The Times
Jerome Starkey, in Kabul

The man who, in effect, ended General Stanley McChrystal’s glittering military career said yesterday that he thought the top commander in Afghanistan was “unfireable”.

In a candid interview with The Times, the journalist Michael Hastings said he never imagined he would get as much access to the general and his inner circle as he did. He insisted he was simply doing his job as a magazine reporter and rebutted suggestions that there was anything underhand about the methods he employed. Hastings’s devastating exposé of General McChrystal and his aides led President Obama to dismiss the man credited widely as the mastermind of America’s strategy in Afghanistan.

“I realised that it was very strong material for a profile,” Hastings, 30, said. “But I thought McChrystal was unfireable. I thought his position was very well protected.”

The President’s decision, on Wednesday morning, hit General McChrystal “like a steam train”, a close aide said yesterday. It stunned his headquarters staff and, were it not for the surprise appointment of General David Petraeus in his place, might have derailed the American war effort altogether, some analysts have said.

In the Rolling Stone profile, entitled The Runaway General, Hastings detailed conversations between General McChrystal and a small cadre of loyal aides that took place between mid-April and mid-May in Paris, Berlin, Kabul and Kandahar. In a series of vignettes he showed them mocking, criticising or dismissing almost all of the senior civilians in and around their chain of command.

One of the comments concerned Mr Obama, with General McChrystal’s aides saying he was “disappointed” by a meeting with the President, which he described as “just a ten minute photo-op”.

Hastings described the General’s staff as “a collection of killers, spies, geniuses, patriots, political operators and outright maniacs”. He watched them on a night out in Paris, drinking until they were “completely shitfaced”.

“They are fun guys to hang out with,” Hastings told The Times. “They are impressive people. I just don’t know if their solution for Afghanistan is appropriate.”

The freelance reporter, who grew up in Vermont and upstate New York, insists he did not set out to have General McChrystal fired. “It was to get people to say, ‘Hey, what’s going on in Afghanistan?’. It’s often as if America doesn’t even realise it’s fighting two wars.”

Nor is he a pacifist. His younger brother, Jeff, 28, was awarded a Bronze Star for his time as a platoon commander in Iraq. “War is not something abstract to me,” he said. “Many of my friends have suffered immensely. I just want to make sure that the sacrifices are worth it.”