How We Lost the War We Won: Rolling Stone's 2008 Journey Into Taliban-Controlled Afghanistan
A portrait of the country as it fell back into the hands of America's enemies
The highway that leads south out of Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, passes through a craggy range of arid, sand-colored mountains with sharp, stony peaks. Poplar trees and green fields line the road. Nomadic Kuchi women draped in colorful scarves tend to camels as small boys herd sheep. The hillsides are dotted with cemeteries: rough-hewn tombstones tilting at haphazard angles, multicolored flags flying above them. There is nothing to indicate that the terrain we are about to enter is one of the world's deadliest war zones. On the outskirts of the capital we are stopped at a routine checkpoint manned by the Afghan National Army. The wary soldiers single me out, suspicious of my foreign accent. My companions, two Afghan men named Shafiq and Ibrahim, convince the soldiers that I am only a journalist. Ibrahim, a thin man with a wispy beard tapered beneath his chin, comes across like an Afghan version of Bob Marley, easygoing and quick to smile. He jokes with the soldiers in Dari, the Farsi dialect spoken throughout Afghanistan, assuring them that everything is OK.
As we drive away, Ibrahim laughs. The soldiers, he explains, thought I was a suicide bomber. Ibrahim did not bother to tell them that he and Shafiq are midlevel Taliban commanders, escorting me deep into Ghazni, a province largely controlled by the spreading insurgency that now dominates much of the country.
This article appeared in the October 30, 2008 issue of Rolling Stone. The issue is available in the online archive.
Until recently, Ghazni, like much of central Afghanistan, was considered reasonably safe. But now the province, located 100 miles south of the capital, has fallen to the Taliban. Foreigners who venture to Ghazni often wind up kidnapped or killed. In defiance of the central government, the Taliban governor in the province issues separate ID cards and passports for the Taliban regime, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Farmers increasingly turn to the Taliban, not the American-backed authorities, for adjudication of land disputes.
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By the time we reach the town of Salar, only 50 miles south of Kabul, we have already passed five tractor-trailers from military convoys that have been destroyed by the Taliban. The highway, newly rebuilt courtesy of $250 million, most of it from U.S. taxpayers, is pocked by immense craters, most of them caused by roadside bombs planted by Taliban fighters. As in Iraq, these improvised explosive devices are a key to the battle against the American invaders and their allies in the Afghan security forces, part of a haphazard but lethal campaign against coalition troops and the long, snaking convoys that provide logistical support.
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We drive by a tractor-trailer still smoldering from an attack the day before, and the charred, skeletal remains of a truck from an attack a month earlier. At a gas station, a crowd of Afghans has gathered. Smoke rises from the road several hundred yards ahead.
"Jang," says Ibrahim, who is sitting in the front passenger seat next to Shafiq. "War. The Americans are fighting the Taliban."
Shafiq and Ibrahim use their cellphones to call their friends in the Taliban, hoping to find out what is going on. Suddenly, the chatter of machine-gun fire erupts, followed by the thud of mortar fire and several loud explosions that shake the car. I flinch and duck in the back seat, cursing as Shafiq and Ibrahim laugh at me.
"Tawakkal al Allah," Shafiq lectures me. "Depend on God."
This highway — the only one in all Afghanistan — was touted as a showpiece by the Bush administration after it was rebuilt. It provides the only viable route between the two main American bases, Bagram to the north and Kandahar to the south. Now coalition forces travel along it at their own risk. In June, the Taliban attacked a supply convoy of 54 trucks passing through Salar, destroying 51 of them and seizing three escort vehicles. In early September, not far from here, another convoy was attacked and 29 trucks were destroyed. On August 13th, a few days before I pass through Salar, the Taliban staged an unsuccessful assassination attempt on the U.S.-backed governor of Ghazni, wounding two of his guards.
As we wait at the gas station, Shafiq and Ibrahim display none of the noisy indignation that Americans would exhibit over a comparable traffic jam. To them, a military battle is a routine inconvenience, part of life on the road. Taking advantage of the break, they buy a syrupy, Taiwanese version of Red Bull called Energy at a small shop next door. At one point, two green armored personnel carriers from NATO zip by, racing toward Kabul. Shafiq and Ibrahim laugh: It looks like the coalition forces are fleeing the battle.
"Bulgarians," Shafiq says, shaking his head in amusement.
After an hour, the fighting ends, and we get back in the car. A few minutes later, we pass the broken remains of a British supply convoy. Dozens of trucks — some smoldering, others still ablaze — line the side of the road, which is strewn with huge chunks of blasted asphalt. The trucks carried drinks for the Americans, Ibrahim tells me as we drive past. Hundreds of plastic water bottles with white labels spill out of the trucks, littering the highway.
Farther down the road, American armored vehicles block our path. Smoke pours from the road behind them. Warned by other drivers that the Americans are shooting at approaching cars, Shafiq slowly maneuvers to the front of the line and stops. When the Americans finally move, we all follow cautiously, like a nervous herd. We drive by yet more burning trucks. Ibrahim points to three destroyed vehicles, the remains of an attack four days earlier.
A few miles later, at a lonely desert checkpoint manned by the Afghan army, several soldiers with AK-47s make small talk with Shafiq and Ibrahim, asking them about the battle before waving us through. As night falls, we pass a police station. We have reached Ghazni province.
"From now on, it's all Taliban territory," Ibrahim tells me. "The Americans and police don't come here at night."
Shafiq laughs. "The Russians were stronger than the Americans," he says. "More fierce. We will put the Americans in their graves."
It has been seven years since the United States invaded Afghanistan in the wake of September 11th. The military victory over the Taliban was swift, and the Bush administration soon turned its attention to rebuilding schools and roads and setting up a new government under President Hamid Karzai. By May 2003, only 18 months after the beginning of the war, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld all but declared victory in Afghanistan. "We are at a point where we clearly have moved from major combat activity to a period of stability and stabilization and reconstruction," Rumsfeld announced during a visit to Kabul. The security situation in Afghanistan, in his view, was better than it had been for 25 years.
But even as Rumsfeld spoke, the Taliban were beginning their reconquest of Afghanistan. The Pentagon, already focused on invading Iraq, assumed that the Afghan militias it had bought with American money would be enough to secure the country. Instead, the militias proved far more interested in extorting bribes and seizing land than pursuing the hardened Taliban veterans who had taken refuge across the border in Pakistan. The parliamentary elections in 2005 returned power to the warlords who had terrorized the countryside before the Taliban imposed order. "The American intervention issued a blank check to these guys," says a senior aid official in Kabul. "They threw money, weapons, vehicles at them. But the warlords never abandoned their bad habits — they're abusing people and filling their pockets.
By contrast, aid for rebuilding schools and clinics has been paltry. In the critical first two years after the invasion, international assistance amounted to only $57 per citizen — compared with $679 in Bosnia. As U.S. contractors botched reconstruction jobs and fed corruption, little of the money intended to rebuild Afghanistan reached those in need. Even worse, the sudden infusion of international aid drove up real estate and food prices, increasing poverty and fueling widespread resentment.
The government of Pakistan, seeking to retain influence over what it views as its back yard, began helping the Taliban regroup. With the Bush administration focused on the war in Iraq, money poured into Afghanistan from Al Qaeda and other Islamic extremists, who were eager to maintain a second front against the American invaders. The Taliban — once an isolated and impoverished group of religious students who knew little about the rest of the world and cared only about liberating their country from oppressive warlords — are now among the best-armed and most experienced insurgents in the world, linked to a global movement of jihadists that stretches from Pakistan and Iraq to Chechnya and the Philippines.
The numbers tell the story. Attacks on coalition and Afghan forces are up 44 percent since last year, the highest level since the war began. By October, 135 American troops had been killed in Afghanistan this year — already surpassing the total of 117 fatalities for all of 2007. The Taliban are also intensifying their attacks on aid workers: In a particularly brazen assault in August, a group of Taliban fighters opened fire on the car of a U.S. aid group, the International Rescue Committee, killing three Western women and their Afghan driver on the main road to Kabul.
The Bush administration, belatedly aware that it was losing Afghanistan, responded to the violence as it did in Iraq: by calling for more troops. Speaking at the National Defense University on September 9th, the president announced a "quiet surge" of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, saying additional forces are necessary to stabilize "Afghanistan's young democracy." But the very next day, testifying before the House Armed Services Committee, Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, offered a sharply different assessment. His prepared testimony, approved by the secretary of defense and the White House, read, "I am convinced we can win the war in Afghanistan." But when Mullen sat down before Congress, he deviated from his prepared statement. "I am not convinced we are winning it in Afghanistan," he testified bluntly.
In early October, the president's plan for a surge was once again contradicted by his top advisers. American intelligence agencies drafting a classified report on the war warned that Afghanistan is in a "downward spiral" fueled by worsening violence and rampant corruption. Defense Secretary Robert Gates also admitted to Congress that the Pentagon is stretched so thin in Iraq, it will be unable to meet even a modest request for 10,000 more troops in Afghanistan until next spring at the earliest.
But those closest to the chaos in Afghanistan say that throwing more soldiers into combat won't help. "More troops are not the answer," a senior United Nations official in Kabul tells me. "You will not make more babies by having many guys screw the same woman."
It is a point echoed in dozens of off-the-record interviews I conducted in Kabul with leading Western diplomats, security experts, former mujahedeen and Taliban commanders, and senior officials with the U.N. and prominent aid organizations. All agree that the situation is, in the words of one official, "incredibly bleak." Using suicide bombers and other tactics imported from Iraq, the Taliban have cut Kabul off from the rest of the country and established themselves as the only law in many rural villages. "People don't want the Taliban back, but they're afraid to back the government," says one top diplomat. "They know the Taliban will ride into the village and behead anybody who has made a deal with the coalition."
According to the diplomat, military solutions are simply no longer viable. "The analysis of our intelligence people is that things are getting worse," he says. "CIA analysts are extremely gloomy and worried. You have an extremely weak president in Afghanistan, a corrupt and ineffective ministry of the interior, an army with no command or control, and a dysfunctional international alliance."
As one top official with a Western aid organization put it, "We're simply not up to the task of success in Afghanistan. I'm increasingly unsure about a way forward — except that we should start preparing our exit strategy."
To travel with the Taliban and see firsthand how they operate, I contacted a well-connected Afghan friend in Kabul and asked him to make the introductions. He knew many groups of fighters in Afghanistan, but said he would only trust my security if those I accompanied knew that they and their families would be killed if anything happened to me. Through a respected dignitary, I was connected with Mullah Ibrahim, who commands 500 men in the Dih Yak district of Ghazni. We met at my friend's office in Kabul on a hot, sunny afternoon. Midlevel Taliban leaders like Ibrahim move freely about the capital, like any other Afghan: U.S. forces lack the intelligence and manpower to identify enemy commanders, let alone apprehend them. (To protect Ibrahim's identity, I agreed to change his name.)
Now in his 40s, Ibrahim has been fighting with the Taliban since the 1990s. He walks with a pronounced limp: He lost his right leg below the knee in the country's civil war, and he had undergone surgery only the week before to repair nerve damage he suffered in a recent firefight. At first he told me his wounds were from an American bullet, but I later learned he had been injured in a clash with a rival Taliban commander.
After our meeting, Ibrahim promised to contact the Taliban minister of defense and request approval for my trip. As I waited for word, I went to a market in Kabul and bought several sets of salwar kameez, the traditional tunic and baggy pants worn by Afghan men. I had grown my beard longer to pass as an Afghan, and before leaving New York I had supplemented my Arabic and basic Farsi with a week of Berlitz classes in Pashtu, the language spoken by the ethnic group that dominates the Taliban. Pashtu is not exactly in high demand, and the book Berlitz gave me was clearly designed for military purposes. It contained a list of military ranks, including "General of the Air Force," and offered a helpful list of weapons, including "land mines" and "bullets." It also provided the Pashtu translation for a host of important phrases: Show me your ID card. Let the vehicle pass. You are a prisoner. Hands up. Surrender. If I wanted to arrest an Afghan, I was now prepared. The book did not include the phrase I needed most: Ze talibano milmayam. "I am a guest of the Taliban."
On a Saturday afternoon, Ibrahim picks me up in a white Toyota Corolla, its dashboard covered in fake gray fur. His friend Shafiq is behind the wheel, wearing a cap embroidered with rhinestones. Afghan culture places a premium on courtesy, and Shafiq comes across as unfailingly polite. At one point, almost casually, he mentions that he has personally executed some 200 spies, usually by beheading them. "First I warn people to stop," he says, emphasizing his fair-mindedness. "If they continue, I kill them."
Shafiq, who fought the Soviets with the mujahedeen, now commands Taliban fighters in the Andar district of Ghazni. "Andar is a very bad place," an intelligence officer in Kabul tells me. "The Taliban show a lot of confidence and freedom of movement there." While coalition forces have focused on driving the insurgents from the south, they failed to maintain a buffer in central regions like Ghazni, where the Taliban now routinely pull people off buses and execute them. "They have that level of control right on Kabul's front door," the officer adds. "Environments regarded as extreme two years ago are much worse now. There has been a staggering intensification."
As we head south, Shafiq tells me that fighters from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Uzbekistan have come through the Andar district. Most are suicide bombers, but some fight alongside the Taliban. He is impressed with their skill, but like many Taliban, he doesn't care for their politics. "Pakistan and Iran are not friends of Afghanistan," Shafiq says dismissively. "They don't want peace in Afghanistan — they want to take Afghanistan." Despite their extremely conservative views on religion, most Taliban are fundamentally nationalist and Afghan-centric. They accept the support of Al Qaeda, but that doesn't mean they approve of its tactics. "Suicide attacks are not good because they kill Muslims," Shafiq says.
In the darkness, we roll into the village of Nughi. We no longer have cellphone reception; the Taliban shut down the phone towers after sunset, when they stop for the night, to prevent U.S. surveillance from pinpointing their position. It is the holiday of Shaab eh Barat, when Muslims believe God determines a person's destiny for the coming year. Young boys from the village gather to swing balls of fire attached to wires. Like orange stars, hundreds of fiery circles glow far into the distance. The practice is haram — one of many traditions banned by the Taliban, who consider it forbidden under Islam. The fact that it is being tolerated is the first indication I have that the Taliban are not as doctrinaire as they were during their seven years of rule.
Shafiq maneuvers the car on the bumpy dirt road between mud houses. After a few stops in the village we are led to a house where a group of young Taliban fighters emerges. Several of them are carrying weapons. We greet the traditional way, each man placing his right hand on the other's heart, leaning in but not fully embracing, inquiring about the other's health and family. Ibrahim, who had promised to protect me on the trip, decides to go home, leaving Shafiq to guide me the rest of the way.
With the moon lighting our path, Shafiq and I follow the Taliban on foot to another house, entering through a low door into a guest room with a red carpet on the floor and wooden beams on the ceiling.
A dim bulb barely illuminates the room. A PKM belt-fed machine gun and a rocket-propelled grenade launcher lean against a wall, next to several rockets. We are joined by Mullah Yusuf, Ibrahim's nephew, who serves as a senior commander in Andar.
Yusuf has dark reddish skin and a handsome face. He wears a black turban with thin gold stripes and carries an AK-47. A boy brings a pitcher and basin and we rinse our hands. We drink green tea and eat a soup of mushy bread called shurwa with our hands, followed by meat and grapes.
Yusuf became a commander last year, when the Americans killed his superior officer. He sleeps in a different house every night to avoid detection. Only 30 years old, he has big ears and an almost elfin air; the ringtone on his cellphone is a bells-and-cymbals version of The Sorcerer's Apprentice theme. A year and a half ago, Yusuf was injured in his thigh by a U.S. helicopter strike, and now walks with a limp. He joined the Taliban in 2003 after studying at a religious school in North Waziristan, the border region of Pakistan where many Afghan refugees live. He seems less motivated by religious ideals than by defending his homeland: He took up jihad, he tells me, because foreigners have come to Afghanistan and are fighting Afghans and poor people.
"The Americans are not good," he says. "They go into houses and put people in jail. Fifteen days ago the Americans bombed here and killed a civilian."
The U.S. campaign in Afghanistan has not been helped by its rash of misguided bombings. This year, according to the United Nations, 1,445 Afghan civilians were killed by coalition forces through August — two-thirds of them in airstrikes. On July 6th, a bombing raid killed 47 members of a wedding party — including 39 women and children — near the village of Kacu. On August 22nd, more than 90 civilians — again mostly women and children — were killed in an airstrike in Azizabad.
Yusuf makes it clear that it is only the Americans he has a problem with. Once the foreigners leave, he insists, the Taliban will negotiate peace with the Afghan army and police: "They are brothers, Muslims." What's more, he says, girls will be allowed to go to school, and women will be allowed to work. It is a stance I will hear echoed by many Taliban leaders. In recent years, recognizing that their harsher strictures had alienated the population, the Taliban have grown more tolerant. To improve their operations, they have even been forced to adopt technologies they once banned: computers, television, films, the Internet.
After we finish eating, we walk to a mud shed. Shafiq opens its wooden doors to reveal another white Toyota Corolla. The men load the RPG launcher and four rockets into the car, along with the PKM machine gun. We drive through the moonlit desert on dirt paths to the village of Kharkhasha, where Shafiq lives. On the way, Shafiq pops in a cassette of Taliban chants. They are in Pashtu and without instrumentation, which is forbidden by the Taliban.
Arriving at Shafiq's house, we enter the guest room in darkness and sit on thin mattresses. A small gas lamp is brought out, as well as grapes and green tea. Shafiq says he fought the Soviets in the 1980s and spent five years in jail. But following the Soviet withdrawal, as the mujahedeen turned on one another, Shafiq felt they had become robbers. He joined the Taliban in 1994, he says, because they wanted peace and Islam.
Shafiq has met Osama bin Laden twice — once before the Taliban took over, and once during the Taliban reign. He was impressed by bin Laden's knowledge of Pashtu. He has also met Mullah Muhammed Omar, the one-eyed cleric who calls himself the "commander of the faithful." Omar, who served as leader of the Taliban government, is now in hiding across the border in Pakistan, where he rebuilt the Taliban with the help and protection of Pakistani intelligence. Shafiq hopes that Omar will return to lead the country, but other Taliban leaders no longer view him as the only option. The shift is significant — a sign that the Taliban are not fighting merely to restore the hard-line government they had before but are prepared to move forward with a greater degree of flexibility and pragmatism than they have shown in the past.
The next morning, we get back into the Corolla, loading the PKM, the RPG launcher and four rockets into the trunk. Shafiq and the machine gun are in the front passenger seat. Yusuf drives, his AK-47 beside him. Another Taliban fighter rides a Honda motorcycle alongside us, an AK-47 strapped to his shoulder. They have promised to take me to see the Taliban in action: going out on patrols, conducting attacks, adjudicating disputes and providing security against bandits and police. As we head deeper into the province, the land becomes increasingly flat and arid. Everything is the color of sand. Even the dilapidated mud homes, bleached almost white by the sun, look like sand castles after the first wave has hit them.
Yusuf points to a police checkpoint. The police know him, he says, but do nothing to stop him. "Every night I go on patrol, and they don't fight me," he says. "They don't have guns, and they are afraid."
The police, in fact, often defect to the Taliban. Shafiq recently bought two jeeps from the police, who later told the Interior Ministry that the vehicles were destroyed in an attack. "The police are highly corrupt," a senior U.N. official in Kabul tells me. "They are at the center of the collapse of the Karzai government — their corruption makes people support the Taliban." The cops have even taken to robbing U.S. contractors. "The police will raid foreign companies and just steal everything — iPods, money, weapons, radios," says an intelligence officer. "People might hate the Taliban, but they hate the government just as much. At least the Taliban have rules. This government, they're just parasites fucking with you."
In the village of Khodzai, we visit a commander at a mosque where eight men and two boys sit on the floor, drinking tea. When they aren't attacking checkpoints or ambushing convoys, the Taliban spend most of their time praying or listening to religious lectures. The men ambushed the Afghan army two days earlier in a nearby village, killing 20 Afghan soldiers. "The Americans do not come here," their commander says proudly. "We control this area. The Taliban is the government here."
Outside, in a sunny courtyard, the men get ready to go on patrol, checking their ammunition and slinging their AK-47s over their shoulders. Suddenly, a coalition military helicopter swoops low overhead, nearly coming to a hover above us. Throughout the war, the U.S. has compensated for its lack of troops by relying on aerial shows of force: It's possible to go for days in Ghazni without seeing a single coalition soldier. I clench my fists in terror, waiting for the helicopter to fire at us, but the men ignore it and laugh at me. One tells me he fired an RPG at a helicopter yesterday, and will fire a rocket at this one if it attacks us. My fear may be comic, but it's not misplaced: A month after I leave, an airstrike in Andar will kill seven suspected Taliban fighters.
To my relief, the helicopter flies off. The men leave on their motorcycles to patrol the countryside. As the Taliban have attempted to counter the Americans by adopting the tactics of Iraqi insurgents, they have become far more brutal than they were when they ruled Afghanistan. To sow insecurity, they routinely enter villages and bypass traditional tribal mechanisms, waging a harsh campaign of social terror.
"They're killing more and more tribal elders," one intelligence officer tells me. "We can't expect communities to show solidarity with the government when we can't provide for their security — it's ridiculous."
As we leave the mosque, Shafiq tells me of the trials that the Taliban frequently hold to prosecute collaborators. The suspects are given a hearing by a qazi, or judge, who orders those convicted to be beheaded. As he drives, Shafiq plays more Taliban songs about brave boys going to fight.
As the Taliban insurgency spreads, it has fallen victim to the tribal rivalries and violent infighting that are endemic to Afghanistan, which is home to hundreds of distinct tribal groups. "The leadership is totally fragmented," a senior U.N. official says. "There is a lot of criminality within the Taliban." With the targeting of civilians now sanctioned by the Taliban, top commanders compete for prize catches, stopping cars in broad daylight and checking the cellphones of foreigners to determine if they are worthwhile captives. As we drive deeper into Ghazni, we are entering territory where such factionalization is now as lethal as the rocket launcher stuffed in the Corolla's trunk.
In the middle of a sandstorm, we head to a local shop, pulling up with the PKM in plain view and the Taliban chants blaring from the car's speakers. The people in the shop greet Yusuf warmly. He buys shoulder straps for AK-47s. Then, as we're passing through a nearby village, we are stopped by a bearded man on a motorcycle. An AK-47 is slung over his shoulder, his face partially concealed by a scarf.
He demands to know who I am. Shafiq tells him I am a guest. The man asks me if I am Pashtun. "Pukhtu Nayam," I say, drawing on my Berlitz lessons. "I am not Pashtun." He glares at me and rides off.
Arriving at another mosque, we find a dozen men inside. A large shoulder-fired missile is on the floor, an anti-armor weapon. Shafiq tells me we are waiting to meet the commander who will approve my trip.
This is news to me. I thought my trip had already been approved by the Taliban defense minister. Suddenly, as I am talking to one of the fighters, the angry man on the motorcycle bursts in holding a walkie-talkie. He barks at the fighter to stop talking to me until the men's commander shows up. A judge, he says, will decide what will happen to me. Upon hearing the Pashtu word qazi, I start to panic. As Shafiq made clear earlier, a meeting with a judge could end with decapitation.
I am ordered to get into a car with the angry man and the other strangers, who will take me to the judge. To my alarm, Shafiq says he will join Yusuf, who is praying in the mosque, and catch up with us later. He seems to be washing his hands of me.
I have been held by militias in both Iraq and Lebanon, but in those situations I could speak the language and talk my way out of trouble. Now I am in one of the most desolate places I have ever seen, far from any help and unable to speak more than a few garbled words of Pashtu. Trying to contain my mounting sense of helplessness, I tell Shafiq that I am not leaving him — I am his guest. Once I am out of his control, I will be at the mercy of men who kill almost as routinely as they pray. Brandishing their rifles, the men shout at me to get into their car.
Yusuf comes out and tells me to get into our Corolla. He won't leave me, he says. He puts another man with an AK-47 in the car to guard me. As I wait, a standoff ensues. Frantic, I send text messages to my contacts back in Kabul to tell them I'm in trouble. In the tense silence, my guard's cellphone abruptly goes off: The ringtone is machine-gun fire, accompanied by a song about the Taliban being born for martyrdom.
My mouth goes dry from fear; I feel as though I have lost my voice. My friend in Kabul who helped arrange the trip manages to get through to Shafiq. He tells him he should not leave me, that I am Shafiq's responsibility and he will hold him personally responsible if anything happens to me.
We sit in the car for more than an hour, windows up. The sandstorm is still raging, and it's impossible to see more than a few yards. Outside, men with guns flicker into view, only to vanish in the blinding haze. Finally, Shafiq tells me I can get out. The angry man and his companions depart, taking the rocket launcher with them. Thinking it is over, I put my hand on my heart as they leave, to indicate no ill will. Then Shafiq tells me there has been a change of plan. He has been ordered to escort me to visit a rival commander — a man called Dr. Khalil — who will determine what will happen to me.
I later learn that I have been caught in the midst of the bitter and often violent infighting that divides the Taliban. Ibrahim's recent injury, it turns out, was the result of a clash between his forces and a group of foreign fighters under the command of Dr. Khalil. The foreigners wanted to close down a girls' school, sparking a battle. Two Arabs and 11 Pakistanis commanded by Dr. Khalil had been killed by Ibrahim's men.
As we leave to meet Dr. Khalil, the car jolts forward in the sandstorm, rocking back and forth on the stony path. I feel as though I am in a boat being tossed about by waves. Yusuf tells me not to worry — if Dr. Khalil tries to take me, he will fight them. It is the only reassurance I have. Throughout all our time in Ghazni, we have seen no authority other than the Taliban. Even if American helicopters were to appear suddenly, that would hardly be a relief — it would only be to target us in an airstrike.
I struggle to find a signal for my phone, cursing as the bars appear and disappear. I reach another of my contacts. "I spoke to Dr. Khalil," he says. "If they behave bad with you, don't worry — they just want to punish you." Shafiq also tells me not to worry — that he will die defending me if necessary. My only hope, I realize, is the Pashtun code of hospitality known as Pashtunwali — the same tradition that forbade the Taliban from handing over Osama bin Laden to the Bush administration after September 11th. Unfortunately, as young Taliban fighters have substituted their own authority for tribal customs, more and more insurgents now ignore the code. "All the old rules have broken down," an aid official who has spent two decades in Afghanistan tells me. The guarantees of safety that once protected civilians have been replaced by a new generation removed from traditional society — one for whom jihad is the only law.
Our car crawls through the empty desert. I can see nothing on the horizon. I ask Shafiq if Dr. Khalil is a good guy. "He's like you," Shafiq answers. "No Muslim is a bad man." His faith in the brotherhood of Islam does little to reassure me. "Don't worry," Shafiq says. "The Doctor has a gun, and I have a gun."
Ibrahim calls to say that he has reached a Taliban leader in Pakistan, as well as someone in the United Arab Emirates, and they have promised to call the Doctor and tell him not to harm me. "The Doctor will fight with me, not with you," says Shafiq, who seems to be warming to the idea of bloodshed. My contact in Kabul calls again. "They might slap you, but they won't kill you," he tells me. "It's just to punish you for coming without permission. They might keep you overnight as a guest. You are lucky you called me." Later, he tells me that the Doctor had assured him that he would not "do anything that isn't Sharia," or Islamic law. This was little consolation, even after the fact, since the Taliban's interpretation of Sharia includes beheading.
"I'm a martyr, I'm a star," the Taliban on the car's tape deck chants. "I will testify on behalf of my mother on Judgment Day. When I was small, my mother put me on her lap and spoke sweetly to me...."
We finally arrive at a mosque somewhere between the villages of Gabari and Sher Kala. The Doctor, I am told, is waiting for us inside. As I enter, I inadvertently step on a pair of Prada sunglasses — just as the Doctor walks into the room.
A burly man with light skin and a dark brown beard, the Doctor picks up the bent glasses and examines them somberly. His hands are thick, enormous. He wears a white cap, with palm trees and suns embroidered in white thread. He straightens the glasses and puts them on — it turns out they're his. My heart sinks. Not the best beginning, perhaps.
After everyone prays, the Doctor orders the others to leave the room, except for Yusuf. His voice is low and gruff. We sit on the floor. "Deir Obekhi," I say, apologizing for entering his territory without permission. He accuses me of being a spy for the Afghan army. He asks how I got a visa to Afghanistan. I tell him I am here to write about the mujahedeen and tell their story. If I like them so much, he sneers, why don't I join them?
The Doctor asks about my contact. I say he fought with the mujahedeen from Jamiat-i Islami. The Doctor scoffs, saying the man never fought the Soviets. Then he gets to his feet and announces that he is going to make phone calls to Pakistan to investigate me. We will have to spend the night in the mosque, and he will come back for us in the morning. As I try to protest, he stalks out.
I sit glumly on the floor in the guest room. A few minutes later, Shafiq sticks his head in and says, "Yallah" — Arabic for "come on." I jump up, relieved to get out of there. The Talib fighters sitting with us insist that we drink the tea they have made. I hurriedly gulp it down and step out into the darkness, eager to get away from the mosque. But Shafiq has more bad news: We will have to return in the morning. My mind flashes to the videos I have seen on the Internet of victims being decapitated by jihadists in Iraq and Afghanistan.
We get in the car and Shafiq drives slowly, winding through nearly invisible paths, the moonlight obscured by dust. When we reach Shafiq's house, he carries a television into the guest room and turns on the generator. Reading the English titles on the program guide, he finds Al-Jazeera, the Arabic news channel. We watch coverage of the attacks we drove by the day before. Shafiq switches to an Afghan channel, and we watch an Indian soap opera dubbed in Dari. The women are dressed in revealing Western attire. I am amazed that Shafiq would watch something so anathema to the Taliban. It's OK, he tells me — "it's a drama about a family." Later he puts on a satellite channel devoted to Iranian-American pop music. We watch as a portly singer with stubble and long hair imitates bad Eighties rock, but in Farsi. The next video features an Iranian pop singer dressed in leather fringe and a tank top, like a cross between Davy Crockett and Richard Simmons. The Taliban commander watches, mesmerized.
In the morning, I awake to the drone of military planes overhead. Stepping outside, I see a convoy of American armored vehicles a mile away. I fight the urge to walk to them and beg for rescue. Even if they don't mistake me for Taliban and shoot me themselves, approaching them would doom everybody who had helped me.
I wait impatiently for the phone network to go back up. When it does, one of my contacts in Kabul tells me that he had spoken to senior Taliban officials who told the Doctor not to harm me, but the Doctor continued to insist that I am a spy. He thinks the Doctor is just trying to assert his independence and exchange me for a ransom. He tells me that Mullah Nasir, a one-armed Kandahari who serves as Taliban governor for Ghazni, is also trying to secure my release. I try to convince Shafiq to drive me to Ghazni's capital, but he says that if he doesn't return me to Dr. Khalil, the Doctor will arrest him.
In the end, I am saved by the same official who authorized my trip. According to my contact, the Taliban minister of defense called Dr. Khalil and ordered him to release me, warning the Doctor that "he would be fucked" if anything happens to me. My contact tells me I will be let go this afternoon but that once we are on the road we should take the batteries out of our phones, to prevent anyone from tracking us. "This Doctor, he is a very nasty guy," he says. "He might send somebody to kidnap you on the way, and then I can do nothing for you."
As we wait for the Doctor to arrive, Shafiq has other problems to deal with. His nephew has been arrested by a Taliban patrol after being spotted walking with a girl. After Shafiq secures his release, other Talib fighters call to complain that they heard music coming from his house the night before. Exasperated, Shafiq protests that it was only Al-Jazeera. He doesn't mention the Iranian pop singer.
A few hours later, Dr. Khalil finally shows up. He examines my passport and leafs through my notebooks, asking me to show him the photos I took. "Zaibullah Mujahed said I should hit you," he says, referring to the chief Taliban spokesman. "But I will not." Rifling through my bags, he seems particularly fascinated by my toothbrush. Puzzled, he riffles the bristles with his finger, trying to deduce their purpose.
For a man who has spent much of the past 24 hours contemplating whether I was worth more to him dead or alive, the Doctor is now surprisingly friendly. "What can I do for you?" he asks, a model of courtesy. I cautiously ask him a few questions. The Doctor tells me he studied at an Islamic school in Pakistan before entering medical school in Afghanistan. He joined the Taliban early, eventually serving as a commander in a northern district. He says he is fighting to restore a government of Islamic law, but that Mullah Omar does not have to be the leader again. God willing, he adds, it will take no more than 30 years to rid Afghanistan of foreigners. Like the other Taliban leaders I've spoken with, he says he is prepared to allow women to attend school and to work.
We pile into the Corolla and drive off to meet Ibrahim, loading an RPG into the trunk just in case. Dr. Khalil gets behind the wheel, with Shafiq beside him holding the PKM. After an hour of driving, the car gets stuck, and we all collect rocks to put beneath the tires. As we drive through the Doctor's village, he points to its outer limits. "This is the border between the Taliban and the government," he says, stressing his control. He is now jocular and relaxed.
At the edge of town, close to the main road, the Doctor gets out of the car, followed by Shafiq, holding his PKM. The locals appear stunned. Everyone stops and stares, immobilized, their daily routine interrupted by the sudden appearance of two heavily armed Taliban commanders escorting a large foreign man in ill-fitting salwar kameez. The Doctor stops a pickup truck and orders the driver to take us to the bazaar. We part warmly.
Arriving at the bazaar in the back of the pickup truck, we find a tense and apologetic Ibrahim waiting for us. Like my contact, he was worried that the Doctor had set up an ambush for me on the road. "I should not have left you," Ibrahim says. "I was lazy. That was my mistake."
On the way back to Kabul, we dodge more craters in the highway. The military trucks I saw burning two days earlier are still smoldering by the road. Children play on the blackened vehicles, removing pieces for salvage. I tease Ibrahim that the Taliban have made our drive more difficult by destroying the highway. To my surprise, he agrees.
Back in Kabul, we all have lunch together at the office of my friend where I first met Ibrahim. My friend teases me for sending him so many text messages — more than a dozen — and reads some of them aloud. Everyone laughs, relieved that the ordeal is over. I look at Ibrahim, wondering if he would have taken me hostage himself under different circumstances. He again surprises me by expressing disapproval of the Taliban for harming civilians in what he views as a war for national liberation. There used to be rules. Now, for many Taliban, there is only killing. "They are not acting like Afghans," he says.
To return to Kabul from a feudal province like Ghazni is to experience a form of time travel. The city is thoroughly modern, for those who can afford it: five-star hotels, shiny new shopping malls and well-guarded restaurants where foreigners eat meals that cost as much as most Afghans make in a month, cooked with ingredients imported from abroad. If you can avoid falling into the sewage canals at every crosswalk, and evade the suicide bombers who occasionally rock the city, you can enjoy the safety of Afghanistan's version of the Green Zone.
But the barbarians are at the gate, and major attacks are getting closer and closer to the city each day. Upon my return to Kabul, I discover that the Taliban have fired rockets at the airport and at the NATO base; the United Nations has been on a four-day curfew; and President Karzai has canceled his public appearances. The city is being slowly but systematically severed from the rest of the country.
"The road from Kabul to Ghazni is gone," an intelligence officer tells me, "and most of the rest of the roads are going. The ambushes are routine now, which tells you that the Taliban have a routine capability." The Parwan province, which borders Kabul to the north, has also become dangerous. "All of a sudden we see IEDs on the main road in Parwan and attacks on police checkpoints," the intelligence officer says. "It's the last remaining key arterial route connecting Kabul to the rest of the country."
The Bush administration is placing its hopes on presidential elections in Afghanistan next year, but everyone I speak with in Kabul agrees that the elections will be a joke. "The Americans are gung-ho about elections," a longtime nongovernmental official tells me. "But it will only exacerbate ethnic tensions." In Pashtun areas controlled by the Taliban, registration would be virtually impossible, and voting would invoke a death sentence — effectively disenfranchising the country's dominant ethnic group. "You can't fix the insurgency with an election," a senior U.N. official tells me. "It's a socioeconomic phenomenon that goes well beyond the border of Afghanistan." Real elections would require the cooperation of the Taliban — and that, in turn, would require negotiations with the Taliban. The war, in effect, is already lost.
"This can't be solved other than by talking to the Taliban," says a top diplomat in Kabul. A leading aid official adds that it is important to understand the ideological goal of the Taliban: "They don't have an international-terrorist agenda — they have an Afghanistan agenda. We might not agree with their agenda for the country, but that's not our war." Former Taliban leaders agree that only talks will end the war. "If the U.S. deals with Pakistan and negotiates with higher-level Taliban," says one, "then it could reach a deal."
Negotiating with the Taliban would also enable the Americans to take advantage of the sharp divisions within the insurgency. Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, has been openly criticized by a rival named Siirajudin Haqqani, who has called for Omar to be replaced. In provinces like Ghazni, the Taliban leadership is now divided between commanders loyal to Omar and men who follow Haqqani. A recent meeting between supporters of the two men in the Pakistani city of Peshawar reportedly descended into fighting when an Omar official threw his tea glass at a Haqqani man. The internal split provides an opening — if U.S. intelligence is smart enough to exploit it.
"The U.S. should try to weaken the Taliban," a former Taliban commander tells me. "They should make groups, divide and conquer. If someone wants to use the division between Haqqani and Omar, they can."
The Bush administration believes it can stop the Taliban by throwing money into clinics and schools. But even humanitarian officials scoff at the idea. "If you gave jobs to the Viet Cong, would they stop fighting?" asks one. "Two years ago you could build a road or a bridge in a village and say, 'Please don't let the Taliban come in.' But now you've reached the stage where the hearts-and-minds business doesn't work."
Officials on the ground in Afghanistan say it is foolhardy to believe that the Americans can prevail where the Russians failed. At the height of the occupation, the Soviets had 120,000 of their own troops in Afghanistan, buttressed by roughly 300,000 Afghan troops. The Americans and their allies, by contrast, have 65,000 troops on the ground, backed up by only 137,000 Afghan security forces — and they face a Taliban who enjoy the support of a well-funded and highly organized network of Islamic extremists. "The end for the Americans will be just like for the Russians," says a former commander who served in the Taliban government. "The Americans will never succeed in containing the conflict. There will be more bleeding. It's coming to the same situation as it did for the communist forces, who found themselves confined to the provincial capitals."
Simply put, it is too late for Bush's "quiet surge" — or even for Barack Obama's plan for a more robust reinforcement — to work in Afghanistan. More soldiers on the ground will only lead to more contact with the enemy, and more air support for troops will only lead to more civilian casualties that will alienate even more Afghans. Sooner or later, the American government will be forced to the negotiating table, just as the Soviets were before them.
"The rise of the Taliban insurgency is not likely to be reversed," says Abdulkader Sinno, a Middle East scholar and the author of Organizations at War in Afghanistan and Beyond. "It will only get stronger. Many local leaders who are sitting on the fence right now — or are even nominally allied with the government — are likely to shift their support to the Taliban in the coming years. What's more, the direct U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan is now likely to spill over into Pakistan. It may be tempting to attack the safe havens of the Taliban and Al Qaeda across the border, but that will only produce a worst-case scenario for the United States. Attacks by the U.S. would attract the support of hundreds of millions of Muslims in South Asia. It would also break up Pakistan, leading to a civil war, the collapse of its military and the possible unleashing of its nuclear arsenal."
In the same speech in which he promised a surge, Bush vowed that he would never allow the Taliban to return to power in Afghanistan. But they have already returned, and only negotiation with them can bring any hope of stability. Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan "are all theaters in the same overall struggle," the president declared, linking his administration's three greatest foreign-policy disasters in one broad vision. In the end, Bush said, we must have "faith in the power of freedom."
But the Taliban have their own faith, and so far, they are winning. On my last day in Kabul, a Western aid official reminds me of the words of a high-ranking Taliban leader, who recently explained why the United States will never prevail in Afghanistan.
"You Westerners have your watches," the leader observed. "But we Taliban have time."
King David's War
Petraeus has a new plan to finish the war: Double down on a failed strategy
On the morning of June 15th, 2010, Gen. David Petraeus skipped breakfast. He was jetlagged from a trip earlier in the week to the Middle East, and he was due at the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill at 9:30 a.m. to testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee. A veteran at these things — he had testified at least half a dozen times over the past three years, most famously as commander of U.S. troops at the height of the Iraq War — he decided not to drink much water that morning. He knew, as others sitting in front of the senators had learned the hard way, that once the marathon session began, he wouldn't have a chance for a bathroom break. "No one wants to be sitting there with a full bladder," a senior military official close to Petraeus tells me. "Those who ask the questions get to go in and out — but if you're the one sitting there in front of the cameras, you have to stay there the entire time."
The hearing started to get interesting after 45 minutes, when Sen. John McCain took the floor. McCain wanted Petraeus, the supreme commander of all U.S. forces in the Middle East and Central Asia, to say that the deadline President Obama had set for withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan — July 2011 — was a bad idea. But the general, while no fan of the deadline, was too shrewd to be drawn into such an obvious spat with his commander in chief. As he evaded McCain's badgering with an almost Clintonian ease, the senator grew increasingly frustrated.
This article appears in the February 17, 2011 issue of Rolling Stone. The issue will be available on newsstands and in the online archive February 4th.
"Do you believe that we will begin a drawdown of forces in July 2011, given the situation as it exists today?" McCain prodded.
"It's not given as the situation exists today," Petraeus corrected. "It's given as projections are for that time."
"You believe we can begin a drawdown in July of 2011 under the projected plans that we have?" McCain persisted, rephrasing his question for the third time.
"That is the policy, and I support it," Petraeus answered, taking a sip of water.
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"I understand you're supporting the policy," McCain pressed. He again pushed Petraeus for an answer, and even resorted to quoting his old foe, Vice President Joe Biden: "In July of 2011, you're going to see a whole lot of people moving out — bet on it." But a minute later, McCain's expression suddenly changed from one of exasperation to befuddlement. Petraeus had fainted, slumping forward in his chair. "Oh my God," McCain gasped.
The general regained consciousness a few seconds later, and was escorted out of the hearing room with the help of his aides. After recovering from a combination of dehydration and jet lag, he returned under his own power a half-hour later. But the committee, shaken by the unexpected turn of events, decided to adjourn for the day.
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To those watching, it was shocking to see Petraeus in such a vulnerable state. As a soldier, he had survived being shot in the chest during a training accident in 1991, had broken his pelvis jumping out of an airplane in 2000, and was considered by many to be a hero for engineering the last-ditch "surge" in 2007 that enabled U.S. forces to stage a face-saving withdrawal from the disastrous war in Iraq. In reality, though, it had been a tough year for Petraeus. He had undergone two months of radiation treatment for prostate cancer — a fact he kept private for fear of giving the Taliban a propaganda edge. He had also fallen out of favor with the Obama administration, which was keeping him at arm's length. Under Bush, the general had enjoyed direct and regular access to the White House, speaking with the president once a week during the height of the Iraq War. But Obama and his top advisers were furious at Petraeus for working to "box in" the president during a strategic review the year before, effectively forcing Obama to send an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan. The White House was also worried about rumors that Petraeus planned to run for president in 2012. ("They saw him as a general on his white horse," another senior U.S. military official tells me.) Petraeus, the golden boy under Bush, found himself out of the loop for the first time. A month earlier, in a moment of frustration, he reportedly told his spokesman that the White House was "fucking with the wrong guy."
But all of that was about to change. Seven days after Petraeus collapsed during his Senate testimony, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of the war in Afghanistan, was summoned back to Washington. McChrystal and his top advisers had been quoted making a host of critical comments about the White House in a profile published in Rolling Stone, and the general's career was suddenly on the line. No one knew whether McChrystal would keep his job; NATO officials had prepared two press releases — one for if he stayed, another for if he was fired. Even the military's top brass was kept out of the loop: Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell, viewed as particularly untrustworthy by the Obama administration, was frantically calling NATO headquarters in Brussels to find out what was happening across the Potomac at the White House.
On June 23rd, McChrystal entered the Oval Office. According to a source familiar with the conversation, Obama told the general, "You've done a very good job, but . . . " and then informed McChrystal that he would accept his resignation. Afterward, the president held a meeting of the National Security Council. "I've accepted Stan McChrystal's resignation," Obama told those gathered in the room, according to a senior administration official who attended the session. There was a shocked silence. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had all lobbied hard to keep McChrystal onboard. In the end, it was the president himself, heeding the advice of Biden and National Security Adviser James Jones, who had decided that the general had to go.
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Then Obama made an equally startling announcement: He was placing Petraeus, the commander who had so skillfully undermined him during the strategic review the year before, in charge of the war in Afghanistan. Petraeus had arrived at the White House that morning "with no indication at all" that he was about to get tapped to replace McChrystal, according to a senior military official close to the general. "He walked into a more or less regular NSC meeting," the official says, "and walked out with a new job." The question that Petraeus had been trying to avoid when he collapsed at the Senate hearing a week earlier — When are we getting out of Afghanistan? — was suddenly one he would be forced to answer, and quickly.
Obama and Petraeus met for 40 minutes. A press conference was scheduled in the Rose Garden to break the news — but the announcement couldn't be made public until Obama allowed the general to fulfill one simple request.
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"Before we announce this," Petraeus told the president, "I better call my wife."
For a brief moment, the appointment of Petraeus united civilian and military leaders in Washington, who had been at war with each other over the unfolding disaster in Afghanistan. Within the Obama administration, doubts about McChrystal's ability to lead had been festering privately for months. In May, a month before the blowup, one White House official had told me that Petraeus was "the one who should really be in charge." The general was widely seen as having enough clout in Washington to alter the course of the war, as he had done in Iraq. If Petraeus can't do it, the thinking went, then no one can — and no one back home could blame Obama for losing with Petraeus in charge.
Photos: Embedded With the Taliban
The irony is that Petraeus had literally written the book on counterinsurgency, the strategy that was failing so miserably in Afghanistan. After serving two years in Iraq, where he oversaw training of the Iraqi army and police, Petraeus returned to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, in 2005. Fed up with what he saw as the Pentagon's outdated, Cold War mentality, he took it upon himself to assemble a handful of the military's most dynamic thinkers and to develop a new field manual, called FM 3-24, which became the basis for America's policy in Iraq. "Counterinsurgency is not just thinking man's warfare," the manual grandly declares of the doctrine now known as COIN. "It is the graduate level of war."
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As McChrystal's boss, Petraeus had also been intimately involved in applying COIN to Afghanistan. During the summer of 2009, he met secretly with McChrystal in Belgium while his subordinate penned an assessment that declared the war on the brink of "mission failure." Petraeus, who graduated two years ahead of McChrystal at West Point, was both a friend and rival to the younger general. Serving under Petraeus in Iraq, McChrystal had overseen the lethal Special Forces operations that had made the surge a tactical success. But once he took charge in Afghanistan, he had struggled to implement the strategy pioneered by his boss. The Taliban, it seemed, were far less cowed by counterinsurgency than Iraq's fractious opposition.
Taking over from McChrystal, Petraeus moved quickly to institute his own, more aggressive version of COIN — one that calls for lots of killing, lots of cash and lots of spin. He loosened the restrictions McChrystal had placed on the rules of engagement, giving U.S. soldiers the green light to use artillery, destroy property and defend themselves more vigorously. He drastically upped the number of airstrikes, launching more than 3,450 between July and November, the most since the invasion in 2001. He introduced U.S. tanks into the battle, unleashed Apache and Kiowa attack helicopters, and tripled the number of night raids by Special Forces. The fighting was calculated to force the Taliban to the bargaining table and reduce NATO casualties, which soared to 711 last year — the highest of the war.
On the political front, Petraeus knew that his primary weapon was money. Unlike McChrystal, who had bent over backward to appease President Hamid Karzai, Petraeus had no qualms about hurting Afghan feelings. Within weeks of assuming command, he went toe-to-toe with Karzai, pushing through a controversial initiative to arm and fund Afghan militias that effectively operate as local gangs, outside the control of the Afghan army and police. He also doled out cash to jump-start reconciliation talks with the Taliban, which had gone nowhere over the past nine years. "Petraeus is big enough," says a senior U.S. official involved in Afghanistan policy. "When Karzai pushes, he pushes right back."
Above all, Petraeus launched a full-scale offensive to reshape how Congress and the American people view the war. One lesson he learned during the surge in Iraq is that it's not what's happening on the battlefield that counts — it's what people in Washington think is happening. As Petraeus wrote in The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam, his 1987 doctoral dissertation at Princeton, "What policymakers believe to have taken place in any particular case is what matters — more than what actually occurred." Success lies in finding the right metrics, telling the right story, convincing the right people we're not losing. The key to victory, Petraeus concluded, is "perception."
After taking over in Afghanistan, the general sat down for interviews with virtually all of the major networks, and his staff is currently grappling with another 130 interview requests. (Petraeus declined to be interviewed for this story.) He also began quietly maneuvering to ditch what he viewed as a major obstacle to success in Afghanistan: the July 2011 deadline that President Obama had set to begin withdrawing U.S. troops.
The White House had announced the date in December 2009, slipping it into a major speech on the war that the president gave at West Point. According to U.S. military officials, who were angered by the announcement, Obama's advisers added the date to the speech without checking with them. The reason: The White House felt it needed to set a public benchmark so it wouldn't get boxed in again by the Pentagon, as it had been during the strategic review earlier that year. "They felt like they got jammed," says a senior U.S. official, "and they didn't want to get jammed again."
In public, Petraeus began walking back the 2011 deadline, saying it wasn't a "sure thing" that the war would be over by 2014. That put him directly at odds with the vice president, who was insisting that U.S. troops would be out of Afghanistan by 2014 "come hell or high water." In November, at a NATO summit in Lisbon, Petraeus also lobbied U.S. allies to support his plan for prolonged fighting and nation-building. By the end of the conference, NATO's secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, was telling reporters, "One thing must be very clear: NATO is in this for the long term." The Lisbon summit, says one U.S. official, "finally got everyone's mind off July 2011."
If Petraeus really wanted to extend the war, however, he knew he would have to derail the latest Afghanistan review, a declassified version of which was made public in December. The White House hoped the review, originally billed as a major event, would settle the primary sticking point it had with the Pentagon: How soon, and in what numbers, would U.S. troops begin to leave Afghanistan? As the review started over the summer and barreled forward through the fall, staffers at the National Security Council in Washington and at ISAF headquarters in Kabul pulled 14-hour days to put together a document they could agree on.
From the outside, the process appeared to lack the drama of the highly publicized 2009 review. But behind the scenes, say U.S. officials familiar with the debate, the infighting was just as fierce. Petraeus and his staff squared off against a handful of key players in the White House, most of them closely aligned with Vice President Joe Biden, who has pressed for a faster withdrawal. It was "the optimists versus the pessimists," as one U.S. official who worked on the review puts it. Although the metrics used to judge progress in Afghanistan are classified, U.S. officials familiar with the review say Petraeus focused on a few key statistics to make his case: the growing number of Taliban commanders being killed and captured, evidence that the local population is becoming more receptive to U.S. troops, and signs that more Taliban fighters are joining the government. Military commanders in Afghanistan also stressed what they see as security gains in Kandahar and Helmand provinces. As Petraeus and his allies in the Pentagon sought to reshape the review to their liking, they had "daily battles with the White House," says one U.S. official.
During the review process, Petraeus also clashed with America's intelligence community over what is really going on in Afghanistan. The CIA wasn't buying the military's spin about progress, and the new National Intelligence Estimate — a document that distills the insights of the nation's 16 intelligence agencies — threatened to repeat the "grim" assessment it had offered two years earlier. So the general set out to remake the NIE to his liking. "Petraeus and his staff completely rewrote it," says a U.S. official with direct knowledge of the assessment, which remains classified. Every time the CIA or the NSC cited something negative, Petraeus pushed to include something positive. "There was much more back-and-forth between the military and the intelligence community than usual," says another official who has read the NIE. "The draft I saw reflected this debate."
Thanks to such internal maneuvering, the strategic review did little to clarify the timetable for withdrawal. The final report, in fact, says almost nothing. We are making progress, but that progress is fragile and reversible. We have broken the momentum of the Taliban, but there will still be heavy fighting next year. The troops will start coming home soon, but they won't start coming home soon. We aren't "nation-building," the president says, though we'll stay in Afghanistan past 2014 to build its nation. It was, in the end, a nonreview review, which suited Petraeus just fine, giving him more time to shape the outcome not just in Kabul, but in Washington. As the general had spelled out in his doctoral dissertation, winning the hearts and minds of Congress is what matters most. Or as one U.S. military official puts it, "If anyone can spin their way out of this war, it's Petraeus."
During his time in Iraq, Petraeus earned the nickname King David, for the imperious manner in which he ruled over the ancient city of Mosul. In Afghanistan, a more apt honorific might be the Godfather. To get America out of the war, Petraeus has turned to the network of warlords, drug runners and thieves known as the Afghan government, which the general himself has denounced as a "criminal syndicate." Within weeks of assuming command, Petraeus pushed through an ambitious program to create hundreds of local militias — essentially a neighborhood watch armed with AK-47s. Under Petraeus, the faltering operation has been expanded from 18 districts to more than 60, with plans to ramp it up from 10,000 men to 30,000.
In Afghanistan, however, arming local militias means, by definition, placing guns in the hands of some of the country's most ruthless thugs, who rule their territory with impunity. In the north, Petraeus is relying on Atta Mohammed Noor, a notorious warlord-turned-governor considered to be one of the most powerful men in Afghanistan, to prepare militias for a long fight with the Taliban. Smaller militias in the region — which have been likened to an L.A. "gang" by their own American advisers — are also getting U.S. training. In the east, where violence has significantly increased, efforts to back local strongmen have already resulted in intertribal violence. And in the south, Petraeus has given near-unconditional support to Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president's brother and one of the country's most unsavory gangsters.
"The Americans have backed so many warlords in so many ways, it's very hard to see how you unscramble the egg now," says John Matisonn, a former top U.N. official who left Kabul last June. "There has never been a strategy to get rid of the warlords, who are the key problem. The average Afghan hates them, whether they're backed by the Taliban or the Americans. They see them as criminals. They know that the warlords are fundamentally undermining the rule of law."
The militia strategy that Petraeus is pursuing is essentially one of outsourcing — and no one better represents the plan's disdisturbing downside than Col. Abdul Razzik, who runs the border town of Spin Boldak in southern Afghanistan. Although Razzik's militia is not officially part of the new program being ramped up by Petraeus, the general has singled him out as a model ally in the region. Razzik played a key role during the recent U.S. offensive in Kandahar, and Petraeus himself paid a visit to the colonel last fall. According to Razzik — who, despite his lower rank, also refers to himself as a general — he and Petraeus hit it off, meeting for an hour and a half and exchanging ideas on how to win the war. "General Petraeus and I have very similar opinions," Razzik tells me during a recent interview in an office at his base a few miles from the Pakistani border. "I want to kill the Taliban, he wants to kill the Taliban."
At just under five feet nine, with a neatly trimmed beard and a sly smile, the 34-year-old Razzik is a bundle of charisma. A photo of President Karzai hangs above his desk, which is empty of papers, and his black desktop Dell computer is switched off. Razzik doesn't know how to read, so paper and the Internet would only get in the way of his work, which is basically kicking Taliban ass by any means necessary. By most accounts, he's been doing a pretty bang-up job of it, leading a series of operations in the country's most dangerous province. "We don't take prisoners," Razzik boasts. "If they are trying to kill me, I will try to kill them. That's how I order my men." He pauses, as if recalling the recent PR training he received from U.S. officials. "If they submit and say they made a mistake," he adds, "then, yes, we will take them prisoner."
Exactly how Razzik became the most powerful figure in his province is a bit blurry. By his account, he began fighting the Taliban in 1995, when the religious fundamentalists killed his uncle and took his 11-year-old brother prisoner. Hiding in the sandy mountains south of town, Razzik was taken in by shepherds of his own tribe. He then snuck north to Kabul and Herat, where he fought the Taliban for a few months before returning to Spin Boldak. In 2002, thanks in part to his tribal connections, he was named chief of the border police. With Hamid Karzai as his patron — along with the president's brother Ahmed Wali Karzai, the provincial chief of Kandahar and a suspected drug runner — Razzik consolidated his power, creating one of the most stable districts in Afghanistan. It was a vital district as well, and its proximity to Pakistan offered ample opportunities for self-enrichment for an ambitious young warlord. U.S. military and diplomatic officials soon came to believe that Razzik had become a central figure in a large-scale drug ring, shipping opium over the border. More disturbing reports also started to filter up the chain of command concerning executions and "indiscriminate tactics against men, women and children," according to a human rights official who specializes in Afghanistan.
Razzik's reputation as a killer grew during a military offensive in 2006, when the young commander reportedly terrorized the population of a rival tribe. "People began to say he was here to kill every Noorzai he could find," according to a local elder, in a recent report from the New America Foundation. But the aggressive tactic backfired: "In our area," another elder reported, "the Taliban went from 40 to 400 in days." According to local reports, Razzik's men also stopped 16 civilians on their way to a New Year's celebration and summarily executed them. Razzik was briefly suspended while his men were investigated, but the results of the inquiry were never made public. As Razzik took a leading role in operations around Kandahar last year, more human rights abuses were reported, though eyewitness testimony was hard to come by. "We hear complaints about Razzik," another human rights official tells me, "but people are too afraid of retribution to come forward." A recent report by Human Rights Watch singled out Razzik, coming to the same conclusion. "In Afghanistan, an ordinary person can't do anything," one Afghan civilian told the human rights group. "But a government person can do what he wants — killing, stealing, anything."
The swirling allegations of graft and criminality did give NATO pause. Last February, a deputy to U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry met with a number of U.S. officials charged with combating corruption in Afghanistan, including Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn, then serving as McChrystal's intelligence chief. According to a leaked State Department cable, the meeting was intended to figure out how to handle "prominent Afghan malign actors" or "corrupt/criminal Afghan officials." Three Afghan officials — including Razzik and Ahmed Wali Karzai — were specifically discussed based on information from "intel and law-enforcement files." By embracing Razzik, U.S. officials acknowledged, they were undercutting any chance for legitimate governance. "By ascribing unaccountable authority to Razzik," another cable noted, "the coalition unintentionally reinforces his position through its direct and near-exclusive dealings with him on all major issues in Spin Boldak."
U.S. officials briefly considered ways to sideline Razzik and Karzai. Capture them? Take them out? Charge them with corruption? At a minimum, according to a leaked cable, officials thought they should give them a slap on the wrist by limiting their public appearances and cutting off high-profile visits from congressional delegations. That, the cable concluded, would "help change perceptions held by parts of the Afghan public that the U.S. supports, explicitly or implicitly, known corrupt officials."
Once Petraeus assumed command, however, any pretense of even the most minimal punishment became a joke. Razzik received a high-profile visit not only from Petraeus but from Eikenberry as well — which included a photo op. He was also rewarded with more funding and military support, including a dedicated Special Forces team to personally advise him. "Sometimes I travel in the American helicopters," he says with pride. By supporting Razzik, Petraeus is pushing the limits of American law: A condition in the supplemental spending bill passed last year to fund the war explicitly states that no taxpayer money can go to units where there is "credible" evidence of human rights violations. Yet instead of holding Razzik accountable for his crimes, U.S. officials have gone into overdrive to refurbish his image. In October, an American commander in Spin Boldak told The Washington Post that Razzik is a modern-day "Robin Hood." The following month, another U.S. commander gushed to The Wall Street Journal that the young warlord is a "folk hero." In perhaps the most honest assessment, Maj. Gen. Nick Carter endorsed Razzik as "Afghan good enough" — a play on a phrase imported from the Iraq War, "Iraq good enough," which basically suggests a high-grade level of shittiness.
When it comes to American strategy, Razzik represents a trade-off. "On one side," a U.S. official in Kabul tells me, "you have State, DEA, FBI saying, 'Hey, this guy is a smuggler, a criminal, he's letting drugs in over the border.' On the other side, there's the CIA and the military, who are saying, 'This guy is giving us good intel in Panjwaii or Zabul, or wherever else.' " At best, arming known gangsters like Razzik is a short-term fix, designed to give Petraeus a way to gradually lower U.S. casualties and convince the media to go along with the narrative of success. "It's a shortcut to get out," says Thomas Ruttig, a former U.N. official who now runs the Afghan Analyst Network. "Behind us, the flood. Most of what's happening now is driven by an American policy to get out of Afghanistan."
The problem is that the militia program undercuts what is supposed to be a central tenet of counterinsurgency — which, according to a memo issued by Petraeus in August, requires drawing the local population away from the enemy by providing them with "accountable governance." Razzik and his ilk, by contrast, are essentially warlords-in-training, a specter that terrifies Afghans, conjuring up memories of the bad old days when the warlords raped, ruled and pillaged at will. "It reminds me of Soviet times," says Gardesh Saheb, a prominent Afghan journalist. "The militias are a very bad experience for the Afghans. All of the people, all the analysts, all the political groups are against this process. It looks like the end of the communist regime. It's a big mistake."
Arming local warlords also fuels existing rivalries and sets the stage for another Afghan civil war: One of the most high-profile cases from last year ended in disaster when a militia outside Jalalabad, emboldened by an influx of U.S. aid, killed 13 members of another tribe. In dozens of interviews, the only Afghans I met who fully support the militia program are members of the militias. "Americans are always choosing stupid friends here," says Izzatullah Wasifi, a former governor and anti-corruption chief. "Razzik has killed hundreds of people, and Karzai and the rest are all crooked. They're seeking a weak and fragmented state for their own self-interest. We are heading to another civil war. To get stuck in this shit? That's a shame."
There is no question that Petraeus has succeeded, at least for now, in calming the chaos in southern Afghanistan. Over the past few weeks, the fighting in and around Kandahar has subsided somewhat. Afghan officials credit the lull to NATO's ongoing operations around the city, the help of Abdul Razzik and the arrival of winter. Even the Taliban admit that the U.S. crackdown has forced them to flee to Pakistan, although sources close to the insurgents tell me that many are simply hiding in Kandahar, waiting for their next opportunity to strike.
But if the "clear" part of the U.S. operation is succeeding, the "hold and build" aspect of the plan still worries Afghan and American officials. The only way to prevent a return of the Taliban, according to counterinsurgency theory, is to establish a legitimate government. But during the summer, as the U.S. ramped up its offensive, the city was devastated by a Taliban campaign of assassinations that targeted anyone who worked for the government or its allies. At least one high-level killing was occurring every day, an astonishing and unprecedented leap in violence. In the time I was there in December — a slow week — there were two targeted assassinations and one major bombing.
The killings mean it will be harder for Petraeus to implement his counterinsurgency strategy, since there are fewer friendly Afghans left to counter the insurgency. I was shown a list of 515 tribal elders and religious figures who have been assassinated over the past nine years, gutting the ranks of the Afghans whom Petraeus hopes to rely on. A media adviser for the mayor of Kandahar, Ghulam Hayder Hamidi, dismisses the notion that things are better now. "Better?" he scoffs. "I didn't say better. I said there have been only two targeted killings this week. This calm will not last forever. We have had military operations again and again, and this is not a solution to the problem."
The mayor's office is in a dark, dank building, one of those office complexes in conflict zones that seem to be permanently under construction. "This has been the worst year," Hamidi tells me. After two of his deputy mayors were gunned down last year, and he was almost killed in a bombing right outside his office, nearly a third of his staff of 76 quit. (He also had to fire 10 other staffers for corruption.) He hasn't had any luck filling the vacant slots — partly, he says, because he can only pay his employees 3,500 Afghanis a month, or about $80 — half of what they can earn in a local militia. The central government in Kabul, he says, has promised to give his staff raises, but it's been months and he hasn't received the extra funds. Kabul has also been slow to fund his police force, he adds. It's this reality that prompts a U.S. official to tell me, "There's talk of transition next year. But in Kandahar, there's not going to be anything to transition to in a year."
I ask the mayor, who is close to Ahmed Wali Karzai, what he thinks of the corruption accusations against the president's brother. He responds indignantly. Karzai is a victim of "propaganda," he says, and Razzik is a "hero." The real corruption, he insists, is elsewhere — among other Afghan officials and Western reconstruction agencies. "There are killers, enemies of society, sitting in our peace jirga," he says, referring to a government-organized conference that was held in Kandahar earlier that week. He also has few kind words for the $250 million in reconstruction funds being poured into the city: He accuses a Canadian firm of blowing $1.9 million on a solar-power system that doesn't work, and a large development firm, IRD, of wasting millions on a program to harvest grapes.
The mayor is of two minds regarding the prospects of success in Afghanistan. The Taliban, he concedes, still have deep roots in the police force and plenty of funding from Pakistan and Iran. On the other hand, his public spiritedness prompts him to insist that this coming summer will be more peaceful than the last. He has even come up with a new slogan he wants to promote for Kandahar: "Tourism, not terrorism."
Petraeus has never been a man to lack con- fidence. He once sent an autographed picture of himself to a reporter he went jogging with, and signed copies of his photos go for up to $825 on eBay. After his speedy approval by Congress last summer, Petraeus returned to CENTCOM headquarters in Tampa, Florida, to pack his bags and thank his staff. He sounded "psyched" and looked like "a man on a mission, not dreading Afghanistan at all," according to a source close to Petraeus. Those who know him say privately that he would never have run for president in 2012, but that hasn't stopped speculation that he'll be in the mix in 2016. He joked at a right-wing think tank about running for president, and "Petraeus for President" T-shirts are already available online.
Petraeus is fond of citing his experience during the Bush administration; in meetings, the general "mentions Iraq every five minutes," as one Afghan official puts it. But it didn't take long after Petraeus arrived in Kabul for him to get something of a shock: This war, it quickly became clear, is nothing like the last one he fought. "It's taken him a few months," says one U.S. official involved in the Afghan strategy, "but I think he's finally realized that Afghanistan is not Iraq. Afghanistan is much, much harder."
In Iraq, Petraeus had a tough-minded and brave leader in Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki, and a reliable diplomatic partner in Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador. But in Afghanistan, both President Karzai and Ambassador Eikenberry have been standing in the way of the narrative the general is trying to sell. Petraeus has responded by pressuring Karzai to beef up local militias and negotiate with the Taliban, straining the relationship almost to the breaking point. At a meeting in October attended by Petraeus and other senior U.S. officials, Karzai stormed out of the room after an intense back-and-forth over whether Western security companies should be banned from Afghanistan, which would effectively shut down all development projects. According to an Afghan official with knowledge of the meeting, Karzai told him that "he didn't care if Petraeus took his projects or his troops home." (The president also threatened, yet again, to join the Taliban.) A few weeks later, according to an Afghan official, Karzai refused to fly with Petraeus to the NATO summit in Lisbon.
"Karzai is crazy — or crazy like a fox," says Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, the leading opposition figure. "He's too skillful at playing games and too retarded when it comes to the rationale. He can't play the role the people of Afghanistan and the international community expect him to play. He will get deeper and deeper into this problem and drag us down as well."
Petraeus has kept his distance from Eikenberry, who has been among the administration's strongest critics of the military's plan in Afghanistan. An embassy spokesman says the ambassador and the general are "very close," but U.S. officials familiar with their relationship describe it as "lukewarm" and "so-so." Eikenberry has been rendered increasingly ineffective in recent months, following the release of WikiLeaks cables in which he criticized Karzai, as well as comments he made to Bob Woodward in Obama's Wars saying Karzai was "off his meds." One State Department official in Kabul describes the atmosphere at the U.S. Embassy as "rudderless," with many of Eikenberry's top deputies operating in a " micromanaged culture of fear." Even Eikenberry's own people have been telling the White House he's useless: In October, a senior official from the embassy met in Washington with Gen. Doug Lute, a top player at the National Security Council, and told him that Eikenberry's relationship with Karzai is "completely destroyed."
Throughout the strategic review last year, all Eikenberry did "was whine," according to a senior U.S. official involved in the process. In recent weeks, military officials have started to do some whining of their own, complaining to the media that the ambassador isn't doing enough to back counterinsurgency. U.S. officials describe Eikenberry's tenure as one of the great tragedies of the war — that a man widely respected for his knowledge of Afghanistan was unable to stop a military strategy he foresaw was doomed to fail. In Kabul, rumors of his imminent departure abound; a former U.S. ambassador recently came just short of publicly calling for his resignation, a sentiment that Afghan officials express privately. Insiders speculate that only McChrystal's sudden firing, followed by Richard Holbrooke's untimely death in December, have kept Eikenberry in the job.
With the death of Holbrooke, the president's special envoy, the administration lost one of its best diplomatic weapons to put pressure on the Pakistanis — seen as key to shutting down Taliban safe havens and orchestrating peace talks in Afghanistan. More than any other top U.S. official, Holbrooke had been "chipping away" in Pakistan, as one State Department official puts it, making at least a dozen trips to the region in the past two years and slowly building the relationships needed to resolve the most daunting diplomatic challenge of the entire U.S. policy in Afghanistan. Petraeus called Holbrooke his "wingman" — a term of endearment that amused Holbrooke. But as a U.S. official told me a few weeks before the envoy's death, Holbrooke believed that diplomacy, not war, should take center stage in foreign policy. "Since when did the diplomat become the general's wingman?" Holbrooke was reported as saying. "It's supposed to be the other way around!"
At the start of the Iraq war, Petraeus famously offered a prescient observation about the impending military disaster. Speaking to a reporter during the early days of the invasion, the general noted that the Bush administration had no real exit strategy in place. "Tell me how this ends," he said.
So far, Petraeus has failed to answer that question in Afghanistan, even while he has tripled the scope of the fighting, essentially creating a new war of his own. Both the U.N. and the Red Cross say that violence is the worst it's been in nine years, and security across the country is deteriorating. In December, a group of highly respected Afghanistan experts published an open letter to President Obama, saying that negotiations, not an increase in military operations, are the only way out. "We are losing the battle for hearts and minds in the Pashtun countryside," they wrote. "What was supposed to be a population-centered strategy is now a full-scale military campaign causing civilian casualties and property damage." In the most shocking incident, a U.S. unit destroyed an entire Afghan village last fall, obliterating it with 42,900 pounds of bombs.
Political pressure to get out is building. Polls now show that two-thirds of Americans — a record level — don't think the war is worth fighting. In Congress, 102 Democrats voted against funding for the war last year, up from 32 in 2009. A host of think tanks are expressing serious doubts: The left-leaning Center for American Progress calls for an "accelerated withdrawal," and the bipartisan Council on Foreign Relations concludes that "at best, the margin for U.S. victory is likely to be slim."
Inside the White House, according to officials familiar with the debate, Obama is prepared to go head-to-head with the military to get his way. At the end of last year, he replaced his national security adviser, Gen. James Jones — who had failed to keep the president from being steamrollered by the Pentagon during the strategic review — with Tom Donilon, a trusted friend who is said to have serious doubts about the war. Donilon is closely tied to Joe Biden; his brother is a top aide to the vice president, and his wife is Jill Biden's chief of staff. His appointment was a clear signal to the Pentagon about Obama's determination to begin winding down the war — which is why Defense Secretary Gates reportedly said that Donilon's selection would be a "disaster."
In Washington, the internal debate now centers on how many troops are actually going to leave. Too low, and the number won't satisfy the Democratic base. Too high, and it will provide ammunition to Petraeus and his GOP allies. In the past few weeks, two high-profile Republican delegations have visited Afghanistan — including four Tea Party senators and GOP presidential contender Mitt Romney. Both delegations received the royal treatment — Petraeus' media operation distributed photos of Romney's visit, and ISAF announced his arrival on Twitter — and both returned insisting that Obama must keep U.S. troops in Afghanistan until Petraeus gives the OK to withdraw.
But despite its "stay the course" rhetoric, even the Pentagon is studying ways to get out. Last summer, Rolling Stone has learned, the Defense Department commissioned a report from U.S. military officials and diplomatic advisers looking at various "end states" in Afghanistan — in short, what the country will look like when we leave. A U.S. official who was asked for input on the document says that "it was an attempt to get the withdrawal strategies." A draft of one paper, obtained by Rolling Stone, describes a plan to split Afghanistan into seven regions, each centered around a major city, with both "insurgents" and "local strongmen" in the new governments. "This is not to sanction warlordism," the paper states, "but an acknowledgment that local strongmen have a part to play in the initial stage of rebalancing the state." A Pentagon spokesman insists that "no such scenario is being contemplated by senior leadership," but sources close to Gates say he reacted "positively" to the plan.
Warlordism certainly seems to be the way America is heading in Afghanistan. If, as Obama insists, we are not engaged in "nation-building," then it doesn't really matter what kind of government we leave behind in Kabul, as long as they let us use their country as a base for killing Al Qaeda. Robert Grenier, a former CIA station chief in Islamabad, recently called for balancing a "small but capable Afghan army" with local militias "sometimes disparaged as warlords" — all to provide "a platform for U.S.-led counterterror operations." In the end, despite the counterinsurgency doctrine's emphasis on good governance, the conclusion of every occupation ultimately comes down to the conqueror's desire for stability, rather than the human rights of the conquered.
Which raises the question: Why risk the lives of 150,000 troops and waste another $120 billion to get there? "America promised us democracy and human rights," says Ahmad Berkazai, who serves as media adviser to the mayor of Kandahar. "If America is fighting for that, they should stay. If they are not — if they are going to leave behind militias and warlords — then they should leave now."
Either way suits Col. Abdul Razzik. Back in Spin Boldak, our interview over, I pose for a picture with him. I admire his watch — a black, diamond-encrusted Concord — and he takes me outside to show off his base. The parking lot is full of Humvees and armored SUVs, all provided by the Americans. Razzik points out a fort on top of a small, rocky hill behind his headquarters. "That's an old British castle," he says. "It's about 90 years old." We stare at the ruins, a remnant of the last Western power to see its visions of empire end in the graveyard of Afghanistan.
I ask Razzik what his plans for the future are. "It is the happiest time in my life," he says. "I am the police chief here, and I am in my own country." Then he asks if I need an escort for the trip back. I politely decline, and thank him for his time. A few minutes later, as we are driving back to Kandahar, my translator notices that we're being followed by two green Ford Rangers, courtesy of Col. Razzik. It's his job, after all, to offer us a semblance of security as we find our way out.
The Insurgent's Tale: Rolling Stone's 2005 Profile of a Soldier Reconsidering Jihad
He took up arms with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and Abu Musabal-Zarqawi in Iraq. The extraordinary saga of a veteran foot soldier in the jihad — and why he had second thoughts about a holy war that seems to have no end
Khalid had been in Iraq for only a few weeks, but he was already sick of the place. It wasn't the missions that bothered him. He was fighting alongside a small group of Saudis, and they were consummate professionals when it came to jihad, completely focused on the lightning-fast attacks they staged each day on the foreign invaders. The ambushes usually lasted no more than five or ten minutes, but Khalid reveled in the chance to hit the streets and fire off his AK-47 at the American soldiers and their allies, four grenades strapped to his waist so he could kill himself if captured.
After the attacks, however, Khalid and the other fighters were confined to safe houses in Mosul and Haditha — dark, dank places with no hot water or electricity. The biggest problem was the Iraqis, the very people he was there to help. Sometimes it seemed as though there were double agents everywhere, checking him out on the street, trying to overhear him speaking the Yemeni dialect that would betray him as a foreigner, all so they could pick up their cell phones and call in the Americans, maybe even collect a reward. That made this jihad more dangerous and unpredictable than the other wars Khalid had fought in — Afghanistan, Bosnia, Somalia, places where they were often treated like heroes. When they weren't out on missions in Iraq, he and the Saudis were forced to stay in the safe house, the shades pulled down, with only a well-thumbed copy of the Koran and five prayer sessions a day to break the monotony.
This article appeared in the December 15, 2005 issue of Rolling Stone. The issue is available in the online archive.
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was a pillar of strength to the insurgents. Khalid knew him from a decade and a half ago, when they were fighting the Soviets and their proxies in Afghanistan. But now, meeting al-Zarqawi in Mosul, he was amazed at the changes in his old comrade. Back then al-Zarqawi was an ordinary foot soldier like Khalid. Now, flanked by two bodyguards and barking orders with fiery determination, he was the most wanted man in Iraq, an Islamic militant with a $25 million price on his head. He had been hailed by Sheik Osama bin Laden himself as "the prince of Al Qaeda in Iraq," but al-Zarqawi still had time for a word with someone from the old days. He and Khalid chatted for a few minutes, recalling their time together in Afghanistan, before al-Zarqawi rushed off to make arrangements with an ally in Kurdistan to try to send some insurgents off to Iraq's northern mountains to fight.
That was more than two years ago, when the insurgency had been looking for fighters like Khalid, veteran soldiers who could be relied on to attack foreign troops with skill and precision. Now, back in Yemen, Khalid heard that they were looking for suicide bombers only. He would watch kids he knew signing up to go to Iraq, unaware that they were being recruited to kill themselves. It made Khalid glad he wasn't in Iraq anymore. Not that he had anything against that kind of mission — it was a noble calling — but he thought that a person willing to fight and die should know what he was meant to do before he left home.
At thirty-two, Khalid was beginning to have serious reservations about the course of the insurgency in Iraq. They are over-killing there. Fighting foreign soldiers was one thing — he had been doing it all of his adult life. But did his faith really sanction killing civilians in their own country? The blood of people is too cheap. Fifteen years in the jihad, fighting in five foreign wars, imprisoned in England and Yemen, enduring the death of a close friend on a mission in Iraq — enough. The cost was just too high. Although he was proud of all the fighting he had done in the past, Khalid wanted to settle down to an ordinary life as a father, husband and son. He was a soldier fighting a war. But what if the war had no end?
Commentary on politics and the economy by Matt Taibbi
Khalid, who agreed To recount the story of his jihad on the condition that his identity not be revealed, is a Yemeni from the ancient city of Sanaa in northern Yemen. The country is one of the most lawless and drug-addicted places in the world. Despite a recent government crackdown, hand grenades are laid out alongside fresh produce at street-side markets, and sources estimate that there are at least 10 million guns in circulation in a country with a population of 20 million.
Social life revolves around qat, a leafy, reddish-green plant that contains amphetamine-like substances. Eighty percent of adult men in Yemen chew regularly, and important political and business decisions are routinely made in the mafraj, a room in many homes specially designed for chewing sessions. The leaf combines the talkative affability of pot with the drive of speed. First comes euphoria and intense sociability — not ponderous, marijuana-induced ramblings, but a deep appreciation of the flow of conversation. In this stage, five hours can pass in what seems like ten minutes. Next comes reflective quiet — a comfortable silence descends as people look inward, contemplating the contents of their minds. The final stage is depression and insomnia — it's not uncommon to see solitary cloaked figures roaming the streets at night, waiting for the effects of the drug to pass. On average, Yemeni men spend about a third of their income on qat, and commerce in the leaf accounts for a third of the nation's GNP.
I met Khalid at a qat chew in the mafraj of a friend. The room was hot and stuffy, the way chewers like it, and each man in the room was identically posed: left knee up and right arm resting on a cushion. Cold bottles of "Canada" — the Yemeni term for water, based on the market dominance of Canada Dry—were distributed all around. The room was clean, but people were already beginning to litter the floor with leaves or stalks too thick or firm to chew. After a few hours, the middle of the room would be blanketed with a thick green carpet of discarded qat.
Qat sessions usually begin with a raucous flow of conversation. But Khalid was quiet, smiling at jokes, carefully pruning his stalks, venturing little. When he finally spoke, he told me that he had just been let out of a Yemeni prison. I asked him why.
"I was arrested as a terrorist," he told me in English, with a trace of a working-class British accent.
Late one night, he went on, an under-cover anti-terrorism squad had dragged him away from his family's home in a comfortable, middle-class neighborhood of Sanaa. He was locked up and questioned repeatedly by Yemeni police in the presence of American agents. To curry favor with the Bush administration, Yemen's president, Ali Abdullah Salih, has arrested hundreds of suspected terrorists, imprisoning almost everyone who returns to Yemen with a Syrian or Iranian stamp in their passport — prima facie evidence that they fought in Iraq. Khalid was released after thirty days when a family friend posted a large bond to ensure that he would stay out of trouble.
At this point, a friend at the qat chew hissed at Khalid in Arabic: "Why are you telling him this? Don't talk about these things."
"I have nothing to hide," Khalid told him. He then proceeded to recount the extraordinary story of his fifteen years fighting as a foot soldier in the jihad. Although it is impossible to independently corroborate every detail of his tale, other Yemenis confirmed Khalid's long, frequent absences from Yemen, his presence at training camps in Afghanistan and his imprisonment in Yemen by the anti-terrorism police. His passport contains entry stamps to Syria that match the dates he said he had gone to Iraq, and the account he gave of his arrest in England mirrors one reported by police in the U.K. around the same time. Moreover, the details Khalid gave of fighting in relatively obscure battles in Bosnia, Somalia and Afghanistan match events that actually took place. In the broad strokes of his story, at least, he appears to be telling the truth.
Khalid is not an ultraorthodox, unbending Muslim. Although he meets to chew qat wearing his Yemeni dress cut midcalf, in the style of an Islamic purist, he also wears button-down shirts and European hiking boots. He has lived in England for years and has befriended Westerners. Slight and handsome, he has the quiet charisma and modesty of the guy who is elected class president based on his low-key appeal. In short, he is not the kind of enemy we have been led to believe we are fighting. He harbors some of the same doubts that our own soldiers have about what brought them to fight and, perhaps, to die, in a place so far from home. To hear a polite and thoughtful man talk casually about his friends in Al Qaeda is to have the whole enterprise reduced to a more fragile, human scale. It is to see this war for what it is: a battle between men filled with contradictions, inconsistencies and weaknesses — not a mythic struggle between our supermen and their ghosts.
Khalid's jihad began with a videotape he viewed at a mosque in Sanaa in 1989. He can still remember the anger he felt when, at the age of sixteen, he watched that footage of Muslim brothers and sisters being slaughtered in Afghanistan. A friend of his had died fighting there — a martyr promised the rewards of paradise. Khalid didn't think much about his own decision to follow his friend into battle; it was the natural, instinctive thing to do. He had seen what the Russians were doing to the brothers, as Khalid calls his fellow soldiers in the holy war. His best friend had stood up to them and died. Now it was his turn.
Yemen is pious and militant, and it has supplied many thousands of the young men who have filled the front lines of jihad, fighting for their faith from Afghanistan to Iraq. The country is the ancestral home of bin Laden, whose father was a one-eyed Yemeni dockworker, and among the few people successfully prosecuted by the Bush administration on terrorism charges were the "Lackawanna Six," Yemeni Americans from Buffalo, New York, convicted of attending an Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, and Sheik al-Moayad, a cleric from Sanaa convicted of conspiring to support terrorism.
There was nothing in Khalid's childhood to suggest that he would wind up joining the jihad. His father was a moderate Muslim with a steady job as a civil servant in the Yemeni government. Khalid worried that he wouldn't be able to get a passport or leave the country without his father's permission. But the recruiters for the Afghan war were acting with the support of the Yemeni government, and within a few weeks, whether or not his father liked it, Khalid had a brand-new passport stamped with a visa for Pakistan.
The final hitch was that a close relative of Khalid's worked at the Sanaa Airport. Khalid feared that an airport clerk might recognize him and alert his family. The recruiters got around that by driving him directly onto the tarmac. Khalid climbed aboard the plane to Pakistan without even passing through immigration.
The reality of jihad, Khalid quickly discovered, was very different from the images presented on the videotape. When he finally made it into Afghanistan, he spent his first night near the front. That evening, a soldier who had been killed was brought back for burial by the mujahideen. Khalid didn't know the man, but seeing his body terrified him. "I'm scared," he told a friend. "I just want to go home."
"Everybody feels like that at first," his friend said. "But soon you won't be scared."
Khalid fought in Afghanistan for two years. He learned to use his weapon, to fight, and to pray with the precision and punctuality of the Salafis, the Islamic purists who were driving the holy war. It was a harder, less forgiving kind of Islam than he had known in Yemen, but its rigidity gave him the strength and discipline he needed to survive as a homesick kid at war in a foreign land. He had arrived in Afghanistan at a pivotal moment. The war against the Soviets was giving birth to a new breed of Arab fighters known as "Afghan Arabs." It was there that the seed of allegiance was planted for the thousands of young men who had flocked to the mountains of the Hindukush to help fight the communists. Afghanistan represented the birth of the global struggle. By helping defeat a superpower, the jihadists showed the world the power of Islam. And in the decade that followed, they would spread that war to the rest of the world.
In 1993, after Khalid had returned home from Afghanistan, he began to hear about a war in Europe where Christians were slaughtering Muslims. Stirred by the stories, he went to join the fighting in Bosnia. Again, as in Afghanistan, he was on the side the world viewed as the good guys — the Bosnian Muslims who were the victims of relentless "ethnic cleansing" at the hands of the Serbian nationalists led by Slobodan Milosevic. The combat was much more intense than the action he had seen in Afghanistan, where the Soviets used superior firepower to bomb them from a distance. In Bosnia, the enemy was right in front of you, and you had to kill or be killed each day. Khalid fought alongside a group called the Green Berets, named not after the American Special Forces but after the color of Islam.
One day, after a year at war in Bosnia, Khalid was on the front line between Tuzla and Zenica, battling Serbian snipers who were shooting into Muslim villages from a nearby mountain. Suddenly, he came face to face with a Serb. The Serb got the jump, firing seven bullets into Khalid's stomach. Bundled up in heavy winter clothing, Khalid at first couldn't even tell how badly he was hit. When he started to peel off the layers around his stomach, part of his guts leaked out into his hands. He stuffed whatever he could back in and lay down on the ground. When a Saudi brother managed to drag Khalid beyond the reach of the Serb snipers, it took three injections of morphine to quiet his screaming. "You must be a heavy drinker," said the medic from Bahrain who administered the shots.
"No," Khalid said. "I chew qat." The medic, who had never heard of the plant, thought Khalid was hallucinating.
It took hours to carry Khalid down the mine-covered trail. When he finally arrived at a triage area at the base of the mountain, he was put with a group of those too far gone to save and left to die.
Soon after, the medic who had given Khalid the morphine arrived and began searching for his patient. He found Khalid lying among the rows of the dead and ordered a Bosnian army helicopter to speed Khalid to a hospital, where he woke up in pre-op. For six months he lived off an IV tube, his intestines hanging outside his body in a sterilized bag. He shrank to skin and bones — under seventy-five pounds — until he looked like "an African famine victim." The hunger was so intense, he would claw at his own stomach.
On his way to Saudi Arabia for further surgery, Khalid stopped home in Yemen. When he arrived at the airport in a wheelchair, his father slapped him across the face. "This is all your doing — tell Sheik Zindani to help you now," he said, referring to a firebrand cleric who had urged Khalid to go to Bosnia. But Khalid received a warmer welcome in Saudi Arabia, where people from all over the country visited him in the hospital, leaving gifts of flowers, perfume and money for a man they considered a hero.
It took Khalid several years to recover from his wounds. In 1996, he joined a group of Arab fighters going to Kosovo, where Christian Serbs were once again menacing a Muslim minority. By the time he arrived, however, the Serbs had already sealed off the country, making it impossible for him to enter. Unable to join the jihad, Khalid decided to move to England, where many of the brothers had settled.
England is the home of one of the largest concentrations of Yemenis in the world; parts of Yemen were long ruled by the British, and thousands of Khalid's countrymen have settled there. When Khalid arrived, he went to see a Palestinian cleric he knew, who helped connect him to the Yemeni community. Khalid settled down to work at a corner store, chewing qat all day while manning the register. The leaf is legal in England, and Khalid's store stocked and sold qat to Yemenis in the neighborhood.
Khalid was twenty-three. For the past seven years, he had been fighting in battles all over the world. He had never been on a date, never kissed a girl, never really talked to a female who wasn't a close relation. So he did what many a lonely guy does when he's stuck in a city he doesn't know very well: He fell for the waitress at the coffee shop.
She was of Irish descent, and she smiled every time she brought him his coffee. Khalid went to a Yemeni friend and explained his quandary: He was in love, but he didn't know what to say.
"No problem," the friend told him. "I'll ask her out for you."
The waitress was receptive but confused. "I like him," she told the friend. "But why doesn't he just talk to me himself?"
Things were rocky from the start. On the first date, she wanted to go to a disco, but Khalid refused. Outside a restaurant, he grew angry when a passing man looked at her. "What are you going to do if I walk on the street with you?" she asked. "Fight everybody in the city?"
A couple of dates later came the gifts: three bottles of pricey perfume and a ring — the ring. He could barely get the words out in English: "I want to marry you."
"Marry me?" She was surprised, amused even. "What's my name?"
"It's hard for me to remember it," he stuttered.
He gave her a week to decide. His gallantry must have won her over, because they were married within a month.
Right after that, the misery began. Khalid tried to control her and force her to wear the hijab, the head scarf worn by devout Muslim women. Their arguments were so loud that neighbors knocked on the door and banged on the walls. He realized the way he treated her was wrong, but he didn't know any other way. They separated, and Khalid got a British passport out of the marriage.
Khalid returned to the only life he knew. This time, his destination was Somalia, where a radical Muslim faction was attempting to impose strict Islamic law, known as sharia, on the entire country. Posing as a Red Crescent worker, Khalid bribed a pilot to fly him from Nairobi to the Somali town of Luuq, where he delivered $40,000 in cash to a Somali warlord allied with the Islamic faction. The money was from Arab backers, mostly Saudis, who were using their disposable income to influence the many conflicts that plagued Africa and the Middle East. Their cash not only advanced the cause of Islam — it also bought allies who might help the struggle in the future.
There were forty Arab fighters in Luuq helping to fight the Ethiopian army, which regularly attacked from across the border. The longer Khalid stayed, the more dire conditions grew. At times the insurgents survived only by eating pure sugar. The brothers eventually organized a counter-attack and retook the city. Khalid fought for two days straight, until he and his men ran out of ammunition. Reduced to throwing stones, most of the Arab and Somali fighters were killed. At one point the few remaining survivors were so desperate, they started to dig their own graves.
Khalid escaped, badly shaken but alive, with neither the money nor the means to get home. What do you do when you're on jihad, all the money's run out and you just want to leave? For Khalid and his remaining men, their only chance was to try and get a piece of the forty grand that Khalid had already delivered to the warlord.
"I can't help you," the Somali leader told him. "We need all that money for our fight."
Khalid wasn't a high-school debater; he was a holy warrior, so he did what came naturally: He put a loaded gun to the man's head. "I'll kill you or you'll help us get out of here," he said. "We brought you $40,000. Now you need to help us." The warlord was convinced. Khalid and his fellow insurgents eventually escaped to Yemen by crossing the Gulf of Aden on a dhow packed with goats.
When Khalid finally arrived home, his father was furious. "What the hell happened to you?" he demanded. "Where did you come from?" To calm him down, Khalid promised to stop fighting and start a normal life. But whenever the call came, he answered. In 1999, Khalid traveled to Tbilisi, in Georgia, and tried to get into Chechnya, where the Russian army was slaughtering Muslims. But many mujahideen, he learned, had died trying to walk across the mountains to Chechnya. Khalid was willing to die fighting for his cause, a gun in his hand, but freezing to death on a mountain-top was no way for a soldier to give up his life. He headed back to England, returning to his job as a clerk at the corner store, chewing qat to keep himself alert, always on the lookout for the next opportunity.
In 2001, he got a call from Afghanistan. The brothers wanted him there.
When Khalid arrived in Afghanistan early that year, the Taliban had unified most of the country under the strict banner of sharia law. The ragtag bands of foreign jihadists who had fought the communists were gone. In their place was a sophisticated network of training camps run by Al Qaeda. This was a new age of jihad, a well-organized, well-financed struggle led by Osama bin Laden. Jihad, Khalid discovered, had been institutionalized.
At first, Khalid ran a sort of hostel in Mashhad, deep in the rugged Iranian frontier. The 600-mile-long border between Iran and Afghanistan is difficult to police because of its steep mountains and many trails, and Al Qaeda was taking advantage of the covert passageways, sheltering jihadists at Khalid's hostel before sending them over the mountains into Afghanistan.
That summer, on a trip into Afghanistan, Khalid met bin Laden at the leader's camp near Kandahar. They talked about the course of jihad and the situation in Yemen, a country for which bin Laden had a special fondness — his father and one of his wives were born there, and Yemen had always supplied some of the best and bravest mujahideen, men bin Laden relied on as his most trusted fighters and bodyguards. Khalid thought jihad should be extended to Yemen, but bin Laden disagreed, saying it would stretch his forces too thin. "There is no justice in Yemen," he told Khalid, "but we can't fight there now."
By the summer of 2001, there was a palpable feeling in the camps that something big was about to happen. Around that time, Khalid ran into an old friend from his days in Bosnia: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a Pakistani who had risen to prominence as an operational chief of Al Qaeda. Mohammed asked Khalid to volunteer for a mission to the United States or Europe — his British passport would enable him to slip in and out of a Western country. But Khalid refused. He was willing to fight foreign soldiers invading Arab lands, but he wasn't ready to take the war to America or Europe.
On September 11th, Khalid was near Kabul when a Libyan cleric announced that the World Trade Center had been destroyed. Everyone in the camp exploded in jubilation — the mood was exhilarating, insane, like Mecca at the height of the hajj. As Khalid remembers it, it was the moment when everything changed. The mujahideen had struck a blow against the West that would never be forgotten. And in the process, they had made themselves the target of the world's only remaining superpower.
When the United States invaded Afghanistan, Khalid saw his most intense fighting in and around Khost. Even with help from a local sheik, the foreign fighters couldn't do much against the American onslaught. One night, Khalid was sleeping in a car near Khost with three other fighters. When he woke up and walked away to relieve himself, the car was blown to bits. Khalid later helped to bury a body he believed to be the wife of Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's second in command. The woman had been killed in a school where many Al Qaeda families had sought shelter from the American bombings.
After a few weeks, as the relentless bombing continued, a message arrived from bin Laden: Any mujahideen who could still travel should return to their home countries. There was no point in dying in Afghanistan. "There was no way to fight a decent war there with the Americans," Khalid recalled. "We hardly ever saw a soldier to fire at." Though the Bush administration believed it had routed the Islamic forces, the mujahideen, in fact, had beat a strategic retreat. American commanders, reluctant to expose ground troops to danger, had relied on a strategy of bombing from above that allowed many Al Qaeda members to slip away, ready and willing to fight again another day.
In late 2001, Sheikh Mohammed, the Al Qaeda operational chief, ordered Khalid to guide a group of fifty women and children to safety in Iran, over the same mountains he had crossed to enter Afghanistan. "You know the route," Mohammed said. "Take some families with you." He gave Khalid thousands of dollars to pay for Afghan guides and to take care of the Iranian border guards.
The journey to Iran took two weeks. They trekked across high mountains — a string of women and children wandering through a remote corner of the world, eating dates, plants and whatever animals they could kill along the way. When they reached Iran, pro-Taliban allies were waiting to shuttle them to safety. For weeks after the trip, Khalid's shoulders ached from carrying so many children on his back.
In the years before September 11th, Khalid and his fellow mujahideen could move around the world with relative ease — creating fake passports, bribing border police, claiming that they were Iraqi dissidents fleeing the tyranny of Saddam Hussein. Immigration officials were a nuisance, but there was always a way around them. Now, returning to England from Afghanistan in 2002, Khalid discovered that even a real British passport couldn't protect him from scrutiny. When he changed planes in Abu Dhabi, the police stopped him, suspecting that his passport was fake. A well-dressed supervisor came out to question him. "What's Marks and Spencer?" the man asked.
"A big British department store," Khalid said. "Look, I'm a British citizen, from Yemen. I'm Shiite. Why would I want to go and help the Taliban? They hate Shiites. I was on a pilgrimage to holy places in Iran." After a few hours they let him go, and he boarded a plane to London.
At Heathrow, he was detained again. British officials asked for his luggage and he told them he had only hand baggage. Strike one. They examined his ticket: one-way from Tehran. Strike two. As he sat on a hard bench in a glass-paneled interrogation room, deathly afraid, he could see officials leafing through his passport in the next room. They kept coming back to one page — a page that had been doctored in Afghanistan to remove a Pakistani visa. He claimed he had accidentally left it in his pants and then ironed them, but they didn't buy it. Strike three. At midnight the agents handcuffed him, shoved him in the back seat of an unmarked car and took him to a maximum-security detention facility.
They questioned him for five days. As the interrogation continued, however, Khalid came to see that he was safer in England, protected by the country's due-process laws, than many of his brothers detained by the Americans in Afghanistan. Realizing that the police had nothing on him, he denied everything. They finally let him go, unable to hold him without further evidence.
The incident communicated something important to Khalid: The jihadi's life had changed after 9/11. Not long ago he could travel all over the world with impunity; now they were hassling him at Heathrow just because he was flying in from Tehran on a one-way ticket with a piece of hand luggage.
Khalid lived quietly in England for a year and a half, working at the corner shop and praying at a local mosque. Around that time, he befriended a fellow Yemeni who would come to share his passion for jihad: Wa'il al Dhaleai, who was well known in England as a leading tae kwon do instructor and Olympic hopeful.
In 2003, when the U.S. invaded Iraq, it was clear to Khalid where he would next do battle. Getting into Iraq from Syria was no more difficult than dressing up like a farmer and walking across the border with phony papers in the middle of the night. But the fighting was a different story. In the early stages of the war, there weren't many foreign fighters like Khalid in Iraq; the bulk of the insurgency was comprised of native-born Sunnis who simply wanted to drive the Americans from their country. They welcomed the foreigners — they weren't in a position to be choosy — but they weren't interested in jihad's broader goal of imposing Islamic law on Iraq.
Khalid quickly discovered that it was impossible to blend in — Iraqis tend to be bigger than Yemenis, and their body language and dialect are hard to imitate. Shiites were especially quick to report foreign Sunnis to the authorities. Khalid and his Arab brothers had the same problem as the American forces they were fighting: They didn't know which Iraqis they could trust.
Most of the foreign fighters in Iraq were very young. At thirty-two, Khalid felt like an old man. Stuck in their safe houses, the mujahideen had to rely on Iraqi insurgents to report on the movement of American convoys, scouting for an opening that would allow them to attack. Months after President Bush declared "mission accomplished" in Iraq, Khalid was ambushing U.S. forces in the northern city of Mosul. Around the same time, Saddam Hussein's sons died in a fierce gun battle there. That October, Khalid's friend Wa'il also died, fighting the Americans in the town of Ramadi.
After three months in Iraq, Khalid returned to England through Syria. But jihad seemed to shadow him everywhere. One evening, after returning home from work, Khalid heard a helicopter overhead. Seconds later the police kicked in the door, handcuffed him and arrested him on suspicion of terrorism. People on his block couldn't believe that the friendly guy who sat behind the counter at their corner store was an Al Qaeda fighter.
The agents interrogated Khalid about his past. They knew he'd been in Syria. Business, he explained. They knew he'd been detained in 2002 after returning to England from Iran. Shiite pilgrimage. I've never been in Afghanistan. I don't want to go. They knew there were Yemeni fighters being held in Guantanamo who said Khalid had recruited them to train in Afghanistan. Liars. They knew he had spoken on his cell phone to Wa'il, shortly before his friend had died in Iraq. Just a chat.
After Khalid spent a week in prison they let him out, just like they always did. They didn't have enough evidence to keep him. When he was released, his next-door neighbors, mostly white Britons, were there to welcome him home. "I might doubt my own son," one old man said, "but I'll always believe Khalid." Most of the Yemenis and other Muslims who had been Khalid's friends had deserted him when he was arrested, fearing for their own safety. When he saw his British neighbors standing by him, Khalid couldn't help bawling.
After the arrest, Khalid returned to Iraq for two more months in 2004, in part to honor the memory of Wa'il. Living in safe houses, he once again went out on raids against the Americans. The heaviest fighting he saw was in Al Qa'im, where thirty Arabs and more than a hundred Iraqis fought for a week against the Americans. Khalid saw seven brothers killed, mostly from Syria and Saudi Arabia. He believed the insurgents killed about ten soldiers from the other side.
By this time, however, the nature of the insurgency had changed. Al-Zarqawi had succeeded, for the moment, in taking over the homegrown resistance. Many of Saddam's former secret police and Republican Guard were now integrated into cells with jihadists like Khalid. The leadership of Al Qaeda had financial resources and strategic expertise that the Iraqis lacked, and the foreign fighters were more willing to die than the local Sunnis — and more willing to kill civilians.
Disturbed by the killings, Khalid began to rethink the role of jihad in his life. Would his faith really justify killing his British neighbors in their own country? Would he ever be able to live a normal life? Hearing about Yemenis he knew who had disappeared into the gulag at Guantanamo, he feared he could end up in prison for life, a fate he considered worse than death.
The doubts intensified after he returned home to Yemen and was arrested earlier this year. "Enough is enough," his father implored. "It's time to settle down and stop this stuff." After Khalid was released from prison, he and a group of other Afghan Arabs — the blanket term for those who fought or trained in Afghanistan — were summoned to a meeting with Ali Abdullah Salih, the president of Yemen, who was trying to contain the jihadists. In private, Salih called them "my sons" and said he had been pressured by the Bush administration to crack down on them. He also did something seldom acknowledged in the war on terror: He offered to pay them off to stop fighting.
"We will help you get jobs, get married," Salih told the men. "Write down your name and what you want."
Khalid didn't take the money, but he was tempted by the offer. He wanted out of jihad. On a trip back to England in late 2004, he had proposed to a Muslim woman he met through friends. In August, his fiancée and her family visited him in Yemen. He was visibly excited about the prospect of settling down and starting a family. He and his betrothed would go on heavily chaperoned picnics to a park outside Sanaa with their extended families, or visit the home of a close relative. They have never been alone together, and he has never seen her face.
But Khalid can see no way to escape from his past. Like many veterans, he looks back on his years of fighting with nostalgia — the thrill of battle, the feeling of brotherhood, the steadfast devotion to a cause. But on some days, it feels as if he has no place in the world. He lives in Sanaa, but it no longer seems like home. Every few days he walks down to a storefront calling center and phones his brother in England. He doubts he can ever go back to the life he knew there. He often visited the mosques frequented by the London bombers, and he fears police will arrest him if he tries to return. But if he stays in Yemen, the brothers will keep trying to draw him back into the struggle.
These days, when they come over to his house and try to rally him for a mission to Iraq or Sudan, Khalid looks bored and says that he can't go anywhere now, that it would put his family in Yemen at risk. Even his fiancée's younger brother tried to enlist his aid to join the insurgency in Iraq. Khalid told him he couldn't help. He doesn't want any part of the fighting, but uncertainty might be seen as betrayal. So he keeps silent, and waits, and imagines the day when the war, and all that comes with it, will finally end.
The Riddle of Jimmy Carter
He seemed like the most open and honest man ever elected president. So why does his true nature remain so elusive, even to those who know him best?
On a cloudy morning at the airport in Juba, the capital of Southern Sudan, a long motorcade of white Land Cruisers is lined up on a battered runway, motors idling. Secret Service agents listening stoically to their earpieces, clusters of soldiers in camo fatigues, tall Sudanese dignitaries in dusty suits — we've all been waiting out on the tarmac since well before nine, checking the sky. Jimmy Carter likes to say, "I have a fetish about being late," and even here, halfway across the world, everyone knows that showing up early to see him arrive precisely on schedule is part of the experience, like watching Clinton eat a cheeseburger or Bush clear some brush.
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There is also something distinctly Carter about the choice of destination. Southern Sudan is seeking independence from the North, but after five decades of on-again, off-again civil war, the country has been so traumatized by killing, famine, slavery and disease that it can seem like a feral place — a failed state even before it has become a state. Though it is early in the morning and still cool, this is late winter, the dry season in northeast Africa, when temperatures rise through the day past 110 degrees. A faint scent of burning fills the air, and the distant echo of things either being constructed or torn apart; in Juba, a war-smashed city with gutted armored personnel carriers strewn along the White Nile, it's often difficult to tell what is a building site and what is rubble.
This article appeared in the February 3, 2011 issue of Rolling Stone. The issue is available in the online archive.
A white plane banks out of the clouds, and everyone on the runway immediately stops speaking and watches while it lands and taxis to a halt. The cabin door is flung open and there they are, those iconic images from a thousand newscasts: First the smile, then the wave and the climb down to the tarmac, the dignitaries striding forward for formal greetings — the familiar ritual executed with such precision that it is easy to forget for a moment that Jimmy Carter is not still the American president.
I have come to Sudan to begin a period of months of thinking about Carter. The midterm elections are still nearly a year away, but there is already a public perception in the United States, faint but growing, that the Obama presidency is not going well. As observers assail the president for his scattered ambitions, his lack of a grand vision, his outsider's discomfort with the ways of Washington, his fumbling economic policies, how aloof and detached he seems, his undervaluing politics because substance is more important, his having written too many memoirs, and above all for his supposed lack of toughness, the man he is increasingly compared with is Carter. In Foreign Policy, the writer Walter Russell Mead has published an article called "The Carter Syndrome," in which he warns "the conflicting impulses influencing how this young leader thinks about the world threaten to tear his presidency apart — and, in the worst scenario, turn him into a new Jimmy Carter." Peter Baker, White House correspondent forThe New York Times, comes to a similar conclusion. Obama, he observes, seems to be looking more and more to Clinton's presidency as a model, "because, in the end, it's better than being Jimmy Carter."
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Carter is the great national sinking feeling. Carter is where you end up when you lose your way. These days, the kindest thing most people have to say about Carter's presidency is that he is the best formerpresident, a compliment that Carter tells me doesn't trouble him — "it does annoy my wife" — but which others in a position to know claim "galls him." What does it say about Carter that Obama kept clear of him during the midterm elections, even as he sent Bill Clinton out to stump for Democrats? Clinton! — who had said all those nasty things about Obama back when Hillary was running against him. Carter is where the danger lurks for Obama. Democrats who voted for change in 2008 thought they were getting FDR for the global age, or JFK with better morals. Now they are more like Democrats in 1978, discovering just how uninspiring an inspired man can be.
As for Republicans, Carter has the same effect on them that George W. Bush has on Democrats: He brings out a kind of sputtering, incoherent rage, infused with a deep tincture of fear. A recent poll of prominent conservative bloggers, who were asked to rank the 25 "worst" figures in American history, placed Carter first on the list, just ahead of Obama. How has it come to this? How has Obama's fragile moment become a reminder of the extent to which Jimmy Carter lost control of his legacy? And who really is Carter anyway?
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That has always been the rub, the core elusiveness of the man. It would be hard to find a person of comparable fame and ongoing public presence who has remained more personally remote. In 1976, candidate Carter created the impression of an honest, God-fearing peanut farmer with a loving heart who would be a purgative to American integrity in the troubled aftermath of Watergate and Vietnam. Much of what drew people to him was his smile, the most seductive American politics has ever known. It switched on like a floodlight, an intense glow that lingered, warming people long after he was gone. But four decades later, even those close to Carter are still struggling to understand what's behind that luminous grin. There are people like that, about whom we know many things and yet who seem forever unknowable. For a man who has lived his entire life in politics, this opaqueness can serve a useful purpose. It draws us closer to him, encourages us to fill in the blanks, to see our best selves in him. But if that proves impossible, the ensuing disappointment and frustration can also produce a ferocious backlash, an untethered need to lash out at what we have been denied.
"Carter's always been an enigma," says Jerry Rafshoon, who served as Carter's White House communications director. "The problem is that people can't categorize him, pigeonhole him. Is he liberal? Moderate? Conservative? Tell me the issue! Even then it's complicated. You can't put labels on him. Never could. When he got into office, the liberals were unhappy with him. Conservatives, especially in the South, were unhappy with him: 'He's one of ours and he disappoints us!' I used to hear complaining from all sides. I'm seeing that with Obama now."
The rituals of arriving in a foreign country still give Carter obvious satisfaction. Although he and Rosalynn, his wife of 64 years, are usually inseparable — during his presidency she sat in on his Cabinet meetings — he has come to Juba without her. She had taken ill in Khartoum, their previous stop, and stayed behind to rest up and visit the Nubian pyramids. Carter has been under the weather himself; on the flight to Juba, he later confesses, "I threw up two or three times." But for the most part, long-distance travel affects him as little today as it did when his conveyance was Air Force One, and he traversed the world, impervious to jet lag.
This morning, he's wearing khakis, casual black shoes, a blue shirt and a red tie. In other words, he still dresses like a high school guidance counselor. He shops like one, too. Carter flew to Africa on a supporter's private jet, but he buys his clothes at the Dollar General store back in Plains, Georgia. "Tight as bark on a tree" is Carter's old friend Dot Padgett's cheerful assessment of his Depression-era frugality.
Carter's days rarely involve spontaneity. Through the agency of the Carter Center, the flourishing, action-oriented organization he founded in 1982 to resolve international conflicts, promote democracy and fight disease, he keeps so busy that his calendar is a legendary document covered with transverse lines, abstract art made out of advance planning. Rita Thompson, a volunteer on his 1976 campaign who now serves as a family assistant, says, "He relaxes once a year. The week after Christmas." That's when Carter takes a family trip with his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren that he organizes right down to the minutes set aside for "free time." To be late for anything on the itinerary is to be left behind, with an exception granted for Rosalynn, whose 57th-birthday present from Carter was a promise to never again nag her about "tardiness." The other 51 weeks, Carter's preferred pace is constant motion, flurrying from briefing to meeting to press conference, maintaining a slam-the-door-and-go tempo that keeps everyone who works for him aware at all times of where the exit signs are.
Although Carter insists that he travels as a private citizen, the truth is that he operates as a foreign service of one, going where he pleases, making his own assessments, issuing statements that can alter the course of world events. The ambiguity of this official-yet-unofficial status has irritated every American president from Reagan on. ("I didn't like it when a certain former president — and it wasn't 41 or 42 — made my life miserable," George W. Bush has complained.) But it's not hard to see why foreign leaders find the time to talk with Carter; a former American president, even one often at odds with his own government, possesses an inevitable patina of power. Up in Khartoum, Carter had met with Omar Al-Bashir, the Northern dictator whose militias have slaughtered millions, to remind him that the Carter Center was organizing impartial observers to monitor this month's highly charged referendum on independent Southern statehood. Now, after meeting with the Southern president, Salva Kiir, Carter climbs into a Land Cruiser and heads off to pursue his other major project in Sudan: curing the great plague caused by a waterborne parasite called the Guinea worm.
Guinea worm has been an excruciating human scourge dating back to biblical times, when it was known as the Fiery Serpent, and is thought to have tormented the followers of Moses. Once someone becomes infected from drinking stagnant water, a white worm as long as three feet forms in the abdomen before slowly emerging through a burning lesion. Although rarely fatal, Guinea worm cripples those infected, leaving them temporarily unable to participate in life and exacerbating their poverty. When Carter left the White House, an estimated 3.5 million people in 20 countries suffered from the disease.
One of the great tensions in Carter is the relationship in him between virtue and ambition; it's often hard to square his public image of piety and good works with his relentless competitive streak. This is a man who, while out turkey hunting, once claimed he could make a better turkey call than a turkey could. Carter's protégé and campaign director, Hamilton Jordan, called his boss "the world's worst loser." Jordan may have had Carter's tennis playing in mind. At the Georgia governor's mansion, there were thorny rose bushes growing alongside the tennis court, and Carter liked working the angles to place shots that produced scarred as well as defeated opponents. In 1986, still smarting from as conspicuous a defeat as this country can provide, Carter was looking to win at something big when he was approached by an old health policy adviser, Dr. Peter Bourne.
Bourne knew he didn't have to convince Carter of the virtues of curing disease. The former president had grown up in rural South Georgia, one of the most backward regions of the United States, where it was routine to see sores on the skin of pellagra-stricken sharecroppers; Carter understood the relationship between stigma and sickness, the circular way one keeps leading to the other. But there are a lot of illnesses in the world that bedevil poor people, and unlike Guinea worm, some of them afflict Americans. So Bourne sold Carter on fighting the Guinea worm by pointing out that only one disease in history has ever been completely eradicated: smallpox. That coup had been less a matter of science than a massive engineering enterprise, a medical Manhattan Project. Guinea worm, Bourne said, could be the world's second eradicated disease. All that would be required for Carter to achieve such a rare and glorious victory was a sustained organizational effort — the kind of undertaking certain to appeal to an engineering graduate, U.S. Naval Academy, Class of '47. With that, Bourne had his man.
The first personal trait most people would think to describe in Carter is motivation, how much stamina he can summon of himself to defeat a problem over a sustained period. His college sport at the Naval Academy was cross-country, and until his knees failed him in his seventies, he continued to run long distances. "I was a fanatic runner," he tells me. "Forty miles a week for a long time." What made Carter well suited to the sport also explains his aptitude for long-term projects, the way patience and impatience play at useful tension in him. He is always thinking about the distant finish. As a politician, Carter seemed to thrive on being underestimated. He was inevitably the long-shot candidate who campaigned so tenaciously that he simply wore down his better-known opponents. (In his 1970 run for Georgia governor, he shook 600,000 hands and visited, he claimed, every factory gate in Georgia.) During his presidency, his greatest achievement was the Camp David Accords, the historic framework for peaceful relations between Israel and Egypt that was negotiated over 12 days in September 1978, and which succeeded only because Carter shuttled back and forth between the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and the Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, staying up deep into the night, refusing to allow them to quit, singing Israeli folk songs with Begin's delegation, refereeing moments of stalemate and outrage, inexorably coaxing them toward an agreement. In the end, when Sadat and Begin raised their arms in joint accomplishment, it was Carter's unexpected victory.
It has been the same way with Guinea worm. Today, a quarter-century after Carter took up the cause and began deploying platoons of volunteers across the world, only 1,700 cases of Guinea worm are thought to still exist, most of them somewhere out in the vast Southern Sudan bush. "Village by village, like chewing on a rock, we make progress," is how Carter describes the process. Once I hear him use this phrase, it seems so perfectly to express Carter himself that for a long time afterward, whenever I think of him, I imagine a man with a chunk of shale in his mouth, biting down hard.
Before heading out into the bush to visit a remote village, Carter meets with a group of health officials and volunteers at the U.S. consulate in Juba. Nothing energizes Carter more than a good Guinea-worm meeting, and this one is full of PowerPoint presentations and meticulous reports from in-country. Carter sits at the head of the table, listening to health workers who have emerged from the field, taken long showers and put on their best clothes to meet the former president and describe what they need from him to finish the job. They look like campaign volunteers, and they have the same all-in passion for the cause — they are sure that Guinea worm will be totally eradicated by 2012, if there is no more war in the region. "We will get there!" one of them declares.
The torrent of infrastructure data and case-reduction figures Carter is absorbing brings to mind the president whose appetite for briefing-book minutiae was such that his CIA director Stansfield Turner says he once approached Carter to bring him up to speed on world food supplies, only to discover that his boss had already memorized the figures for wheat production per hectare in places like Afghanistan and India. Donald Hopkins, a leading epidemiologist who helped eliminate smallpox and now directs health programs at the Carter Center, compares the former president to Jack Webb, the relentless detective from the old TV show Dragnet. "Just the facts," Hopkins says. "He wants the bottom line, and you can't bluff him."
Listening to the health workers in Juba, Carter offers praise and encouragement, although in limited doses. He has never been much for approbation. "Every sort of compliment you get from him is hard not to take," is the delicate way that Bert Lance, his closest White House adviser, puts it. Carter's two great mentors in life were his father, a businessman and land owner, and the Navy admiral Hyman Rickover, who created the country's nuclear submarine program and chose Carter to take part in it. Their mutual way of nurturing Carter was not to say anything about his performance unless they found it lacking. Carter's response, according to Rafshoon, was to become a person who is "always wanting to prove it to somebody."
The conference room at the consulate has cold soft drinks and dishes full of fresh macadamia nuts, and the surrounding compound includes a swimming pool where Carter can complete his daily regimen of at least 40 lengths. But atop the exterior walls are spikes of barbed wire, and a sign on the exit gate warns those heading out to vary their transit routes and never to travel without a cellphone. Encountering Carter in such a setting, it is difficult not to think of the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979, the event that abruptly alerted Americans that they were now as vulnerable as everyone else. That November, Islamic students stormed the U.S. Embassy compound in Tehran, holding 52 hostages captive for the final 444 days of Carter's presidency. Carter himself became a prisoner of the predicament, growing so obsessed with the hostages that for months on end he remained in the Oval Office, refusing to light the national Christmas tree or campaign for re-election. His inability to make a band of flag-burning militants in a small nation bend to our will enraged an electorate whose desire to see America as an indefatigable force in the world prevented them from finding virtue in a dogged president whose determination to wait the situation out, in the end, brought every hostage back alive.
At home, Americans were also becoming increasingly familiar with an economic indicator known as the Misery Index. Oil shortages led to an "energy crisis," double-digit inflation and high unemployment. Carter responded by appointing Paul Volcker to lead the Federal Reserve. Volcker, he knew, would raise interest rates, creating a counterbalancing recession. There would be many months of economic pain, and then, well after the presidential election in November 1980, there would be relief. Stuart Eizenstat, who served as Carter's chief domestic policy adviser, remembers him making the Volcker decision. "He said, 'Inflation can't be my legacy. We must choke inflation out. I've tried everything else.' If that's weak and ineffectual, I don't understand the definition. He took the worst medicine. It was like chemotherapy. He hoped it would work. Otherwise comes death. It worked. Volcker rightly gets the economic credit. But Carter should get the political credit."
At the time, many Americans thought the energy crisis was flimflam. With his concerns about excessive consumption, and the perils of relying so heavily on imported oil, Carter was way ahead of his time — talking hybrids to a country not yet sold on seat belts. Carter says he spent more time thinking about energy policy than anything else, investigating alternatives like synthetic fuels, geothermal energy, wind and solar power, tax credits for energy efficiency. His initiatives cut oil imports in half, a trend that was quickly reversed by Reagan. Reducing foreign oil seemed especially crucial to Carter, he says, because scientists had already noticed "the first glimmer of global warming." There is little doubt that the world would be a far better place today if Jimmy Carter's energy programs had lasted.
In July 1979, Carter searched for a way to explain to an Eisenhower generation used to believing they could have it all, that there were limits in life. He scheduled an energy speech. Then, instead of delivering it, he disappeared. "The whole country did a double take," says the Princeton historian Sean Wilentz. "Nobody knew where he was. He canceled the speech. Where'd he go? Nobody knows what's going on. All was quiet. People thought he'd gone crazy."
Carter was at the presidential retreat in Camp David, where he spent days in reflection, weighing what to say to the nation. Then he came down from the Maryland mountaintop, looked into the camera and announced that the country was suffering from a "crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will." But America could revive, if it would roll up its sleeves and sacrifice. "I do not promise you that this struggle for freedom will be easy," he said. "What I do promise you is that I will lead our fight."
The speech was a presidential classic because Carter had done that rare thing: He had spoken to Americans like adults, appealing to that cherished Emersonian myth of self-reliance, offering a progressive way to be patriotic. And the country responded. For a moment, Carter's polling soared — until he followed up the speech a few days later by abruptly asking for the resignations of his entire Cabinet.
Looking on at the time, Eizenstat witnessed a display of political ineptitude that seemed "hard to fathom," almost willful, as though Carter was a man determined to emphasize the difficulty of the times at a moment when what people wanted most from him was a diversion from all the hardship — a worthy cause, an uplifting of the heart, maybe even a laugh or two. In storage, Carter located the old "The buck stops here" sign of his favorite president, Harry Truman, and placed it on his own desk in the Oval Office. But Truman played poker and piano, liked sharp haberdashery, and sent off hasty letters defending his daughter's terrible singing. Truman was fun. Carter, like Obama, had campaigned largely on his own personality; he had charm, but he didn't value it. People close to him were always trying to convince you how funny he was, a sure sign that he wasn't really very funny. Carter was the national drudge. "
After three years in office, there was no buoyancy, no optimism," says Eizenstat. "Optimism — the great presidents have it. Clinton had it. Roosevelt and Reagan had it. President Carter, for all his skills, did not. Maybe because he is a realist."
Carter had campaigned as a leader whom Americans could rely on because he was one of them, just folks, a humble, trustworthy and plainspoken man of faith and of the land. But once in the White House, he seemed different, less down home than a little out there. Part of it was his eccentric family. There was his God-loving evangelist sister Ruth, his Hells Angels-loving sister Gloria, his beery brother Billy and his mother, Miss Lillian, "a sight in this world," as they say in Plains, who once reflected on her own four children: "Lillian, you should have stayed a virgin." At the White House, Carter's divorced son Chip could be found up on the roof getting stoned with Willie Nelson, while downstairs daughter Amy read books at the table during state dinners and roller-skated through the White House halls. When family friends Gregg Allman and Cher came to supper, the Carters watched as their guests mistook the contents of the finger bowls for clear soup, eating even the scented geranium leaves floating on the surface. Amid the chaos, Carter himself seemed an alternately stern and bemused figure, busying himself with briefing books while everyone ran wild around him. His coolness to the national press, coupled with media prejudice against Southerners, had primed many journalists to describe him as "un-presidential," and the widely mocked report in 1979 that his fishing boat had been attacked by a fast-swimming "killer" Georgia swamp rabbit only increased public concern that Carter was too weak and too odd for the job.
The following year, voters sent him back to Georgia. "I can't stand here tonight and say it doesn't hurt," he said in his concession speech, with the tinge of embittered vengeance that still resonates to this day. What tends to define that 1980 presidential election now is the landslide margin that ushered in the Reagan Revolution. Yet in the final few days of the campaign, polls projected a vote too close to call. Hendrik Hertzberg, who served as Carter's speechwriter, recalls being on Air Force One the night before the election, when Carter learned from his press secretary Jody Powell and his pollster Pat Caddell that Reagan was going to beat him. "Jody was in Carter's suite, talking to Caddell on the phone. Carter came in and said, 'Who are you talking to?' Jody said, 'Caddell.' He said, 'Oh, let me talk to him.' I saw him crumple, go pale, kind of go sit down on the bed. We all knew to leave. That's when Caddell told him, 'It's gone.'"
Carter hadn't expected to lose, and once he did, he couldn't get used to it, didn't want to get used to it. When I talk with him about the 1980 campaign, he complains that as it approached, "every headline was dealing with the hostage anniversary, not with the election." He also blames the defection of many of his supporters on Ted Kennedy, whom Carter eventually defeated in the primaries. Kennedy, Carter notes, "refused to shake my hand on the convention platform." Then, in a sudden shift, he acknowledges that the divided Democratic Party was "to a major degree my fault. In the 1976 campaign, I'd done much better as an independent, lonely peanut-farmer candidate who'd never been to Washington. Then when I came to Washington as titular head of the Democratic Party, I never acted as titular caretaker or loving proprietor of the Democratic Party." Say what you will about Carter, more than most politicians, he owns his errors.
Still, Carter believes that had the hostages been released before Election Day, he would have won a second term. Nobody then doubted that Carter was a good man. The country could see how he suffered; they had voted for him and, as is the American way with incumbents, they wanted him to succeed. Instead, the hostages remained captive until minutes after Reagan had been sworn into office. In a conversation at the Juba consulate after the Guinea-worm meeting ends, Carter tells me that when he learned the hostages would be released that morning, he telephoned Reagan with the news, but was informed the president-elect was still asleep and could not be disturbed.
"In the last weeks of my administration, the Reagan administration made it clear they didn't want to be involved in the hostage situation," Carter says. "They said I should handle it 100 percent until I left. I wasn't surprised. I wasn't sure we'd have the hostages released during my term. They were in an airplane on a runway waiting to take off. The Iranians decided not to let the plane take off until I was out of office. I know they were waiting two hours until there was a new administration. I hadn't slept in two and a half days. I didn't have any criticism of Reagan. I didn't need his help or his staff's help."
To those who ask Carter what, in retrospect, he would have done differently as president, he always says what he eventually tells me twice: "I'd have sent one more helicopter." He is referring to Operation Eagle Claw, the secret hostage-rescue attempt that was aborted in the Iranian desert amid swirling sandstorms and wrecked Sikorskys. The mission was widely dismissed as a debacle, but Carter still believes it could have succeeded. "It was tangible," he insists. "We had a plan that would have worked." While he admits that the rise of what is now known as Islamic fundamentalism caught him off-guard — "I didn't ascertain the radical nature of the leadership or the people until after the hostages were taken" — he dismisses complaints that he "humiliated America" by refusing to invade Iran. He knew how popular he would have been at home if he flattened Tehran into a Persian carpet. But unwilling to sacrifice so many lives to the nation's wounded pride, he finished out his term as the last American president to keep the country out of war, then returned home to Plains. He says there were no second thoughts: "I've always felt complete equanimity about what we did as president," he tells me. Yet his defeat prompted feelings of "despair and embarrassment and frustration." He also felt uncertain about what he would do with his remaining allotment of years. He was only 56.
Some people who have worked closely with Carter over the years like to play a parlor game in which the object is to think up the ideal job for Jimmy Carter. Popular entries — Supreme Court justice, pope, benevolent Latin American dictator, Saint Peter at the gates — all stress authority and acumen, without much call for compromise or collaboration. If Carter were to play the game, he would say president. For him, what was worse than losing an election was losing a job he loved. So in Georgia, on his mind was finding a way to replicate the armature of the presidency without actually holding it. One asset he had in this pursuit is that a former president possesses tremendous international prestige. Virtually all former presidents had resisted taking advantage. They had made way for the next man, gone off quietly into the back nine, held off from criticizing policies of their successors that differed from their own. Carter decided he would take advantage, he would criticize, he would not make way.
In 1982, the normally sound sleeper woke in the middle of the night and told his wife, in her recounting, "I know what we can do. We can have a place like Camp David." Immediately, they were planning the Carter Center. Describing those rejuvenating days, he says, "What Rosalynn and I wanted to do was fill vacuums, resolve problems others weren't able or willing to do." From the rustic office he converted out of the garage at his house in Plains, he has spent his post-presidency scanning the world for big, unresolved public dilemmas. Once he locates something that intrigues him, he swoops in. By 2002, he had helped to soothe so many political crises — in Korea, Nicaragua, Haiti, Bosnia and the horn of Africa — that he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Accepting the prize in the Oslo city hall, Carter thanked his fellow Georgian Martin Luther King Jr. for making a national political life possible for a white Southerner of his generation. He also described an increasingly dangerous world in which the most serious threat to peace is "the growing chasm between the richest and poorest people on earth." Then he returned home from Norway and got back to the business of killing Guinea worms.
The day after the Guinea-worm meeting in Juba, Carter heads to a remote village in Terekeka County to call attention to the plight of local sufferers. Eradicating the disease, he tells me, is "one of the most gratifying experiences of my life. Some people who've had Guinea worm have never known success." To be cured of such a conspicuous physical humiliation, he adds, is a way to overcome more general feelings of diminishment: "It gives you a new sense of life and personal integrity." It seems significant that Carter now thinks of the humiliated and the diminished as his primary constituents.
The road to Terekeka County is a rutted, two-lane, red-dirt highway back into the Bronze Age. Carter's destination, the village of Molujore, is a scatter of mud huts where the locals herd cattle, drink water from roadside gullies and livestock lagoons, carve tribal hash marks into their faces with knives, and sometimes subsist on edible leaves and the bush rats naked little boys kill with bows and arrows. It's a strenuous place to travel to for a young man, let alone someone who is 86, and for those who live here, life's rigors are many. During the rainy season, there used to be a case of Guinea worm in almost every hut. It was believed by some that you got sick because an ancestor was angry with you. In a nearby village, the headman became so ashamed of his inability to control the spread of the disease that he hung himself. Now, with cases so infrequent, there is concern in Molujore that there will be no sufferers to display to "the president of all white men," whom everyone has heard is coming to see them.
The large crowd that has gathered in a dusty open area long before Carter's scheduled arrival includes people who have walked for many hours. Under a tent, a bishop wearing magenta robes sits near the governor and the village chief in a Panama hat. At the stroke of 9:30, Carter arrives, sporting a big "J.C." belt buckle. Someone has carted in a podium, and Carter steps up to it. He has no planned remarks for an audience whose language he doesn't speak — but, being Carter, he can't resist offering up a few relevant statistics on declining disease incidence. Someone presents him with a bow and quiver, and another man offers him land so he can return and farm ground nuts. This pleases Carter, once he learns that a ground nut is the local term for peanut. "I'm a farmer!" he tells the man. "I still grow ground nuts on my place."
Carter says that he came to Molujore because of God, and that his presence shows God cares about dispossessed people. "Christianity, 'What would Jesus do?' is very motivating for him," says Carter's son, Jack. "What he thinks God wants him to do with his life is a very significant driver in his life. We used to get in lots of arguments over religion. Mom tells me he had a sign over his bunk in the Navy that said "So What!" There was a cynical side to him at some point."
Health officials had been trying hard to find a Guinea-worm sufferer in Molujore for Carter to meet. Their difficulty leads him to exult, "This could very well be the last village!" Finally, he is led down a trail to a man seated in a plastic chair with a vivid red blister on his foot. Efforts are being made to cajole the worm to come out. It turns out a Guinea worm can be as stubborn as a South Georgia turtle. While he waits, Carter asks the man if this is his first worm. "Yes," the man says.
"And the last," Carter tells him. Carter wants to know if the man is a farmer.
"That's the only thing we do here."
"Me too!" says Carter, delighted. Does the man grow sorghum and millet?
"Ground nuts!"
"Me too!"
After only 90 minutes in Molujore, Carter is on his way back to Juba. None of the villagers have understood anything he said to them, but because of Carter, they saw their governor, the local commissioner and the bishop all for the first time.
Back in Juba, Carter gives a press conference that begins with what amounts to a Guinea-worm stump speech. With the great retail politician's practiced skill for manipulating the vast amounts of empty matter that fill his days, he manages to sound enthusiastic as he brandishes figures and facts he has recited thousands of times before. Every story Carter ever tells me about himself, I have already read elsewhere, but he tells them all with enthusiasm. This leaves me thinking about what it took to be able to shake 600,000 strangers' hands while trying to get elected governor of Georgia, and what it took to keep count. Carter has a similar approach to inscribing the many books he writes, wherein, incidentally, the same personal stories are often recycled. "When the books come out, he loves setting records," says Rafshoon. "He'll say to me, 'You know Borders bookstore in L.A.? I signed 1,500 in two hours!' " Achsah Nesmith, who was the president's favorite speechwriter, recalls Carter describing "the satisfaction you'd get as a boy at the end of the day when you could look back and see what you'd accomplished, how much of a row got plowed, how many bales got picked. In farming, there's a lot of satisfaction; he could see what got done. You could see what didn't get done, too. In the White House, it's very hard to see what got done. It's much more of a process."
Now, at the press conference, Carter is suddenly saying something that I find surprising: "One of the best friends I ever had was John Garang." Then he adds, "He and I were like brothers." Garang was the president of Southern Sudan and the leader of its rebel movement until he died in a helicopter accident in 2005. The only foreign leader I'd heard described as Carter's true friend was Sadat. It seems hard to envision Carter actually making time for real friendships, let alone a boon one with a martyred Sudanese militant. But Carter is much given to hyperbole, especially in regard to his personal relationships. "There is hardly a foreign leader or a Democratic politician who is not his 'close friend,' " Elizabeth Drew wrote in The New Yorker in 1980. Hertzberg marvels at the "coolness of Carter's relationships in general and the warmth of his interactions, often with ordinary people, powerless people or powerful people whose power doesn't threaten his power."
When Carter came to Washington, he brought with him a small, intensely loyal coterie of advisers who became known as the Georgians. The closest of them — Jordan, Rafshoon, Eizenstat, Powell, Bert Lance and Frank Moore — were all younger than Carter, and had all helped him gain office by campaigning against so-called Washington-establishment politics. Perhaps he had such faith in his own intelligence that he prized youthful initiative over seasoned dissent. But surrounding himself with younger men from his home state led to a widespread impression that Carter valued personal fealty above experience — the mark of an insecure leader. "It was so ill-advised to staff the White House with friends from Georgia," says Hertzberg. "I fear he was threatened by people too big or smart around him."
Many who come into contact with Carter find him a little cold at the center. Yet the Georgians, like those who work most closely with him at the Carter Center, have remained devoted to him over the years, though always from a distance. "Friends aren't necessary to him," says Moore, who ran 17 states for Carter during the 1976 campaign. "He's content to sit and read with Rosalynn beside him. They're not out of sight of each other much. If they are, he's miserable. I don't mean miserable." He points at my wristwatch, an old one that had belonged to my grandfather. "That watch," he says. "If it's not on your wrist, you know it's missing, right?"
It's difficult for someone as powerful as a president to make friends, but Carter's uniquely insulated nature was with him long before Washington. It cost him in the White House, and it still does. His independence — intellectually and financially — has always been one of his most appealing qualities. The post-political life that Carter has created for himself as a relentless, motivated outsider tackling enormous world problems has provided a template for other eminent men like Bill Clinton and Bill Gates, who also found themselves in need of second acts that could live up to the power and the glory they had known before. But where Clinton and Gates seem restlessly searching for something satisfying to do, Carter gives the impression of being unable to relinquish a position he believes was wrongfully taken from him. This image may be untrue, but the Democratic Party has perpetuated it over the years by refusing to have anything to do with Carter. By treating him like North Korea, the party only hardens his lifelong impulse to go his own way.
Not long after the trip to Sudan, a senior Obama administration official tells me that Carter had recently called the White House to complain that the president and his advisers were not asking for his advice. So far as I can tell, Carter has felt unappreciated by every administration since the Carter administration, leading him to lash out, in turn, at each of them. The Obama official explains that as much as Carter wants to be helpful, people in government are resistant to giving him assignments because he cannot be trusted to follow instructions. "Jimmy Carter doesn't mix well with Washingtonians," the official explains. "Jimmy Carter feels dissed by Washington, and Washington feels that he never accepts guidance."
It seems inevitable that someone who has been the most powerful man in the world isn't likely to take orders well. But the official says it goes beyond that — it cuts to the nature of who Carter is. The former president, he says, doesn't seem to value others in any deep way, except in terms of what they can do for him. "Jimmy Carter is like the man of whom Goethe said, 'He loved humanity but hated people.' Such a strange, driven man. Almost possessed as he plods forward to spread good to the world in accordance with his — or His — plan."
On another evening, at a quiet Washington restaurant, a different senior official in a dark-blue sweater sits across a table from me, reciting some of Carter's most memorable public remarks. "'I've committed adultery in my heart!'" the man says. "'There's a crisis of spirit in our country!' 'I'll never lie to you!' — they're all so admirable!" The man praises Carter's attempts to eliminate Guinea-worm disease, and his work monitoring international elections. "I love the election monitoring!" the man says. He is getting worked up. "When did it become OK to diss Jimmy Carter?" Then he answers his own question: It all comes down to personality. "When someone totally lacks the ability to schmooze, the only way they can motivate collective action is through deals," he says. "Charm, and the willingness to use it, is essential. But his forward motion is such that it seems impossible for him not to see life as a list of to-dos."
Then the man's take on Carter shifts. "The Teddy Kennedy thing!" he exclaims. "If you're Carter, you're thinking, here's this guy, multiple adulterer, drunkard, and he's the keeper of the liberal flame. There's Jimmy Carter, every day he goes and works against the Guinea worm, and nobody in this town wants anything to do with him. People roll their eyes when his name comes up. I'm blown away by his intellectual command and his bluntness and his total lack of schmooze. Some guys are all form, no substance. He's all substance, no form. Turns out each is bad."
Carter is often criticized for his willingness to visit with dictators, thereby, say his critics, legitimizing them. "I meet with who I choose," he says, "and I always give a full report to the U.S. government." Over the years, he has maintained relations with a gallery of tyrants, including the mysterious leaders of North Korea. In 1994, despite concerns from the Clinton administration, Carter accepted an invitation from Kim Il Sung to visit the Great Leader and his ostracized country. That was during a time of heightened international tension over North Korea's incipient nuclear-weapons program. A CNN crew accompanied Carter on the trip, and the images broadcast back to the United States remain stark in the minds of past and present State Department officials. Carter averted a possible war by spontaneously negotiating both a nuclear freeze and a North Korean summit with South Korea — a spectacular piece of diplomatic legerdemain that might have brought Carter acclaim at home, had he not immediately followed it up with live televised statements undermining his own government and contradicting Clinton administration policies. It was an occasion where the craving for credit, an apparent need for validation, tripped up Carter's better judgment. After Carter and Kim's formal work was done, they cruised the Taedong River together on the dictator's yacht, exchanging compliments and hunting stories, toasting one another with costly wines. Most striking was the obvious mutual attraction between Carter and a pariah who killed his own people in forced labor camps — and warmly talked of God and peace to a visiting American.
The North Koreans still like Carter because they feel respected by him. If he criticizes them, he does so in private and is always careful to let them know he chides his own government as well. That's why, last summer, when North Korea agreed to free Aijalon Gomes, an American who had been imprisoned for illegally crossing the border from China, they announced they would hand Gomes over only to Carter. Returning home from Pyongyang, Carter insisted that the North Koreans "really revere me for being the last person who met Kim Il Sung before he passed away." Then he extended his argument, saying, "We meet with some unsavory people, some outcasts . . . but they're the ones who can solve problems." That unsavory people tend first to cause the problems they are then in a position to solve, is a syllogism Carter did not address.
To improve the world, Carter counsels his staff, sometimes you have to hold your nose and tell the Haitian strongman Raoul Cédras how beautiful his wife is, pose for a photograph with genocidal Serbian generals or raise a glass with Kim Il Sung. It's a theory of international relations that reasonable minds can debate. Those who admire Carter's improvised style of post-presidential international relations include Republicans like Colin Powell and Robert Gates. "He gets slammed for chumming around with dictators, trying to win them over," says Hertzberg. "I don't hold that against him at all. He'll do what it takes. He has devoted himself to foreign policy, where you can function as a dictator among other dictators."
Among some foreign-policy people in Washington, the feeling is that Carter spends so much time with dictators because they, in turn, legitimize him — providing a conduit that enables him to remain involved at the highest levels of power. Aside from his entourage of Secret Service agents, Carter displays few other obvious signs of presidential pedigree — but then, he never favored them as president either. In the White House, Carter was famous for eliminating any trappings of the office he considered "ostentatious," a favorite Carter word. "Hail to the Chief" was no longer played; the presidential yacht Sequoia was sold. He preferred to walk softly and carry his own bag, and he still does. Actual power, however, is another matter. By using his ex-presidential cachet to stay in the thick of world events and yet remain accountable to no one, Carter has achieved a post-modern work of self-fashioning: He's still very much in the game, in a way that is unique in American politics.
In Juba, Carter tells me that he first set eyes on John Garang when the Sudanese revolutionary walked into his Bible study class in Plains. "He'd been visiting Fort Benning," Carter recalls. "He had four of his top people with him. We had a long talk. He described the problems of Sudan. That's when I decided to help the South Sudanese. They'd been through a horrendous war — more than 2 million people were killed. He asked me to help negotiate a peace agreement." The president of Kenya set Carter up with a villa in Nairobi, and "we made a lot of progress." But this "wonderful opportunity for success," Carter goes on, was ruined when "unfortunately, President Clinton came into office. He had a very attractive former Rhodes scholar working for him named Susan Rice. She had a fetish against North Sudan. She wanted to destroy North Sudan. This was very frustrating to me."
Carter makes it clear that he thought more highly of the Sudanese rebel than he did of Clinton's emissary. "Garang, I trusted him and he trusted me. There were things he did I didn't like. He was running a revolutionary army. There were uprisings against him. He'd meet me at airports in Entebbe or Khartoum when I couldn't go to the South. We were kind of like political brothers at a distance. When he had a need or I did, it was a matter of mutual trust and dependence. All I wanted was peace."
The next day, I see Carter in action when he meets with the vice president of Southern Sudan, Riek Machar. Carter, who is quietly laying the groundwork for the Carter Center's role as a watchdog in this month's independence vote, jokes and spars with Machar, a former warlord, in an amiable way. Then his tone suddenly hardens, and he confronts the vice president, demanding to know if he is secretly assembling a new private militia.
"No," Machar insists.
"You don't have a militia?" Carter presses.
"No," Machar repeats.
Carter's powerful intelligence is especially well-suited to negotiation. He is skilled at absorbing facts and points of view, organizing the new information on the fly, retrieving what he needs, building it all into neat summaries that advance the dialogue. As the two men speak, with Carter boring in and Machar earnestly responding, it is easy to forget that there are a dozen other people in the room. A kind of political intimacy exists; Carter is putting himself out there for Machar to feel and experience. There is something flattering in the former leader of the free world taking Machar's circumstances so seriously, even though Machar is also simultaneously on the griddle. I'm reminded of something Hertzberg told me about the necessity of dealing with dictators. "When Carter makes nice to a dictator, people say, 'Isn't that awful!' But he was a lot more successful with Sadat than with Begin, because once Sadat decided it was OK, it was OK. Begin was harder to work with because he was the leader of a rambunctious democracy who couldn't deliver the way that Sadat could." Since democracies cannot act with the decisiveness of dictators, the world sometimes needs a man like Jimmy Carter, a democrat with the will of a despot.
People have been critical of Jimmy Carter for many things, but none of the thousands of cuts he has absorbed across his long political life can compare in intensity with the fury that has followed him since the 2006 publication of his book Palestine Peace Not Apartheid. When Hamilton Jordan heard the title, he told friends it was "the worst mistake Carter has made since he left office."
Carter wrote the book because his frequent visits to Palestine convinced him that Gaza is a "tragic area of the world," and that Israel will be increasingly isolated and vulnerable unless it works to create a Palestinian state. Many people share Carter's general views on the conflict — but to those who don't, the use of the word "apartheid" was abhorrent. Because of it, they made him a "whipping boy," in the words of Carter's former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. In response to those he offended, Carter offered an Al Het, a plea of forgiveness, for allowing what were intended as constructive criticisms to give the appearance of stigmatizing Israel. His overall aim, he says, is to ensure Israel's welfare at a time when its actions are putting it in peril. Still, he tells me, "At this moment, I don't think I'd change the book's title."
What Carter doesn't engage with is how emotional the issue is for many Jews. Throughout his decades of thinking publicly about the subject, he has rarely expressed any sympathy for Israel's tenuous place in the world, and he rarely credits any Israeli motivations beyond aggressive ones. Nor does he talk much about the security risks of suicide bombers or rocket launchers. He believes that the primary reason Israel is able to treat Palestinians as inferior citizens undeserving of the same rights as Israelis is that they have powerful connections in Washington who let them get away with it. In a recent seminar at Emory University, a young man from Syria asked Carter why American presidents never criticize Israel. Carter compared Israel's influence on members of Congress to that of major pharmaceutical companies. "In the U.S. Congress," he said, "it's impossible to achieve balance on Israel."
Back when Carter was president, the issues at impasse in the Middle East — autonomy, land, settlements — were much the same as they are today. He wanted badly to solve the problem once and for all, and he seems to blame Israeli intransigence for still getting in his way. Carter's certainty that he could, if permitted, resolve such an intractable dilemma seems grounded in his growing awareness of his own mortality. The Middle East conflict, says his son Jack, "is the piece of unfinished business he still has hanging over him." When I take this up with Rosalynn, she insists that her husband's motivations on Israel stem from his deeper convictions. "He just doesn't like to see conflict and oppression of people," she says. "It's been with him a long time, not just something that happened. When he does things that make people think he's favoring Palestine over Israel, it's not anything in it except that he thinks all people are entitled to live in peace. He really believes in human rights for all people."
Carter, a man mindful of his reputation, is well aware of just how destructive the controversy has been for him. Sitting with Rosalynn in a Florida hotel room, he discusses the way it has affected his relationship with Obama. Carter considers Obama a fellow outsider and pragmatic centrist. "I feel a lot of compatibility with him," he says. Obama's grass-roots, youth-driven campaign "thrilled" Carter, and the president's speech on race in 2008 left him "overwhelmed with emotion. That was the best speech on the black and white situation I've ever heard." He praises the way Obama has "transformed the image of America around the world — elevated America's status in an almost miraculous way, compared with what he inherited."
Carter wishes the president would keep his enemies closer by reaching out to North Korea, Cuba, Syria and Iran, but he hastens to mute any criticism and strives to keep his distance in a way that I find poignant. "I don't want to stigmatize him," he says. "I never claim that publicly. We feel very close to Obama. I affected my relationship with the Obama campaign because of my Palestinian book. This was evident to me at the Democratic convention. I'm one of two surviving Democratic presidents. I'd been asked to all preceding conventions and made a speech. On this occasion, I was called by the Obama campaign leaders and told that Bill Clinton and I would be asked to make a documentary to be shown for 20 minutes instead of a speech. That suited me fine. Then Rosalynn and I went to the convention. They showed the film. It was four and a half minutes. We went onstage and waved."
At this point, we've been talking for over half an hour, and Rosalynn hasn't said a word. Now she speaks for the first time. "We understood it and anticipated it," she says curtly.
"I didn't," Carter says.
"I did," says his wife, even more curtly.
"I could tell my role was being minimized. I didn't object. I didn't want to hurt Obama. The American Jewish vote is crucial. But that kinda separated us." Since then, he says, "We do our own thing."
Not long after he returned from Sudan, Carter let it be known that he had been kicked around once too often. He sat down at his father's old desk in his office in Plains, where there is a large presidential seal on the wall near a photograph of Hyman Rickover, and wrote a long and forceful letter to Foreign Policy defending himself against Walter Russell Mead's article. As Rosalynn later explains, "If you're not re-elected, you didn't do anything good. And you get tired of listening to it."
In the letter, Carter condemns Mead's essay as "gratuitous and incorrect." He derides the writer's "cute and erroneous oversimplistic distortions." He admits, with typical candor, that the article made him both resentful and aggravated. Then follows a spirited defense of his record and accomplishments. Mead responded sheepishly, calling Carter "a man who is justifiably unhappy that his presidency's complex story is so rarely treated with the respect and sympathy that it deserves."
Upon taking office in 1977, Carter's minimal foreign-policy experience did not stop him from dedicating much of his presidency to foreign policy. The temptation was understandable. To accomplish anything in domestic politics, a president has to persuade Congress to go along with him. Abroad, he is on his own. (This is the reason a recent New York Times headline read "For Obama, Foreign Policy May Offer Avenues for Success.") When I speak about Carter's legacy with a man who has been participating in American policymaking at top levels for a long time, he predicts that Carter's reputation will eventually improve in the hands of historians on the basis of three foreign-policy achievements: the Panama Canal Treaties, which took on a strategically crucial but politically toxic predicament and modernized U.S. relations with its neighbors; normalization of relations with China, which made way for a fruitful, ongoing American dialogue with the world's most populous nation; and the Camp David Accords, which brought lasting peace between Israel and Egypt. All were crucial, forward-looking gestures that anticipated the shifting power structures of the world.
At the Carter Center's annual Winter Weekend fundraiser in Port St. Lucie, Florida, Carter devotes an entire evening to the Panama Canal, which I take in while sitting with his eldest grandson, Jason Carter. There is much gleeful discussion of how politically unpopular the treaties were at the time, how loathed the so-called "give back" was by conservatives like Jesse Helms, how many senators were subsequently voted out of office after Carter persuaded them to "do the right thing." At one point, Carter proclaims, "Of all the diplomatic achievements of the United States of America in the last 60 years, this is the most important." The much-derided handover, he says, promoted peace, human rights and free enterprise. The canal has generated so much income for Panama that it is now the fastest-growing country in the Americas — and an increasingly powerful U.S. ally. All of which proves to Carter that if you "treat a small country with decency and respect, it pays rich dividends for my country." This comment produces a standing ovation from the audience. Carter looks very moved. "That's quintessentially my grandfather," whispers Jason. "Getting choked up about the influence of the Panama Canal treaty!"
What the Panama Canal Treaties and the Camp David Accords have in common is that they required tremendous diplomatic exertion from Carter, if only because they were of such low political priority to everyone else. "There was something more than a desire to lead," says Hertzberg. "That was very strong. But as strong was the self-sacrificial ideal of doing the right thing even if it cost him the presidency. He risked it over and over. He loved thankless tasks like the Panama Canal. It's a perfect Carter achievement. He got absolutely no mileage out of it. It sparked Reagan. Reagan rode it to the election. And yet, by doing it, he avoided a catastrophic, very serious war in Latin America."
When you talk with people like Hertzberg about Carter, it's clear that they think of him as a flawed leader, but such an intelligent, determined, decent and compelling person that they want him to have been a great president. Only 44 men have been president. What was Carter missing that Lincoln and FDR possessed? At the Winter Weekend, I decide to ask Carter what he thinks are the qualities necessary to be a successful president. In the hours I spend with him over the course of five formal interviews and other casual interactions, his answer is the most revealing thing he tells me.
We are sitting with Rosalynn in his suite at the Florida resort. On the table between us, among cookies and a box of chocolates, is the small, worn, leather Bible from which the Carters read aloud to one another every night before bed. It's a Spanish Bible, allowing them the dual opportunity to study a foreign language. No president was ever a more vigilant self-improver than Carter. Across his adult life, he has taken courses in great books, great issues, speed-typing, speed-reading and dancing. While he was running for president, Carter tutored himself for the job by reading books like James David Barber'sThe Presidential Character. But despite decades of study and preparation, the question about presidential qualities seems to catch him off-guard.
At first, citing Roosevelt during the Great Depression, Carter says, "successful service in a time of crisis." But this isn't answering the question. "I don't draw a distinction between personal attributes and political attributes," he says. "Personal attributes can be described as tenets of major religious faith. I worship the Prince of Peace. All the great religions stand for peace, justice, the alleviation of suffering, telling the truth. Those are all measures of an academic teacher, in business, the medical world."
He pauses. "I'm fumbling around," he concedes. "I don't really know how to define it. I look from a subjective basis. Another measure of success is to get re-elected, no doubt about it."
He doesn't really know. It's an honest admission, but a painful one. The job meant so much to him, yet decades later, he still cannot define it.
"He's an engineer," says Andrew Young, whose loyal support of Carter's political career led the new president to appoint him U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, the first African-American to hold the job. "Engineers will tell you exactly how to build a bridge, but they can't seem to explain why you need this bridge. He's so fact-oriented, so detailed in almost everything." During the 1976 campaign, speechwriter Bob Shrum resigned nine days after going to work for Carter, explaining, "I am not sure what you truly believe in other than yourself." In a devastating essay for The Atlantic Monthly, another Carter speechwriter, James Fallows, described his former boss as someone who awakened every morning "popping with ideas." But Fallows also confessed, "I came to think that Carter believes 50 things but no one thing." Too often in life, what gets you somewhere is exactly what holds you back once you've arrived.
Although Carter is often forced to think about his political career in terms of his 1980 defeat, his victory in 1976 was far more of an accomplishment than Reagan's. It required astonishing conviction and resolve for a peanut-farming, one-term, out-of-office governor from a tiny town of 600 in a small Southern state to become president. "My name is Jimmy Carter and I'm running for president" was his refrain, a signature greeting like "Hello, I'm Johnny Cash" that allowed people without much in common with Carter to believe they had everything in common with him. "He was the most average Joe that has ever been the president," says his grandson Jason. "He wasn't born in a log cabin, but in the modern age. He didn't know anybody!"
When describing his youth in the town of Archery, outside Plains, Carter likes to focus on his barefoot, farm-boy experiences spent in a home without electricity surrounded by black neighbors; the narrative suits his self-presentation as a man of the people fighting against the special interests. But growing up in the poorest part of Depression-era Georgia, his deprivations were relative. His father, Earl, was a prominent farmer and civic leader who, according to Jimmy Carter, Peter Bourne's biography of his old boss, had as many as 260 black sharecroppers and laborers tending his cotton, corn, cane and peanut fields. Earl also owned a commissary, where his workers bought their supplies at inflated prices — a "license to steal," a Carter neighbor told the biographer Kenneth Morris. As Morris writes in Jimmy Carter: American Moralist, "successfully exploiting blacks" created many comforts for Earl Carter and his family. The Carters had a cook, nice cars, a clay tennis court, a pond house with a jukebox, billiards and ping-pong tables, and crystal salt and pepper shakers on their table. "Jimmy Carter's daddy, I knew him before he died," says Bobby Rowan, a former state senator from Enigma, Georgia. "He was a redneck, hard-nosed, hard-driving Southern plantation owner."
Carter's mother, Lillian, provided her son with a different example. She nursed blacks and whites alike, welcomed blacks through the front door, and late in life served as a Peace Corps volunteer in India because, she said, she wanted to help people with dark skin. "His mother, I loved," says Andrew Young. "She was a devout Christian but anti-church. She told me she liked to sit in front of the church on Sunday morning and drink whiskey. She didn't want anybody to think it was tea, so she put a bottle of Jack Daniels out there. She thought church people were hypocrites. She was a feisty person."
In his many memoirs, Carter again and again confronts the unstated problem of describing his segregated youth for a progressive age. During the civil rights movement, his part of Georgia had the reputation of being fiercely resistant to integration. Mostly, Carter says in his writings, he accepted the situation without really thinking about it. In his presidential campaign biography, Why Not the Best?, he calls his father "my best friend." Yet at other times, he portrays his father as a cold, distant, strict, ruthlessly punctual and skilled man of action, a philanderer and an athlete whom Carter never once beat at tennis. "Hot shot" was Earl's skeptical nickname for his eldest son. This father seemed so daunting to Carter that he spent his childhood thinking of ways to please him, to gain the approval of the man "I almost worshipped."
Like every other member of Carter's immediate family, Earl was a heavy smoker who died of cancer. Young says that losing so many family members so early and to such a quick and brutal disease means "Carter lives most of his life as if under a death sentence."
In 1953, as his father lay dying, Carter returned to Plains from the Navy. He learned of Earl's many charitable acts in the community, how "diverse and interesting and valuable a man's life could be." Against Rosalynn's wishes he decided to resign from the Navy, move back home, take over Earl's peanut-processing warehouse and follow in his father's footsteps. Resettled in Plains, he and Rosalynn were quiet progressives in a bitterly racist community. Carter was the only businessman in town who didn't belong to the local White Citizens' Council. When several members came by and offered to pay his dues for him if he'd join, Rosalynn says he told them, "You can flush it down the john for all I care." There are other such stories of Carter standing up to bigotry, and as a white Southerner of his generation running for national office in 1976, Carter used them to persuasive effect. Yet the reality is a bit more complicated.
In 1966, when Carter first ran for governor of Georgia, he lost to Lester Maddox, an ax-handle-wielding segregationist. So Carter took a month off and then immediately resumed campaigning, preparing for 1970. "He spent four years walking across Georgia, studying Georgia," says Bobby Rowan. "Jimmy Carter was very focused. He needed four hours of sleep a day. Tenacious!" This time, his leading rival was Carl Sanders, a respected former governor who had been the most progressive chief executive in Georgia history. To the outrage of those who knew him, Carter ran to the right of Sanders, courting the poor white vote by tearing at "Cufflinks Carl" for being a wealthy insider entitled elitist. The suspicion that Carter was actually wealthier than Sanders, Carter did not address. Carter also resorted to darker tactics. He promised to invite George Wallace, America's most famous segregationist, to Georgia — a gesture that Sanders had declined as governor. "Carter figured out if he was gonna beat Sanders, it would be with the redneck vote," says Rowan. Carter paid his respects to virulent racists like the White Citizens' Council leader Roy Harris, spoke approvingly of the new all-white private schools that were springing up across the Deep South to skirt integration, and was even quoted as praising Lester Maddox.
To Russell Thomas, a Georgian who helped finance Carter's first campaign for governor, all of this was very disillusioning. In 1970, he approached Carter after hearing him make a speech at an all-white country club. "The tone was that he was going hard to the right, trying to get local folks with him," Thomas recalls. "It was too much. I'll never forget, he told me, 'Russell, I looked out and saw you and the president of the college, and I wondered what you two would think.' I said, 'If you only wondered, that answers my question.' Doing what he had to do to get elected," Thomas concludes, "I felt Jimmy was selling us out."
Carter received only seven percent of the black vote in 1970, but he won the primary against Sanders and the general election. Then, when it came time for his inauguration as governor, he did something that changed his life and that of the country. During the campaign, David Rabhan, a wealthy Savannah entrepreneur with close connections to the civil rights movement, had personally flown Carter around Georgia in his Cessna, free of charge. At the end of the campaign, up in the sky, Rabhan remembers that Carter "turned to me and said, 'You've done all this work. What can I do for you?' I said, 'You can say, Now is the time to end racial segregation.'" Carter agreed. Rabhan told him to write it down on an aviator's navigation chart, the only piece of paper in the cockpit. Rabhan says Carter seemed glad to do it, but "it wasn't burning in him like it was in me."
In his inaugural speech, Carter stood up in Atlanta and announced, "I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over." Listening to words of a kind never before publicly spoken by a prominent politician in the South, Rowan says he and many others were "amazed." Lester Maddox later denounced Carter, which led Jody Powell to remark, "Being called a liar by Lester Maddox is like being called ugly by a frog." Up North, Time put Carter on the cover with the headline "Dixie Whistles Different Tune."
Four years later, when Carter ran for president, he made a point of describing his hanging of Martin Luther King Jr.'s portrait in the Georgia Capitol as a "long-overdue action." But during King's lifetime, Carter avoided ever meeting his fellow Georgian, and he did not attend his funeral. Carter now says that one of the chief regrets of his life was never meeting King, but it wouldn't have been difficult to arrange. Both men worked in Atlanta, and once King spent a very public weekend in the Americus jail, eight miles from Plains.
Carter made an early case for his presidential candidacy in 1974, when he gave a speech at the University of Georgia School of Law. Sen. Ted Kennedy spoke before Carter and addressed the current American "malaise." The comments were so close in spirit to what Carter had planned to say that he threw away his prepared text and scribbled a few notes on a scrap of paper. He then delivered an impassioned, largely improvised address rebuking lawyers, lobbyists and other privileged Americans for their failure to ensure that criminals, prisoners, alcoholics, blacks and the poor were being provided justice. The spontaneous speech, all the more potent coming from a white Southerner, had the rawness of revelation. When Hunter S. Thompson described it as a "king hell bastard of a speech" in Rolling Stone, Carter was suddenly a viable option in the wide-open Democratic field seeking the White House.
"I made an extemporaneous, beautiful speech about the fallibilities and injustices of the Georgia judicial system," Carter tells me with blithe immodesty. "It was an extraordinary speech, if I do say."
No one can become president without a tremendous aptitude for politics, and Carter has always been an enormously political man. Perhaps because his own faith and virtue have always been such vital political attributes, he just doesn't like us to think so. This aversion to seeming political, his unwillingness to admit what he plainly is, has undermined the public perception of his strength — and is part of the reason people wrongly believe he is weak. Calibrated to please his two greatest influences, his father and Rickover, men who were impossible to please, there was a slight madness to the myopic way Carter kept his eyes on the political prize. His ambition caused him to miss the seminal, transformative social event of his lifetime. He steered clear of the civil rights movement when it counted, and he played the race card to move ahead. "He's somebody who was willing to dip on the dark side to get elected," says Julian Bond, the former NAACP chairman who served as a state senator in Georgia. "He wanted badly to get elected. This is what he chose. To me, it was an awful thing to do."
Yet Bond and other leaders of the civil rights movement also stress how far Carter has come from his roots. Rep. John Lewis, who led the historic walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, back in 1965, believes that Carter evolved as a person when he left behind the brutal realities of his upbringing to run for president. "Jimmy Carter grew up in a setting where segregation and overt racism were the order of the day," Lewis says. "No longer beholden to the voters of South Georgia, he became a free person. He was liberated."
The evolution continued, Lewis says, when Carter left the White House and became one of the strongest and most vocal advocates for the world's poor. "I tell you, Carter has become something he was not as president. He's being true to himself. People should listen to him. He just keeps going. He's like the Energizer Bunny. He's here! He's there! People can't stand it. He feels a sense of calling and mission. I admire that." In the end, black leaders view Carter with the forgiveness that was a trademark of the civil rights movement. In their eyes, he managed to overcome the fear and hatred instilled in white Southerners of his generation, integrating his better self with his very political nature, leaving behind the kind of race-baiting he briefly engaged in to stand up for those in need. As Bond puts it: "A good man had a couple of bad days."
Last May, on a sun-splashed Saturday, three days before his special election for an open seat in the Georgia state senate, Jason Carter was working the crowd at Atlanta's East Lake Farmers Market when the cavalry arrived wearing a huge j.c. belt buckle. It had taken Jimmy Carter a while to convince his grandson to let him help with the campaign. The situation was complicated for Jason, in part because Jewish voters in his district have mixed feelings about Carter. As Carter had joked in an address to the campaign's volunteers, "I'm glad that Jason has finally confessed that I'm his grandfather."
At the farmers market, everyone wants to meet Carter. "Ask all your friends to vote for my grandson," he tells each person he sets eyes on. He also kisses babies, signs books, poses for pictures and talks turkey with the organic turkey lady. "I just killed a big one the other afternoon, I'm sorry to tell you," he says. He doesn't look sorry. As they leave the market, Rosalynn carrying some lettuce and mushrooms she's bought, all three are ready to go house-to-house, ringing doorbells. Should they work as a team so they can visit as they walk, Jason wonders, or spread out? Carter and Rosalynn, veterans of thousands of mornings like this one, don't hesitate: "Spread out!"
After a few unanswered doors, Carter says, "I used to be an expert at this — I've lost my touch!" But then doors begin opening. "Hi, I'm Jimmy Carter," he greets everyone who answers his ring. "I'm campaigning for my grandson. He's a good kid!" At one house, Carter tells the owners, "You know, when I ran for the state senate for the first time, my opponent got many of his votes from the cemetery!" At another, he says, "When I ran for governor, my wife and I shook 600,000 hands in Georgia. We went to every factory. Every Falcons game." As he approaches a third house, Jason calls from across the way, "I already did that house. They're not home."
"Well," Carter says, sounding annoyed, "the fan's on and the light's on. They're wasting electricity."
Inside a Chevron station's minimart, a woman does a double take. "Jimmy Carter! My favorite president!" At a chicken-wings shop, a Korean man working the counter nearly vaults over it as he cries, "God bless you, Jimmy Carter!" Outside a laundry, a woman almost drops her sack of clothes. "President Carter! Oh, I love you. You are so for real." She puts down her bag and gives him a hug. "Thank you for all you've done. You are a blessing in this world. Let me just hug you one more time. Bless you. You're a fighter."
Carter refuses to sign autographs — it takes too much time — but he'll pose for a picture if you're quick. He explains to several people how to work their cameras. The seminars on buttons and lenses are so technically precise that they bring to mind the Carter that Dan Aykroyd captured in his 1977 Saturday Night Live spoof "Ask President Carter," in which Carter expertly assisted random telephone callers with such conundrums as how to fix a clogged Marvex 3000 postal letter sorter and how to ride out an acid trip. ("Peter, what did the acid look like? ... You did some Orange Sunshine, Peter.")
Afterward, back at his house, Jason sits on his front porch with his mother and his father Jack's ex-wife, Judy Langford. With an election coming up on Tuesday, he notes, his grandfather would still have been out there shaking hands. Instead, Jason blows soap bubbles for his children and talks about Carter.
"Nobody wants their president to be a normal guy," he says.
"That's why things that Papaw did, like carrying around his own bag, were true to who he is, but it wasn't who they wanted the president to be," Judy agrees.
Jason brings up a letter Carter once sent to state wildlife authorities. "He confessed that he went over his limit, because he took one shot and two turkeys died! Nobody believes this! 'OK, forgive me, I shot two turkeys in one!'"
Then they fondly discuss how Carter overplays the virtues he discovered in his father at his funeral and how he makes his childhood sound more impoverished than it really was. Rosalynn tweaks him in this way, too. When she hears his stories of praying for an orange for Christmas as a boy, she reminds him that he got a pony. In reply, he tends to say, "That ol' donkey?!" At his Atlanta apartment in the Carter Center, Rosalynn and Carter sleep in a Murphy bed. Judy finds Carter's parsimony amusing. "One day it was raining," she recalls. "Jimmy had no raincoat. Rafshoon gave him his. Jimmy intentionally never gave it back. Rafshoon still finds ways to remind him."
Most of the people close to Carter enjoy lightly chaffing him when he isn't there. Part of it may be that they want to bring a man who is always doing so many benevolent things for far-flung strangers a little closer to them. "At a fundamental level he is supertrue to a powerful belief that you take every opportunity to make a difference and do good," Jason says. "He really has done what he could. It's like today: If we split up, we can do more."
To get from Atlanta to Plains, you drive due southwest past FDR's Little White House, take a left at Columbus and, passing small churches and tumbledown barns, go back in time. The places we associate with presidents often come to embody our national idea of them, from Hyde Park and Independence to Hyannis Port and Hope. Plains, pop. 635, is the same way, with its flags, railroad spur, water tower and single block of brick buildings on Main Street.
In town, there's no mistaking who comes from here. Carter has devoted a lot of his time to ensuring that Plains will not go the disappearing way of so many rural Southern towns, and the community is a monument to Mr. Jimmy. There are places to buy peanuts, four souvenir shops trading in green-and-white memorabilia, a statue of a 13-foot-tall smiling peanut and various restored period landmarks, such as brother Billy's old service station, where you can no longer buy gas — making it more of a Jimmy Carter memorial than intended. Less than a minute in any direction and you are out in the fields where the plants seem to grow right in front of you out of the sunburned dirt. The smallness of the town and the largeness of the land make it as improbable as ever that an American president came from Plains, but it's also easier to stand out in such a place. Everything seems possible when you're the only one in the crowd.
Jason has prepared me for my visit to Plains. "To me, the thing I admire most about my grandfather and grandmother is that they've done everything they can to stay normal people," he told me. "They built their house in the 1960s, and they almost haven't changed a thing. They were superexcited — legitimately excited! — when the Dollar General store opened in Plains. They buy their clothes there."
Then he was talking about Southerners. "The South is the history of my family," he said. "People were superpoor, rebuilding their state after the war, living through extreme poverty, some of which persists. My grandparents, their microwave is from 1985. It goes tick tick tick tick! It takes 12 minutes ticking down to pop popcorn, because why would you buy a new microwave? The point is that nothing is easy, and why should it be?"
The brown-brick, ranch-style house where Jimmy and Rosalynn live is just as Jason described it. Shaded by tall pines, it looks like the sort of suburban residence where you might expect to find a young ophthalmologist and his family. There is a tennis court and an outdoor swimming pool and a carpentry shop. When Carter left the White House, his staff planned to buy him a Jeep, but he let it be known he'd prefer a set of woodworking tools. Carter has since built many of the wooden furnishings, including a handsome four-poster bed for the master bedroom, a coffee table he fashioned out of a livestock trough, and a chess set. His weekend watercolor paintings line the walls, along with a tropical landscape given to him by Fidel Castro. In the kitchen, along with the elderly microwave and Goldwater-era appliances, is a cartoon in which the devil clutching a huge melting snowball stands near Carter, who is holding a "Jimmy Carter for President" sign. Two other men are looking on, and one says, "My money is on the snowball." A president's life encompasses so many elements — especially a president like Carter, who possesses such an urgent, roaming curiosity about how things work. But the house doesn't really reveal the range of Carter's worldly concerns. It suggests that he doesn't want anything around that would distract him from them.
Carter comes to the door in a faded plaid shirt and jeans and escorts me to the not-spacious living room, where he sits under an Ansel Adams photograph. He seems more receptive to company than usual. Rosalynn is away, promoting her new book on mental illness, and there is a bachelor feeling in the house. In the bathroom, the seat is up and the sink is filled with a jumble of pipes and other plumbing apparatus. On an easel is a painting of a church that Carter is working on.
We talk about 1970. With a borrowed automobile, Carter says, "I drove all over Georgia for four years. I'd work all day at the warehouse and on the farm. In the late afternoon, I'd drive all over the state giving speeches" — to the Jaycees, Lions Clubs, Kiwanis. Late at night, driving home, "I'd dictate on a hand-held Dictaphone the names of people I met." Then letters were sent to all of them. "It was rudimentary, but detailed," Carter says of this extraordinary effort. He mentions the 600,000 hands he shook, the 12,000 pamphlets he handed out and the factories he visited — every one in the state. "I ran against former governor Carl Sanders," he says. "An enlightened guy, but I got the conservative vote. The reason I did was because Sanders had challenged Richard Russell, and all the Russell supporters voted for me." Russell was the revered senator from Georgia who for 38 years led the opposition in Congress to ending racial segregation. Carter, in effect, is suggesting that Sanders defeated himself by alienating white conservatives. This is the first time I have heard this explanation for Carter's defeat of Sanders. I ask him about his campaign's race-baiting.
"I was stigmatized by the Atlanta Journal Constitution, which supported Sanders," Carter says. "They published all along that I was racist." Carter tells me that he met with black leaders "frequently and ostentatiously." Then he says, "I would say that nothing I did or said during the campaign, actual quotes or actions, justify any allegation I was soft on the issue of racists." I tell him what David Rabhan had told me about the way Carter initially avoided blacks and later evolved into a person who spoke out against segregation. "I can't dispute that," Carter says. But then he returns to his defense. If the research were done, he insists, investigators would find "nothing to make a supporter of mine flinch or make anybody think that I opposed exactly equal treatment of black people."
I mention that his old supporter Bobby Rowan once described to me the split between the true Jimmy Carter and the Jimmy Carter who did what he thought it took to win. "I always wished I was from Enigma, Georgia!" Carter says, referring to Rowan's hometown. Then he says, "Had it been a reversal of my previous positions, my inaugural speech would have been a dramatic revelation. I don't think anybody was surprised or saw it as a departure from my campaign."
I tell him that Rowan says many people were, in fact, surprised. "Bobby Rowan is an eloquent person," he says. "I wouldn't dispute what he says."
We talk about the South, about listening to dinner-table conversations as a child at the homes of relatives that featured a stream of grievances about the Northern oppression of the South — "My mother was the only one who would defend Abraham Lincoln." He tells of his 1964 speech in the Georgia legislature, in which he called for an end to the "so-called 30 questions" that blacks were required to answer to qualify to vote — "obscure questions nobody could answer," such as the legal intricacies of habeas corpus and the names of Georgia's Supreme Court justices. "Richard Russell told me I was making a serious mistake," Carter recalls. "Obviously, I disagreed." He mentions how difficult it was for Southerners to admit that slavery was the most important issue of the Civil War. Instead "it was just Yankee domination of the South through the federal government at the expense of states' rights. Now, with the Tea Party movement, that same feeling has come back."
The talk turns to his parents. "My daddy was deeply resistant to the government intruding in personal affairs," Carter says. He and Rosalynn inherited his mother's status as "very liberal on the race issue. An expression was used I won't repeat." In Plains, he says, "a lot of our friends disagreed strongly" with his racial views, and some terminated their relationships. He relates his community's experience of segregation to the current situation in the Middle East, where he believes there is "a similar pressure on Jews who don't want to speak against the treatment of Palestinians. Now, increasing numbers are speaking out for a two-state solution."
Then Carter shifts course, implying that American racism was actually worse in the North. He calls the busing riots in Boston during the 1970s "more severe than any riots that took place in Georgia," and mentions that Philadelphia and Chicago were also plagued by racial hatred. In the South, he says, blacks and whites are more "intimately involved" with one another. Carter isn't the first person from the region where slavery, lynching and Jim Crow held sway to want to shift attention to the sins of the Yankees, but it surprises me that he would. As much as he has done to combat suffering in the world, the suffering that took place next door to him remains complicated within him in a way that his books and our conversations make me suspect he hasn't fully sorted out.
It is time for lunch. In the kitchen nook, we sit down on a blue-vinyl-covered bench and hold hands while Carter says a prayer. Then a silent, African-American woman named Mary Fitzpatrick serves pork barbecue sandwiches on sliced whole-wheat bread. Fitzpatrick met Carter when she was assigned to the Georgia governor's mansion as part of a rehabilitation program for criminals. When Carter won her a reprieve from her murder conviction, she became Amy's governess in the White House, and has worked for the family ever since. She is known for never saying a public word about Carter.
Over lunch, we talk about Carter's favorite book, James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the seminal account of white Depression-era sharecroppers in Alabama, which Carter says he loves because it "told accurately what I knew as a child." Carter expresses his dismay at America's harsh immigration policies, the racist treatment of Hispanics and the long-term incarceration of prisoners without trial. He is gearing up for an afternoon of writing and hunting. There are trips in his future! I mention to Carter that just about everyone I have spoken with about him uses the word "driven." He frowns.
"I don't feel driven," he says. "I feel completely relaxed. I have an almost meticulous commitment to orderly events in my life. I can change total attention from one subject to another without interruption. I get a full night's sleep every night and plenty of exercise." If he isn't driven, I ask, would he at least grant that he's competitive? Yes, he happily concedes. And where did that come from? Even more happily, he says, "I don't know!"
He thinks about it. Then he says, "Once I set a goal for myself — be elected, make a living as a businessman, make the best seed peanuts in Georgia, command a submarine — I am able to devote maximum thought process in planning a schedule of action and to act. When I ran for the Georgia senate, it was easy to give up. All the odds were against me succeeding. I would have died first. People would tell me, 'You have no chance to be elected governor or president.' But if I got only two votes, I'm in to stay. I don't mind competition. I actually relish competition. Same thing at the Carter Center. We try things that might succeed. If they don't succeed, that's OK. Some things that look unachievable, we achieve."
One of the consequences of being the kind of person Carter describes — of possessing such a single-minded fixation on taking action — is that a certain level of reflection becomes impossible. Although he plainly chafes at interviews that take away from all the other things he could be doing, once he commits his time he is engaged and generous, and never seems to be holding back. Yet no matter how much he talks about himself, no matter how many memoirs he writes or how many interviews he gives, he still remains the most elusive of our former presidents.
Among the more iconic images of the Obama presidency is a photograph taken in the Oval Office in January 2009. All four ex-presidents stand shoulder-to-shoulder next to Obama — except for Carter, who is off on the end, a foot away from Bill Clinton. He is, in every sense, a man apart. Some interpreted this as deference, Carter's unconscious admission that he did not belong in such company. But in a recent interview, Carter seemed to suggest that the remove was a way of underscoring what he sees as his ongoing, outsize position in world affairs. "I feel that my role as a former president is probably superior to that of other presidents," he said. "We're right in the midst of the constant daily debate."
That proud, boastful explanation is, in effect, the same one Carter has always given for why he, nationally unknown, thought he could be elected president. As governor of Georgia, Carter met just about every prominent Democratic contender and came away feeling he could do better than any of them. He then proceeded to coolly change American politics by insisting that the way to get elected was to run not on policy but on personality, and to seem the American norm rather than exceptional. His anti-Washington, anti-elite, man-of-the-people, outsider approach worked so well that every successful presidential candidate since Carter has sought to replicate it. (The campaign model of Sarah Palin, another tenacious, bestselling former governor with a big smile from a small state, owes more to Carter than any major candidate since Carter.) That this intelligent, principled, dogged man who remains so steely and enigmatic at his center got himself elected president is one amazing American story. That he reinvented a way for a former president to live on in defeat is another. He accomplished both by relentlessly looking forward — as he still does today. In the end, his personal paradoxes and unresolved contradictions are simply left behind by the arrow of his ambition — the ongoing desire to do something more, to go anywhere to stay in the game, to make a lasting difference.
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POLITICSPROFILESTHE TALK OF THE TOWNCOMMENTTHIS WEEK'S ISSUETHE NEW YORKER REPORTING & ESSAYS
THE POLITICAL SCENEDON'T LOOK BACKDarrell Issa, the congressman about to make life more difficult for President Obama, has had some troubles of his own.
by Ryan Lizza
JANUARY 24, 2011 Issa, the new chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, is seen as a future leader of his party. SHAREPRINTE-MAILSINGLE PAGE
RELATED LINKS
Ask the Author: Join a live chat with Ryan Lizza about Darrell Issa on Wednesday, January 19th, at 3 P.M. E.T.
Primary Sources: Documents from Darrell Issa's 1972 gun arrest.
KEYWORDS
Darrell Issa; Congress; House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform; Kurt Bardella; Republicans, Republican Party; William Issa; Joey B. Adkins
A few days before Christmas, the mood in Representative Darrell Issa's office was jovial. Outside, the hallways were filled with the House's equivalent of scalps: wooden pallets piled high with shrink-wrapped boxes belonging to defeated or retiring Democrats. Inside, some of Issa's closest advisers sat around talking trash. Issa, a six-term California Republican, had recently been elected chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which, according to House rules, "may at any time conduct investigations of any matter." Now that he had been given the power to subpoena, investigate, and harass the Obama Administration, Issa was being described as a future leader of his party—and the man most likely to weaken the President before the 2012 election.
Issa's chief of staff, Dale Neugebauer, was wedged into a chair before a semicircular desk. He turned to welcome Kurt Bardella, Issa's spokesman. On a couch sat Jason Scism, the congressman's longtime legislative director, who had recently left to become a lobbyist for Research in Motion, the manufacturer of the BlackBerry.
Bardella removed his suit jacket, picked up four darts, and started tossing them with near-perfect aim at a well-used board on the wall. "The thing we discovered with Jason is that he's unable to play darts sober," Neugebauer said. "Kurt is actually a phenomenal dart player, but Jason, once he gets about six beers in him, is also phenomenal. They call him Dead-Eye."
The conversation turned to Issa's feats of electrical and mechanical engineering. During a recent interview with the Times, Issa repaired a reporter's old-fashioned microcassette recorder. Years ago, Neugebauer recalled, Issa fixed a malfunctioning sound board in the middle of a talk-show interview.
An inveterate gadget junkie who was once the chairman of the Consumer Electronics Association, Issa often acts as the office's I.T. manager. "If someone's got a computer problem and he hears about it, he is, like, sitting down at your desk fixing it," Neugebauer said. "That's the one thing I always tell the staff: If your computer's not working, do not tell him!"
Issa (pronounced "Ice-uh") is fifty-seven years old and six feet tall, with a prominent nose and ink-black hair neatly parted on one side. He was giving a tour of his suite to two Republican congressmen and was in an adjoining room directing their attention to the ceiling. In each office, Issa has removed several ceiling tiles and replaced them with plastic panels depicting blue sky and wispy clouds, making you feel as if you were inside a Super Mario Bros. game. Next, he showed his visitors an alcove that had once been stuffed with filing cabinets. He told about a long-running battle he'd had with the Architect of the Capitol, who refused to allow him to remove the cabinets. Fed up with the bureaucracy, he simply instructed his staff to take them out, adding precious workspace. New members of Congress make pilgrimages to Issa's office to see his modifications. He's become something like the Martha Stewart of the Republican Party.
FROM THE ISSUECARTOON BANKE-MAIL THIS
He pointed to a row of old filing cabinets hidden behind a curtain that he had not yet managed to take out. "Why?" one of the congressmen asked incredulously. Issa shook his head and began detailing a complicated clash involving sprinklers and a fire-code regulation.
The three men moved into Issa's personal office, where Issa had chosen and arranged every piece of furniture and bit of décor. On one wall were sixteen framed patents under Issa's name from his time as a car-alarm manufacturer, in the eighties and nineties. "Advanced embedded codehopping system having masterfixed code encryption," one said. On the opposite wall, there was a silver-framed portrait of his paternal grandfather, who was born in Lebanon. Nearby hung an oil painting by the artist Andy Thomas depicting eight Republican Presidents sitting around a table playing poker. In another corner, a similar painting by the same artist showed eight Democrats. Issa pointed to the Presidents. "My committee's job is to trust no Administration," he said.
Next up was a glass case in which dozens of military coins were displayed, each bearing the insignia of a different unit of the armed forces. Issa pulled a coin out of a desk drawer, prompting one of the other congressmen to take a coin from his pocket. "Oh, very nice! Yours is bigger than mine!" Issa said. The three men laughed. "I don't know why people think size doesn't matter!"
Issa's scheduler entered the room and broke up the fun. "We're behind schedule, I'm sorry," she announced. Issa called out after the departing congressmen, "You can have your office just like mine, but you can't have my office!"
Darrell Edward Issa grew up outside Cleveland, the second of six children. "Cleveland's a great place when you're a kid," he likes to joke. "You hardly ever get sunburned, without the sun shining." His mother was a Mormon and his father, who was Eastern Orthodox, worked as a truck salesman. The big event of his youth was moving from a two-bedroom, one-bathroom house in an ethnically Hungarian and Italian suburb to a three-bedroom, two-bathroom house in the predominantly Jewish suburb of Cleveland Heights. "You just can't have eight people in one john," he said. "I grew up working for a rabbi, in a Jewish Boy Scout group, in which the services were on Saturdays, going to bar mitzvahs galore, learning that gefilte fish ain't all that good, and being immersed in that society and not really thinking of myself, defining myself, as an Arab. We defined ourselves as: 'Hey, we're like Danny Thomas, we're Lebanese.' "
In 1970, on his seventeenth birthday, Issa dropped out of high school and enlisted in the Army. He has said that he had high test scores, which led to an offer to join an explosive-ordnance-disposal unit. "They showed us this movie about taking apart bombs in World War Two," he told me. "And they gave you this rah-rah speech and said, 'Wouldn't you like to sign up for E.O.D.?' " After interviewing Issa in 1990, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported that his E.O.D. unit had provided security for President Richard Nixon and had swept the stadium for bombs when Nixon attended a game of the 1971 Pirates-Orioles World Series.
In 1972, Issa's father suffered a heart attack, and the Army granted Issa a hardship discharge. He earned a G.E.D. and enrolled in Siena Heights University, a small college in Adrian, Michigan. He transferred to Kent State, where he was a member of the campus R.O.T.C. This was a "pivotal point in Darrell's history," his older brother, William, said. "The marked leftist bent by a portion of the student body may have helped further define his already formed conservative perspective." After graduating, he returned to the Army, which moved him to different bases around the country. He served until 1980, when he was stationed at Fort Ord, in Monterey, California. During one of his political campaigns, he said that he received the "highest possible" ratings while in the Army.
During this period, Issa married his college sweetheart, Marcia Enyart, but the union didn't last. When he returned to civilian life, he remarried. He met his second wife, Kathy Stanton, when she locked her keys inside her apartment and Issa, who lived next door, gallantly scaled a balcony and broke into her place. "He was in within thirty seconds," Kathy recalled. "I had to go out with him after that." The couple bought into a small company run by a friend of Issa's from the Boy Scouts, and they moved from California to Cleveland. In a 1998 campaign ad, Issa said that the investment comprised "our life savings of seven thousand dollars."
The company, Quantum Enterprises, assembled electronics such as bug zappers, FM power boosters, and CB radio parts for other companies. It was struggling when Issa made his investment, but not as badly as one of its clients, Steal Stopper International, which made car alarms. Issa acquired Steal Stopper in February, 1982, began to run the company himself, and turned it around. That year, he sold two hundred thousand car alarms to Ford, and was planning to sell Ford a million the following year. He also was negotiating a major contract with Toyota.
At 2:35 A.M. on September 7, 1982, the phone rang in Issa's house. The Quantum and Steal Stopper office and factory was on fire. Issa got dressed and drove the seven miles from his house, in Oakwood Village, to his workplace, in Maple Heights. He arrived by 3 A.M., to find blue flames shooting from holes in the roof. Four fire engines, a helicopter, and forty-three firefighters from three departments responded to the alarm. When the firemen entered the building, they encountered black smoke so thick they couldn't see their hands in front of their faces. The fire took three hours to bring under control.
A lieutenant in the Maple Heights Fire Department noted in his incident report that the "cause of this fire appears to be electrical." The fire had started at a workbench where light bulbs for bug zappers were tested. Almost everything of value was gone. Fortunately for Issa, he had recently increased his fire insurance.
Within months, he had opened the business at a new location nearby. The United States was entering a decade-long surge in auto thefts, the Steal Stopper line took off, and Issa signed deals with BMW, Rolls-Royce, General Motors, and other major car manufacturers. In 1985, he sold his company to a California firm that made home alarm systems, and he moved to San Diego to work for the new entity. Soon afterward, he left to start another car-alarm company, called Directed Electronics, Inc. D.E.I. shared Issa's initials and his voice, which he recorded for the company's signature product, the Viper, an alarm that warns potential car thieves (as well as passing trucks and bursts of wind), "Please step away from the car."
Issa, who still owns a stake in the company through a family foundation, can recall his exact sales figures from the era. "In 1985, we did about a million dollars," he said. "In 1986, we did $2.1 million; in 1987, we did $2.7 million. The next year, 1988, we did seven million. And then about fourteen in 1989. We got up to about one hundred million. The company does about two hundred and twenty million dollars now."
In 1994, according to one version of Issa's official biography, he "received Inc. Magazine's Entrepreneur of the Year Award." He began to work with consumer-electronics trade associations, made trips to Washington to lobby for the industry, and started to get involved in politics. In an increasingly Democratic state, he soon became one of the biggest donors to Republicans. He helped fund Proposition 209, a 1996 ballot initiative that would ban affirmative action in public institutions. It passed with fifty-five per cent of the vote. He helped bring the Republican Convention to San Diego in 1996 and got to know the Party leaders. "It was an evolution of involvement," Issa told me.
In 1997, he decided to run for the United States Senate. His impressive background—working-class high-school dropout, Army officer who helped protect the President, and self-made high-tech tycoon interested in law and order—helped him attract some of the best campaign operatives in California. He started out by spending two million dollars on radio ads. One of the first declared, "Sometimes people mispronounce his name, but, once you get to know Darrell Issa, you discover this is a life with more great chapters yet to be written."
Issa didn't even win the Republican primary. Although he outspent his main opponent, Matt Fong, the state treasurer, by some nine million dollars, he lost by five points. His campaign fell apart after a burst of investigative reporting raised serious questions about his honesty and his past. Many politicians have committed indiscretions in earlier years: maybe they had an affair or hired an illegal immigrant as a nanny. Issa, it turned out, had, among other things, been indicted for stealing a car, arrested for carrying a concealed weapon, and accused by former associates of burning down a building.
In May of 1998, Lance Williams, of the San Francisco Examiner, reported that Issa had not always received the "highest possible" ratings in the Army. In fact, at one point he "received unsatisfactory conduct and efficiency ratings and was transferred to a supply depot." Williams also discovered that Issa didn't provide security for Nixon at the 1971 World Series, because Nixon didn't attend any of the games.
A member of Issa's Army unit, Jay Bergey, told Williams that his most vivid recollection of the young Issa was that in December, 1971, Issa stole his car, a yellow Dodge Charger. "I confronted Issa," Bergey said in 1998. "I got in his face and threatened to kill him, and magically my car reappeared the next day, abandoned on the turnpike."
Bergey died of lung cancer in 2002, but his widow, Joyce, recently said to me that she remembered her husband telling the story of the stolen Dodge Charger. She laughed when she heard that Issa is now a prominent member of Congress. "Well, he probably figured he was borrowing it from a friend," she said. "But now we're discussing politicians, so we all know how honest they are. When I meet a good one, I'll let you know."
On March 15, 1972, three months after Issa allegedly stole Jay Bergey's car and one month after he left the Army for the first time, Ohio police arrested Issa and his older brother, William, and charged them with stealing a red Maserati from a Cleveland showroom. The judge eventually dismissed the case.
While the Maserati case was pending, Issa went to college. Just before 11 P.M. on Friday, December 1, 1972, two police officers on patrol in the small town of Adrian noticed Issa driving a yellow Volkswagen the wrong way down a one-way street. The police pulled him over, and, as Issa retrieved the car registration, an officer saw something peculiar in the glove compartment. He searched it, and, according to the police report, found a .25-calibre Colt automatic inside a box of ammunition, along with a "military pouch" that contained "44 rounds of ammo and a tear gas gun and two rounds of ammo for it." Issa was arrested for carrying a concealed weapon. The policeman asked why he was armed. "He stated in Ohio you could carry a gun as long as you had a justifiable reason," the report said. "His justifiable reason was for his car's protection and his." Issa pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of possession of an unregistered gun. He paid a small fine and was sentenced to six months' probation.
The second half of Issa's Army career appears to have been sterling, and he rose to captain. Wesley Clark, who was one of his superiors, wrote in a 1980 evaluation, "This officer's performance far exceeded that of any other reserve officer who has worked in the battalion." He added, "Promote ahead of contemporaries. Unlimited potential." Shortly before he was discharged, however, Issa was arrested again.
According to court records, on December 28, 1979, William Issa arrived at Smythe European Motors, in San Jose, and offered to sell Darrell's car, a red 1976 Mercedes sedan. William was carrying an Ohio driver's license with his brother's name on it and the dealer gave William a check for sixteen thousand dollars, which he immediately cashed. Soon afterward, Darrell reported the car stolen from the Monterey airport. He later told the police that he had left the title in the trunk.
The brothers had been together in Cleveland for Christmas, and, after Darrell gave a series of conflicting statements about his brother and whether he himself had recently obtained a second driver's license, the investigator in the case became suspicious that the two men had conspired to fraudulently sell Darrell's car and then collect the insurance money.
The brothers were indicted for grand theft. Darrell argued that he had no knowledge of William's activities; William claimed that his brother had authorized him to sell the car, and he produced a document dated a few weeks before the robbery that gave him power of attorney over his brother's affairs. On February 15th, with the investigation ongoing, Darrell returned to the San Jose dealership and repurchased his car, for seventeen thousand dollars. In August, 1980, the prosecution dropped the case. Darrell insisted that he was a victim, not a criminal. William had produced evidence that he had the legal authority to sell the car, and the injured party was reimbursed.
Five months later, in January, 1981, at an intersection in Cleveland, Issa had further car troubles. He crashed a truck into a 1959 Thunderbird Classic driven by a forty-year-old woman named Juanita Martin. According to court documents, Issa told her that he did not have time to wait for the police and left the scene. Martin ended up in the emergency room the next day with neck and back pain that she said caused "permanent damage." A month later, she sued Issa for twenty thousand dollars; they settled for an undisclosed amount.
Issa's early business career was equally tumultuous. He started his car-alarm empire by acquiring the Steal Stopper brand in what was essentially a hostile takeover. A man named Joey B. Adkins owned the company, and Issa loaned him sixty thousand dollars. When Adkins was late on a payment, Issa went to court and foreclosed on the loan. Two days later, Adkins told me, Issa called and said that he wanted Adkins to come visit him at his new office. He gave Adkins the address of Steal Stopper. "I just took your company," Adkins recalled him saying.
Once in control, Issa allegedly used an unusual method to fire Jack Frantz, an employee. Frantz told the Los Angeles Times that Issa came into his office, placed a box on the table, and opened it to reveal a gun. Issa told the paper, "Shots were never fired. If I asked Jack to leave, then I think I had every right to ask Jack to leave. . . . I don't recall [having a gun]. I really don't. I don't think I ever pulled a gun on anyone in my life."
Issa was soon suspected of doing something worse: burning down the factory. The initial notion that an electrical socket had caused the fire was challenged. The science of determining whether a fire was caused by arson can be flawed. But a fire-analysis report commissioned by the St. Paul insurance company, and dated October 19, 1982, a month after the incident, concluded that the fire was "incendiary." The report cited "suspicious burn patterns," such as "two separate major areas of origin," and it said, "No accidental source of heating power was located at either of these two major areas of origin." The manner in which stacks of cardboard boxes burned was inconsistent with an accidental fire. A flammable liquid appeared to have been poured over the boxes. The blue flames seen emanating from the roof were evidence, according to the investigators, of burning carbon monoxide that is produced when an accelerant like gasoline ignites. The black smoke was also a clue. "Such black smoke normally occurs in a fire only when a hydrocarbon is burning," the report said. When investigators tested burn damage from inside the factory, they found "the same identical mixture of flammable hydrocarbons" in four samples taken from diverse locations.
St. Paul sought out background information on Issa and his companies. Investigators interviewed family members, bank officials, and former employees. They looked into Issa's court and credit records, mortgage documents, and other personal information.
Joey Adkins, the former owner of Steal Stopper, provided the main evidence against Issa. On the afternoon of September 20, 1982, in a lengthy recorded interview with an insurance investigator, he described a series of suspicious actions by Issa before the fire. Adkins, who still worked for Steal Stopper, said that Issa removed the company's Apple II computer from the building, including "all hardware, all software, all the instruction books," and also "the discs for accounts payable, accounts receivable, customer list, everything." According to Adkins, Issa also transferred a copy of every design used by Steal Stopper from a filing cabinet to a fireproof box. He also said that Issa put in the box some important silk screens used in the production of circuit boards. Insurance officials noted that, less than three weeks before the fire, Issa had increased his insurance from a hundred thousand dollars to four hundred and sixty-two thousand dollars. "Quite frankly," Adkins told the investigator, "I feel the man set the fire."
The Ohio state fire marshal never determined the cause of the fire and no one was ever charged with a crime. According to Issa, St. Paul paid Quantum twenty-five thousand dollars, but refused to pay his claim for the Steal Stopper inventory. Issa sued St. Paul for a hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars, and the two parties eventually settled out of court for about twenty thousand dollars.
The insurance company, meanwhile, had found something peculiar about Issa, unrelated to the arson: there was no indication of where his initial capital came from. After interviewing a family member, an investigator reported, "She was unable to advise us as to his financial banking [sic] to become an officer in Quantum Inc." A second report noted, "We were unable to find the source of his financing for the business ventures he is engaged in at the present time."
In 2000, two years after losing the Senate primary campaign, Issa easily won a congressional seat in a conservative district near San Diego, where voters seemed unconcerned about the then two-decade-old tales from his youth. In 2003, Issa, who was now worth more than a hundred million dollars, funded the recall of the state's governor, Gray Davis. It was an ambitious project. Davis, who had been elected to a second term six months earlier, had not committed an impeachable offense; he simply had become unpopular. Issa planned to run for governor and replace Davis, but once again reporters started to look into his past. They took particular interest in the story of his brother stealing his car, and again questioned Issa's truthfulness. For example, the Los Angeles Times reported that Issa did not win Inc.'s national Entrepreneur of the Year award, as he had suggested. He won a regional prize in San Diego and became one of a few hundred nominees for the national award. Issa said that he hadn't meant to indicate otherwise.
On August 7, 2003, Issa visited the office of the San Diego County registrar of voters, where he was expected to file the paperwork for a gubernatorial campaign. Facing a scrum of cameras, he announced that he wasn't running. Instead, he tearfully explained, he had decided to devote his life to finding peace in the Middle East. Because of his Lebanese roots, he had always cared about the issue; now he intended to make it his life's work. "It's my desire to see that the recall continues, that Gray Davis is recalled, and that California has a brighter day," he said. But he also wanted to see "Israel and a Palestinian people living side by side in peace. I won't choose between the two." After mocking him for the melodrama, the California press corps moved on to cover Arnold Schwarzenegger's campaign, and Issa spent a few quiet years as a congressional backbencher engaged in Middle East issues. He travelled several times to Syria to meet with President Bashar Assad at a time when the Bush Administration was treating the country as the fourth member of the Axis of Evil. He was the only member of Congress to visit Lebanon during the 2006 war with Israel.
On most domestic issues, Issa has been a reliable conservative vote, but he has often found himself at odds with Republicans over foreign policy. His pro-Arab and pro-engagement positions on Middle East politics led a domestic terrorist group, the Jewish Defense League, to target Issa in December, 2001. A whistle-blower in the group foiled a plot to blow up a mosque and Issa's California office.
Issa has abandoned his longtime dream of holding a statewide position. "The moment that happened was the day after the election and watching Meg Whitman," Neugebauer, Issa's chief of staff, told me. In a year of Republican victories across the country, Whitman spent a hundred and forty million dollars of her own money, and still lost the race for governor of California by thirteen points. With the U.S. Senate and the California governorship out of reach, Issa will have to channel his ambitions toward the House leadership. He is in an ideal position to do so. With the White House and the Senate still under Democratic control, the new Republican House has little hope of passing its legislative agenda. Its real power will come from the ability to investigate Obama and feed a press corps that thrives on partisan combat.
Issa has set up what his aides call Issa Enterprises, a highly organized effort to manage his image. Kurt Bardella, the spokesman, who is twenty-seven, and whom Issa calls "my secret weapon," fiercely screens all interviews. Bardella has a reputation as one of the savviest young spokesmen on Capitol Hill, someone who understands the complicated new media environment.
Over lunch at Bistro Bis, a French restaurant near the Capitol, Bardella was surprisingly open in his disparagement of the media. He said, "Some people in the press, I think, are just lazy as hell. There are times when I pitch a story and they do it word for word. That's just embarrassing. They're adjusting to a time that demands less quality and more quantity. And it works to my advantage most of the time, because I think most reporters have liked me packaging things for them. Most people will opt for what's easier, so they can move on to the next thing. Reporters are measured by how often their stuff gets on Drudge. It's a bad way to be, but it's reality."
He marvelled that the Daily Beast recently reported that Issa was fond of referring to himself in the third person. The reporter who wrote the story, Howard Kurtz, had in fact been interviewing Bardella when he thought he was talking to the congressman on the phone. (Kurtz later said that Bardella didn't indicate that he wasn't Issa when they spoke.) "I think anyone who knows me well enough knows I'm far too fond of myself to abdicate my own identity in favor of someone else's," Bardella told me.
Bardella later added that he was dealing with a new twist in his relationship with the press. Now that Issa had been elevated to chairman of the Oversight Committee, he said, "reporters e-mail me saying, 'Hey, I'm writing this story on this thing. Do you think you guys might want to investigate it? If so, if you get some documents, can you give them to me?' I'm, like, 'You guys are going to write that we're the ones wanting to do all the investigating, but you guys are literally the ones trying to egg us on to do that!' "
Bardella joined Issa's staff two years ago, after working for Brian Bilbray, another San Diego congressman, and Olympia Snowe, the moderate senator from Maine. During lunch, he was quick to explain how he had helped transform Issa from an obscure congressman to a fixture of the Washington media-political establishment. Most members of Congress focus mainly on reporters back home. Bardella set out to promote Issa in Washington. "My goal is very simple," he said. "I'm going to make Darrell Issa an actual political figure. I'm going to focus like a laser beam on the five hundred people here who care about this crap, and that's it. We've been catering more to that audience, so Darrell can expand his sphere of influence here among people who track who's up, who's down, who wins, who loses. Then we can broaden that to something more tangible afterward."
The task for Issa Enterprises is thus to help Issa make the change from an outsider, grandstanding for talk-radio partisans and conservative bloggers, to a responsible committee chairman. "You've got to move from the right to the center," Issa told me. "If there was a blog with five listeners or viewers, I had to be on it. Now I have to be on fewer media, but more substantive media. What we're really trying to do is move an agenda, and that requires that we have the support of the American people and at least a big chunk of Democrats."
More specifically, Issa Enterprises needs to convince élites that Darrell Issa is no Dan Burton, the head of the House Oversight Committee when Bill Clinton was President. Burton, who is still a member of the committee, doggedly pursued right-wing conspiracy theories about Clinton, and will forever be remembered for firing bullets into a pumpkin or a melon—the actual fruit was never determined—while trying to prove that Vince Foster, a Clinton aide who committed suicide, was murdered.
The transformation is a work in progress. In an interview with Rush Limbaugh last year, Issa described Obama as "one of the most corrupt Presidents in modern times." In December, he told me that what he really meant is that Congress was "corrupting part of government" by passing major spending bills without specifying how the executive branch should use the money. "The stimulus that the Democrats passed, and the TARP that Republicans and Democrats passed, is corrupting to the process," he said. "This Administration enjoys that corruption. It's not personal corruption of the President." More recently, in an interview with CNN, he claimed that he meant "corrupt" in the sense that a computer hard drive can become corrupt: it just stops working well.
During the past year, Issa has spent much of his time on a deeply partisan investigation of ACORN, a national community-organizing group that Republicans alleged had conspired to steal government grants for the benefit of a few of the organization's leaders. Now, however, Issa speaks more like an accountant than like a prosecutor. "I'm looking for waste, fraud, and abuse in government," he told me. "Do I have abuse of the power of the President while the President's in power? Can I make the government be more responsive and more efficient? Those are my major charges."
It's easy to imagine, however, that some of Issa's investigations could end up as acrimonious party struggles, if only because Republicans and Democrats now seem to deal with different sets of facts. Issa seems unconvinced about the science behind climate change, and the investigation that he seemed most passionate about when we spoke involved U.S. government funding for the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit. This is the organization behind the so-called Climategate controversy, in which a batch of e-mails were published, showing, Issa claimed, that there had been fraud involving "the base numbers" underlying our understanding of climate change. However, three separate investigations have cleared the Climate Research Unit of manipulating research, and its work does not form the basis for our understanding of the issue.
Issa has tried to draw a line separating events that he considers appropriate subjects for investigation and those which he deems inappropriate. He has criticized his predecessors for wasting time looking into matters involving the Clintons that predated their arrival at the White House, such as the Whitewater and cattle-futures episodes. "These are items that occurred before the President was elected," Issa told me. "I would not have viewed them as particularly significant." He added that issues involving Obama's past are also off limits, such as "the birther question." Implicit in this rule is that his past should also be left undisturbed.
"Darrell's sensitive about fixating too much on his past," Bardella said. "Obviously, the stuff that happened . . ." His voice trailed off. "We can talk about it, as well we should. It is part of his past, but it does make him somewhat wary."
On January 8th, Issa was walking the floor of the annual Consumer Electronics Show, in Las Vegas, wearing jeans and a black mock turtleneck. He's not exactly Steve Jobs, but, among a subset of the C.E.S. convention-goers who remember his tenure as chairman of the trade association, he is treated like a hero. As he strolled through what seemed like acres of iPod accessories, a man wearing an Alpine Audio shirt approached and grabbed his hand. "Sorry," he said, "you don't know who I am. But, Congressman, thank you very much for everything that you're doing."
Minutes later, an elderly man called out, "Excuse me, Darrell? God bless ya. I met you a hundred years ago. I just wanted to say thank you. Thank you for everything you do." Old friends and competitors rushed up to give him a hug and gossip about the car-alarm business. One man shouted that he had seen Issa recently on Fox News, and asked to have a picture taken with him. Another asked when he was going to run for President. "In this industry, we don't send a lot of people to government," Issa told me. "So I'm sort of an exception."
Issa stood with Bardella at the booth for Directed Electronics, where he is still on the board of directors, and talked to some of his former employees. Unlike many other companies, D.E.I. was not using models to sell its newest product, the Viper SmartStart, a mobile-phone app that starts your car. "The quality speaks for itself," Bardella said. "They don't need any bells or whistles or naked women. But I enjoy the ones that do. I'm a guy, you know. Nothing wrong with admiring God's work—the plastic surgeon's work, too, I'm sure. Some of these chicks, though, I just want to feed, because they're really, really thin. I'm, like, 'God, eat something!' "
I walked upstairs with Issa, his wife, Kathy, and Bardella, and we sat down at a small table. Issa wore a brace on his right foot. On Christmas Eve, he smashed the foot into a wall and broke two toes. I wanted to know about the troubles in his past: the gun conviction, the three allegations of car theft, the arson allegation, the allegation that he dismissed an employee while brandishing a gun, and the mysteries about his finances. These are matters he avoids discussing at length with the press, and, as we got into the details, he joked that it might be less painful if I would "just twiddle the toes."
Issa seemed tired of defending himself from these old stories. He cited the tale of how he allegedly helped protect Nixon, and insisted that a writer had misunderstood an anecdote. Issa failed to correct the story and was subsequently accused of polishing his résumé. He learned a lesson. "If you've sent a letter, you can say, 'Look, in real time I disputed this,' " he told me. He noted that after Christmas his Wikipedia page was rewritten to highlight many of the old controversies. "Fixing Wikipedia is a full-time thing when you've got people hacking it, or editing it, in a rather slanted way." He added that in most areas of knowledge Wikipedia works well. "If you're looking at the history of Picasso's 'Scream,' " he said. "What's that famous—'Ahhhh'?"
"Actually, no, that's Edvard Munch," Kathy interjected.
"No, no, it's one of the other Impressionists," Issa said, dismissively and erroneously. He added that a description of a painting on Wikipedia continuously improves, "because it doesn't have enemies. People are just trying to get the truth." The same is not the case, he said, when it comes to politicians.
On the substantive issues raised by court documents, Issa's defense in most cases can be summarized in four words: "My brother did it." Referring to the 1972 conviction for having a gun in his glove compartment, Issa said that he was a freshman in college and was leaving a bar when the incident occurred. He parked his car in an alley and drove out the wrong way. "He pulled me over because the alley was, quote, one way," Issa said. "Well, I'm new to the town, and I didn't come in in a way where I ever saw the sign."
Issa told me that he was driving William's car and did not know there was a gun inside. "Had I known it was in there, would I have opened the glove box for him to see it?" He added, "There's some debate about bullets, no bullets, whatever. As far as I know, there weren't any. As far as I know, it wasn't loaded."
Issa seemed annoyed that the incident ever became public. "I agreed to plead to the misdemeanor, and they later expunged it, but expunging turns out not to be worth much," he said. "This was pre-Internet days, this stuff was not supposed to be discoverable, it's supposed to be gone. Turns out nothing's ever really gone, I guess." William Issa told me that the car and the gun were indeed his. But Darrell Issa's 2011 account contradicts the 1972 police report, which says that there was a loaded clip and a box of ammo, and that Issa told the police that he was allowed to carry the gun and that he needed to protect his car.
Issa said that all three accusations of automobile theft were false. The incident involving the Maserati was a case of mistaken identity, he said. "By the time I get home in '72, my brother has been incarcerated," he said. "Cleveland Heights is a pretty small town. He was arrested and sent off to juvenile detention for a year and now he's back on the street, and the police stop us. We're about a thousand feet away, but walking in a direction toward this car. And they put two and two together: 'Hey, car sitting in the middle of the road and two guys walking toward it and one of them'—Billy had never been arrested for car theft, but he'd been arrested for other thefts. Eventually, they put together the, quote, eyewitness with us and we don't match and the case is dismissed."
When I mentioned the car-theft allegation made by Sergeant Bergey, Issa bridled. I reminded him that in 1998 Bergey had told a newspaper he couldn't believe Issa was running for office. "I can't believe he ended his career as a medium-rank sergeant with an alcohol problem," Issa replied. He added, "Did I steal his or anyone's car? No. Did I have anything to do with it and do I know whether somebody else stole it or he simply left it in a drunken stupor? I'd have to go check. I didn't."
Both brothers told me that the 1980 case involving the fraudulent sale of Darrell's Mercedes was William's scheme, which he carried out entirely on his own. By then, William had spent three years in state and federal prison for car theft. Darrell, though, admitted that he then tried to cover up for his brother. "Am I going to make a statement incriminating my brother?" he asked. "No. Do you expect me to?" Both Issas said that, to pull off the crime, William obtained an Ohio license with his picture and Darrell's name on it. As for the title's being in the trunk, William laughed and said, "He always kept the title stuff in his car, which was kind of stupid."
Issa told me that he did not set the fire at the Quantum factory in 1982, and he is furious that the story has dogged him. He lashed out at Eric Lichtblau, the New York Times reporter who, in 1998, while working for the Los Angeles Times, first aired allegations from Issa's former business partner Joey Adkins. Lichtblau, Issa charged, "is a notorious hatchet man." ("Everything in that story was accurate," Lichtblau told me in response. "The picture that emerged of his early start in Cleveland was very different from the Horatio Alger story he had adopted.")
Adkins, both Issa brothers said, is not credible. William told me that Adkins was "a lowlife." The morning after the fire, Darrell said, Adkins took most of the Steal Stopper merchandise that wasn't damaged, hauled it away, and set up a rival business across town. (Adkins told me it was his understanding that the inventory would be scrapped, so he took it.) It was that theft of merchandise, Darrell pointed out, that caused the insurance company to deny his claim on the Steal Stopper inventory. There was one more twist. Adkins's brother, Gary, sold the merchandise back. Issa paid with a check that he cancelled before Gary Adkins could cash it.
Issa seemed unfamiliar with the insurance company's fire-analysis report concluding that the fire was arson, and said that, as far as he knew, it was officially declared accidental. He blamed the local fire department for letting the fire get out of hand. "If the fire department had done a competent job and turned off the natural-gas line, there would've been de-minimis damage," he said. "They fought the fire for a couple of hours before they realized that the fire is being fed by a gas line from an overhead heater that had ruptured early on in the fire. And if there's a story, the story is 'Fire department screws up, small fire becomes devastating fire.' " If Issa is right, the natural gas could explain the blue flames that insurance investigators cited as evidence of arson, although it wouldn't explain the suspected presence of an accelerant.
Both brothers suggested that the real winner was a company called Pied Piper, which sold the bug zappers that Issa's company was assembling. "The beneficiary of almost all the insurance was a man who was double-insured," Issa said. He added, "This is not an accusation, but, coincidentally, several years later, while we're in California, whose factory burns down in downtown Cleveland? Pied Piper."
When I relayed this conversation to Franklin Porath, one of the owners of Pied Piper—which has since gone out of business—he said that Issa had tried to defraud his company, and that he believes Issa committed arson to cover up the alleged fraud. He added, "Issa is the most evil man I ever met."
Issa corroborated the gist of what Adkins told the investigator were suspicious actions before the fire, though he said that they proved nothing, and he offered an explanation for each. For example, he said that he increased the insurance, on the advice of his agent, because he was storing the inventory for several companies, and he removed the Apple II computer only because he wanted his lawyer to help him install new accounting software. He was irritated that a series of innocent actions had been twisted into such a serious allegation. "You can always try to make a circumstantial case," he said.
The fire wasn't a boon to his early business, he said. It had almost ruined him. "Our employees, in violation of the law, I'm sure, worked for free to get us turned around," he said. "It was an ugly, ugly time. I think for five or six weeks people were working for free while claiming unemployment because we couldn't pay them." As for firing an employee while brandishing a gun, Issa said that he did not have a gun with him that day and that his statement that "shots were never fired" was taken out of context.
At one point, as he reflected on his past, Issa became a little emotional about his brother. "I admired my brother even when he was doing wrong," he said. "I was always the kid at his ankles. Did he do wrong? Yes. Did he get caught? Yes. Did I ride around in cars with my brother that I had to know in good faith he hadn't paid for? Yeah. Did I get caught? No. So did I have some youthful time when, although generally doing the right thing, I probably wasn't as careful and honest and straightforward as I should be? Yeah. Do I regret that? Sure. To be honest, in spite of all the good things that have happened in my life, I regret not finishing high school before going in the Army, I regret a lot of things, where I go, 'You know, I should've been in a hurry to succeed, not in a hurry to go outside the loop.' And when you get to be fifty-seven it's a lot easier to say, 'I should've been in less of a hurry.' But I was always in a hurry." He pointed to his foot. "I suspect I broke these toes by being in a hurry."
The question now for Washington is how much of a hurry Issa is in to investigate alleged misdeeds by the Administration. Many people assume that Issa Enterprises doesn't have a brake, but while Issa can be careless when he speaks off the cuff, mangling facts the way normal people often do in conversation, he seems chastened by all the legal and journalistic investigations of his own complicated past. If one believes his version of events, he has been unfairly accused of several crimes, and has long had to live under a cloud of suspicion. It seems possible that Obama won't be tormented by his chief prosecutor in the House. Perhaps Issa's experiences will lead to investigations that are careful and serious, and avoid the warfare that has characterized the Oversight Committee in recent decades.
A few days after we met in Las Vegas, Issa called me. He was concerned about all my questions regarding his early life and didn't see why they were newsworthy. The conversation was awkward. I told him that there was one more question I wanted him to answer: Where did you get the money for your start in business? The issue had stumped the insurance investigators, and William had, somewhat mysteriously, told me that his brother "would lend people money and get money back that way when he was in the service. He would buy and sell cars sometimes. He would get cars at a very good price, keep them, and sell them."
There was a pause on the phone. "That's sort of an amazing one to ask," Issa said. He took a deep breath, and then carefully and patiently explained that, before he started at Quantum, he sold a BMW motorcycle and two cars—his Mercedes and his wife's 1967 Volkswagen Bug. "We liquidated everything we could to raise money," he said. He added that he also borrowed fifty thousand dollars from family members to make the first loan to Adkins. Issa seemed frustrated and exhausted. "Everyone," he said, "has a past." ♦
ILLUSTRATION: DANIEL ADEL
THE POLITICAL SCENE, "DON'T LOOK BACK," THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 24, 2011, P. 52
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Are You There God? It's Me, Brain.
How our innate theory of mind gives rise to the divine creator.
By Jesse Bering
Posted Tuesday, Feb. 1, 2011, at 12:15 PM ET
The following is an edited excerpt from The Belief Instinct, which will be published Feb. 7.
The scientific jury is still out on whether our species is unique among social mammals in being able to conceptualize mental states—other species, such as chimps, dogs, scrub jays and dolphins, may have some modest capacity in this regard. But there's absolutely no question that we're much better at it than the rest of the animal kingdom. We are natural psychologists, exquisitely attuned to the unseen psychological world. Reasoning about abstract mental states is as much a trademark of our species as walking upright on two legs, learning a language, and raising our offspring into their teens.
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There is a scientific term for this way of thinking—"theory of mind." It's perhaps easiest to grasp the concept when considering how we struggle to make sense of someone else's bizarre or unexpected behavior. If you've ever seen an unfortunate woman at the grocery store wearing a midriff-revealing top and packed into a pair of lavender tights like meat in a sausage wrapper, or a follicularly challenged man with a hairpiece two shades off and three centimeters adrift, and asked yourself what on Earth those people were thinking when they looked in the mirror before leaving the house, this is a good sign that your theory of mind (not to mention your fashion sense) is in working order. When others violate our expectations for normalcy or stump us with surprising behaviors, our tendency to mind-read goes into overdrive. We literally "theorize" about the minds that are causing ostensible behavior.
The evolutionary significance of this mind-reading system hinges on one gigantic question: Is this psychological capacity—this theory of mind, this seeing souls glimmering beneath the skin, spirits twinkling behind orbiting eyes, thoughts in the flurry of movement—is this the "one big thing" that could help us finally understand what it means to be human? Could it tell us something about how we find meaning in the universe?
As a human being, you're prone to overextending your theory of mind to categories for which it doesn't properly belong. Many people remember fondly the classic film Le Ballon Rouge ("The Red Balloon," 1956) by French filmmaker Albert Lamorisse, in which a sensitive schoolboy—in reality Lamorisse's own 5-year-old son, Pascal—is befriended by a good-natured, cherry-red helium balloon. Absent dialogue, the camera follows the joyful two, boy and balloon, through the somber, working-class streets of the Ménilmontant neighborhood of Paris, the glossy red balloon contrasting sharply with the bleak old-Europe atmosphere while adults, oblivious to the presence of an inanimate object that has apparently been ensouled by an intelligent gas, are largely indifferent, even hostile, to the pair. Eventually, a mob of cruel children corners the boy and begins pelting the "kindhearted" balloon with stones, ultimately popping it.
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The plot of Le Ballon Rouge exemplifies how our evolved brains have become hypersocial filters, such that our theory of mind is applied not only to the mental innards of other people and animals, but also, in error, to categories that haven't any mental innards at all, such as ebullient skins of elastic stretched by an inert gas. If it weren't for our theory of mind, we couldn't follow the premise of the movie, let alone enjoy Lamorisse's particular oeuvre of magical realism. When the balloon hovers outside Pascal's flat after his grandmother tries to get rid of it, we perceive a charismatic personality that "wants" to be with the boy and is "trying" to leverage itself against the window panes; it "sees" Pascal and "knows" he's inside. Our theory of mind is so effortlessly applied under such conditions that it's impossible to see the scene any other way. In fact, part of what makes the movie so effective is that the young boy in the lead role genuinely believed that the balloon was alive. "The Red Balloon was my friend," recalled a much older Pascal Lamorisse in a 2007 interview. "When you were filming it, did you really feel that way?" asked the reporter. "Yes, yes, he was a real character with a spirit of his own."
As a direct consequence of the evolution of the human social brain, and owing to the importance of our theory-of-mind skills in that process, we sometimes can't help but see intentions, desires, and beliefs in things that haven't even a smidgeon of a neural system. In particular, when inanimate objects do unexpected things, we sometimes reason about them just as we do for oddly behaving—or misbehaving—people. More than a few of us have kicked our broken-down vehicles in the sides and verbally abused our incompetent computers. Most of us stop short of actually believing these objects possess mental states—indeed, we would likely be hauled away to an asylum if we genuinely believed that they held malicious intent—but our emotions and behaviors toward such objects seem to betray our primitive, unconscious thinking: we act as though they're morally culpable for their actions.
Some developmental psychologists even believe that this cognitive bias to see intentions in inanimate objects—and thus formulate a very basic theory of mind—can be found in babies just a few months out of the womb. For example, Hungarian psychologists György Gergely and Gergely Csibra from the Central European University in Budapest have shown that babies, on the basis of their staring response, act surprised when a dot on a computer screen continues to butt up against an empty space on the screen after a computerized barrier blocking its path has been deleted. It's as if the baby is trying to figure out why the dot is acting as though it "thinks" the barrier is still there. By contrast, the infants are not especially interested—that is, they don't stare in surprise—when the dot stops in front of the block, or when the dot continues along its path in the absence of the barrier.
The most famous example of this cognitive phenomenon of seeing minds in nonliving objects, however, is a 1944 American Journal of Psychology study by Austrian researchers Fritz Heider and Mary-Ann Simmel. The scientists put together a simplistic animated film depicting three moving, black-and-white figures: a large triangle, a small triangle, and a small circle. Participants watched the figures moving about on the screen for a while and then were asked to describe what they had just seen. Most fell back on a human social behavioral narrative—for example, seeing the large triangle as "bullying" the "timid" smaller triangle, both of "whom" were "seeking" the "affections" of the "female" circle.
So it would appear that having a theory of mind was so useful for our ancestors in explaining and predicting other people's behaviors that it has completely flooded our evolved social brains. As a result, today we overshoot our mental-state attributions to things that are, in reality, completely mindless. And all of this leads us, rather inevitably, to a very important question: What if I were to tell you that God's mental states, too, were all in your mind? That God, like a tiny speck floating at the edge of your cornea producing the image of a hazy, out-of-reach orb accompanying your every turn, was in fact a psychological illusion, a sort of evolved blemish etched onto the core cognitive substrate of your brain? It may feel as if there is something grander out there . . . watching, knowing, caring. Perhaps even judging. But, in fact, that's just your overactive theory of mind. In reality, there is only the air you breathe.
After all, once we scrub away all the theological bric-a-brac and pluck the exotic cross-cultural plumage of religious beliefs from all over the world, once we get under God's skin, isn't He really just another mind—one with emotions, beliefs, knowledge, understanding, and, perhaps above all else, intentions? Aren't theologians really just playing the role of God's translators, and isn't every holy book ever written a detailed psychoanalysis of God? That strangely sticky sense that God "willfully" created us as individuals, "wants" us to behave in particular ways, "observes" and "knows" about our otherwise private actions, "communicates" messages to us in code through natural events, and "intends" to meet us after we die would have also been felt, in some form, by our Pleistocene ancestors.
Consider, briefly, the implications of seeing God this way, as a sort of scratch on our psychological lenses rather than the enigmatic figure out there in the heavenly world that most people believe Him to be. Subjectively, God would still be present in our lives. (For some people, rather annoyingly so.) He would continue to suffuse our experiences with an elusive meaning and give the sense that the universe is communicating with us in various ways. But this notion of God as an illusion is a radical and, some would say, even dangerous idea because it raises important questions about whether God is an autonomous, independent agent that lives outside human brain cells, or instead a phantom cast out upon the world by our species' own peculiarly evolved theory of mind. Since the human brain, like any physical organ, is a product of evolution, and since natural selection works without recourse to intelligent forethought, this mental apparatus of ours evolved to think about God quite without need of the latter's consultation, let alone His being real.
Then again, one can never rule out the possibility that God microengineered the evolution of the human brain so that we've come to see Him more clearly, a sort of divine LASIK procedure, or scraping off the bestial glare that clouds the minds of other animals.
Either way, this cognitive capacity, this theory of mind, has baked itself into our heads when it comes to our pondering of life's big questions. Unlike any science-literate generation that has come before, we now possess the intellectual tools to observe our own minds at work and to understand how God came to be there. And we alone are poised to ask, "Has our species' unique cognitive evolution duped us into believing in this, the grandest mind of all?"
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POLITICSPROFILESTHE TALK OF THE TOWNCOMMENTTHIS WEEK'S ISSUETHE NEW YORKER REPORTING & ESSAYS
PROFILESSHOW THE MONSTERGuillermo del Toro's quest to get amazing creatures onscreen.
by Daniel Zalewski
FEBRUARY 7, 2011
Del Toro, whose films include "Hellboy" and "Pan's Labyrinth," has amassed in a house outside Los Angeles an enormous collection of horror iconography. "All this stuff feeds you back," he says.
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Video: Daniel Zalewski on del Toro's most notable creatures.
KEYWORDS
Guillermo Del Toro; Directors; Movies; Monsters; "At the Mountains of Madness"; "The Hobbit"; "Pan's Labyrinth"
In 1926, Forrest Ackerman, a nine-year-old misfit in Los Angeles, visited a newsstand and bought a copy of Amazing Stories—a new magazine about aliens, monsters, and other oddities. By the time he reached the final page, he had become America's first fanboy. He started a group called the Boys' Scientifiction Club; in 1939, he wore an outer-space outfit to a convention for fantasy aficionados, establishing a costuming ritual still followed by the hordes at Comic-Con. Ackerman founded a cult magazine, Famous Monsters of Filmland, and, more lucratively, became an agent for horror and science-fiction writers. He crammed an eighteen-room house in Los Feliz with genre memorabilia, including a vampire cape worn by Bela Lugosi and a model of the pteranodon that tried to abscond with Fay Wray in "King Kong." Ackerman eventually sold off his collection to pay medical bills, and in 2008 he died. He had no children.
But he had an heir. In 1971, Guillermo del Toro, the film director, was a seven-year-old misfit in Guadalajara, Mexico. He liked to troll the city sewers and dissolve slugs with salt. One day, in the magazine aisle of a supermarket, he came upon a copy of Famous Monsters of Filmland. He bought it, and was so determined to decode Ackerman's pun-strewed prose—the letters section was called Fang Mail—that he quickly became bilingual.
Del Toro was a playfully morbid child. One of his first toys, which he still owns, was a plush werewolf that he sewed together with the help of a great-aunt. In a tape recording made when he was five, he can be heard requesting a Christmas present of a mandrake root, for the purpose of black magic. His mother, Guadalupe, an amateur poet who read tarot cards, was charmed; his father, Federico, a businessman whom del Toro describes, fondly, as "the most unimaginative person on earth," was confounded. Confounding his father became a lifelong project.
Before del Toro started school, his father won the Mexican national lottery. Federico built a Chrysler-dealership empire with the money, and moved the family into a white modernist mansion. Little Guillermo haunted it. He raised a gothic menagerie: hundreds of snakes, a crow, and white rats that he sometimes snuggled with in bed. Del Toro has kept a family photograph of him and his sister, Susana, both under ten and forced into polyester finery. Guillermo, then broomstick-thin, has added to his ensemble plastic vampire fangs, and his chin is goateed with fake blood. Susana's neck has a dreadful gash, courtesy of makeup applied by her brother. He still remembers his old tricks. "Collodion is material used to make scars," he told me. "You put a line on your face, and it contracts and pulls the skin. As a kid, I'd buy collodion in theatrical shops, and I'd scar my face and scare the nanny."
Del Toro filled his bedroom with comic books and figurines, but he was not content to remain a fanboy. He began drawing creatures himself, consulting a graphic medical encyclopedia that his father, an unenthusiastic reader, had bought to fill his gentleman's library. Del Toro was a good draftsman, but he knew that he would never be a master. (His favorite was Richard Corben, whose drawings, in magazines such as Heavy Metal, helped define underground comics: big fangs, bigger breasts.) So del Toro turned to film. In high school, he made a short about a monster that crawls out of a toilet and, finding humans repugnant, scuttles back to the sewers. He loved working on special effects, and his experiments with makeup grew outlandish. There is a photograph from this period of del Toro, now overweight, transformed into the melting corpse of a fat woman; his eyeballs drip down his cheeks like cracked eggs. ("It's a gelatine," he recalled. "It looks messy, but it's all sculpted.")
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He attended a new film school, the Centro de Investigación y Estudios Cinematográficos, in Guadalajara, and after graduating, in 1983, he published a book-length essay on Alfred Hitchcock. (Discussing "The Birds," del Toro notes that "in the terror genre, an artist, unbound by 'reality,' can create his purest reflection of the world—the cinematic equivalent of poetry.") In 1985, he launched Necropia, a special-effects company, making low-end bogeymen for films being shot in Mexico City. "Producers would call me on Friday and say, 'We need a monster on Tuesday,' " he said. In 1993, he released his first feature, "Cronos," about a girl whose tenderness for her grandfather deepens after he becomes a vampire. The girl has her abuelo sleep in a toy box, not a coffin, and pads it with stuffed animals. The grandfather doesn't want to kill, and his predicament is captured with grim humor; at one point, he licks the results of a nosebleed off a bathroom floor.
"Cronos" won an award at Cannes, and del Toro began working in Hollywood, where monster design was in a torpid state. The last major period of innovation dated back to 1979, when the Swiss artist H. R. Giger unveiled his iconic designs for Ridley Scott's "Alien." The titular beast's head resembles a giant dripping phallus, and for years afterward monster designers emulated Giger's lurid sliminess. In 1982, the effects technicians Stan Winston and Rob Bottin slathered the spastic creatures of "The Thing" with Carbopol, a polymer used in personal lubricants; four years later, in "The Fly," Jeff Goldblum's skin sloughs off, revealing the gelatinous insect within.
Del Toro embraced the cliché with his first studio feature, "Mimic" (1997), in which oozing giant insects overtake the New York subway system. But his subsequent monsters were strikingly original, combining menace with painterly beauty. Starting in 2004, he made two lush adaptations of the "Hellboy" comic-book series, which is about a clumsy horned demon who becomes a superhero and battles monsters. The vicious incisors of "tooth fairies" were offset by wings resembling oak leaves; the feathers of a skeletal Angel of Death were embedded with blinking eyes that uncannily echoed the markings on a peacock. A del Toro monster is as connected to a succubus in a Fuseli painting as it is to the beast in "Predator." His films remind you that looking at monsters is a centuries-old ritual—a way of understanding our own bodies through gorgeous images of deformation.
The dark, sensual fairy tale "Pan's Labyrinth" (2006), del Toro's most heralded film, is not what is typically conjured by the phrase "monster movie." As is often the case in del Toro's work, the worst monsters are human beings. In the violent aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, a defiantly imaginative girl, Ofelia, recoils from her harsh life—her stepfather is a Fascist captain who tortures dissidents—and descends into a ravishing underworld of sprites and satyrs. Though she barely evades the jaws of a famished ogre, she ultimately finds comfort in this spectral realm. For del Toro, who jokes that he "never willingly goes outside," fantasy, even violent fantasy, is a refuge. The story of Ofelia inverts the usual scheme of horror; it's as if one of the teens in "A Nightmare on Elm Street" had fought to remain trapped inside the world of dreams.
Many contemporary filmmakers seem embarrassed by the goofiness of monsters, relegating them to an occasional lunge from the shadows. Del Toro wants the audience to gawk. In the Mexican film industry, he told me, "it was so expensive to create a monster that, even if it was cardboard, they showed it a lot." For del Toro, one of the key moments of horror cinema is in "Alien," when Harry Dean Stanton "cannot run because he is in awe of the creature when it's lowering itself in front of him. It's a moment of man in front of a totemic god."
Del Toro has battled to get his opulent vision of monsters onscreen. Miramax, which financed "Mimic," found del Toro tediously arty and commissioned a second-unit director to add what del Toro calls "cheap scares." He returned half his salary for "Hellboy," and his entire salary for "Pan's Labyrinth," because he insisted on creature effects that his backers considered too expensive.
"Pan's Labyrinth" received an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, but del Toro refused to reposition himself as a highbrow auteur. His next film was the hectic "Hellboy II." As del Toro has put it, "There is a part of me that will always be pulp." He may be proudest of his schlockiest creations, such as the vampire Nomak, in "Blade II" (2002), whose toothy mouth folds open sideways, like labia, forming the ultimate vagina dentata; or the behemoth plant of "Hellboy II" (2008), which ravages Lower Manhattan like a greenhouse Godzilla. The plant monster's demise is one of the most memorable in movie history: it spurts emerald blood that covers everything it touches in a lush carpet of moss. Del Toro does not worry that such fancies will sully his reputation. "In emotional genres, you cannot advocate good taste as an argument," he said.
Although del Toro makes suspenseful movies, he often seems less like a disciple of Alfred Hitchcock than of Hieronymus Bosch. "I don't see myself ever doing a 'normal' movie," del Toro said. "I love the creation of these things—I love the sculpting, I love the coloring. Half the joy is fabricating the world, the creatures." The movie that he most longs to make is an adaptation of a grandly ridiculous H. P. Lovecraft novella, "At the Mountains of Madness," in which explorers, venturing into Antarctica, discover malevolent aliens in a frozen, ruined city. Some of the aliens mutate wildly, which would allow del Toro to create dozens of extreme incarnations. He said, "If I get to do it, those monsters will be so terrifying."
Del Toro, now forty-six, owns a mock-Tudor mansion in Westlake Village, a sterile suburb northwest of Los Angeles. The house, which is a three-minute drive from an equally large house where he lives with his wife, Lorenza, and their two daughters, functions as his office, but it's also a temple to his obsession with collecting—Forrest Ackerman's mansion reborn.
Even outside, there are ghoulish touches. A weathervane on the roof is a dragon, and the front windowpanes are darkly tinted, suggesting a serial killer deflecting the postman. A sign on the lawn announces the estate's formal name: Bleak House. Del Toro calls the place his "man cave."
I knocked, and an assistant hollered for me to come in. When I opened the door, a rectangle of California sunshine invaded the dark entryway, landing on the hideous face of a large, lunging demon. It was a life-size cast-resin model of Sammael, from "Hellboy," standing where a decorator would have placed a welcoming spray of flowers. Behind it, French doors offered a shimmery view of the back-yard pool. Sammael was far from the only model on display. Del Toro had filled the house with dozens of monster maquettes from his films—scale models created by special-effects shops during the early design phase, allowing the imaginary to become palpable. Del Toro had given Sammael, who has a lion's mane of writhing tentacles, a subtle motif of asymmetry; one front limb is slightly longer than the other, setting his gait off balance, and he has an extra eye on the right side of his snout. Doug Jones, a mime turned actor who has played creatures in dozens of films, including "Hellboy" and "Pan's Labyrinth," says that, in the subculture of monster design, del Toro's creatures are couture. "It's because he's a fanboy," he said. "He knows exactly how fanboys critique movies. He anticipates the 'That wouldn't really work!' response."
I heard a heavy shuffling sound: del Toro, who at the time weighed more than three hundred pounds, was coming from a back room. (As Doug Jones observes, "Guillermo doesn't pick up his feet when he walks.") Del Toro gave me a genial slap on the back, his hand like a bear paw. Bleak House, he said, had been "inspired by Forry Ackerman," who had been his "hero of heroes." He said, "He was so nice! If you called him in advance, he would let you come to the house. Then he'd take you out for a slice of cherry pie." Del Toro wore black sweatpants, a black T-shirt, and an unzipped black hoodie, all of which had been laundered so many times that they had faded into clashing inky shades. He had large ice-blue eyes, round glasses, and the rubbery cheeks of a kindergartner. An unruly brown beard, touched with gray, grounded him in manhood. A film of perspiration on his forehead trapped strands of hair that were supposed to be combed to the side.
Looming over the entryway was a huge contemporary painting of St. George and the Dragon, by a Russian painter named Viktor Safonkin. A curator at MOMA would cringe, but del Toro had keyed in on the originality of Safonkin's dragon: all tail and no body, it coiled around St. George's horse like a giant eel. Dragons, he told me, were his "favorite mythological animal," and he was finally getting to design one: Smaug, the talking serpent who hoards the treasure in J. R. R. Tolkien's "The Hobbit."
Del Toro, in the biggest project of his career, had signed on to direct two films based on the novel. The project had already received enormous publicity, but, curiously, it did not yet have a green light. The film rights to "The Hobbit" were shared by New Line Cinema and M-G-M, and M-G-M, which had amassed a crippling $3.7-billion debt, could not finance a blockbuster project. But "The Hobbit" was likely to be a huge moneymaker, and del Toro felt certain that funds would be forthcoming. Peter Jackson, who had directed the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, was an executive producer of the "Hobbit" films. After Jackson declared that he had no interest in directing five movies set in Middle Earth, del Toro was named his successor.
Del Toro, with his ornate aesthetic, was hardly the obvious choice to follow Jackson, who in his trilogy had placed Tolkien's mythological characters in realistic landscapes—one worried about Frodo's furry toes getting frostbite as he trudged through heavy snow. As del Toro put it, Jackson had reconstructed the Battle of Mordor with the same exactitude as the Battle of Gallipoli. Del Toro described his own style as more "operatic." Speaking of Tolkien, he said, "I never was a mad fan of the 'Rings' trilogy." "The Hobbit," he said, "is much less black-and-white. The monsters are not just evil. They're charming, funny, seductive. Smaug is an incredibly smart guy!" Del Toro later said that he inevitably imposed his sensibility on source material: "It's like marrying a widow. You try to be respectful of the memory of the dead husband, but come Saturday night . . . bam."
He began to show me around Bleak House. The windows had blood-red curtains and shirred blinds, giving the place a bordello vibe. In the downstairs library, the shelves were rigorously taxonomized. "This is Vampire Fiction," he said, pointing to a row of books. "And this is Vampire Fact." He picked up an aged leather-bound volume. "This is a treatise on vampirism, probably one of the best ones ever published, from 1759." The book, "Dissertations Upon the Apparitions of Angels, Dæmons, and Ghosts, and Concerning the Vampires of Hungary, Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia," was printed in Paris and helped establish the idea that vampirism was contagious. ("Those who have been sucked suck also in their turn.") Del Toro, who has inflexible preferences when it comes to vampires, admires the Polish folkloric tradition, in which erotic fangs are replaced by vile stingers. "They are the nastiest creatures," he said. "Nothing romantic about them." In 2009, he co-wrote a novel, "The Strain," a gory update of the Polish typology—and a riposte to the swoony "Twilight."
We headed upstairs, del Toro adopting the hushed garrulity of a docent. The walls were crowded with framed images, as at the Barnes Foundation, except in this case the collection featured Edward Gorey illustrations, concept-art sketches of the demon from "Fantasia" ("I'm an obsessive Disney-villain guy"), and comic-book panels, including a Richard Corben drawing of a mutant with four breasts. Del Toro himself still drew. "I cannot learn technique from Caravaggio and those guys—how they did it, I have no idea," he said. "That's why I started collecting original illustrations. I wanted to see the brushstroke or the Wite-Out. Then I could understand how they did it."
Over a doorframe, del Toro had hung a Magic Marker skeleton drawn by his older daughter, Mariana, now fourteen. She "comes here to play," he said; his younger daughter, Marisa, who is nine, found Bleak House too frightening. Lorenza, a former veterinary surgeon who is now a homemaker, met del Toro when they were in high school. They had a shared interest in animal anatomy. For a while, she assisted him with his makeup designs. (Uxoriousness, as expressed by del Toro: "She was the best foam technician I've ever had.") It was Lorenza who had transformed him into the leaky-eyed corpse, for a Mexican television show.
The show's script had been silly, he recalled, but when it came to horror it was foolish to focus on dialogue: "Some of the most immortal things in our glossary of images come from movies with not necessarily the greatest screenplays." He refers to a script as a "libretto"; horror, he said, is special because it "excites a nonverbal part of us." He mentioned Kubrick's "The Shining": "You're reading, 'Danny rides his tricycle through the corridors.' You just don't get it—how lonely they are, the rhythm of the prrr, the change of frequency in the wheels, the pattern in the carpet going frh, frh, frh, the lens enhancing the field and the perspective, and the moment he turns the corner the twins being there. You can't explain that in words." Del Toro often spends months planting "visual rhymes" in his movies; the tunnels that Ofelia travels through in "Pan's Labyrinth," for example, all have "feminine apertures." What others call eye candy del Toro calls "eye protein."
We went back downstairs, and del Toro gently tapped a glass panel covering a mounted Malaysian stick bug; its rigid abdomen was nearly a foot long. He had bought the bug at Maxilla & Mandible, the famous Manhattan emporium, on a childhood visit to New York, and its form had steeped in his imagination. Two decades later, it inspired a key sequence in "Pan's Labyrinth." In her first glimpse of magic, Ofelia witnesses a stick bug on her bed change into a chattering pixie. "That's why I collect images," he said. "All this stuff feeds you back."
In an adjoining hallway, he pushed on a bookcase: the inevitable hidden door. A severed leg, from "Cronos," was propped near the fireplace. Del Toro picked it up and smiled. "This is complete with fake hair!" he said. "We used to do this at Necropia. You put the hair through a hypodermic needle and inject it." While running Necropia, he worked regularly on "Hora Marcada," a Mexican homage to "The Twilight Zone." In one episode, del Toro played an ogre who befriends a child; the show was directed by Alfonso Cuarón, who later made "Y Tu Mamá También." They became good friends, and essential editors of each other's work. The ménage-à -trois scene near the end of "Mamá" was del Toro's idea.
The latest addition to Bleak House was a clockwork automaton of a skeleton playing the accordion, which del Toro had bought for sixteen thousand dollars. He has said of his fetish for the macabre, "It's as hard to explain as a sexual proclivity. Some guys like high-heeled shoes. I like horror." The size of the collection was disconcerting; it was as if the 40-Year-Old Virgin had been handed a three-million-dollar decorating budget. Del Toro owned more than five thousand comic books and several puppets of Nosferatu. On a shelf, a posed plastic figurine of Leatherface, from "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," battled Edward Scissorhands. A life-size statue of Boris Karloff, in the guise of Frankenstein's Creature, lurked in a corner of the dining room. At one point, del Toro issued the apt warning, "This is the room where I keep most of my aliens."
The kitchen had no food other than a box of crackers. But, just as Carrie Bradshaw stored Manolos in her oven, del Toro had slyly repurposed the kitchen into a museum of anatomical models. Fetuses crowded the counters. As a young child, del Toro had read a book featuring laparoscopic photographs of babies in utero; the images eventually provided a visual rhyme for "The Devil's Backbone" (2001), a ghost story set during the Spanish Civil War. (A doctor keeps a collection of jarred mutants; the ghost drowns a villain in a pool that has the golden tinge of amniotic fluid.) Del Toro then shared a story that, like many tales he tells about his Mexican youth, had the polished feel of a fable.
"I saw a guy with a split skull walking down the street," he said. "The guy wasn't mentally stable, because somebody had hit him, and I took him to the hospital. And they said, 'We'll take care of him.' I came back the next morning, and they said, 'We returned him to the mental ward.' So I went there, and they said that he escaped in the night. I went to the director and I said, 'What kind of hospital is this?' And she said, 'Look, if you have something to say about it, come and volunteer.' So I got to know the embalmers. One day I visited, and there was a pile of fetuses, new arrivals. Maybe it's magnified in my memory, but I remember it being this tall." He lifted his arm to his waist.
Del Toro had been raised Catholic, but this sight, he said, upended his faith. Humans could not possibly have souls; even the most blameless lives ended as rotting garbage. He became a "raging atheist." Guadalajara was a rough place, and he recalled his childhood as a slide show of harrowing images: the decapitated body of a teen-age boy, found by a barbed-wire fence; a crashed motorist aflame inside his VW Beetle. Del Toro said, "People tell me, 'Oh, you must love forensic photos.' But I can't stand the sight of real pain or blood."
At one point, I asked him why he no longer lived in Mexico. He explained that, in 1998, his father had been kidnapped by bandits for seventy-two days. After the family paid two ransoms, Federico was released, and Guillermo moved his family to America. Although the experience was wrenching, he observed, "I highly recommend you save your father's life. You don't see yourself as somebody's child anymore. You become a man saving another man." He claimed that the experience had ended his "perpetual puberty."
We walked past a display case of Star Wars aliens, and returned to the front door. Del Toro told me that, in a few weeks, he'd be locking up Bleak House for a while. He was taking his family with him to New Zealand, where filming for "The Hobbit" was to begin once he had finished designing dozens of costumes and creatures. The production-design work would be completed at Weta Digital—the Wellington visual-effects firm that Jackson co-founded, and that created much of the dreamscape of James Cameron's "Avatar."
For several months, del Toro said, he had been working on the dragon. "It will be a very different dragon than most," he said. He proposed discussing it over lunch. He went upstairs to retrieve several notebooks. "I keep my journals locked in a safe in my bathroom," he said abashedly, as if this had been the afternoon's sole display of eccentricity. As we left, I noticed that several boxes of eye protein from Amazon—comic books, DVDs, model kits—had been tossed onto the floor before Sammael's gaping maw.
We drove east to Burbank. Del Toro is devoted to the Valley—he calls it "that blessed no man's land that posh people avoid in L.A." We pulled into Ribs U.S.A., a frayed establishment on Olive Avenue. Del Toro ordered ribs and a lemonade, along with a redundant appetizer of "riblets."
He told me that each of his notebooks was "an art project in itself." He'd bought seven leather-bound journals at an antiquarian bookstore in Venice. I opened up his current notebook, which included sketches for "The Hobbit," while he put on a plastic bib bearing the inscription "I ♥ RIBS." Ink drawings of creatures were surrounded by text that jumped between Spanish and English: captions, musings, story ideas. The first drawing I saw was titled "Peces Sin Ojos"—"Fish Without Eyes." Del Toro writes with a fountain pen, and lately he has used a Montblanc ink the color of blood. The over-all effect is that of a Leonardo codex.
I paused at what looked like an image of a double-bitted medieval hatchet. "That's Smaug," del Toro said. It was an overhead view: "See, he's like a flying axe." Del Toro thinks that monsters should appear transformed when viewed from a fresh angle, lest the audience lose a sense of awe. Defining silhouettes is the first step in good monster design, he said. "Then you start playing with movement. The next element of design is color. And then finally—finally—comes detail. A lot of people go the other way, and just pile up a lot of detail."
I turned to a lateral image of the dragon. Smaug's body, as del Toro had imagined it, was unusually long and thin. The bones of its wings were articulated on the dorsal side, giving the creature a slithery softness across its belly. "It's a little bit more like a snake," he said. I thought of his big Russian painting. Del Toro had written that the beast would alight "like a water bird."
Smaug's front legs looked disproportionately small, like those of a T. rex. This would allow the dragon to assume a different aspect in closeup: the camera could capture "hand" gestures and facial expressions in one tight frame, avoiding the quivery distractions of wings and tail. (Smaug is a voluble, manipulative dragon; Tolkien describes him as having "an overwhelming personality.") Smaug's eyes, del Toro added, were "going to be sculpturally very hidden." This would create a sense of drama when the thieving Bilbo stirs the beast from slumber.
Del Toro wanted to be creative with the wing placement. "Dragon design can be broken into essentially two species," he explained at one point. Most had wings attached to the forelimbs. "The only other variation is the anatomically incorrect variation of the six-appendage creature"—four legs, like a horse, with two additional winged arms. "But there's no large creature on earth that has six appendages!" He had become frustrated while sketching dragons that followed these schemes. The journal had a discarded prototype. "Now, that's a dragon you've seen before," he said. "I just added these samurai legs. That doesn't work for me."
Del Toro's production design for "The Hobbit" seemed similarly intent on avoiding things that viewers had seen before. Whereas Jackson's compositions had been framed by the azure New Zealand sky, del Toro planned to employ digital "sky replacement," for a more "painterly effect." Sometimes, instead of shooting in an actual forest, he wanted to shoot amid artificial trees that mimicked the "drawings in Tolkien's book." In his journal, I spied many creatures with no precedent in Tolkien, such as an armor-plated troll that curls into a ball of metal plates. Del Toro said that it would be boring to make a slavish adaptation. "Hellboy," he noted, was based on a popular comic-book series, but he had liberally changed the story line, and the demon had become an emotionally clumsy nerd. "I am Hellboy," he said.
Even the major characters of "The Hobbit" bore del Toro's watermark. In one sketch, the dwarf Thorin, depicted in battle, wore a surreal helmet that appeared to be sprouting antlers. "They're thorns—his name is Thorin, after all," he said. The flourish reminded me of a similar arboreal creature in "Hellboy II," which was slightly worrying. That film is so overpopulated with monsters that it begins to feel like a Halloween party overrun by crashers. Midway through the film, del Toro stages a delightful but extraneous action sequence in a creature-clogged "troll market" hidden beneath the Brooklyn Bridge. The scene comes across as del Toro's bid to supplant the famous Cantina scene in "Star Wars."
The ribs arrived, and after one bite del Toro pushed them aside. "They must have changed management," he said sadly. He had frequented the place while editing "Cronos" and "Blade II" at a studio in the Valley.
He showed me some notebooks from that early period. One contained the first incarnation of the Pale Man, the ogre that chases Ofelia in "Pan's Labyrinth." A metaphor for gluttony, he is del Toro's most personal creation, and the five wordless minutes in which he appears are among the scariest in modern cinema. Ofelia, wandering through a tunnel, encounters the Pale Man sitting motionless at the head of a banquet table covered with food. He is sickeningly thin, his chalky white skin hanging in drapelike folds. He has apparently been cursed—placed, like Tantalus, before objects of temptation. The Pale Man "came out of a really dark, primal place," del Toro said. "I had lost weight, and I saw my belly sagging."
He pointed at the notebook drawing, which depicted a wizened creature. Originally, he said, the ogre was "going to have an old man's face," to indicate that he had been cursed for centuries, but he "didn't like how trivial it seemed." To emphasize the Pale Man's monomaniacal hunger, del Toro asked his designers to render the ogre's face blank, except for a mouth and tiny nasal punctures. He told them, "Let's take out the eyes and put them on a platter before him." The eyes are an allusion to St. Lucy: "I saw a statue when I was a kid where she had the eyes on a little plate. That was pretty freaky, and I liked it."
As Ofelia creeps through the banquet hall, she glances upward. A series of frescoes on the ceiling silently unfurls the story of the Pale Man. In one panel, a hearty-looking ogre devours a child, as in Goya's painting of Saturn. Del Toro told me that, in imagining the monster, he had settled on a twisted rule: the Pale Man could "engage in gluttony only if a kid indulged in gluttony. If a kid broke the rule of not eating, then he could." When Ofelia snatches a grape from the table, the curse is broken and the Pale Man quickens. In a sickening change of silhouette, the ogre picks the eyes off the plate and squishes them into his palms. Placing his hands in front of his face, like goggles, he pursues Ofelia with a shuffling gait, his outstretched fingers like grotesque eyelashes. The image, del Toro said, owes something to a poster for the trashy 1979 film "Phantasm," in which the eyes of a screaming woman can be seen through the hands covering her face.
Closing the notebook, del Toro spoke about his struggles with his weight. His pants size was down from its peak, size 62, but he was concerned about the physical challenges of shooting on location in New Zealand. He worried that his next few films might be his last. Maybe it was time to resist temptation. Looking at the plate of uneaten ribs, he joked, "I'm not just Hellboy—I'm the Pale Man, too."
Before decamping to New Zealand, del Toro checked in on another monster—a new version of Frankenstein's Creature. Since childhood, he had dreamed of adapting Mary Shelley's novel, which he considers a founding text of modern monster mythology. "Monsters exist only if the pretense of reason exists," del Toro had told me. "Before the Age of Reason, you cannot generally claim monsters as an unnatural force. There were dragons on the map—as much of a fact as sunrise." For someone like del Toro, giving birth to a new Frankenstein's Creature is even more exciting than designing an original monster. Just as a Renaissance painter relished the challenge of rendering the Crucifixion, a true monster-maker wants to take on the icons.
"Frankenstein" was one of nearly a dozen projects that del Toro had in development. He hoped to follow "The Hobbit" with a spate of more personal films, including "Saturn and the End of Days," a "deranged little movie" about a boy who witnesses the Rapture from his bedroom window. Del Toro is sometimes mocked for his tendency to announce projects prematurely. Recently, on the Hollywood news site Deadline, a commenter sniped, "This man is more famous for what he hasn't done than what he has."
To secure financing for "Frankenstein" from Universal, which signed a production deal with del Toro in 2007, he had to direct a "proof of concept" video: a brief sequence demonstrating that his Creature was thrilling enough to justify a new film. Though he had mentally sketched out the film, he hadn't even begun a script. Everything would emanate from the monster's design.
Work on Frankenstein's Creature was being done at Spectral Motion, a design studio in a warehouse in Glendale. Most of del Toro's monsters come to life there. When we arrived at the studio, del Toro was greeted by the company's founder, Mike Elizalde, and they amiably exchanged curses in Spanish. Born in Mazatlán, Elizalde has the compact, muscled build of a superhero sidekick. He is a master of animatronics—making puppets move with robotics. With del Toro's support, Spectral Motion has become an avant-garde studio for traditional monster design. It innovates with latex, not pixels.
We headed to the sculpting area, at the back of the warehouse. Monster maquettes were crammed atop bookshelves, like sports trophies in a locker room. A headless Hellboy suit hung on a gray mannequin. Desks were strewn with muscle magazines—the sculptors consult them when designing monster physiques. A torso lay on a long table, harshly illuminated by a swing lamp; several maquettes had been wrapped in black garbage bags, in preparation for storage. The place felt like a makeshift morgue.
At Spectral, a monster design is first rendered in clay. A mold is then made, and a plastic compound is poured into it to produce a maquette. Even when a creature is destined to be primarily computer-generated, del Toro commissions maquettes; seeing a beast in physical form helps him detect design flaws. Elizalde said that del Toro was by far his favorite client, because of "his tremendous imagination and appreciation for what can be done practically." Many directors, Elizalde said, haplessly begged him to make something scary; del Toro provided blueprints from his notebooks, and assessed maquettes like a biologist supervising a dissection. They shared a distrust of excessive computerized effects, which often looked weightless onscreen. "That's part of the goal of his films," Elizalde said. "To celebrate the handmade, old-school creature."
The "Frankenstein" project was tucked in a side room. Just before we got there, del Toro stopped short. "Is that the original casting?" he asked. On a high shelf sat a bust of Gill-man, from "Creature from the Black Lagoon." One of Elizalde's sculptors had borrowed the bust from an archive for close study. Del Toro, who considers Gill-man the apex of man-in-a-suit design, informed me that its creator was Milicent Patrick, a former Disney animator. Patrick did not receive official credit—apparently, nobody involved in "Lagoon" had wanted it known that a woman created the monster. Judging from the staff at Spectral, the demographics of monster design hadn't changed much. Del Toro could recall working with only one female designer, on "Hellboy." "This is a very geeky pursuit," he said.
Sculpting Frankenstein's Creature was Mario Torres, a slight, doleful-looking Latino whose head was covered by a navy-blue ski cap. For "Hellboy II," he had helped del Toro design Mr. Wink, a troll with a mace for a fist. On Torres's desk, near a small portable oven, was a large red clay bust of the Creature. Once the design was settled, the staff at Spectral Motion would use the bust as a guide for creating prosthetics that could be layered on an actor's face.
In accordance with Mary Shelley's description, the head appeared to have been stolen from a cadaver: there was exposed sinew around the jaw, and the cheekbones looked ready to poke through the scrim of flesh. Most appallingly, the Creature lacked a nose; a single bridge bone protruded over an oval breathing hole. Torres had been etching deep furrows into the Creature's forehead, and shaved bits of clay were scattered on his desk, like clippings on a barbershop floor.
The Creature's face was inspired, in part, by the graphic artist Bernie Wrightson, who, in 1983, published a stunning illustrated edition of "Frankenstein." Four panels from the book hung in del Toro's study at Bleak House. Wrightson's Creature has been rudely cobbled together from several corpses, but he also has a lithe, sensual grace. It's Michelangelo's David, if Goliath had won.
For ten seconds, del Toro beheld the bust. "Que lástima," he began—"What a shame." Torres looked ready to pull his ski cap over his eyes. Del Toro unleashed a twenty-minute critique, largely in Spanish, lessening the sting with humor and pats on the back. "Cabrón, is that the nose of Skeletor?" he teased. The nose bridge was implausibly long, del Toro said. The facial decay was inconsistent: if the nostrils and underlying cartilage had rotted away, the earlobes would be long gone, too. "Anything that dangles goes away faster," he noted. And the Creature's furrowed expression was too limiting: "If it was going to be the monster just for a few minutes, I would say it's really good. But it's the main character." The prosthetics for the Creature needed "to accommodate a personality," allowing the actor wearing them to express "calm, vacancy, or even happiness."
"So these lines are too deep?" Elizalde, who was taking notes, said.
"Yes," del Toro said. "It needs to go beyond a good sculpture. You need to really believe." He wanted fewer wrinkles across the face. "It has to convey being newborn."
Del Toro studied the bust again, then told Torres that the jawline should be "bulked up" to look more square—it would be the single allusion to the famous Boris Karloff incarnation.
"Más Karloff," Torres agreed, meekly.
The bust was modelled on the face of Doug Jones, the former mime, who had already agreed to play the role. Jones has performed as a monster so many times that Spectral Motion keeps a full-body cast of him on hand. Jones is prized by del Toro for his tiny head, swanlike neck, and spindly physique (six feet three, a hundred and forty pounds). Makeup artists can layer prosthetics on him without giving him a clunky silhouette. "Is this his real neck?" del Toro said of the bust, admiringly. "He's inhuman!"
Elizalde asked del Toro about the Creature's hair. Shouldn't it be patchy, to emphasize the theme of decay?
"No, it should be long and full," del Toro said. "He's the Iggy Pop of Frankensteins!" He wiggled his hips. Shelley's story had resonated with del Toro as a metaphor for the rebelliousness of teen-agers, and so he wanted the Creature to have the unnerving vitality of a rock star.
Del Toro turned to a nearby table, where he examined a green clay version of the Creature's entire body. The figure, about a foot high, was lurching forward. "This is very twenty-first century," he joked, pointing at the figure's dangling penis.
"Lose it?" Elizalde asked.
"Yes," del Toro said. "We're going to have to make a gauze-cotton loincloth that is sort of falling off." This would indicate that the monster "just came out of the lab table." To underscore the Creature's origin in multiple cadavers, one of the arms needed to be longer than the other.
He complained that the sculpture didn't graphically indicate where the sutures were. "Give me the gauge," he said to Torres. He grabbed the tool and, squinting, carved into the lower right hip; turning the sculpture wheel, he continued the line across the Creature's buttocks. The suture lines, he told Torres, should "look jagged," and the various body parts should have different skin tones.
Torres took some warm clay out of his oven and began Karloffing the jaw. Del Toro, scrutinizing the bust again, ordered a radical rhinoplasty: "Take this nose off." He was questioning Wrightson's breathing-hole concept. Later, he explained, "It's a great graphic idea, but I'm not sure it works so much practically. When an actor acts with his eyes, you want to be looking at his eyes, not at a breathing plug-hole." He requested a nose that looked semi-crushed and "about to slide off."
Elizalde liked the idea. "It's a cool effect, when you have that ridge of the bone, and you have tissue that's sort of stringy and hanging on. It'll be pretty creepy-looking."
Torres asked, "How should the nose look on the inside?"
"Not like this!" del Toro said, patting him. "This is too Halloween." He paused. "Don't you have a skull around?" He flipped through Bone Clones, a catalogue of osteological replicas. "See? There are some very tiny, skinny bones in there." Del Toro told Torres that he would return in four days, "to determine exactly what the nose area should look like."
While we were in the sculpture studio, a pair of assistants filled del Toro's Chrysler sedan with maquettes that had been polished for display at Bleak House. As del Toro emerged outside, the Angel of Death was being gingerly lowered into the back seat. "Es la Virgen MarÃa!" he said. Elizalde wished del Toro good luck in New Zealand. Del Toro climbed in and headed toward the freeway; a seat-belted maquette of Mr. Wink rode shotgun.
Shortly after that, del Toro and his family moved to Wellington, but he never shot a frame of "The Hobbit." For nine months, he waited for a starting date, but M-G-M was unable to resolve its financial woes. In May, after the earliest possible release date for Part 1 slid back a year, to December, 2012, del Toro abruptly flew home to Los Angeles. A statement was released: "In light of ongoing delays in the setting of a start date for filming 'The Hobbit,' I am faced with the hardest decision of my life. After nearly two years of living, breathing and designing a world as rich as Tolkien's Middle Earth, I must, with great regret, take leave from helming these wonderful pictures."
A week later, I met with del Toro in a restaurant on New York's Lower East Side. He was a bit sheepish, perhaps because his sudden departure raised the question of whether he had been fired. Since "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" won eleven Oscars, Jackson had made two overblown messes, "King Kong" and "The Lovely Bones." Revisiting Tolkien would allow him to rebound. And with Jackson in charge, "The Hobbit" could be presented to investors as a no-risk product. Though the studios initially announced that another successor would be found, Jackson soon signed on himself, and the green light came. Steve Cooper, one of the heads of M-G-M, said, "Under Peter's direction, the films will undoubtedly appeal to fans of the original 'L.O.T.R.' trilogy."
At the restaurant, del Toro had trouble squeezing into the booth; he had gained weight in Wellington. He was adamant that he had left "The Hobbit" of his own accord, but his language seemed careful. "The visual aspect was under my control," he said. "There was no interference with that creation." In collaboration with Jackson and two screenwriters, del Toro had completed drafts for Parts 1 and 2. But final revisions were still to come, and he noted that any "strong disagreements" between him and Jackson would have occurred when they debated which scenes to film and which to cut—"You know, 'I want to keep this.' 'I want to keep that.' " But, he said, he had quit "before that impasse." I asked him if there had been creative tension. At Weta, he said, the production delay had made everyone anxious, and he "could not distinguish between a real tension and an artificial tension."
He admitted that there had been discomfort over his design of Smaug. "I know this was not something that was popular," he said. He said that he had come up with several audacious innovations—"Eight hundred years of designing dragons, going back to China, and no one has done it!"—but added that he couldn't discuss them, because the design was not his intellectual property. "I have never operated with that much secrecy," he said of his time at Weta.
Del Toro said that it had hurt "like a motherfucker" to leave the production, but I got the sense that he had found it even more painful to be away from L.A. "I really missed my man cave," he said. In an attempt to approximate his collections at Bleak House, assistants had shipped two dozen boxes of duplicate material to Wellington, but del Toro still felt as if he were in a sensory-deprivation tank. A different kind of man would have enjoyed being close to the New Zealand Alps, but del Toro, the ultimate indoorsman, rarely left Wellington. Being stuck in New Zealand caused him to lose important creative opportunities. He had agreed to launch a new animation label at Disney, Double Dare You, specializing in scary movies for kids, but the deal foundered during his absence.
The most difficult part, he said, was "making peace with the fact that somebody else is going to have control of your creatures, your wardrobe, and change it, or discard it, or use it. All options are equally painful." He added, "The stuff I left behind is absolutely gorgeous. I'm absolutely in love with it." He suddenly became animated, waving his hands in the air like a conductor navigating a treacherous passage of Mahler. "We created a big exhibit in the last few weeks, in preparation for a studio visit. I had color-coded the movie: there was a green passage, a blue passage, a crimson passage, a golden passage. In Tolkien, there is a clear season for autumn, winter, summer, spring in the journey. And I thought, I cannot just stay in four movements in two movies. It will become monotonous. So I thought of organizing the movie so you have the feeling of going into eight seasons. So a certain area of the movie was coded black and green, a certain area was crimson and gold, and when we laid out the movie in a big room, we had all the wardrobe, all the props, all the color-coded key art. When you looked and saw that beautiful rainbow, you could comprehend that there was a beautiful passage." His scheme would probably be abandoned, he said later: "Not much is going to make it. That's my feeling." Would his art be returned to him? "I hope to get maquette visitation rights." But he was grateful not to have them already at Bleak House; they would be a torment.
At the restaurant, he reminded me that the subtitle of "The Hobbit" is "There and Back Again." He said, "There was a moment in the screenplay—I don't know if it's going to survive or not—where it was made clear that the purpose of the journey is for Bilbo to know that he wants to be home, to say, 'I understand my place in the world.' For me, the journey to New Zealand was like that."
Del Toro had gone on a quest, but he came home with no treasure. The triumph of "Pan's Labyrinth" was now five years old. He needed a comeback project. In Wellington, he hadn't been able to film the proof-of-concept video for "Frankenstein." That could be next. But he was thinking of taking an even bigger risk, and pursuing the adaptation of Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness"—his "Sisyphean project." He had begun sketching images for an adaptation in 1993 and had completed a script in 1998. But the project had seemed too daunting; digital effects weren't yet good enough to render creatures that changed shape far more radically than Transformers. Then, while del Toro was in Wellington, "Avatar" was released, and its landmark effects made "Madness" seem plausible. Crucially, James Cameron, a friend, had agreed to be a producer for "Madness," sharing his expertise in designing strange worlds. And del Toro was now less wary of making digital monsters. At Weta, he had experimented with a "virtual camera," which allows a director to maintain a sense of physicality when filming a C.G.I. creature. "They lay out the animation, you grab a camera, and you can change the angles within that virtual environment," he said. "One day, I ended up dripping sweat from handling the virtual camera on the motion-capture stage. This camera would be very handy on 'Madness.' "
The movie would not be an easy sell, though. Del Toro envisaged "Madness" as a "hard R" epic, shot in 3-D, with a blockbuster budget. Creating dozens of morphing creatures would be expensive, and much of the film needed to be shot somewhere that approximated Antarctica; one of the most disquieting aspects of Lovecraft's novella is that the explorers are being pursued by monsters in a vast frozen void, and del Toro wanted to make the first horror movie on the scale of a David Lean production. But a "tent-pole horror film," as del Toro put it, hadn't been made in years. High-budget productions such as "Alien" and "The Shining" had been followed by decades of cheaper thrills. "The natural flaw of horror as a genre is that, ninety-nine per cent of the time, it's a clandestine genre," he said. "It lives and breathes—'Texas Chainsaw Massacre,' the first 'Saw,' 'The Blair Witch Project'—in dark little corners that come out and haunt you. Rarely is there a beautiful orchid that blooms." He mentioned Hitchcock's "The Birds": "It was a major filmmaker using cutting-edge optical technology and special effects. It was a big-budget movie. It had Edith Head designing costumes, it had all the luxuries. And it was appealing because it had all the polished aspects of a studio film."
Del Toro thought that nearly all his previous movies had conveyed "sympathy for the monsters." With "Madness," he said, he would terrify the audience with their malignancy. First, though, he needed to make Universal executives feel that, in allowing del Toro to design a creature-filled world, they weren't being reckless—rather, they were commissioning a variation on "Avatar," the most successful film in history. "Studios look backward," del Toro said. "Filmmakers look forward."
To anybody who owns thousands of comic books, "At the Mountains of Madness" is as central to the American canon as "Moby-Dick." H. P. Lovecraft, who was born in 1890 and died in 1937, wrote densely interlinked stories that convey "cosmic horror." More than one tale features a giant tentacled alien named Cthulhu. Lovecraft refers to Cthulhu several times in "Madness," and del Toro, in writing his script, had devised a way to integrate the iconic beast into the climax. ("Its membranous wings extend, filling the horizon, its abominable head silhouetted by lightning in the clouds!") Del Toro could create a totemic god.
Although Lovecraft's work was dismissed in his lifetime, contemporary writers including Stephen King and Joyce Carol Oates have celebrated him as the heir to Edgar Allan Poe. Lovecraft's prose may have the highest adverbial density in English: "I saw the freshly glistening and reflectively iridescent black slime which clung thickly to those headless bodies and stank obscenely." But, like an outsider artist, he is so committed to his lunatic visions that they achieve a strange grandeur.
In "Madness," twenty Edwardian scientists sail from Tasmania to Antarctica in search of geological samples, and they discover a mountain range that dwarfs the Himalayas. On one summit is a hidden, ruined city whose bizarre architecture suggests that its inhabitants were not human. As the scientists explore the ice-encased structures, they discover "pictorial friezes" revealing an awful secret. Hyper-intelligent aliens, the Old Ones, landed on earth millions of years ago. Creating organic life forms as tools, the Old Ones fashioned every creature on the planet, including human beings. One of their inventions, shape-shifters known as Shoggoths, were intended as slaves; but the Shoggoths rebelled, slaughtering the Old Ones. After the explorers accidentally thaw a few surviving Old Ones, a hidden army of Shoggoths emerges from the shadows, and the humans find themselves caught in an alien war. Del Toro loves the story, in part because Lovecraft combines terror—the panicked effort to escape the creatures—with metaphysical horror: "The book essentially says how scary it is to realize that we are a cosmic joke."
This past summer, Universal gave del Toro seed money, allowing him to create an "art room" for "Madness." Once again, del Toro was designing creatures without a green light. By the end of the year, he would present his vision to the studio. If Universal executives said yes, he would start filming by June; if not, he would have provided more support for the parental claim that monsters don't really exist.
I met with del Toro in Los Angeles on the first day of preproduction. He had hired five artists to engage in ten weeks of "design promiscuity" at Lightstorm, James Cameron's production company, which is in Santa Monica. Parts of "Avatar" had been designed in the same suite of offices. Corkboards were covered with constellations of silver pushpins; in an interior room, "Avatar" maquettes were still on display.
Del Toro had transformed his own silhouette. He had lost twenty-seven pounds in three weeks, after undergoing sleeve-gastrectomy surgery. "They take three-quarters of your stomach out and throw it out!" he said. "I feel great." That day, he had eaten a light lunch with his daughter Mariana, and in an elevator they had played a family game: Guillermo aimed his belly and crushed her, gently, into a corner. In Spanish, she lamented, "This game won't be fun when you're no longer fat." Mariana, who is slender, has the flinty confidence of Thora Birch in "Ghost World"; she was toting an iPad, upon which she had sketched an apple-green, lizardy creature—a monster leavened with Nickelodeon cheer.
For the first few days, del Toro wanted his "Madness" artists to draw without precepts. These men had been sketching Shoggoths since junior high school. What had Lovecraft made them see? "Lovecraft is actually really stringent about describing the Old Ones," he noted. "And his design is really hard to solve, because they are essentially winged cucumbers."
He wanted the creatures in "Madness" to be fascinating, not disgusting. He said, "Normally, creatures are designed in the same way that gargoyles were carved in churches—for maximum shock value." He cited Ray Harryhausen, a master of stop-motion animation, who designed the effects for the 1981 "Clash of the Titans": "He used to say, 'Whenever you think of a creature, think of a lion—how a lion can be absolutely malignant or benign, majestic, depending on what it's doing. If your creature cannot be in repose, then it's a bad design.' When you see our creatures, you're not going to say, 'Oh, what a great movie monster.' You're going to say, 'What aquarium, what specimen jar did that thing come from?' They need to look entirely possible in their impossibility." He'd been watching nature documentaries. "The worst thing that you can do is be inspired solely by movie monsters. You need to be inspired by National Geographic, by biological treatises, by literature, by fine painters, by bad painters."
At Lightstorm, del Toro met first with Callum Greene, a British producer. Greene warned him that, without discipline, his budget could easily exceed Universal's limit of a hundred and twenty-five million dollars. Greene had identified thousands of moments in the script where special effects would be employed.
Most of them, del Toro declared, required C.G.I. "Animatronic effects don't look good in daylight," he noted, and much of the movie would be shot in foggy snowscapes. He would be adopting an "Eastern palette," in which whiteness connoted death. "Also, a physical approach doesn't lend itself to the way I want to depict the creatures that much, because I want them to look very heavy. You'd have to do multiple core molds, and—you know how it is—the heavier the puppet is, the easier it breaks down. On set, you always end up saying, 'Do not hit the deadly monster too hard, or it will break!' " When possible, del Toro said, he would initiate a shock sequence with physical objects, to ground the viewer in something real. The Old Ones are first seen as corpses, and Mike Elizalde could make those at Spectral Motion.
Del Toro wanted to shoot in Canada, which offered tax rebates. Greene proposed filming outside Vancouver: "You're looking at mountains covered in snow every day." But, he warned, "every night with two hundred people on per diem in a hotel is money."
"We're going to shoot there for a long period of time," del Toro insisted. Otherwise, "you take away the scope instantly, and then you are doing a fucking Hallmark movie-of-the-week." He also insisted on having two weeks to shoot landscapes in Antarctica, where, he noted later, scientists had recently mapped a massive mountain range hidden under ice.
He told Greene that digital-effects houses needed to understand that each Shoggoth had at least "eight permutations." He said, "Let's say that creature A turns into creature A-B, then turns into creature B, then turns into creature B-C. And by the time it lands on a guy it's creature E." He discussed one grisly Shoggoth transformation: "It's like when you grab a sock and you pull it inside out. From his mouth, he extrudes himself."
Del Toro then visited his art team—guys who nodded in unison when someone said, "You know how sea cucumbers puke their insides out to evade predators?" The veteran was Wayne Barlowe, a mild, bespectacled man in his fifties; he had collaborated with del Toro on "Hellboy" and had helped define many of the creatures in "Avatar," including the Great Leonopteryx, the flying beast that Jake Sully tames on the planet Pandora. Barlowe still draws with pencils, and he sat in a sunny corner room. He had been sketching Cthulhu in a surprisingly soft hand. In his rendition, many appendages emanated from a central vertical column; it had the majesty of a redwood tree. When del Toro looked at it, he said, "I love the idea of the floating things!" Cthulhu was surrounded by satellite parasites, just as some sharks are haloed by schools of fish. Barlowe said that he was going for a "regal look," and pointed at the creature's neck. "It's like an Elizabethan collar!" del Toro said, smiling. "Great."
The group's gross-out specialist was Guy Davis, the author of "The Marquis," a graphic novel that features, as del Toro put it, "awesome genitalia-like monsters." Davis, a sweet man with a downturned smile and a thinning buzz cut, showed del Toro a Shoggoth mid-transformation.
"Really nice," del Toro said. "It's sort of like a tapeworm."
"Yeah," Davis said. "When it's forming, instead of just forming eyes, maybe it's bubbling like mud, or pudding, so you have these sockets forming but no eyes yet. Then it gets one eye and has this cavernous companion. Mummies always freak me out because they have sockets but no eyes."
"I hadn't noticed," del Toro teased. "Lovely."
Allen Williams was the neophyte; del Toro had hired him at Comic-Con, in July, after seeing his illustrations on display. Several of Williams's sketches were inspired by marine life: a morphing Shoggoth looked like giant jellyfish sliding across the Antarctic ice. It would be especially creepy, Williams said, if the viewer could see innards "vaguely moving under membranous material." Del Toro nodded. Pointing at a creature with a profusion of fins, he said, "I like this, because it's very much like a lionfish"—one of the weirdest inhabitants of a coral reef.
Though del Toro was enthusiastic about Williams's work, he admonished him for incorporating too many signs of "infection or disease." "These creatures are like Ferraris," del Toro said. He sliced the air with his hands, suggesting aerodynamic contours. "The Old Ones didn't create shitty machines."
Peter Konig, who also designs characters for video games, sat in a pitch-dark room, before a glowing screen. His work was sharply etched, like Egyptian hieroglyphs. He had been playing around with symmetry, and showed a Shoggoth that appeared to be perched on spindly legs. With a click, he flipped the image upside down, and the legs became long arms, like those on a monkey.
"The silhouette works both ways," del Toro said.
Next, Konig showed a Shoggoth whose tentacles were surging from what resembled a long, retracting foreskin. The creature had dozens of eyes, randomly placed, like those on a potato.
"Dude," del Toro said, laughing. "It's like a botched circumcision!" He told Konig that he was banning phallic imagery—the most obvious sign that an alien was designed by a nerdy Homo sapiens.
Del Toro told me that the group was off to a great start, but he was eager to impose discipline. "I will ruin their lives," he joked. "There is no rhythm, and everything is too busy."
Even though del Toro's team had three months to experiment, the challenge was immense. The frozen city, for example, could emerge only after the artists had settled how the Old Ones moved, ate, and slept. "If you spend enough time strolling in the street—seeing a cathedral, seeing a door opening and closing in a building or a car—you understand the ergonomics of human beings," he said. With a few key shots, del Toro needed to conjure, wordlessly, the lives of the aliens.
He also had to master 3-D. He had been studying "Avatar" on his laptop, and praised the "crystalline depth" that Cameron had created for Pandora. He said, "What is really great about 3-D is not what comes at you but the depth—what I call the 'aquarium effect.' "
The digital spectacle of "Madness" was worlds away from the days of collodion scars and rubber suits. I asked him if technology was effacing his art. "The great consolation always comes in the form of Hitchcock," he said. "Hitchcock did 3-D, wholeheartedly, with 'Dial M for Murder.' He would try every gimmick, every lens, every camera mount. He's the patron saint for my proclivities." With some embarrassment, he noted that, at Comic-Con, he had introduced a line of "Pan's Labyrinth" figurines. "Hitchcock would have gone to Comic-Con," he said. "He would have signed collectible shower curtains. He was a showman and an auteur."
In early December, on the evening be fore del Toro presented his vision for "Madness" to Universal, he was fretting at Bleak House. The mansion had been expanded since the summer. The French doors had been dismantled, and a new hallway led to the Rain Room, a red parlor whose sole window was not a window at all. Old-school effects behind the glass—a mirror, a projector—insured that it was always a dark and stormy night.
The effect mimicked a similar window in the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland. A few months earlier, del Toro had announced plans to develop a feature film based on the attraction. Like "Frankenstein," a haunted-house movie was something he had contemplated for years, but he wanted both projects to be realized after "Madness." He said, "Seriously, I've been in preproduction between 'The Hobbit' and 'Madness' for two and a half years." He could handle "only so much foreplay."
Del Toro was pallid, and it did not look as if he had continued losing weight: he was still wearing black sweats. He went into the kitchen and rummaged through the freezer. "Want a Popsicle?" he said, taking one for himself. His lips were soon stained red.
The designs created at Lightstorm had been delivered to Bleak House, and del Toro's assistants had prepared presentation boards. They were on a kitchen counter, and del Toro began going through them.
The aquarium look that he had spoken of at Lightstorm had clearly become a governing metaphor. "I wanted the whole city to be like an abandoned coral reef," he said. He showed me an image of a cavernous interior space. Everything was tubular and encrusted with skeletal remains—abandoned tools. "A coral reef is a shitload of skeletons fused together, right? All the technology those creatures have, all their technology is organic. You and I use metals, plastics. These creatures don't have weapons or chisels. They create other creatures as tools."
The architecture of the Old Ones was based on "curves and cylinders," he said. "There are no steps, no ramparts. And the edifices are not at all human. There's no balconies or doorways." The city resembled a labyrinth of pneumatic tubes.
As del Toro had promised, the city's form intimated the silhouette of the Old Ones. "They are essentially suppositories," he said. "They sort of torpedo through the tubes." But didn't Lovecraft write that they had wings? Del Toro smiled: wings and tentacles had been hidden inside the ovoid silhouette. An Old One opened up "like a Swiss Army knife."
The oceanic motif was particularly evident in the design of the Old Ones. Del Toro's enthusiasm for the lionfish had endured, and the aliens' wings echoed their flamboyant fins. In motion, he explained, the Old Ones would appear buoyant—"unbound by gravity." As the camera tracked them caroming around the city, the viewer would feel disoriented, like a panicked scuba diver inside a cave. "We designed the creatures in such a way that they can go forward or backward, or hang, or be vertical, and they still make sense," he said. Beckoning me into the Rain Room, he opened his laptop and showed me a rough digital rendering of an Old One. As Peter Konig had done at Lightstorm, he flipped the image upside down; then he flipped it on its side—in all formations, locomotion was plausible. "It has no forward and no backward," he explained. "If this moves forward or backward in a way that I can recognize, it's boring. Have you seen a Spanish dancer move in the water? They go like this"—his hand made an undulating motion. "It's muscular and creepy."
The Shoggoths, he said, performed an even more fluid transformation. Creating them would push digital technology to the limit: you weren't just tweaking a polygon; you were ditching one polygon for another. Del Toro had commissioned several maquettes from Mike Elizalde. The cast-resin monsters rested on beds of artificial snow, and hovering Shoggoths were held aloft with thin metal poles. The models were poignant relics of twentieth-century technology, but they helped connect del Toro's current vision with the tradition of Forrest Ackerman. These were the next Famous Monsters of Filmland.
The Shoggoths had a racecar sheen. "They are pristine," he said. "They are functional. They are not asymmetric. Symmetry is efficiency. And these guys need to be efficient." He wasn't sure yet if the Shoggoth palette should be "pearlescent" or "circulatory"—reds and blues. Since the Shoggoths could mutate into anything, there was no fixed silhouette, but many would feature a "protoplasmic bowl," an abdomen-like area from which new forms could sprout. One maquette was a disorienting twist on classic Lovecraftian form. It looked like a giant octopus head with tentacles jutting from the top and the bottom—a fearful symmetry. "That's my belly in the middle," del Toro joked.
In another maquette, the Shoggoth had sprouted two heads, each extending from brontosaurus-like necks. Their skulls could be smashed together to destroy victims. "The idea is to create craniums that function as jaws," he said. The Shoggoths would often create ghastly parodies of human forms; as they pursued the humans, they would imitate them, imperfectly.
Having read the script, I knew that the body count would be high. ("BAMMMMM!!!!! A massive Shoggoth explodes out from the tower!!!!! It grabs and devours Gordon in mid-sentence!") But del Toro promised that the film was "not gory." Victims would be "absorbed" by the aliens in ways that were "eerie and scary." He explained, "When you watch a documentary of a praying mantis eating the head of its mate, because of the complexity of the mouth mechanism, you're fascinated. It's a horrible act, but you're fascinated." Though he wouldn't be spattering blood, he said that he needed to fight Universal for an R rating, "to have the freedom to make it really, really uncomfortable and nasty."
The meeting at Universal, he said, was at ten-thirty: "I've never been this nervous going to a meeting. This invested." He added, "There are certain rules to dating a movie. You try to fall in love when it's a reality, and try not to be completely head over heels on the first date. But I'm hopelessly in love with the creatures."
Adam Fogelson and Donna Langley, the top executives at Universal, would attend, as would James Cameron. Del Toro said, "He's supporting what I want. He said to me, 'You did this with five guys in ten weeks? That's astounding.' "
Del Toro indicated that he would not be willing to make radical adjustments to his vision. "I don't want to make a movie called 'At the Mountains of Madness.' I want to make this movie. And if I cannot make this movie I'll do something else." He paused. "It'll be horrible."
Fogelson was impressed with the presentation. "The sense of scope, the sense of danger, and just the sheer popcorn commercial appeal of the creatures that he was presenting to us were a sight to behold," he told me. "At each step, he wowed us, and, to be candid, he knew— and we all knew—that a 'wow' was required to keep this movie moving forward. It's a big bet." Still, Universal wasn't quite ready to give the project a green light. Del Toro went to another meeting, and then another. As of late January, the project remained potential energy. Del Toro was confident that his creatures would one day roam the multiplex, but I remembered that he had called Hollywood "the Land of the Slow No."
On that December night at Bleak House, I noticed that del Toro had moved some of his journals from the bathroom safe to a shelf in the Rain Room. I asked to see early sketches for "Madness."
The notebook was from 1993. He turned the pages, stopped, and smiled. "Look!" he said. It was an image of one of the explorers falling into icy water. An inky creature lunging at him looked breathtakingly similar to the Shoggoth with symmetrical tentacles. Del Toro's monsters had inhabited his mind for nearly two decades. From the beginning, del Toro had imagined that his creatures, unlike Lovecraft's, would have a fatal vulnerability—one that explained why the horrible beasts had remained trapped in Antarctica. Salt water: it dissolved a Shoggoth like a slug. ♦
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