At West Point his classmates compared him to the charismatic renegade played by Steve McQueen in The Great Escape. But General Stanley McChrystal, the coalition commander in Afghanistan, can offer no vanishing trick for the “deteriorating” mission that he has been ordered to rescue. Rather, he has called on politicians and a weary public to make the leap of faith.
While Barack Obama pondered McChrystal’s request for 40,000 more troops last week, the American head of Nato and US forces in Afghanistan arrived in London to make his pitch. Unsparing in his criticism of the West’s shortcomings, he cited the failure to address the needs of ordinary Afghans and a command structure that had frustrated the campaign.
Given the 55-year-old general’s background as a “black ops” warrior whose special forces captured Saddam Hussein and assassinated Al-Qaeda’s leader in Iraq, his audience at the International Institute for Strategic Studies might have expected a gung-ho figure in General Patton’s mould.
Yet he is a gaunt ascetic who rises at 4.30am, eats one meal a day and jogs for an hour. His audience encountered a mild, thoughtful and at times humorous soldier lacking the sense of entitlement that can come with four stars. He had the grace to honour “the enormous sacrifice” made by British families and to express “awe” at the performance of the “British brothers I have been honoured to work with”.
Rather than expounding on how 40,000 extra troops will blitz the Taliban, he was at pains to emphasise the complexity of Afghanistan’s problems — even digging a well could shift the balance of power in a village. Afghans had to be protected not only from the Taliban, but also from “our own actions”, he said.
Some critics have wondered if coalition troops are capable of the change of “mindset” McChrystal calls for and whether he has defined an achievable mission. Others point out his failure to make any mention of Hamid Karzai, the president, whose government’s corruption would undermine fresh initiatives.
However, there is an admirable cool about this public servant, who has been in the eye of a political storm since his private assessment of the situation in Afghanistan was leaked to Bob Woodward of The Washington Post. In the 66-page document, McChrystal warned that matters were “serious” and that without more boots on the ground the US risked failure. “The insurgents cannot defeat us militarily,” he wrote, “but we can defeat ourselves.”
With Obama publicly musing: “Are we pursuing the right strategy?” and the war’s detractors suggesting the military is dragging the president into another Vietnam, McChrystal has held his nerve. The general, who admires Obama, has reportedly met the president only three times, although never for long enough to discuss his strategy in depth, and is said to be “palpably uncomfortable” with the suggestion that his commander-in-chief is having second thoughts. What if Obama withholds the troops McChrystal insists are essential? “I’ll do the best I can,” he said. Friends say it is not a resigning issue.
McChrystal, who is married and has a (non-military) son, was chosen as the man who would shake things up. He arrived in Kabul last June to declare there were two types of people at headquarters — “martyrs and those that are going home”. Decreeing that troops had to learn to get along with Afghans, he dressed down the commander of a convoy bristling with weapons and speeding through the streets at 60mph: “This is exactly the way you create the ugly Isaf” (International Security Assistance Force, the coalition of American and Nato forces).
He stopped the practice of flying flags at half-mast every time a soldier was killed. “A force that’s fighting a war can’t spend all its time looking back at what the costs have been,” he said. His approach challenged the standard military culture of overwhelming the enemy with superior firepower, sometimes regardless of the consequences. He told his men to think before they shot. In August he angered Germany by apologising for an airstrike on two hijacked Nato fuel trucks. The strike, called in by the German contingent, had killed up to 90 people.
This compassion was a long way from the reputation McChrystal had enjoyed as America’s ruthless “chief terrorist pursuer” in Iraq and Afghanistan, caught up in a scandal over torture and prisoner abuse. His transformation into a “scholar-soldier” is perhaps one of his greatest achievements in a remarkable career.
He was born into a military family on August 14, 1954. His father, Major-General Herbert J McChrystal Jr, was a Korean and Vietnam war veteran whom he remembered as soft-spoken and moral: “I never, ever saw him do a wrong thing in my whole life.” Stanley was the fourth child in a family of five boys and one girl, all of whom grew up to serve in the military or marry into it. “They’re all pretty intense,” recalled Judy McChrystal, his sister-in-law.
By McChrystal’s account, at West Point military academy he was “a troublemaker” who endured hundreds of hours of punishment drills for violating the drinking ban. Once he was nearly shot by police when he organised a mock attack on a school building, using real guns and rolled-up socks as grenades. Yet he was made a battalion commander, one of only a dozen. He graduated in 1976 and two years later enrolled in special forces, where he discovered his true metier.
“He’s lanky, smart, tough, a sneaky stealth soldier,” said a retired officer. “He’s got all the special-ops attributes, plus an intellect.” Much of his 33-year career remains classified, including his command of a Green Beret team in 1979 and 1980, several tours in the elite Rangers and service in the Gulf war of 1991.
Resisting senior officers’ advice that his career would prosper if he got a desk job, he insisted on staying in the field. However, he had seen little combat in his early years: “I missed Panama and Grenada and it bothered me. You always wonder how you’ll do.”
Those two operations were characterised by America’s post-Vietnam “force protection” mentality of using massive firepower and minimising US deaths. A similar approach governed the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, where the riskier jobs were undertaken by US special forces. These became McChrystal’s hunting grounds during 2003, when he was appointed head of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) — a unit whose existence the Pentagon refused to acknowledge for years. It oversaw the clandestine Delta Force and the navy Seals. Although based in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, McChrystal was said to be fond of accompanying his men on commando raids. “I won’t claim I was ever any great help on the missions,” he said, adding that his reason for going was to understand the challenges faced. “I’ve never shot anyone,” he claimed. Yet, according to Newsweek last week, “he has been a very effective killer”.
It was McChrystal, according to former CIA officials, who in 2005 pushed for a secret joint operation in the tribal region of Pakistan, aimed at capturing or killing Ayman alZawahiri, Osama Bin Laden’s deputy. It was cancelled at the last minute by Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, as being too dangerous and based on unreliable intelligence.
However, McChrystal succeeded in an operation against Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Al-Qaeda chief in Iraq. Jordanian agents identified Zarqawi’s clerical adviser, who was tracked to the terrorist’s hideout near Baqubah, north of Baghdad. After several weeks’ observation, the hut was destroyed in an F-16 airstrike. McChrystal, who reportedly made an eyes-on identification of Zarqawi’s body, was personally congratulated by President George W Bush in a telephone call. It was his second coup, after the capture by JSOC forces of Saddam in December 2003.
McChrystal was known as Rumsfeld’s man and a favourite of Dick Cheney, Bush’s vice-president. Early in 2003 he had conducted nationally televised Pentagon press briefings on US operations in Iraq. One of his units, Task Force 6-26, became well known for its interrogation methods, notably at Camp Nama, where it was accused of abusing detainees. After the scandal over prisoner torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, 34 members of the taskforce were disciplined. In 2008 the affair threatened to stall his appointment as director of the joint staff, but after a private meeting in the Senate his promotion was confirmed.
The announcement in June that he was to take command in Afghanistan, where he had a bruiser’s reputation, was not universally welcomed. However, McChrystal had recanted his earlier views. After watching the US failing to put down insurgencies “with a hammer” in Iraq and Afghanistan, he admitted that local populations had to be convinced, not bullied or killed. “Decapitation strategies don’t work,” he declared. Now it is time to see whether his gentler tactics succeed — or even get the green light from Washington.
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