Outside Islamabad

Michael Hastings, you are my hero.

Not for bringing down General McChrystal.

Not for shaking things up in the White House.

But for doing your job.

It wasn’t the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, ABC, NBC, the BBC, the Guardian, or the Independent, but you, a contributing reporter with the Rolling Stone magazine, who showed that there is a startling disconnect between Afghanistan’s civilian and military A team. Your stunning reporting led to an immediate impact. McChrystal had to pack his bags.

Dozens of reporters with leading news organizations have interviewed General McChrystal but no one showed the reality that you did. We journalists need more heroes like you.

‘How’d I get screwed into going to this dinner?” demands Gen. Stanley McChrystal.

“The dinner comes with the position, sir,” says his chief of staff, Col. Charlie Flynn. McChrystal turns sharply in his chair. “Hey, Charlie,” he asks, “does this come with the position?” McChrystal gives him the middle finger.
The Runaway General, Rolling Stone magazine

Apparently not, General. Especially when that finger closely follows comments from you and your top staff like “Bite Me” Biden, “yanking on shit” Holbrooke, “clown who remains stuck in 1985″ Gen Jones and a “not very engaged” Obama.

Yes, Afghanistan’s top commander and his team actually used those very words in front of a reporter with the Rolling Stone, Michael Hastings.

The Runaway General’s subheading reads: Stanley McChrystal, Obama’s top commander in Afghanistan, has seized control of the war by never taking his eye off the real enemy: The wimps in the White House.

The explosive article goes on to show Afghanistan’s A team giving the finger at pretty much everyone in Obama’s top administration, except Hillary.

FINGER @ BIDEN:
Unable to help themselves, he and his staff imagine the general dismissing the vice president with a good one-liner.
“Are you asking about Vice President Biden?” McChrystal says with a laugh. “Who’s that?”
“Biden?” suggests a top adviser. “Did you say: Bite Me?”

FINGER @ OBAMA:
Their first one-on-one meeting took place in the Oval Office four months later, after McChrystal got the Afghanistan job, and it didn’t go much better. “It was a 10-minute photo op,” says an adviser to McChrystal. “Obama clearly didn’t know anything about him, who he was. Here’s the guy who’s going to run his fucking war, but he didn’t seem very engaged. The Boss was pretty disappointed.”

FINGER @ GEN JONES
In private, Team McChrystal likes to talk shit about many of Obama’s top people on the diplomatic side. One aide calls Jim Jones, a retired four-star general and veteran of the Cold War, a “clown” who remains “stuck in 1985.”

FINGER @ HOLBROOKE
McChrystal reserves special skepticism for Holbrooke, the official in charge of reintegrating the Taliban. “The Boss says he’s like a wounded animal,” says a member of the general’s team. “Holbrooke keeps hearing rumors that he’s going to get fired, so that makes him dangerous. He’s a brilliant guy, but he just comes in, pulls on a lever, whatever he can grasp onto. But this is COIN, and you can’t just have someone yanking on shit.”

THUMBS UP @ HILLARY
Only Hillary Clinton receives good reviews from McChrystal’s inner circle. “Hillary had Stan’s back during the strategic review,” says an adviser. “She said, ‘If Stan wants it, give him what he needs.’?”

And that thumbs up probably made Hillary Clinton break into an uncontrollable sly smile when a CNN reporter asked President Obama if McChrystal was going to be fired after a cabinet meeting presser. This was President Obama’s first public comments after the article leaked to news outlets on Tuesday.

As could be expected the comments did not roll well with the President. McChrystal flew into DC, met his boss, the commander-in-chief for 30-minutes, explained himself and offered his resignation. Obama accepted saying his remarks undermined the civilian control of the military “at the core of our democratic system” and that as hard as it is to lose the general, the “war is bigger than any one man or woman” and that while he welcomes debate among his team, he won’t tolerate division.

Essentially Michael Hastings, through his Rolling Stone report brought the top commander in Afghanistan down. He probably never thought it would come to this. He was never meant to spend so much time with the General and his staff. Hastings met McChrystal and his team in Paris, but the volcanic ashes made it possible for them to spend more time together, including getting drunk at a Paris bar to celebrate the General’s 35th wedding Anniversary. His wife had even flown in to join in on the celebrations.

The civilian communications adviser who set up the interview, Duncan Boothby, has resigned.

So how did the 4-star general allow such a slip-up? In fact, it wasn’t just one slip up. Hastings was with McChrystal and his team for a month.

Speaking to CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Hastings said. “I was surprised by the access and the candor immediately….I felt like they had another reason for my being there they wanted to shake things up a little bit….as a journalist I try to be as fair and accurate as possible. I was wondering why are they saying these things in front of me. Is it just bad judgment or are they trying to send a message out. ”

And that is what some analysts were speculating when news of the article first broke. “Do we have an issue here? Are McChrystal’s comments a part of a larger issue?”

But some analyst’s maintained “as mad as they are, he (McChrystal) is the best person to carry the mission forward.”

President Obama decided not to take either route, maintaining that it was just bad judgment on the General’s part, but accepting his resignation. “I believe that this mission demands unity of effort across our alliance and across my national security team. And I don’t think that we can sustain that unity of effort and achieve our objectives in Afghanistan without making this change.”

President Obama urged the Senate to swiftly confirm Petraeus, who would leave his Central Command position.

I don’t know if the commander shuffle will ultimately hurt an already losing war effort but I do know that I’m in a pretty cool country if a magazine like the Rolling Stone can bring down a General.

Fox News’ Geraldo Riviera blames Hastings saying the comments were probably “off-the-record.” He actually questions his journalism as a contributor with the Rolling Stone. He quotes his own dozens of embedding missions in which he saw the kind of stress the soldiers were under and how Hastings should’ve known better. My response to Geraldo is: You are a quack. Not a journalist. Journalists are supposed to report all the facts, not sift through the facts that they think might be stress-related.

According to the Forbes Blog, Hastings is an alum of Newsweek who wrote a powerful-sounding memoir called “I Lost My Love in Baghdad: A Modern War Story” about his fiancee’s death while working as an aid worker. He’s open about his past struggles with alcohol. And he seems principled, having left Newsweek after it became clear it was valuing opinion-journalism over reporting. You can check out his profile on trueslant.com.

My husband has a subscription to the Rolling Stone magazine, and honestly every time a crack open an issue I am blown away by their investigative reports which in the last few months have ranged from the Global Land Grab, the Biggest Cyber Crime in History, & the Revenge of the Puppet (Karzai.)

Because they’re target market is young, the magazine’s cut-the-bullshit writing style is dynamic and direct. Hastings, The Runaway General for example did not bleep out the f word.

Ever since 20-year-old Jann S. Wenner dropped out of the University of California Berkeley to start a quirky rock-music-oriented biweekly called Rolling Stone, the magazine has spoke to—and for—an entire generation. The magazine has won 14 National Magazine Awards for General Excellence, Design, Photography, Visual Excellence, Specialized Journalism, Feature Writing, and Reporting. Today, Rolling Stone has 12 million readers and serves as the ultimate source for music information and popular-culture trends.

Kudoos to magazines like Rolling Stone, Mother Jones and the New Yorker for putting the budgets aside and really pushing the bar in terms of investigative journalism. Especially in these hard economic times, where costly investigative departments in most news outlets are just shrinking. We need unbiased reporting, especially with two wars going on. We as journalists can’t just stick to the official word, we have to probe deeper. It is irresponsible not to probe deeper. And we are already shamefully guilty of that in 2003, when most news organizations accepted that “Weapons of Mass Destruction” were in Iraq.

Hastings article wasn’t just about exposing trashy locker room talk, it was about starting a larger discussion on a failing counter-insurgency strategy that is not winning hearts or saving lives. In conclusion Hastings writes,

“So far, counterinsurgency has succeeded only in creating a never-ending demand for the primary product supplied by the military: perpetual war. There is a reason that President Obama studiously avoids using the word “victory” when he talks about Afghanistan. Winning, it would seem, is not really possible. Not even with Stanley McChrystal in charge. “

Hastings follow-up piece,“Replacing McChrystal: Can Petraeus Win the War?” which appeared hours after the General was dismissed maintains,

“Changing generals isn’t likely to resolve the real trouble in Afghanistan: the fundamental flaws in the U.S. strategy of counterinsurgency.”

He goes on to write that Petraeus has been chosen because he not only drafted the Army field manual on counter-insurgency that is being pursued in Afghanistan but because

“he single-handedly convinced many Washington insiders that his “surge” in Iraq resulted in some kind of major victory in Mesopotamia — a notion that is right up there with thinking that Pizza Hut has good pizza.”

On his TrueSlant profile Hastings writes “I Truly Respect: Writers who live their lives with integrity and without compromise.” Thank you Hastings for being one of those writers.