Great article......
http://www.newsweek.com/id/216237In Kabul, the entrance to the headquarters of the International Security Assistance Force—the coalition of NATO and U.S. forces in Afghanistan—is easy to miss. Ever since the Taliban blew up the main gate a month ago, visitors have been required to pass through a small metal door and down winding, dingy passageways topped with barbed wire. Inside the ISAF compound, grimy trailers, used to provide office space, are stacked up around a seedy, once grand building that was long ago a social club for officers of the British Empire. There was a bar, but a couple of weeks ago, Gen. Stanley McChrystal outlawed alcohol on the base, and he has indicated that he wants to turn a small, pretty garden, a tiny oasis of green, into a rifle range.
McChrystal, 55, is a purebred warrior, the son of a two-star general, West Point class of '76, a former commander of the elite Rangers Regiment, and, from 2003 to 2008, the head of hunter-killer black ops in Special Operations. He eats one meal a day, works out obsessively every morning at 5, and is so free of body fat that he looks gaunt. Lately, as commander of the war in Afghanistan, he has become a kind of Zen warrior, preaching that often "the shot you don't fire is more important than the one you do." He is a student of what he calls "counterinsurgency math." If you encounter 10 Taliban members and kill two, he says, you don't have eight remaining enemies. You have more like 20: the friends and relatives of the two you killed.
McChrystal reinforces his sermon early every morning in a dreary, windowless bunker at a meeting called the CUA (pronounced koo-ah), for commander's update assessment. He sits in the back row of five tiers of computer modules, facing giant video screens streaming with data and statistics. One day last week, when a briefer informed him that two Taliban had been killed the day before by soldiers using a multiple-rocket launcher, McChrystal dryly noted, "That's an awful lot of firepower to kill two people." He used gentle humor to chide an officer who presented a convoluted diagram full of boxes and arrows to illustrate counterinsurgency in Kandahar. "The day we can explain that, we've won," the general observed.
McChrystal has a disarming, low-key style, free of the bombast and sense of entitlement that can come with four stars. He is polite and gracious, if direct, and he can be funny. At the end of the CUA, an officer brought up the spate of articles appearing in the American press suggesting that McChrystal's request for more troops in Afghanistan was being seriously questioned by policymakers in Washington, including President Obama. McChrystal had sent his chiefs in the Pentagon a secret assessment of the situation in Afghanistan, which he described as "deteriorating" and headed for "failure" unless the Americans sent more troops. The 66-page document had been leaked to Bob Woodward of The Washington Post, setting off a buzz of critical stories in the media. Hawks seized on the report to argue that Obama was going all wobbly, while critics of the war suggested the military was dragging him toward another Vietnam. The controversy caused evident anxiety among McChrystal's commanders at the morning briefing. The officer asked if General McChrystal was feeling the pressure. "I am," McChrystal allowed, and deadpanned, "Money would make me feel better." There were a few laughs as his legal adviser, Col. Rich Gross, gave the general a dollar, but the joke fell a little flat. McChrystal's people want to believe in him, and they want to believe in their mission; they do not want to see McChrystal's judgment questioned—and certainly not his integrity.
At the morning briefing, McChrystal tried to make light of stories in the press quoting Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as saying McChrystal's call for more troops was just one opinion among military experts. "She's absolutely right," said McChrystal to his lieutenants. "There are other experts and they're smarter than me," though, he quipped, "not in this room." The jokes were uncharacteristically lame, as if he was struggling to put a bright face on bad news. Later that evening, eating his one meal of the day (salmon salad, chick-en, strawberry shortcake), McChrystal was clearly troubled—"a bit bothered," as he put it—by the rumors appearing in the media that he might resign over his differences with those unnamed other experts in Washington. "It is my responsibility, my duty—my sacred duty," he said, to tell the unvarnished truth to his leaders, but then to carry out their orders. He would not resign, he said, even if they rejected his advice.
Duty, that most noble of military virtues, is a deceptively simple notion. "Duty, Honor, Country" is the motto of the U.S. Military Academy. But what if duty to your troops conflicts with duty to your political leaders? What then is the honorable thing to do for your country? McChrystal would not acknowledge that there might be a conflict. But virtually everything he said to me over the course of an hour last week suggested that he believes he cannot carry out his mission in Afghanistan without more troops. He would not say how many he is asking for in a still-secret document, but knowledgeable military officials who would not be quoted discussing classified information say the number is about 40,000. Maybe McChrystal will salute smartly if he is ordered to make do with fewer. He has great political skills; he couldn't have risen to his current position without them. But he definitely does not see himself as the sort of military man who would compromise his principles to do the politically convenient thing. At the very least, when he is called back to Washington to support his assessment and recommendation, he will make a strong public case that only an all-out campaign of counterinsurgency against the Taliban will accomplish his assigned mission—to make sure that terrorists do not use Afghanistan as a base for terrorist operations against the United States.
McChrystal has led a charmed life until now, in part because his leadership skills have been obvious and recognized. His inspiration was his father, a Korean and Vietnam War combat vet who was, according to his son, the "non-Great Santini"—soft-spoken, never a bully. "I never, ever saw him do the wrong thing in my whole life," says McChrystal. "I never saw him say, 'With a wink and a nod we can get around this.' "
