General Stanley McChrystal and his staff spoke on the record and wanted to send a message to President Barack Obama conveying their “frustration” with the Afghan war policy, the Rolling Stone article’s author said Tuesday.
Michael Hastings, the journalist who spent weeks with the blunt-talking commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, also told ABC News it became clear during his time with McChrystal and his team that “there are serious skeptics (about the war) in the highest levels of his staff.”
McChrystal was summoned to the White House on Wednesday to explain the article in which he and senior aides criticized and mocked top officials, including commander-in-chief Obama.
“I think they were frustrated with how the policy was going, and I think there was an intent on their part to get a message out about that frustration,” Hastings told the U.S. broadcaster.
“The headline for me is, the war is out of Obama’s control. Obama does not have control over the war in Afghanistan. He doesn’t have control over the policy, and the policy has serious issues,” Hastings said.
The article ignited a firestorm in Washington, and questions swirled as to why McChrystal and his aides were so blunt in their assessments.
The magazine’s executive editor Eric Bates insisted that “everything we published was on the record.”
“We got a lot of stuff off the record and didn’t use it. We respected all of those boundaries,” he told CNN.
“These weren’t off-the-cuff remarks by his staff he didn’t know about.”
Bates said the stunning profile, entitled “The Runaway General,” was helped by the fact that the author was stranded with McChrystal and his entourage when their flights were canceled due to ash from an Icelandic volcano in April.
“One of the reasons we got so much access was Michael Hastings was with the general and his staff in Paris, and they got stranded by the volcano in Iceland and couldn’t fly to Berlin and had to take a bus.
“So our reporter was on the road with him for a number of days, went out drinking with them, saw them preparing for speeches, saw them going to meetings and then also went to Afghanistan.”
“We were really behind the curtain and hearing how the general and his top staff talk among themselves amidst this war. They are a close knit group,” Bates added. “They are in the war and this is how they talk behind the scenes when they are blowing off steam by themselves.”
Hastings told NBC News that McChrystal and his aides were drinking “the whole way” on the bus trip to Berlin.
“They let loose,” Hastings told the network. “I don’t blame them. They have a hard job.”
Hastings has familiarity with the top echelons of the U.S. military from reporting on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan during recent years.
On Tuesday, Hastings said McChrystal and his team were thoroughly aware that the reporter in their midst was using their quotes.
“There were no ground rules given to me. I had a tape recorder and notepad out the entire time,” he told CNN by telephone from the Afghan city of Kandahar. “I think it was all very clear that it was on the record.”
Hastings told ABC he attributed the shock statements to “a natural kind of recklessness that Gen. McChrystal has, which has been with him through his entire career, as I understand it.”
Bates said no one asked them to pull the article, which he said was checked thoroughly by McChrystal’s team, and he suggested its impact would be significant.
“These comments show a deep division, a war within the administration over the war itself and the strategy,” he said.
“That war has been going on since the beginning over the troop escalation and continues very clearly between the military side and the diplomatic side, and it’s very hard to see how we can win a war when we’re divided ourselves.”
Obama named McChrystal as commander in May 2009 to bring a fresh approach to the struggling Afghan campaign, but Hastings said the relationship “has been strained from the beginning.”
“I think the frustration is that the President really believes in the mission in Afghanistan. That, I think, is at the root of the problem,” he told NBC.