Michael Hastings' portrayal of Stanley McChrystal in this week's Rolling Stone is a strange and jarring thing. The general's career and legacy of precise -sometimes ruthless- aptitude is well described, yet so is the near-anarchy of the nation he is (or was, by time of blog) de facto master of. There is something classic about the rise and fall from grace of this unusual executive, just as there is something ugly yet classic about the fable of how the world's most powerful nation is unable to govern one of the world's most pathetically poor and disadvantaged.
Classical metaphors aside, though I don't usually give a whit about Afghanistan. And before you tar and feather me as a willfully ignorant cuss, a bad American, and unfit even to have a blog on the interwebs, let me explain what it was that refired my interest. It was lithium. My friend Jeff -who's always flush with wonderful information, even if it's not always impeccably researched- recently told me that there's been a motherlode of lithium discovered by geologists (minerologists, maybe) in Afghanistan. This tantalizing nugget put me on the case, and before too long I'd discovered the RS piece, which proved to be a far more engaging find than Pentagon dribblings about vast lithium wealth. If anything is going to convince me, as a taxpayer, to support the occupation of a dirt-poor, historically pulverized nation, it'd better be more dope than lithium. Try again, Pentagon (maybe ask Cheney what think tank he hired to bake his yellow cake story).
Now'd be a good time to read this McChrystal article, over at Rollingstone.com-- I'm sure as hell not going to rehash even a fraction of Hasting's piece, for I'm not even a fraction the writer. My goal is to supply some commentary and points of view that I feel have been unintentionally underrepresented, even in this age of the blogosphere and zines. And yes, I already did that, with the Cheney & Pentagon jibes, but there's more to come.
So what points of view, exactly? Are they any more substantive than my irrational hatred of Dick Cheney? Well, as a veteran I have very little love for the bureaucracy and increasingly corporate (re: craven & corrupt) culture of the US military. I respect men like McChrystal; rare indeed are the colonels and generals who actually walk patrols alongside their troops, who actually put their asses on the line and legitmately earn those combat medals that they all seem to acquire, somehow or other. Most generals and colonels I've served under, or had the misfortune to encounter, are possessed of both blitheringly inflated self opinions and a truly terrifying and bland faith in the talents and strengths of their troops.
I'm reminded of a classic, "Catch-22" type happening at a large air base in Korea, where the biggest exercise the US military regularly conducts was in full swing. Not only my own Air Force brethren but thousands of soldiers, marines and sailors had convened on our little stronghold, and we were all "playing war" round the clock for a solid fortnight: there was a personnel-wide moratorium on consuming alcohol for the entirety of the game, even, if you want to gauge the degree of seriousness that infused the air. No one in the military prohibits alcohol lightly.
So it was, during this overwrought and highly tense dozen or so days, when the gathered generals and their staff were convening daily to pore over colorful maps and powerpoint slides (many, no doubt, channeling their first-ever viewing of Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove"), that Colonel Bull made himself known to my team of airmen. The Bull (as he heartily encouraged us to call him) was actually assigned to our unit in Korea, and was not "in town for the rodeo", i.e. was not just passing through. Yet we'd never seen much of the man except for his grand arrival at the base a few months hence, when he last visited my shop, and thunderously ridiculed my haircut in front of my colleagues. (Ed note: whatever relevance this anecdote may have, it seems that the haircut bit is an emotional lynchpin, so it's staying in.) Well, The Bull was now fully on our radar, pestering us night and day, and he seemed to have nothing better to do than request asinine things of my fellow communication engineers, despite being in the midst of a full-scale and insuperably huge military exercise, with something like 30,000 warfighters from around the globe gathered to test their mettle and learn to work together. And to make Kim Jong-Il lose sleep, of course.
The climax of his foolish requests was that we reprogram the encrypted phone switch, just to change the number of his hot-phone (yes, like in "Dr. Stangelove", "Stargate", etc) to 784-BULL. Whether it was an elaborate joke, or whether he was trying to keep his comm guys on our toes, I'll never know. I prefer not to, honestly; if my suspicions as to the true value of 85% of our military high command are ever confirmed, I'm leaving the country ASAP, before some 'accidental junta' happens-- it'll be staged by the proposed 15% with brains and nerve, of course, not by The Bull, yet all the similar matadors that crowd the halls of the Pentagon and the military academies will be given a seat at the table, and I'm not in the mood for something even worse than corporate feudalism.
Well, at any rate, back to the RS essay. Unsurprisingly then, I find the most redeeming aspects of Rolling Stone's portrait of McChrystal to be the general's concern for the men and women serving with him, out there in the dark and strange heart of Asia. While Hastings' rightly criticizes McChrystal's lion-hearted and fearless belief in the merits of COIN, it's the bits of the tale where McChrystal visits guards in the most blasted, forsaken, and heavily contested areas of the country that really impress me. From what I've seen of the hierarchy and command structure of the military, nobody is in the position to give orders to a four-star general, to tell him exactly what to do: no one can say to McChrystal, "go play nice, go do a photo-op for Rolling Stone". No, what Hastings observed, and felt were truly sincere pep talks in some of the nastiest zones of the conflict, could only have been initiated by the commander of Afghanistan forces.
And if you're as jaded as me, it's certainly fair game to claim that McChrystal only did those for the benefit of Hastings and RS. I've seen worse abuses of trust in my few short years in the mil, but I'm not prepared to throw McChrystal into the same bucket as all the hypocrites and clowns that I encountered. Not yet. It'll be interesting to see where he ends up five years from now, though.
But yes, some leniency towards the man is in order, I say. Yet what are we to make of the reportage that digs back a few years, that details that slimy mess about Pat Tillman and a tip-off to the Bush administration to distance themselves from the whole thing?
And the weird bluster that the man exudes-- how he seldom eats, sleeps four hours a night, and runs dozens of miles a week? This talk of superhuman endurance and austerity removes him from the realm of common men, surely, and the keenest leaders know that this is usually a good thing for their image and rep with their subordinates. Yet even with the kindest of predispositions, you can't help but start to wonder if McChrystal, ever the warrior's warrior, didn't go completely bonkers many years ago... I mean, REM sleep isn't a good thing to fiddle with, especially for years at a time, and while living under enormous and perpetual stress.
If we can take anything away from this portrayal-become-autopsy of a powerful and talented leader, then, perhaps it should simply be caution: caution against hubris, caution against trying to make your own rules when the game is already lost. If Stanley McChrystal's story is remembered well by his brothers and sisters in arms, I hope it is an odyssey of achievement and strength in the face of status quo and all the 'business as usual' bullshit. It'd be a shame to take anything but high-minded life lessons from Afghanistan now, seeing as how there has always been so very little there for us... unless that trillion-dollar lithium vein turns up after all.
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