---

(page 64)

Jake came up to me. "We'll hunt you down and kill you if we don't like what you write," he said. "C. will hunt you down and kill you."

[note: Jake McFerren is General McChrystal's top civilian political advisor responsible for helping foster international relations with the 44 coalition countries involved in Afghanistan. Jake was also McChrystal's West Point roommate and drinking buddy....C. was a member of the SAS, the most elite British commando unit]

---

(page 88)

"Sorry about threatening to kill you," Jake said. It was the first time anyone in the group had acknowledged the blowout on Friday night.

"Yeah, geez, the guy is just trying to do his job," McChrystal said.

"No worries. Like I said, it happens all the time, but yeah, you're probably the highest rank to do so," I said.

I laughed, and they didn't.

---

(page 73-74)

Over the past year, journalists had regularly been given intimate access to McChrystal and his staff. A reporter for the New York Times spent a few days in Kabul with him, producing a profile that found McChrystal's only fault was that he worked so hard, "he sometimes affords little tolerance for those who do not." He described his running habits: "eight miles a clip, usually with an audiobook at his ears." A writer for the Atlantic had enjoyed a good stay, writing an article titled "Man Versus Afghanistan." He asked if McChrystal was Afghanistan's only hope. He found reason to believe: "eight miles a day, eating only one meal a day, and sleeping four hours a night--itself expresses an unyielding, almost cultic, determination." Time magazine had put him as runner-up for Person of the Year, opening with an anecdote about a competitive "eight to ten mile" run he had with General Patreus. 60 Minutes spent the most personal time with him: He allowed them to film while he was jogging around the base. They'd all told the same story:McChrystal as a modern combination of saint and ninja, a "Jedi Knight," as Newsweek called him.

---

(page 75)

As a country, we'd changed since Vietnam--the ghost McChrystal and his generation of military leaders desperately wanted to exorcize. The fear that their wars, too, could end in disgrace: "It's not going to look like a win, smell like a win, or taste like a win," Major General Bill Mayville, McChrystal's director of operations, would tell me. "This is going to end in an argument." An argument they were determined to win. One of the first books McChrystal read after arriving in Kabul was Stanley Karnow's "Vietnam: A History." McChrystal called the author to ask if there were any lessons that would apply to Afghanistan. "The main thing I learned is that we never should have been there in the first place," Karnow reportedly told him. It wasn't what the general wanted to hear.

---

(page 76)

The lesson our leaders took from Vietnam was not, it turns out, how to avoid another Vietnam. It was how to seal off the horror: to ensure that only a small group felt and saw it. An all volunteer military, and a further reliance on the most elite, specialized soldiers to do the nation's work we prefer to ignore. Entering houses at midnight and shooting unarmed men while they sleep. A widespread acceptance of drone strikes, killings committed by remote control--McChrystal watched a man on a videofeed in his headquarters for 17 days before he ordered the strike on a compound to kill Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. He went to see the dead man's body: the pictures of the corpse were displayed at a press conference, a modern day version of putting a man's head on a spike.

---

(page 110)

I had downtime to digest the reporting. A question persisted: What was the motivation behind McChrystal's decision to have me tag along? Was it that Rolling Stone would reach a demographic of young officers and recruits they wanted to impress? Would it confirm the view that the team held of McChrystal--that he was a "rock star," as they regularly called him? Dave explained that Special Forces operators had a healthy disrespect for authority; Rolling Stone fit this self-styled image perfectly. They were building Brand McChrystal--ballsy, envelope-pushing, risk taking. New York Times Magazine cover? Done. Time cover? Done. Atlantic cover? Too easy. 60 Minutes profile? No worries. Rolling Stone? Boom. It was a natural evolution of a very aggressive media strategy to establish McChrystal as a contender for the greatest general of his generation, on a par with Patreus.

---

(pages 142-143)

Insurgents are Afghans. What is essential for success is not to kill the insurgents, because they are the Afghan people. If you kill the insurgency, you kill the Afghan people you came to protect, and there's nobody left to win over.

If you kill two out of ten insurgents, you don't end up with eight insurgents. You might end up multiplying the number of fighters aligned against you. McChrystal calls it "Insurgent Math." If you kill two, he said, "more likely you're going to have something like twenty. Those two that were killed, their relatives don't understand that they're doing bad things. Okay, they think. a foreigner just killed my brother--I got to fight them."

Afghan Math: 10 - 2= 8 (wrong)...10 - 2= 20 (right)

---

(page 205)

The manual performs a rather impressive sleight of hand: tying counterinsurgency to the War on Terror. The vast majority of the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan is not against any combatant who poses a threat to the United States homeland. But to justify the tremendous outlay of resources and lives it requires to enact a counterinsurgency plan, the theories claim that COIN, somehow, is an effective way to deal with transnational terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda. That this is patently false does not give the movement much pause. A RAND study "How Terrorists Groups End," commissioned in 2008, explicitly points out that the best way to defeat terrorist networks is not through military force, but through law enforcement. The authors looked at 648 terrorist groups that were active from 1968 to 2006. In 40 percent of the cases, policing is "the most effective strategy," with local intelligence and police agencies able to penetrate and disrupt the terror groups, while 43 percent reached a political accommodation with the government. The study states: "Military force led to the end of terrorist groups in 7 percent of the cases," and that military force has not "significantly undermined (Al-Qaeda's) abilities."