'The Operators' behind the scenes in the War in Afghanistan

After Hastings' behind-the-façade account of drunken sprees and locker-room jibes appeared in Rolling Stone magazine that June, McChrystal was summoned to the White House and fired. Now Hastings has written "The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America's War in Afghanistan," a troubling first-person narrative about that bizarre episode inU.S. military history, as well as a trenchant analysis of the disaster in Afghanistan.

A generation of war reporters made their names in Vietnam by challenging inane Pentagon policies and propaganda. Hastings is no David Halberstam or Michael Herr, but he brings a fresh eye and a brutally authentic voice to America's decade-old misadventure in Afghanistan. In his view, Americans have squandered treasure and blood in what he calls the "Bermuda Triangle of geopolitics," a place where outsiders disappear. A decade after9/11, the U.S. has embraced a venal regime, the presence of U.S. troops is fueling the insurgency, and the war "has very little to do with protecting the United States from terrorists," he argues.

In the weird logic of the war, "we're there because we're there. And because we're there, we're there some more," he writes. Even worse, "The simple and terrifying reality, forbidden from discussion in America… [U.S. troops] were getting their asses kicked by illiterate peasants who made bombs out of manure and wood," presumably improvised roadside bombs made from chemical fertilizer.

General Stanley McChrystal was lionized in the media as a warrior poet, a snake-eating rebel, a super Special Ops mix of saint and ninja. Glossed over was his role in some of the worst military scandals of the George W. Bush era: detainee abuse and torture at prisons in Iraq, and the coverup of Army Ranger Pat Tillman's death by friendly fire.
When he goes to a combat outpost, he gets an angry earful. The troops he meets are frustrated by the rules of engagement. They hate the Afghans. And they think they're losing.

Hastings certainly thinks so. Even the killing of Osama bin Laden last May leaves him cold. The raid "revealed the biggest lie of the war, the 'safe haven' myth, Afghanistan's version of WMDs," he writes. Terrorist attacks or plots since 2001 have emerged not from Afghanistan, but from Yemen, Nigeria, Somalia, Pakistan, not to mention Connecticut and Texas. "The concept of waging an extremely expensive and bloody counterinsurgency campaign to prevent safe havens never truly made sense."

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-book-michael-hastings-20120110,0...