Interview: General Stanley McChrystal

By Toby Harnden in Kabul, Telegraph

General Stanley McChrystal designed his Situational Awareness Room so it would gear up the American military for the information technology era just as Winston Churchill's map room equipped Britain for war in the industrial age.



At Nato's Kabul headquarters, his dozen or so key advisers sit behind computers around a u-shaped table opposite eight screens that scroll down intelligence reports, news headlines and operational updates of Improvised Explosives Device (IED) attacks and air strikes across Afghanistan.

When he's not visiting troops or conferring with Afghans, Gen McChrystal, a lean, intense and ascetic Special Forces veteran, is usually in the SAR, where he also conducts three or four video teleconferences a day, sometimes with the White House and Pentagon. Up to 50 people crowd into the room for his daily morning updates.

The SAR is part of the McChrystal vision for a flatter, less hierarchical way of waging war where information is shared and assumptions challenged. Every other week, he conducts a 45-minute virtual "town hall" meeting in which troops use a chat room to ask questions and he responds over streaming audio.

Gen McChrystal is the man charged by President Barack Obama with turning around a war within the space of 18 months after more than eight years of steady drift towards strategic defeat.

He spoke to The Daily Telegraph about his plan for revolutionising ways of fighting by focusing on the Afghan people rather than on the Taliban.

"Your security comes from the people," he said. "You don't need to be secured away from the people. You need to be secured by the people. So as you win their support, it's in their interests to secure you, to report IEDs."

This can mean patrolling without armoured vehicles or even flak jackets. It means accepting greater short-term risk – and higher casualties – in the hope of winning a "battle of perceptions and perspectives" that will result in longer-term security.

"If we respond with overwhelming fire to limited small arms fire from a compound we do protect ourselves but we destroy their livelihood and potentially the people," he said.

"Even when we run around in armoured vehicles or personal armour we often send an unintended message that we're more important than they are. If we've got more armour but in reality the people are at more risk they have to question the degree to which we really are protecting them."

Two months after he took command in June, after his predecessor Gen David McKiernan was fired, Gen McChrystal warned that the Nato forces were close to an "outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible".

Since then, US Marines and British troops, along with Afghan forces, cleared the Taliban stronghold of Marjah in Helmand in Operation Moshtarak.

Civilian casualties have been reduced and US forces are in the process of being increased by 30,000 – a doubling of the force in place a year ago.

"I don't think we've reversed the momentum yet," he said. "I think the situation is still serious but I don't think it's deteriorating now."

The glimmer of hope is that Afghans "do sense something different" – even though confidence in President Hamid Karzai's government has plummeted and "the insurgency has gotten to where it threatens more people, more hours of the day".

Gen McChrystal said: "They're much more open minded than I sensed even a few months ago ... But they're unconvinced. They're right in the middle – 'Yeah, we want to believe but you just haven't given us enough yet to believe'.

"In places where their security is pretty good, people need to be convinced more. In places where their security is very weak it's a very practical issue of survival – they can't afford to believe openly until they can be sure we will protect them."

As a way of gauging the shifting opinions of ordinary Afghans, Gen McChrystal regularly meets a group of students. A man of legendary single-mindedness, the 55-year-old, who took part in Special Forces combat missions in Iraq up until 2007, has brought a new seriousness to Nato headquarters.

He eats once a day – what one aide described as a "big ass meal" in the evening – and munches on pretzels the rest of the day. He also runs once a day at a ferocious pace, covering some eight miles in an hour while listening to books, including works by Winston Churchill and about Horatio Nelson, on his Kindle.

Alcohol is now banned at the headquarters and he has just ordered that Burger King and Pizza Hut fast food outlets on Americans bases be closed.

The next big test for Nato and Gen McChrystal will be a summer offensive against Kandahar, the spiritual home of the Taliban and the birthplace of its one-eyed leader Mullah Omar, which is increasingly under the influence of the insurgency.

Breaking with traditional military doctrine, Gen McChrystal is announcing the Kandahar objective months ahead of time even though this gives the enemy a chance to prepare. "Telegraphing our punch is important because we've said that we are going to do effective counter-insurgency, protect and respect the people."

He continued: "It's also not a bad thing for us to communicate that to the enemy as well because we say, 'We are going to do this and the reality is, you can't stop us'." It is inevitable that "the insurgents will make a tremendous effort to upset this and prevent it" and "they'll have to use mostly assymetric tactics, which means they'll plant IEDs, use suicide bombers".

This, he argued, means that two different visions of Afghanistan would be presented. The Taliban "blowing up civilians is not going to be particularly compelling ... the people will get a fair chance to view and make their choice".

The biggest challenge, he conceded, was something largely out of his control – the ineffectiveness and corruption of the Karzai government.

He said: "The government of Afghanistan has got to get control of that to a degree where the people believe it's at least an acceptable political environment".

What is needed is "probably a hybrid of using natural leaders in the community and their natural traditional structure like shuras and jirgas".

He added: "In some cases it's using sharia law down at the local level to get timely and fair justice. But that's got to be linked to a central government that's credible." Eventually, he predicted, senior Taliban figures would opt to cut a deal.

Military success by Nato would lead to the Taliban being "in the position, 'If we cant win and continue to fight on and be potentially killed or captured or we can say OK, what could we do to get into the political process'".

Until then, however, Special Forces would be used to kill as many senior Taliban as possible with little consideration of which ones might eventually come to the negotiating table.

"You need not let yourself be too constrained because the Taliban leaders need to understand that the willingness for their ability to make an accommodation is not endless and so if they're going to be out there as functioning insurgent leaders they are at risk," he said.

"If they send a message that they're interested in working with the government then I think there's room to consider not targeting them. But just because somebody might some day do something I don't think gets them protection."