[ 2010-06-25 ]

I thought General McChrystal was ‘unfireable’
London (UK) – 25 June 20 – The Times - The man
who, in effect, ended General Stanley McChrystal’s
glittering military career said yesterday that he
thought the top commander in Afghanistan was
“unfireable”.

In a candid interview with The Times, the
journalist Michael Hastings said he never imagined
he would get as much access to the general and his
inner circle as he did. He insisted he was simply
doing his job as a magazine reporter and rebutted
suggestions that there was anything underhand
about the methods he employed. Hastings’s
devastating exposé of General McChrystal and his
aides led President Obama to dismiss the man
credited widely as the mastermind of America’s
strategy in Afghanistan.

“I realised that it was very strong material for a
profile,” Hastings, 30, said. “But I thought
McChrystal was unfireable. I thought his position
was very well protected.”

The President’s decision, on Wednesday morning,
hit General McChrystal “like a steam train”, a
close aide said yesterday. It stunned his
headquarters staff and, were it not for the
surprise appointment of General David Petraeus in
his place, might have derailed the American war
effort altogether, some analysts have said.

In the Rolling Stone profile, entitled The Runaway
General, Hastings detailed conversations between
General McChrystal and a small cadre of loyal
aides that took place between mid-April and
mid-May in Paris, Berlin, Kabul and Kandahar. In a
series of vignettes he showed them mocking,
criticising or dismissing almost all of the senior
civilians in and around their chain of command.

One of the comments concerned Mr Obama, with
General McChrystal’s aides saying he was
“disappointed” by a meeting with the President,
which he described as “just a ten minute
photo-op”.

Hastings described the General’s staff as “a
collection of killers, spies, geniuses, patriots,
political operators and outright maniacs”. He
watched them on a night out in Paris, drinking
until they were “completely shitfaced”.

“They are fun guys to hang out with,” Hastings
told The Times. “They are impressive people. I
just don’t know if their solution for Afghanistan
is appropriate.”

The freelance reporter, who grew up in Vermont and
upstate New York, insists he did not set out to
have General McChrystal fired. “It was to get
people to say, ‘Hey, what’s going on in
Afghanistan?’. It’s often as if America doesn’t
even realise it’s fighting two wars.”

Nor is he a pacifist. His younger brother, Jeff,
28, was awarded a Bronze Star for his time as a
platoon commander in Iraq. “War is not something
abstract to me,” he said. “Many of my friends have
suffered immensely. I just want to make sure that
the sacrifices are worth it.”

When he graduated from New York University in
2002, aged 22, Hastings took an unpaid internship
at Newsweek. From 2005 to 2007 he was the
magazine’s correspondent in Baghdad, until his
girlfriend was killed in an ambush. Soon
afterwards he wrote a memoir, How I Lost My Love
in Baghdad. It received mixed reviews, with The
New York Times pointing to a “whiff of
exploitation” hanging over his narrative.

In a confessional article for GQ about the dark
arts of campaign journalism, Hastings wrote: “You
pretend to be friendly and non-threatening, and
over time you ‘build trust’, which everybody
involved knows is an illusion. If the time comes,
if your editor calls for it, you’re supposed to
f*** them over.”

That, and the extraordinary level of access that
Hastings enjoyed with General McChrystal, prompted
a Fox News commentator to describe him as a “rat
in an eagle’s nest”. One rival reporter in Kabul
dismissed his McChrystal profile as “people
bitching about Washington? What’s new?”

Even senior Nato officials admit, however, that
the profile brought together an irrefutable weight
of anecdotal evidence about the fractured
relationships that surrounded General McChrystal’s
command. It also incorporated a series of
revelations about the mission’s prospects of
success.

“Even those who support McChrystal and his
strategy of counter-insurgency know that whatever
the General manages to accomplish in Afghanistan,
it’s going to look more like Vietnam than Desert
Storm,” he wrote.

“It’s not going to look like a win, smell like a
win or taste like a win,” Major-General Bill
Mayville, General McChrystal’s chief of staff, was
quoted as saying in the report. “This is going to
end in an argument.”

Hastings insists he does not care what the critics
say. There were no ground rules, guidelines or
even unspoken understandings broken. Tellingly, he
points out that no one at Nato, the Pentagon or
even the White House has questioned the truth of
what he wrote — nor have they claimed that the men
were quoted out of context.

A senior Nato official said that Hastings captured
the “natural venting” and “institutional tensions”
that exist everywhere. His worst criticism of the
6,000-word profile was that, perhaps, it
represented an “incomplete view”.

“We tell it how it is,” Hastings said about the
way journalists join soldiers on operations. “We
report what the soldiers say. We report them
venting. Why should it be any different for the
generals? Their opinions matter even more. Why
should we protect them?”

He was with a helicopter unit at Kandahar Airfield
when his story broke this week. The soldiers he
said, were incredibly civil. One, he said, even
sent him a congratulatory e-mail. “The soldiers
respect McChrystal, but there’s no love lost
between them,” he said.



His bombshell story started with an e-mail to the
executive editor at Rolling Stone magazine, Eric
Bates, earlier this year. Hastings wanted to write
about General McChrystal to coincide with his
first year anniversary of command in Kabul, and
Bates agreed to publish it.

“He said just send them an e-mail so I did. They
responded almost immediately and said they would
love to do it,” Hastings said.

Duncan Boothby was General McChrystal’s civilian
media adviser who arranged it. He has since
resigned. Hastings said it took around 10 days
from first making contact to when he got a phone
call telling him to meet General McChrystal and
his team in Paris.

“They were pretty candid right from the get go,”
he said. Bates later told US television: “They
knew when we were on the record. They said a lot
of stuff to us off the record that’s not in the
story. We respected those boundaries. This was all
when they knew they were on.”

That has left media analysts questioning what
General McChrystal hoped to gain from the profile.
One senior Nato source said that despite his
special forces background, the general believed
“the benefit of openness outweighs the risk”.

The media have been instrumental in building up
the myth of General McChrystal as an aescetic
warrior-monk. Weeks before he moved to Kabul, the
New York Times reported that he ran to and from
work, ate one meal a day — in the evening to avoid
sluggishness — and only slept four hours a night.
It has become a newspaper mantra that has been
repeated and exaggerated almost every time the man
is mentioned.

“I think he had been protected by other profile
writers in the past, who wanted access,” Hastings
said. “I am not an access journalist. That’s not
my style.”

Source - The Times(UK)

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