The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan Read Online Free Page B

Johnson says in 1964, a year before he commits hundreds of thousands of troops to Saigon.) Carter—shit! He gets pushed around by the Iranians, while Reagan cuts a secret deal with them, gives them weapons, no less—but forget that. Clinton proves the military’s worst fears: He wants to let fags in, dodged the draft, smoked dope, and gets mocked when he tries to kill Bin Laden with missile strikes.
    Obama, his advisors believe, has to prove he isn’t really antiwar. That he’s serious. That he can keep America safe. (Remember Hillary’s three A.M. phone call ad?) That he’ll play by the bipartisan conventions of the national security community. During the presidential campaign, he stresses that we “took our eye off the ball” in Afghanistan and have to refocus our efforts there. Obama goes out of his way to say he “doesn’t oppose all wars.”
    That January, McKiernan’s request for more troops is waiting on Obama’s desk. With three reviews just complete, Obama orders up his own review. Bruce Riedel, a terrorism expert, is called in to write up the draft. On February 17, a month after visiting the Pentagon, Obama releases a statement, the first major comment he’s made on the war while in office. He says he’s sending seventeen thousand troops to Afghanistan, that he’s approving a “months-old” troop request, pinning the blame for the delay and increase on the previous administration. Obama expands the war into Pakistan, too, upping the number of drone strikes in the first year of his presidency to fifty-five, almost doubling the number that Bush had ordered in the previous four years.
    What Obama and his top advisors don’t realize is that the seventeen thousand troops are just the beginning. Seventeen thousand becomes twenty-one thousand a month later. McKiernan still has a request in for nine thousand more, part of his original ask. But he will tell military officials close to him that it’s all he needs to do the job. He doesn’t thinkAfghanistan can support too many more American troops. McKiernan, an ally of the president, is not going to press for another massive troop increase. Inside the Pentagon, other senior military officials don’t see it that way. Twenty-one thousand isn’t enough, nor is thirty thousand, for the war they have in mind. The Pentagon wants more troops, and sets out to find a way to get them.

5    ARC DE TRIOMPHE
     
APRIL 15, 2010, PARIS
     
    McChrystal’s entourage waited outside the Westminster. A gray minivan pulled up. The staff poured in, getting seats. A navy blue Peugeot parked behind it. A French general stepped out, wearing a fancy light gray uniform with gold epaulets. McChrystal and his wife, Annie, an outgoing and fit brunette just on the other side of fifty who had joined him in Paris for the weekend, ducked inside.
    I walked up to the minivan. There wasn’t enough room.
    Duncan waved down a taxi. “We’ll follow them,” he said.
    Duncan and I jumped into the cab.
    “Arc de Triomphe,
s’il vous plaît
.”
    The cabdriver hit the gas and started weaving through traffic, starts and stops.
    “It’s sort of fun to be following that car, especially when it’s filled with American military uniforms,” Duncan said.
    “Like something out of the Cold War,” I said.
    Duncan checked his BlackBerry.
    “Two French journalists have been kidnapped outside of Kabul,” he told me. “They were supposed to have an interview with McChrystal and got kidnapped the day before. It’s a bit of a problem. The French are willing to pay ransom, and the Taliban know that.”
    “Has it come up in discussions?”
    “Yes, briefly.”
    The French’s willingness to pay ransom was an irritant to the Americans. By paying off the kidnappers, the Americans believed the Europeans were incentivizing kidnappings, a sin on a par with negotiating with terrorists. The French had lost ten soldiers in one incident in 2008 because they had stopped paying protection money to the