

In 2010, Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings thought he would write a profile of Stanley McChrystal, then the commander of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. It turned into a caustic expose of McChrystal's buckwild command style, capturing the general's staff disrespecting the Obama team. And it cost McChrystal his career.

And that was actually an accident. Overshadowed by the McChrystal controversy was the story Hastings really wanted to produce: an indictment of U.S. counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan, which Hastings considers a deadly folly. And so Hastings has revised and extended his account in a new book, The Operators, published on Thursday.

The Operators is an angry book. Part wartime memoir, part polemic, part score-settling with his critics, Hastings argues that the Afghanistan war is a debacle and that counterinsurgency is a liberal-sounding sham that conceals a bloodthirsty agenda. It's the book's big blind spot. If the problem is the Afghanistan war's waste of human life, it's odd to attack the general who restricted air strikes and ordered U.S. troops to drive friendly.

But The Operators is also a good, thorough and insightful book about the Afghanistan war. Which makes it rare: the few good ones either focus on the human dimensions of the war at the expense of its policy complexities (Sebastien Junger's War) or vice versa (Ahmed Rashid's Descent Into Chaos). You might not agree with all of Hastings' conclusions, but few other books are ambitious enough to survey the entire war and go down to the squad level.

Some in the military view Hastings as a twerp who took cheap shots at drunk officers who trusted him. Some defense reporters view him contemptuously, even playing along with the McChrystal crew's attempts at payback. But Hastings writes with an unsparing honesty. "The guilt that many felt for not serving was covered up by an uncritical attitude toward those who did," Hastings says in The Operators, and that's real talk.

Speaking of: I consider Hastings my friend – and a colleague whose passion can lead him astray, like when he erroneously accused the general in charge of training Afghan forces of running a "psychological operation" against important senators. But Hastings' work makes me question whether I've been too journalistically credulous at buying into counterinsurgency hook, line and sinker.

On the eve of the book's publication, Hastings talked with Danger Room about The Operators, McChrystal's command and Afghanistan. An edited transcript follows. For the record, McChrystal declined to comment for this story.

Danger Room: I don't understand your actual critique of McChrystal. Is he a villain or is he a tragic figure?

Michael Hastings: He's a complicated guy. He's a fascinating figure. In my mind, he's a [Gen. Douglas] MacArthur – one of these great generals who by the very nature of their character leads to troubles in their career. I think he's complex and I think if I would have come down one way or the other, it would have been simplistic. He's done stuff that's clearly suspect. Have you ever interviewed the Tillman family?

DR: I never have. But wasn't McChrystal trying to mitigate how bad the war had become? You have a powerful scene in the book with a unit in Afghanistan angry with McChrystal for forcing it to fight with restraint. Do you think he was wrong there?

MH: I'm saying we shouldn't be there. It's pretty clear. You can come up with different reasons why we should be there. Counterinsurgency is the latest iteration. You're trying to put it in to this context, it's this Dr. Exum context [CNAS fellow Andrew Exum], 'COIN is like Nerf warfare and McChrystal's trying not to kill people.' Great! I'm glad we have a strategy where we're trying not to kill people. But I don't even think that's much of a step in the right direction. My major critique is we shouldn't be there.

What I'm writing about in those scenes were the soldiers. They get it. I've been around the block, I've spent a lot of time with a lot of different infantry units, and those soldiers about as mutinous as I've seen since Baghdad 2006. This wasn't like cherrypicking Angry Joe. This was really a unit-wide mutiny. McChrystal's staff didnt see that. But McChrystal himself did see that, and he knew it was too late. The whole time I was there, he never tried to really spin me. But after that, he pulled me aside said that was rough. My question would be, if you say McChrystal encourages restraint, well, he wanted 100,000 troops there. How is that restraint? If you look at the numbers, more Americans and more Afghans died the year he was in command.

DR: In your original Rolling Stone piece, you attribute a lot of the nasty quotes from McChrystal's camp about the Obama team anonymously. But in the book, you put names to the quotes. Why?

'I think it's a mistake when you're trying to fight someone else's counterinsurgency for them.'MH: I had named them originally in my story. But the editors at Rolling Stone decided not to use them for space and narrative reasons. But I'd like to make a point on that that needs to be out there. "Biden/Bite Me" was said by Jake McFarren, McChrystal's top adviser, 30 year confidante and West Point roommate. He was not a junior guy. "Don't get that on my leg," [about an email from diplomat Richard Holbrooke], that was Charlie Flynn, who's now a general. Dave Silverman [a former Navy SEAL] said some colorful stuff too.

There's an impression out there that McChrystal never said any of this, it was his staff. No, McChrystal criticized [Amb. Karl] Eikenberry, McChrystal made fun of Holbrooke, and McChrystal decided to start all the jokes on Biden. Blaming [media adviser] Duncan Boothby, or blaming one of these lower level guys, when in fact you've got McChrystal, his top adviser and his executive officer who's now a general himself at Ft. Leavenworth – these are serious people making these comments.

And if they say, "Oh, it's all a big joke," I would question that. If you were hanging around people as a reporter and they were making jokes about race or women and then they said "it's all a big joke," it would still represent a cultural attitude. And in this case it was a contempt for civilian control.

DR: But wasn't it just crap that's said around a barstool, and it's stupid, but does it really reveal so much?

MH: I disagree totally. I think it reveals the exactly the nature of the kind of guy, who when the White House says, 'Don't ask more troops,' is going to say, 'Fuck you, give me more troops.'

DR: After the McChrystal story, you did another Rolling Stone piece about the general in charge of training Afghans running a psychological operation on visiting senators to sell the war. I think you were wrong; were wrong, it looked more like routine spin. What happened with that?

MH: My goal with that story was to lay out that there was this guy who was part of this information operations team, Lt. Col. Michael Holmes, who received training in how to plan and conduct psychological operations, and he's being asked by a general [William Caldwell] to spin and influence senators. That, to me, is a big story, just in terms of the reach and power of – I hate to call it the propaganda machine. But huge amounts of resources are being spent to influence American public opinion. And our only response to that, we have, what, 30 journalists covering this stuff? We have thousands of people in the Pentagon who work day and night to figure out how to dupe us. That to me was the key takeaway of that piece.

__ DR__: What's your actual critique of counterinsurgency? I can understand you arguing that the Afghanistan war is a bloody mistake, killing too many Afghans. But isn't counterinsurgency an attempt at mitigating those civilian deaths?

MH: I don't agree that they're actually killing fewer Afghans. Look at the numbers, they're not. If I had goverment that local insurgents were trying to overthrow, then yes, I'd probably try to adopt a counterinsurgency strategy. But what that strategy entails is a system of secret prisons and torture and this kind of no-holds barred fight. I think it's a mistake when you're trying to fight someone else's counterinsurgency for them. We're just not equipped to do it very well. The Israelis have been fighting a counterinsurgency against the Palestinians for decades, and they know the language, they know every nook and cranny of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and the conflict is never-ending.

DR: But the counterinsurgency wars in Iraq and Afghanistan weren't like the Israeli wars against the Palestinians. Petraeus warned troops in Iraq against torture; McChrystal's guidance to his troops was to be respectful of Afghan drivers.

MH: But I don't think it's true. Petraeus says we have to not torture Iraqis, I don't think that's true. Our proxies we fund and train, like Prime Minister Maliki in Iraq, or Col. Abdul Razik in Afghanistan, are torturing people and running secret prisons. McChrystal says we have to respect Afghans, I don't think they really are. They convince themselves they are, but I don't necessarily buy it. And certainly they're not doing it for any kind of moral reason, because we care about the Afghan people.

DR: Don't you go too easy on Obama in the book? You portray him as getting rolled by the Pentagon on the Afghanistan surge, rather than actually ordering all these troops to Afghanistan. I remember interviewing the Obama team on the campaign trail and they were talking about escalating the Afghanistan war – not as much as he ultimately did, but I've been surprised people were surprised by the surge.

MH: But the White House was surprised by the size of McChrystal's troop request. I would dispute that. I think they truly believed that after they sent the first 21,000 [extra troops in 2009], they were good to go. Which showed that they were totally clueless about what COIN was. I don't know how I could have been harder on the president in the book. I said he didn't understand the promises he made on the campaign trail and got rolled into this by the Pentagon. I think you're underestimating the power of the Pentagon. They play this happy warrior shtick but it's nonsense. And if you look at what President Obama has done, he's done his best to neuter and take control of the Pentagon. [Defense Secretary Robert] Gates is out, McChrystal is out, Petraeus is out of uniform, and there are no more celebrity generals.

DR: You have this powerful passage: "The guilt that many felt for not serving was covered up by an uncritical attitude toward those who did." I find civilians and veterans are both trying to understand each other – not to condescend or heroize or be hostile but to communicate as equals, with mutual respect – without really knowing how. How do we get past that?

'We have thousands of people in the Pentagon who work day and night to figure out how to dupe us'MH: I'm trying to get at this. I'm trying to write about the difficulty one has, understanding what happens to people when they go to war. Part of it is just a confidence thing, to be able call the military on their bullshit and for the military to call civilians on their bullshit. But when one has been at war and one has not, there's a cultural power imbalance.

John F. Kennedy served in World War II. After he got burned at the Bay of Pigs, he said, never again am I going to blindly trust these guys. He had learned in the Pacific that a lot of these admirals and generals running around were clowns. What did I learn in Iraq, seeing Iraqi police execute people on the streets and then having a two, three star general tell me how great the Iraqi police are? You realize these guys are clowns!

But it's really tough for people who haven't served to stand up to all the shiny brass. And it's tough for journalists as well. My younger brother is an infantry platoon leader and won a Bronze Star. My best friends are in the military. The most formative experiences of my life have been with these guys – as a journalist, which is a huge luxury, and I never want to equate my experience with theirs. But in the same way I can try to empathize with bombing victims, I can also try to do that with soldiers.

But the burdens of this war have fallen on so few. So, so few. Goddamn right the people who did serve should feel like their opinion matters, maybe even should matter more. But then you get into a Starship Troopers scenario [where citizenship is measured by military service]. I think the only way to combat against that is for everyone to do their best to understand what's really going on. And to do their best to understand that just because someone has a uniform on doesn't mean you need to genuflect. You can be respectful and thank them. But one has to be able to be as critical of four-star general as of Newt Gingrich. You have to treat these people like they're flawed human beings like you.

Photos: DVIDSHUB, U.S. Army