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the most heavily populated areas of the country, but the officials feared that by ceding the rural areas of Afghanistan to the Taliban, McChrystal was tacitly admitting that the U.S. and NATO forces would never be strong enough to take on the Taliban in their backyard.
    A senior British military official summarized the sentiments of many of his colleagues during a coffee break: “McChrystal’s counterinsurgency strategy is predicated on the belief that in the time allotted to him by the White House, it was impossible to take back the countryside from the Taliban. So the only alternative was we had to save what we could of the country if we were going to try to negotiate from a position of strength at a peace conference with the Taliban.”
    The British general was right, of course. President Obama had put General McChrystal in an untenable situation when he announced on December 1, 2009, at West Point that he had ordered that an additional 30,000 troops be sent to Afghanistan on top of the 68,000 troops already there, but that the first of these troops were to be withdrawn by July 2011. Even if they did not say so publicly, everyone at the NATO summit meeting knew that McChrystal had been saddled with an impossible task. In essence, the president had given the general only a year and a half to turn the battlefield situation around before he had to begin drawing down the size of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. In the time allotted and with the forces at his disposal, McChrystal could not militarily defeat the Taliban, given the amount of territory that the guerrillas then controlled. The best McChrystal could reasonably be expected to do was to degrade the strength of the Taliban’s guerrilla forces and try to secure the major cities and towns of Afghanistan. And now, McChrystal was admitting to NATO’s top commanders that he might not be able to accomplish even this very limited goal.
    But a few weeks later, General McChrystal was gone. On June 21, 2010, news broke that Rolling Stone magazine was about to publish an article containing disparaging remarks made by General McChrystal and his senior staff about President Obama and other members of the administration. Two days later, McChrystal flew back to Washington to be relieved of his command by President Obama and sent unceremoniously into retirement.

CHAPTER 5
    We Have to Kill Them All
    Scenes from the Global War on Terrorism
    Â 
    Too long a sacrifice
    Can make a stone of the heart.
    â€”WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, “EASTER, 1916”
    British prime minister Winston Churchill is reputed to have said more than sixty years ago, “We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.” Churchill was, of course, referring to the unconventional and often brutal tactics that the badly outnumbered British forces felt compelled to use against the Germans during the darkest days of World War II.
    The metaphor may be more than sixty years old, but it remains apt today when describing the decade-long secret war that the U.S. intelligence community and its allies around the world have waged against not only al Qaeda in Pakistan but the dozens of other foreign terrorist groups of every size, shape, and color around the world.
    In the days after the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration made a resolution, which was codified in a top secret directive—National Security Presidential Directive 9, “Combating Terrorism”—that as a matter of the greatest urgency it was necessary to destroy al Qaeda and all of its allies by any means necessary because of the clear and present danger they posed to U.S. national security and, according to a declassified Joint Chiefs of Staff document, “ our way of life as a free and open society .”
    This document was written in stark terms that reduced a very complex global problem down to a simple “us versus them” paradigm in which