McChrystal's Frank Talk on Afghanistan

Editor's Note: On June 23, 2010, Gen. McChrystal was relieved of his command following controversial comments made in a "Rolling Stone" magazine interview. Click here for more coverage.

Even with more troops, he warns, there has to be "a dramatic change in how we operate." That stark assessment comes from a man who is perhaps this country's most battle-hardened general and, according to those who have served with him, a one-of-a-kind commander.

60 Minutes and correspondent David Martin went to Afghanistan to spend a week with McChrystal as he races against the calendar. We found him to be blunt, hard charging and fed up with the way the U.S. has been fighting the war for the past eight years. His assessments are as close to an unvarnished war briefing as you're likely to get.

More from 60Minutes.com:
Impressions from Afghanistan
Afghanistan: Country Fast Facts
General McChrystal
McChrystal: Tough Guy
McChrystal: Bulletproof?
McChrystal And The President

Asked if things are better or worse than he expected, General McChrystal told Martin, "They are probably a little worse."

"What's worse than you thought?" Martin asked.

"Well, I think that in some areas that the breadth of violence, the geographic spread of violence, places to the north and to the west, are a little more than I would have gathered," McChrystal replied.

That violence is catalogued in the briefing books he scans every morning at his headquarters in Kabul. But he doesn't trust them to give him a real sense of what's happening out there amid all the ambushes and firefights. Two or three times each week he gets on a helicopter to see for himself.

"You can listen to every radio transmission, down to squad level, and you can watch from the Predator, you can see what's going on. But you can't kid yourself that you know what's going on. But there's a danger that you do, because you hear and you see it and you think 'Okay, I know.' But you're not on the ground with that guy. You don't feel it. You don't hear the bullets. You just can't make an assessment," McChrystal told Martin while they flew above the Afghan countryside.

Flying over terrain that has defeated invaders from the British to the Soviets, McChrystal knows he has to do more than just fine tune a strategy that after eight years of war appears on the brink of failure.

So he has issued a new directive on counterinsurgency operations, telling his troops in writing: "We must change the way we think, act and operate."

Protecting the Afghan people - many of them living in impoverished villages - is now more important than killing the enemy, even if that means taking more risks.

"The parents of kids over here can't be too happy to hear that the commander is telling them to accept more risk," Martin noted.

"This is something that takes a tremendous amount of understanding. What I'm really telling people is the greatest risk we can accept is to lose the support of the people here," McChrystal explained. "If the people are against us, we cannot be successful. If the people view us as occupiers and the enemy, we can't be successful and our casualties will go up dramatically."

When 60 Minutes went out on patrol with a squad from the 10th Mountain Division, they were not going into a village to root out insurgents but to offer the people protection and help with their daily lives, which the central government in Kabul has so far failed to do.

The only way to win, McChrystal insists, is to earn the support of the people.

McChrystal's new strategy says conventional military operations designed to kill the enemy can never win this war. Destroying homes and accidentally killing civilians in the process only create more insurgents and alienates the population.

In other words, for much of the past eight years, the U.S. has been sowing the seeds of its own demise.

By McChrystal's count, 265 civilians were killed by American or allied firepower in the past 12 months. He said during one of the many video conferences he holds each week that civilian casualties could make or break his strategy.

"I knew this was an important issue, but since I've been here the last two and a half months, this civilian casualty issue is much more important than I even realized. It is literally how we lose the war or in many ways how we win it," McChrystal said during a briefing.

To reduce those casualties, he took drastic action, ordering a virtual ban on air strikes against residential areas, even if hostile fire is coming from the building.

"We've got some things we absolutely have got to show them that we'll do differently. If we succeed, some of it will be despite some of the things we've done or failed to do," McChrystal explained.

"The hallmark of American military power was its overwhelming firepower. Now you're describing a situation in which firepower is almost beside the point?" Martin asked.

"You know, the favorite saying of, 'To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.' We can't operate that way. We can't walk with only a hammer in our hands," McChrystal replied.

When he walks in public, he doesn't wear a side arm or body armor.

"If we are visiting Afghans, typically the afghan governor, district or provincial governor, we see he doesn't wear body armor, and yet we're walking through his streets. I'm his guest. I think that that's important that I send a message that I trust him and I don't think I am more valuable than I think he is," McChrystal explained.

60 Minutes went with McChrystal to a market in western Afghanistan. He wanted the security thrown up around him to back off, so he could hear firsthand what the people had to say about the war.

"How can we be better? Ask him how coalition forces can be better," McChrystal asked a group of men with the help of an interpreter.

Shopkeepers told him the Taliban controls the one paved road. "If they know you have a business or you have some money, there is no way you can go through that road," one shopkeeper explained to McChrystal.

And the government can't provide basic services. "One most important problem is electricity. We need electricity. You can bring it for us?" another man asked the general.

One man said he was kidnapped by the Taliban and that they asked for ransom.

McChrystal was also told that security was good only today, and only because the American commander had come to visit.

McChrystal knows the Taliban have been gaining ground, spreading into parts of the country where they've not been seen before. And he was not impressed when the soldiers and civilians who man one remote outpost assured him they are making slow steady progress.

"The question is not whether we're making progress. The question is whether we're making enough progress fast enough," McChrystal said.

He drew a graph showing the rate of progress he really needs. "What if our rate of progress is below that, but it's still up? So then people come visit, I come visit you, and every time I visit you, you say 'We're doing good. We're doing better. We made progress.' It doesn't matter, 'cause at the end of the day you lost. At some point you lost," he said.

His frustration with business as usual was palpable. "We could do good things in Afghanistan for the next 100 years and fail. Because we're doing a lot of good things and it just doesn't add up to success," McChrystal said.

In one video conference with the Pentagon, he complained about the months it takes just to get officers assigned to his staff when he's up against a deadline from the Secretary of Defense.

"The secretary talks in terms of 12 to 18 months to show a significant change and then we eat up two or three months just on sort of getting the tools out of the tool box. That really hurts," McChrystal explained during the briefing.

He relentlessly pounded away at the Pentagon bureaucracy. "The average organization, when someone asks when you want something, they pull out a calendar. But in a good organization they look at their watch and we really got to get that way," McChrystal said.

He also wants American convoys to stop their aggressive driving on Afghan streets.

"It's perceived by the people as arrogance. It's perceived by the people as not caring about, you know their right to use the road. And at the end of the day, it's their roads," he said.

"It sounds like you're trying to deprogram eight years of bad habits," Martin noted.

"Exactly," McChrystal agreed. "There's an awful lot of bad habits we've got to deprogram."

McChrystal's compulsion for shaking up the system even includes the flags outside his headquarters. They used to fly at half staff every time a soldier was killed. He ordered them raised.

"We had gotten to the point where the flags were at half mast all the time, and I believe that a force that's fighting a war can't spend all it's time looking back at what the costs have been. They've got to look ahead and they've got to have their confidence. And I thought it was important that the flags be up where they belong," McChrystal explained.

There's a war on. But a level of comfort has crept into life at headquarters, including a garden which has become a favorite hangout.

"You seem to think that life might be a little too soft around headquarters," Martin said.

"I think life is hard at the combat outposts, and anything that distracts us from supporting them in my mind is something that we shouldn't do," McChrystal replied.

Asked what he thinks of the garden were one can sip cappuccino in the shade, McChrystal told Martin he'd "Like to turn it into a rifle range."

McChrystal himself keeps a murderous schedule, up at 4:30 a.m. and out the door at five for his morning run through the maze of buildings and trailers that makes up his headquarters. This is his idea of leisure time.

Asked how many miles he thinks he covers during his runs, McChrystal said, "I do an hour. Yeah. And it's not as many miles as it used to be."

He eats one meal a day; anything more makes him feel sluggish. In another life, he could have been a monk.

"The lap of luxury," Martin joked, seeing the general's small and Spartan bedroom.

"It is. It's good. I mean, what else do you need? It's functional and it's comfortable. You get very used to it. You have what you have and that's all you need. And you realize you don't need a lot of other stuff. One thing of course you miss is family, but besides that it's pretty much perfect," McChrystal said.

He lived like that for five years as head of a top secret hunter-killer unit which captured Saddam Hussein and tracked down the infamous terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, calling in an airstrike to kill him.

Being a general didn't stop him from going on commando raids.

"I won't claim that I was ever any great help on the missions," McChrystal said. "It was really to go and see what the force does. And to understand just what their challenges are. And also there's a value to the old man coming along, just to show that he's willing to do that."

"Kind of dangerous though," Martin said. "I mean, what if Zarqawi got his hands on you? You know an awful lot."

"Well, we got him first," McChrystal replied.

It's hard to keep pace with McChrystal as he races through his marathon days. His morning update on the progress of the war starts at 8:30, not 8:31. It's a standing room-only affair which breaks all the rules about restricting classified information to those with an absolute need to know by using video technology to conference in every one from the Pentagon to the headquarters of the Afghan army.

"One of the things I was looking at just this morning is Taliban reporting on their desire to widen the fight," McChrystal noted during the briefing.

After the briefing, McChrystal explained to Martin, "The idea is as many stations as you can get in here, and as many people in each one to listen. Just, it cuts the challenge of communicating."

"Must be hundreds of people," Martin said, speaking about the people listening to and watching the general's briefing.

"There are hundreds of people, that's right," McChrystal agreed.

"Do you worry about security leaks when you have so many people involved in these things?" Martin asked.

"I'm less worried about leaks than I am about the people who don't know what we're trying to, you know, ignorance. So, I think it's a trade off and I think I come down on this side every time," he said.

For all his innovations, McChrystal still is hostage to geography: Afghanistan is bigger than Iraq, yet he has only half as many troops. He plans to double the size of Afghan forces to 400,000, but that will take years.

The only place he can get the troops he needs now is from the United States.

Asked if he's confident he'll get what he is asking for, McChrystal said, "I'm confident that I will have an absolute chance to provide my assessment and to make my recommendations."

"But you're already under pressure not to ask for more. I mean, how's that affect what you do?" Martin asked.

"Doesn't affect me at all. And David, I take this extraordinarily seriously. I believe that what I am responsible to do is to give my best assessment," McChrystal said.

Asked how often he talks to the president, McChrystal said, "I've talked to the president since I've been here once on a VTC."

"You talked to him once in 70 days?" Martin asked.

"That's correct," McChrystal replied.

"Can you imagine ever saying to the president of the United States, 'Sir, we just can't do it,'?" Martin asked.

"Yes I can," McChrystal said. "And if I felt that way, the day I feel that way, the day I'm sure I feel that way, I'll tell him that."

Produced by Mary Walsh