The Runaway General | Rolling Stone

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Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, commander of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force and U.S. Forces-Afghanistan, works on board a Lockheed C-130 Hercules aircraft between Battlefield Circulation missions.

U.S. Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Mark O’Donald/NATO

By Michael Hastings

Jun 22, 2010 10:00 AM EDT

This article appears in RS 1108/1109 from July 8-22, 2010, on newsstands Friday, June 25.

'How'd I get screwed into going to this dinner?" demands Gen. Stanley McChrystal. It's a Thursday night in mid-April, and the commander of all U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan is sitting in a four-star suite at the Hôtel Westminster in Paris. He's in France to sell his new war strategy to our NATO allies – to keep up the fiction, in essence, that we actually have allies. Since McChrystal took over a year ago, the Afghan war has become the exclusive property of the United States. Opposition to the war has already toppled the Dutch government, forced the resignation of Germany's president and sparked both Canada and the Netherlands to announce the withdrawal of their 4,500 troops. McChrystal is in Paris to keep the French, who have lost more than 40 soldiers in Afghanistan, from going all wobbly on him.

"The dinner comes with the position, sir," says his chief of staff, Col. Charlie Flynn.

McChrystal turns sharply in his chair.

"Hey, Charlie," he asks, "does this come with the position?"

McChrystal gives him the middle finger.

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The general stands and looks around the suite that his traveling staff of 10 has converted into a full-scale operations center. The tables are crowded with silver Panasonic Toughbooks, and blue cables crisscross the hotel's thick carpet, hooked up to satellite dishes to provide encrypted phone and e-mail communications. Dressed in off-the-rack civilian casual – blue tie, button-down shirt, dress slacks – McChrystal is way out of his comfort zone. Paris, as one of his advisers says, is the "most anti-McChrystal city you can imagine." The general hates fancy restaurants, rejecting any place with candles on the tables as too "Gucci." He prefers Bud Light Lime (his favorite beer) to Bordeaux, Talladega Nights (his favorite movie) to Jean-Luc Godard. Besides, the public eye has never been a place where McChrystal felt comfortable: Before President Obama put him in charge of the war in Afghanistan, he spent five years running the Pentagon's most secretive black ops.

"What's the update on the Kandahar bombing?" McChrystal asks Flynn. The city has been rocked by two massive car bombs in the past day alone, calling into question the general's assurances that he can wrest it from the Taliban.

"We have two KIAs, but that hasn't been confirmed," Flynn says.

McChrystal takes a final look around the suite. At 55, he is gaunt and lean, not unlike an older version of Christian Bale in Rescue Dawn. His slate-blue eyes have the unsettling ability to drill down when they lock on you. If you've fucked up or disappointed him, they can destroy your soul without the need for him to raise his voice.

"I'd rather have my ass kicked by a roomful of people than go out to this dinner," McChrystal says.

He pauses a beat.

"Unfortunately," he adds, "no one in this room could do it."

With that, he's out the door.

"Who's he going to dinner with?" I ask one of his aides.

"Some French minister," the aide tells me. "It's fucking gay."

The next morning, McChrystal and his team gather to prepare for a speech he is giving at the École Militaire, a French military academy. The general prides himself on being sharper and ballsier than anyone else, but his brashness comes with a price: Although McChrystal has been in charge of the war for only a year, in that short time he has managed to piss off almost everyone with a stake in the conflict. Last fall, during the question-and-answer session following a speech he gave in London, McChrystal dismissed the counterterrorism strategy being advocated by Vice President Joe Biden as "shortsighted," saying it would lead to a state of "Chaos-istan." The remarks earned him a smackdown from the president himself, who summoned the general to a terse private meeting aboard Air Force One. The message to McChrystal seemed clear: Shut the fuck up, and keep a lower profile

Now, flipping through printout cards of his speech in Paris, McChrystal wonders aloud what Biden question he might get today, and how he should respond. "I never know what's going to pop out until I'm up there, that's the problem," he says. Then, unable to help themselves, he and his staff imagine the general dismissing the vice president with a good one-liner.

"Are you asking about Vice President Biden?" McChrystal says with a laugh. "Who's that?"

"Biden?" suggests a top adviser. "Did you say: Bite Me?"

When Barack Obama entered the Oval Office, he immediately set out to deliver on his most important campaign promise on foreign policy: to refocus the war in Afghanistan on what led us to invade in the first place. "I want the American people to understand," he announced in March 2009. "We have a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle and defeat Al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan." He ordered another 21,000 troops to Kabul, the largest increase since the war began in 2001. Taking the advice of both the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he also fired Gen. David McKiernan – then the U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan – and replaced him with a man he didn't know and had met only briefly: Gen. Stanley McChrystal. It was the first time a top general had been relieved from duty during wartime in more than 50 years, since Harry Truman fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur at the height of the Korean War.

Even though he had voted for Obama, McChrystal and his new commander in chief failed from the outset to connect. The general first encountered Obama a week after he took office, when the president met with a dozen senior military officials in a room at the Pentagon known as the Tank. According to sources familiar with the meeting, McChrystal thought Obama looked "uncomfortable and intimidated" by the roomful of military brass. Their first one-on-one meeting took place in the Oval Office four months later, after McChrystal got the Afghanistan job, and it didn't go much better. "It was a 10-minute photo op," says an adviser to McChrystal. "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."

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General McChrystal Denies Rift With Obama on Afghan War - NYTimes.com

By THOM SHANKER and ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON — The senior American commander in Afghanistan on Wednesday rejected any suggestion that his grim assessment of the war had driven a wedge between the military and the Obama administration, but he warned against taking too long to settle on a final strategy.

The commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, said in an interview that he welcomed the fierce debate that had emerged this week over how to carry out the war.

“A policy debate is warranted,” General McChrystal said in a telephone interview from his headquarters in Kabul.

“We should not have any ambiguities, as a nation or a coalition,” he added. “At the end of the day, we’re putting young people in harm’s way.”

President Obama’s top advisers are rethinking the strategy that Mr. Obama unveiled in March, amid a growing political divide in the United States over how to proceed and confusion among allies that have fighting forces in Afghanistan.

General McChrystal would not address how many additional combat troops he would seek in a request he is preparing to send to the Defense Department. Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary, said Wednesday that the commander’s request would be submitted this week, even though no decisions would be made until the administration had finished its newest review of Afghanistan policy.

In his confidential assessment delivered on Aug. 30, General McChrystal warned that he needed more troops within the next year or else the conflict most likely would result in failure.

“I had absolute freedom to put in a candid assessment, and I did that,” he said in the interview, his first since submitting his 66-page classified report. “I have not been limited in any way in identifying resources that might be required.”

General McChrystal said he agreed to speak to The New York Times on Wednesday after he became increasingly concerned about reports of rifts between the military and the civilian leadership, and about rumors he was considering resigning if his assessment was not accepted.

The general denied that he had discussed — or even considered — resigning his command, as had been whispered about at the Pentagon, saying that he was committed to carrying out whatever mission Mr. Obama approved.

“I believe success is achievable,” he said. “I can tell you unequivocally that I have not considered resigning at all.”

The general said that after submitting his report, he had been directed to provide more information and respond to several questions, including on perhaps the thorniest issue: the impact of the flawed Afghan presidential election. Allegations of widespread ballot fraud have raised serious doubts about the legitimacy of President Hamid Karzai as a partner in the counterinsurgency campaign.

“We are doing an assessment almost on a constant basis,” General McChrystal said, speaking of both the twists and turns of the military mission and the political developments in Afghanistan.

He would not address various proposals for reshaping the mission that differ from his, including an approach supported by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to scale back the military operation in Afghanistan to focus instead on terrorists seeking haven in Pakistan.

The commander said that he welcomed alternative proposals for how to stabilize Afghanistan and stressed that he did not feel that his analysis had been diminished in the view of senior administration officials because of its blunt tone.

“This is the right kind of process, and the way I see duty,” he said. “I have been given the opportunity to provide my inputs to the decision. Then it is my duty to execute that decision.”

General McChrystal, who assumed command of the American and NATO operations in Afghanistan in June, said that he had not spoken directly to Mr. Obama since he submitted his assessment, but that he expected he would after the president and his advisers had time to digest it.

Separately, at a conference in Washington, Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of American forces in the Middle East, said that both he and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had endorsed General McChrystal’s broad assessment of the situation in Afghanistan.

Asked to evaluate the impact of possible delays on endorsing a new strategy and considering troops requests, General McChrystal said, “Obviously, from a strictly military standpoint, time is always important, but it also is relative in this case.”

The general said he never was told to delay his troop request because of political concerns in Washington.

“My prognosis probably did exactly what it should have done: It got people to stop and say, ‘Wait a minute. Let’s look at the basic premise,’ ” he said. “To me, there’s no rift. There’s no boxing anybody in.”

Even in advance of any decisions by the Obama administration, General McChrystal said he was taking steps to reshape the war effort in Afghanistan, including changing the way coalition forces develop Afghanistan’s own security forces.

While there are a range of opinions in Congress on whether to send more combat troops, there is broad support for making a priority of building up Afghanistan’s army and police force.

General McChrystal said he had ordered allied forces working with Afghan soldiers and police officers to go beyond organizing, training and equipping local forces; American and NATO units now try to build “a full-time partnership” with local forces, expanding the relationship to include living side by side, combining their planning efforts and going out on operations together.