, wanted to build a strategy centered on protecting the population, which did not have the wholehearted support of Washington. It was said of Abrams that he deserved a “better war” but had only the war he was given.99 For his part, McChrystal’s adoption of population-centered counterinsurgency came after years of under-resourcing the war and faced formidable obstacles—the porous border to Taliban safe havens sheltered by Pakistan, the weakness of the Karzai government, the corruption of the Afghan elite, growing war-weariness in Washington.
And there was another problem—counterinsurgency warfare took a toll on the morale of soldiers on the ground, who thought it meant “they should not shoot even if they are threatened with death,” according to Sergeant Israel Arroyo, of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 12th Infantry Regiment, in an email to McChrystal. For all the mavericks and oddballs who ended up handling weapons in Afghanistan during the surge, like Tunnell and Bergdahl, there were tens of thousands of mainstream American soldiers like Arroyo—the backbone of the counterinsurgency effort, leading a nine-person platoon on daily patrols into the vine and marijuana-growing, mud-walled badlands of Arghandab, which Mullah Naqib offered to hand over with no fighting in 2001, and Canadian troops had won at high cost in Operation Medusa in 2006.
Arroyo wrote to McChrystal, asking him to come out on patrol and see what it was like, wanting to share the concerns of his soldiers about courageous restraint. He did not need to add that the general should come without his private security detail. Forty-eight hours later, McChrystal was on a four-hour patrol with Arroyo, being treated as just another soldier. One of those on the patrol, a popular corporal, Mike Ingram, who was soon to be married, was killed soon afterward, bleeding out when it took thirty minutes for a helicopter to arrive after he was hit by an IED. McChrystal went down again and had a hard session with the unit, who did not understand why they could not call in air strikes as they had in Iraq. McChrystal’s answer was that it would not be possible to kill their way out of Afghanistan as the Russians had. “Winning hearts and minds in COIN is a cold-blooded thing.”
Hastings was at this meeting and wrote a highly negative account of the soldiers’ mood. It was the only time McChrystal took him aside to express concern about what he might report, describing what they had seen as a “raw wound.” Hastings quoted one soldier as saying that what McChrystal said made sense, but by the time it came down from “Big Army,” it became too restrictive.
McChrystal’s forced early departure left hanging the most intriguing what-if of the Afghan war. What if he had stayed for another year, been able to carry the war on his terms? Like McKiernan before him, McChrystal was never able to see to fruition plans he had put in place. He had many supporters. State Department official Marc Chretien said, “He did not come with a preconceived idea, he listens and adjusts.” Matt Sherman, who worked in various senior advisory roles for four ISAF commanders, said he was an outstanding communicator, good at building huge teams of people who understood what they were doing, “one of the most impressive people I ever worked with.” He willed the world to be better than it was, believed in counterinsurgency, believed he could turn the war round, reverse the “creeping fatalistic pessimism.”
It was a belief satirized in the movie War Machine, starring Brad Pitt as General McMahon (who was based on McChrystal), uncomfortable viewing for Team America. Forced to spend time in Europe by the Icelandic ash cloud, McMahon’s team drink too much in the presence of a reporter. There is not a four-star general alive who would not want to be played by Brad Pitt—but not like this. In the movie, McMahon pitches his Afghan war plan in Berlin as McChrystal did and is confronted by a forceful German MP (played by Tilda Swinton) who wonders if his belief in counterinsurgency is delusional. “What I question is your belief in your power to deliver these things that you describe … I question your sense of self.”
To replace McChrystal, and not to lose momentum, Obama turned to the general most identified in the public mind with counterinsurgency, David Petraeus, in what was at best a sideways career move that he did not seek. It was not his war, and he knew public opinion was moving against it. His friend, the Florida socialite and CENTCOM goodwill ambassador Jill Kelley, told him it was a “failing war.” She was lining up donors willing to back a presidential run. Afghanistan was a “shit sandwich.”100
Petraeus happened to be in the White House for his monthly update with the president as CENTCOM commander the day McChrystal was fired. He was called up to the Oval Office, where there was only one answer to the president’s request that he go back into the fight. They talked for forty-five minutes, Obama emphasizing his desire to limit the area of operation and draw down on schedule. There was concern in the White House about Petraeus’s political ambition and willingness to accept direction. The president pointedly told his national security staff, “We’ve agreed to trust each other and to share assessments in private.”101
Eleven days later, after the swiftest congressional confirmation, Petraeus was on a plane to Kabul. He told Obama he would do one year. Afghanistan presented “what has to be among the most challenging imaginable contexts for a counteri
nsurgency campaign.” While he did not seek it, there was opportunity here that put a gleam in his eye. The timetable laid down by the president meant the first troops would not leave before summer 2011, as Petraeus left. He was to hold a unique military record as the only general to command at the highest level in both of the post-9/11 wars, and as in Iraq, he was arriving at peak surge.
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THE BELL CURVE AND THE ANACONDA
Until you have stood every other night at the back of a C-17 putting another collection of bodies on an airplane, and reflected on whether you are to blame for their death, you haven’t really experienced what it’s like to be a commander.
—General Nick Carter
MALIK D.
General David Petraeus enjoyed an unusually good press. “Brilliant,” “tireless,” “soldier-scholar,” “our very best general,”1 “widely hailed as the U.S. military’s finest strategic mind in a generation,”2 “the dominant U.S. military figure of our time”3—the language lit a trail as bright as a comet. His easy relationship with journalists guaranteed him good press, which he deployed as if a weapon. In his 1987 Ph.D. thesis, he wrote that the “perceptions of reality, more so than objective reality, are crucial to the decisions of statesmen,” and after experiencing high command, he had not changed his mind. “Tone is very important … What generals can do is set tone.”4 For Petraeus, how military actions were seen was central to his capacity as a commander.
