Pecha returned from leave in mid-January. He, Meshkin, and Mazzocchi were sitting on the small enclosed deck right off the aid station, smoking cigars, when a sniper’s bullet passed right between them and knocked out a light above Mazzocchi’s head. That they had been targeted there suggested to them that locals were telling insurgents that the deck was a good place at which to randomly fire, that American soldiers often hung out there. Or maybe the enemy had just seen the cigar smoke.
Either way, for Pecha, the bullet was yet another reminder that he had to try to improve relations with the locals—a challenge, since the elders from the Kamdesh shura had begun offering excuse after excuse for not visiting Camp Keating: “So-and-so is too old to make the walk,” they would say, or “That one doesn’t have any shoes,” or “The weather is bad.” Meanwhile, the outpost continued to provide a significant amount of humanitarian assistance to local villages—blankets, jackets, shoes, and food—and the “Radio Kamdesh” idea was finally starting to come together. Taliban propagandists had been airing clandestine radio broadcasts warning locals that the Americans were planning to kill innocent people, steal their land, and kidnap their children. The enemy radio hosts would stay up all night singing the poetry of jihad; Safulko called these recitations Taliban death jams. Victorino suspected that the broadcasts originated in Kamdesh Village itself, from hand-held radios, the transmissions carrying throughout the area because the village was at such a high elevation. The Americans wanted to mount a counterinformation campaign in Kamdesh District, and to that end, Master Sergeant Ryan Bodmer, a U.S. Army Reserves civil-affairs NCO, was posted to Combat Outpost Keating from the PRT in Kala Gush to oversee the project.
With Markert’s support, Bodmer had $130,000 worth of equipment, including a thirty-foot radio tower, shipped to Camp Keating. The goal was to broadcast news and miscellaneous music. Just as Dennis Sugrue of 3-71 Cav had done to promote Radio Naray, Bodmer made sure to distribute hundreds of small, Chinese-made hand-cranked transistor radios to the local populace. The locals, as they did with the humanitarian aid, bickered over the gifts.
At the White House, on January 23, a newly inaugurated President Barack Obama made his way to the Situation Room to talk about Afghanistan.
The commander of international forces in Afghanistan, General Mc-Kiernan, had an outstanding request for thirty thousand additional U.S. troops. While the new president had campaigned on the promise to withdraw American soldiers from Iraq, he had pledged to send more men—at least ten thousand, or two brigades’ worth—to Afghanistan. But Obama was reluctant to send more troops there without taking a harder look at the overall plan for that war, which he regarded as a mess lacking a clear strategy. During his presidential transition, one of President Bush’s top advisers on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Army Lieutenant General Douglas Lute, had briefed the president-elect with a PowerPoint presentation that frankly spelled out for him that there was no strategy in Afghanistan that anyone could either articulate or achieve.63 There were some thirty-six thousand U.S. troops in Afghanistan already, and the president wasn’t about to grant McKiernan’s request and nearly double that number without undertaking a more comprehensive review of what the United States was doing there—and why this war was in its eighth year, with no end in sight.
Having impressively advanced through the ranks, General David Petraeus, leader of the group that had rewritten the Army’s counterinsurgency manual, published in 2006, now headed U.S. Central Command, covering the twenty countries that comprised the European, Pacific, and African commands, including Afghanistan. Petraeus wanted the president to send in more troops and put even more emphasis on counterinsurgency in the Afghanistan war. He was backed in this call by Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.64
Almost a month later, President Obama announced that he would commit an additional seventeen thousand U.S. troops to Afghanistan. “The Taliban is resurgent in Afghanistan, and Al Qaeda supports the insurgency and threatens America from its safe haven along the Pakistani border,” he explained. The president said he would be sending a brigade of Marines and a brigade of Army troops “to meet urgent security needs.” He meanwhile asked a former CIA official and National Security Council staffer named Bruce Riedel to conduct a sixty-day review of the war and its strategy. The previous year, Riedel had published a book entitled The Search for Al Qaeda, in which he suggested that the real threat lay in Pakistan.
Another issue was percolating beyond McKiernan’s troop request, and that was McKiernan himself. Mullen and Robert Gates, Obama’s (and Bush’s) secretary of defense, both had doubts about his leadership and wondered if he was really the right man for the job. To them he seemed too cautious and conventional.
Radio Kamdesh, once it was up and running, featured clerics who preached messages of peace and decried the other voices on the airwaves that were rallying locals to attack Americans. Similar monologues were delivered by the local Afghan National Police chief and ANA commander. After President Obama announced the surge of troops to Afghanistan, the Americans co-opted the information and began broadcasting the falsehood that all of the nearly twenty thousand new troops were headed straight for Kamdesh District. (The other broadcasts reaching the valley, from BBC and Voice of America, never specified where, precisely, the U.S. soldiers were to be posted.) The insurgents pulled back from the area around Combat Outpost Keating for a few weeks, until it became obvious that two new brigades weren’t being squeezed into the modest camp.
Forty-four elders came to Camp Keating on February 15 to learn more about Radio Kamdesh and to discuss other topics. They represented all four settlements in Kamdesh Village, plus Mirdesh, Urmul, and Agro. The elders from Paprok couldn’t make it due to poor road conditions. The Mandigal elders weren’t there, either; the consensus seemed to be that they were protesting the shura because Afghan security forces had killed two insurgents from their village, one of whom had been detained the previous summer for distributing pamphlets near Urmul on how to make bombs. (Yllescas had released him after the Mandigal elders promised to monitor him and keep him out of trouble. They hadn’t done either of those things, apparently: according to several Nuristanis, the man had constantly peppered the main entrance to Combat Outpost Keating with small-arms fire.)
During the shura itself, ANA Commander Jawed compared the elders from Mandigal to the thugs from Tora Bora. Anayatullah, the district administrator for Kamdesh, talked up the Americans’ new radio station and its benefits for the area. Anyone who wanted to be a journalist, he said, would be welcome to travel around and collect information for broadcasts, with the shura assuming responsibility for correspondents’ safety. No matter what issue was brought up during this meeting, the discussion always got snagged in the thicket of security and its insufficiency—as, for example, when Gul Mohammed Khan asked why the Afghan government had promised to bring wheat to their district but then stopped in Barikot.
“The driver would not drive all the way into Kamdesh District due to the security issues,” Anayatullah replied.
“There were supposed to be forty-five hundred blankets for Kamdesh District,” another elder noted. “Where have they gone?”
“You have to trust us,” Anayatullah said. “There were three hundred and thirty blankets, but they were unable to bring them because there were illegal checkpoints past Barikot. The shura needs to do more to provide security.”
“Security is the government’s responsibility,” Abdul Rahman protested. “Providing it is the job of the Afghan National Police and the Afghan National Army.”
Anayatullah insisted that he had brought up the matter of security within Kamdesh District several times with the new governor of Nuristan,65 Jamaluddin Badr, and promised that he would send Governor Badr yet another letter requesting assistance.
“All the other districts have electricity, hospitals, and roads,” noted Afghan National Police commander Jalil. “We need to come together for construction in Kamdesh District.”
The next day, at a meeting that Camp Keating hosted for all the contractors, Anayatullah spoke bluntly. “Security has been bad in Kamdesh for many years now,” he said. “As contractors, you were aware of that when you took on these projects, so you need to stop using it as an excuse for why the projects are not getting done. From now on, you should factor in the cost of hiring security guards before you submit bids. And stop lying about how close the projects are to completion.” Kyle Tucker, in charge of development funds for Combat Outpost Keating, informed the seventeen contractors present that they would need to finish the projects they were currently working on before they could be awarded any new contracts.
“You are the most important part of the development of Afghanistan,” Pecha told them. “You need to take pride in what you’re doing. Even the smallest projects are very important.”
Important, maybe, but also endangered. Tucker had looked into the nearly three million dollars that had been committed to projects in Kamdesh District, and the report that he and Pecha wrote up worked its way up the chain of command. Spiszer and Markert decided the money had to stop flying out the door. As Spiszer saw it, 1-91 Cav had initiated these projects without having any means of performing proper oversight or inspections—or any power at all, really, to hold a contractor accountable after the first payment was made. (Then, too, the undermanned 6-4 Cav was at a disadvantage in having less combat strength than 1-91 Cav, hence less ability to get out to the villages to check up on projects.) In any case, the new civil-affairs team at Forward Operating Base Bostick believed that Tucker should cancel every project outright until the violence stopped.
Tucker pushed back against that notion; he remained convinced that the projects could be used as important bargaining chips. He and Pecha did, however, cancel some projects, and for good reason. The contractors on the Bar Mandigal secondary-road project, for example, were reportedly working for the Taliban; they also rubbed Tucker the wrong way, and besides that, they hadn’t done any work. Their total fee would have been $407,197, of which $50,000 had already been paid out. Project canceled. Another contractor had been hired to build a pipe system in Chapo—north of Urmul and up the road toward Barg-e-Matal—to help irrigate the fields there. He had collected $17,000 out of $27,552, but Tucker never saw or heard from him. Canceled. Same problem with the contractor in charge of the pipe project in Sudgul: $11,000 already paid out of $27,552, but no contact with Tucker. Canceled. A micro-hydroelectric plant in Sudgul: $35,000 paid out on a $67,560 contract. Canceled.
Many projects were far enough away, and in areas where security was sufficiently sketchy, that Tucker simply had no direct knowledge of whether or not they were real. He hired a local man with a video camera to drive out to the Marwai secondary road—$118,692.24 paid, in full, for its construction—and document its existence. The man did that and was paid for his time, though Tucker never felt 100 percent sure that the video wasn’t of some other, already existing road.
The Americans had spent $19,000 on refurbishing the Kamdesh boys’ school, that money having been used to build chairs and desks for the students and to repair the building itself. But then one day Tucker heard that the Taliban had taken over the school and raised their signature white flag over it. So he canceled payment on the remaining $6,000 owed to Mohammed, the contractor.
“We’re paying for this school, and you’re letting the bad guys live there,” he scolded Mohammed.
“We can’t control them,” the contractor protested. “They have guns! What can we do?”
“Okay,” Tucker said. “We’ll come in with our guns.”
“Oh, no,” a shocked Mohammed replied, “we don’t want you coming into our village with all your guns.”
The next time Tucker checked, the flag had been removed. The shura tried to make a big deal out of this, but Tucker wasn’t buying it; it wasn’t as if the Taliban had abandoned Kamdesh, after all. He imagined the head of the shura telling the Taliban, “The Americans are mad that your flag is up, and they want to cancel the project. Take it down so we can continue to get paid, and we’ll give you a slice of the pie.”
The Kamdesh girls’ school was a whole other box of frustrations. Out of a $25,200 commitment by the United States, $9,200 had already been paid, but Tucker wasn’t sure that any girls in the region even went to school, given how dedicated the entire female population of Nuristan was to manual labor. The lieutenant sent his quality-control engineer, a local Afghan, to visit the project after receiving reports that the Taliban had blown up the building. The Afghan confirmed that there was a large hole in the roof. “Why are we repairing this if they’re never going to use it?” Tucker asked. Project canceled.
Besides canceling nine projects, Tucker also saw five completed while he was in charge. Thirteen others could charitably be considered, well, continual works-in-progress. A total of $1,233,159.66 had been paid out to contractors by the end of Tucker’s tour, but there was also a big sum—$1,093,835.40—left unpaid, cash allocated but not disbursed for terminated projects. This annoyed a lot of contractors and villagers. Tucker knew that with American money no longer coming in, some of them would have little incentive to care whether or not the American soldiers were safe. Even worse, some would find work with the insurgency. Tucker tried to leave on good terms with everyone, but he walked away from some of these Nuristanis thinking that things in the valley would almost surely get worse before they got better.
The litter of puppies Cali had birthed in the summer of 2008 had matured into a pack of aggressive beasts, and the antipathy between them and the Nuristanis had grown apace. The dogs provided the U.S. troops with companionship and boosted their morale, as well as offering an added measure of security, but they regularly terrified the locals, barked at Nuristani contractors and security guards, and clamped their jaws around the necks of goats and sheep. Blackfoot Troop’s “pets” also attracted other feral curs from the area.
Gulzaman, the head Afghan Security Guard at Observation Post Fritsche, had a house in Kamdesh, but he would often bring his oldest son, Hasanyullah, with him to stay at the observation post. Sometimes he would even entrust Hasanyullah, who was around eight, to the care of Lieutenant Chris Safulko and his troops while he went off on some errand or other. The kid would come to Safulko’s hooch, sit on his cot, and browse through American magazines. His presence in itself showed that Gulzaman had a level of trust in the Americans that was not insignificant at this precarious time in the valley.
And then, for some reason, Cali started snarling at the boy.
It started off modestly: a growl here and there, a baring of teeth. But then it quickly devolved into outright hostility toward the boy, who began cowering in Cali’s presence. Sergeant First Class Dominic Curry talked it over with Staff Sergeant Ian Boone, and the two of them shared their conclusions with Safulko: they couldn’t have this anymore. Cali was causing a huge disruption in an important relationship. And the problem wasn’t only with Hasanyullah; every day required the Americans to do some sort of damage control after Cali and another snarling pooch named Willie Pete growled and barked at one or another of the day laborers on the observation post. The Nuristanis were not of the “man’s best friend” school, throwing rocks at and even kicking the dogs, and the dynamic was becoming increasingly tense.
Safulko agreed that they couldn’t allow Cali to attack and bite Hasanyullah before they acted. So soon after their discussion, Boone approached Willie Pete, who was gnawing on a goat bone he had found in the trash, and shot him in the head. Then another soldier walked over to Cali, who was at the landing zone. Bang, she was killed, too.
Many of the troops were upset, but as far as Safulko was concerned, he hadn’t had any choice in the matter. It would be great if we could all spend our days hanging out, cooking steaks, and playing with dogs, he thought, but we’re soldiers in Afghanistan, we’re not on a fucking camping trip.
In March, the enemy mortars returned. Tucker, working out the math based on time of flight and analyses of craters freshly formed at Combat Outpost Keating, developed a general idea of where the enemy was likely firing from: Lower Kamdesh. Several days were spent hunting for the tube, with troops sitting on the Northface and waiting for the mortars to fly so they could try to pinpoint the exact location for counterfire. But the mortars never came.
After Mazzocchi returned from leave in March, he and Red Platoon moved up to Observation Post Fritsche, where he sent word to the Kamdesh elders: Talk to us. But they wouldn’t accept the invitation, so Mazzocchi asked Pecha if he could threaten the shura with a warning along the lines of, If you don’t come here and talk to us, we’re eventually going to find the enemy mortar tube and blast it away, and if anyone from Kamdesh gets hurt, the blood will be on your hands. Do it, Pecha said. So Mazzocchi conveyed that message to a Kamdeshi whom the troops referred to as “Skinny” Gul Mohammed, one of whose sons was suspected of being an insurgent. The Kamdesh elders never turned over the mortar tube, but neither did Blackfoot Troop ever receive fire from it again.
Mazzocchi deemed this a great victory—and one accomplished, moreover, by means of words, not weapons. Then, a week later, enemy mortars started hitting Camp Lowell. The insurgents had just moved the tube down the road.
By this point, Pecha had become convinced that the Hundred-Man Shura was impotent and perhaps even a bit corrupt. Adding to the Americans’ general unease was the fact that the new ANA troops who’d arrived in February were green and weak; indeed, the whole Afghan battalion, spread out across Nuristan and Kunar Provinces, seemed incompetent. Intensely frustrated by their limited manpower, Pecha and his lieutenants brainstormed ways to secure the area: Mazzocchi increased the number of joint patrols with the ANA from Observation Post Fritsche, while Pecha worked more closely with the Afghan National Police, in whom he had more faith than he did in the ANA. Neither effort sufficed, however, and attacks on the camp continued. Pecha had been hoping that there might be an influx of U.S. soldiers to Kamdesh as part of President Obama’s new troop surge, but no additional forces were forthcoming.
Pecha then gathered his platoon leaders and sergeants and proposed that they set up a new, permanent observation post on the Northface, to be named after Captain Rob Yllescas. They would put eight to ten U.S. troops there, along with four or five ANA soldiers. It would make life safer for all of them, Pecha was convinced. His commanders were not so sure. Lieutenant Colonel Markert had concerns about, first, the addition of yet another target for the enemy, and second, the squadron’s ability to haul up enough supplies to create a new OP Yllescas. The idea was officially shot down when Colonel Spiszer visited Camp Keating: Pecha just didn’t have enough troop strength to man another observation post, he said. Spiszer also knew that back in Colorado, their replacements were already making plans to close down the base in any event.
From the moment the officers of Blackfoot Troop first heard about the attack at Wanat, in which a huge group of insurgents had surprised and overwhelmed a much smaller American force, they’d sworn they would do everything they could to avoid suffering the same fate—a vow that was repeated at most of the more modest outposts scattered throughout the region. But then, on May 1, Markert called Pecha with some bad news: it had happened again.
Early that morning, a force of up to one hundred insurgents had surrounded, attacked, and overrun nearby Combat Outpost Bari Alai,66 a recently established Afghan National Army camp in Markert’s area of operations, Kunar Province. Three American troops, two coalition troops, four ANA soldiers, and an Afghan interpreter had been killed. Markert, worried that the enemy might try to capitalize on this event by launching another overwhelming attack on a different remote outpost, recommended that Pecha limit not only the number of patrols outside the wire at both Keating and Fritsche but also the distance those patrols were allowed to range from their home base. In response, Pecha staggered his patrols so that there would never be one from Camp Keating out at the same time as one from Observation Post Fritsche. He immediately ordered more troops to stand guard, relying on a pattern-analysis wheel that Victorino had created to provide some predictive guidance about when attacks were most likely to occur. (Thursday, it seemed, was the next-most-volatile day after Saturday.)
What happened at Bari Alai was alarming enough in and of itself, but soon the Americans also began to wonder if there might not be something more sinister to the story—specifically, complicity on the part of Afghan soldiers. The account of the actual attack was all too familiar, beginning with dozens of insurgents staging a well-coordinated assault on the outpost. An RPG killed Staff Sergeant William Vile, an ANA trainer. (The ANA trainers at Bari Alai were members of the U.S. Army, the Michigan National Guard, and the Latvian Army.) The other two Americans killed at the camp67 were hit by another well-placed RPG that breached the wall and caused a secondary explosion, destroying a bunker; one of the two men was also shot at close range. Two soldiers from Latvia were killed as well, and a third Latvian was severely wounded, while a fourth experienced severe psychological trauma.
But what was different and confusing about this particular incident was that the Taliban, in an unusual move, took prisoner eleven ANA soldiers and a second interpreter. A dozen Afghans—that was a lot of POWs for this war. It seemed suspicious to the Americans. And there were other puzzling aspects, too, starting with the fact that Combat Outpost Bari Alai sat on the top of a mountain and therefore wasn’t easy to overrun. Some U.S. officers speculated that there might have been some collusion—that perhaps the “captured” Afghan troops had aided the insurgents. This was a new ANA platoon, and one of the three U.S. soldiers killed that day, James Pirtle, had expressed concern about the Afghan soldiers to his parents. They were insubordinate, he said; they sneaked off the base at night and didn’t stay at their guard posts. Other reports indicated that when their superior officers tried to push them to do their jobs, the ANA troops pushed back.
In the wake of the attack, Markert was eager to learn the truth. He didn’t expect the same professionalism from Afghan troops that he demanded from his own men and women, but this latest ANA battalion was without question inferior to its predecessors. Days later, a complex rescue mission dubbed Operation King’s Ransom, involving more than two thousand troops, was launched into and around the Hel Gal Valley. Coalition forces broadcast a radio message demanding the release of the ANA hostages, who were ultimately freed. At first, the soldiers appeared to be in suspiciously good condition, but then closer examination by physician assistants and medics revealed some light wounds. Only after six days of interrogation were the ANA troops finally returned to their brigade. Spiszer and Markert never found sufficient evidence that the POWs had been part of a conspiracy. The insurgents had merely gotten some breaks, the investigation indicated, and taken a lucky shot that blew up a bunker and ignited a fire.
A couple more breaks had been given to them by Afghan security forces. An eight-man Afghan National Police post protecting one of the approaches to Bari Alai was abandoned just a few days prior to the attack. There was also supposed to be a full platoon of twenty-eight ANA troops at the Bari Alai outpost, but the company commander had repositioned a dozen of his soldiers at the bottom of the mountain the night before the raid, in preparation for a troop swap. He’d done it because it would make things easier for him and his men.
As Markert often said, “If you’re doing something in war because it’s easier, you’re probably doing the wrong thing.”
Had the eleven Afghan troops who were captured surrendered too quickly? In all likelihood, Markert felt, the answer was yes—these were not good soldiers. Indeed, the members of this new battalion of ANA troops in Nuristan and Kunar were quickly becoming notorious. But their actions in this case were evidence of incompetence, not of treachery.
This was of little comfort.
In late May 2009, Colonel George and Lieutenant Colonel Brown of 3-61 Cav were preparing to ship out to Forward Operating Base Fenty at Jalalabad and Forward Operating Base Bostick at Naray, respectively. From those locations, they hoped to shut down Combat Outpost Keating, Observation Post Fritsche, and Camp Lowell in Nuristan Province, as well as Observation Posts Mace and Hatchet in Kunar Province. The troops from these outposts would be sent to other areas of the country that, in George’s view, would better support the overall campaign. Forward Operating Base Bostick would thereby become the northernmost U.S. base in northeastern Afghanistan.
Their visit to Nuristan and Kunar the previous December had reinforced the commanders’ resolve to pull out of the region. George and Brown believed that Blackfoot Troop had, for the most part, lost its connection to the local population. The officers of 6-4 Cav seemed to them to have little direct knowledge of most of the projects they’d been funding, nor did they have the freedom of maneuver to assess those projects. “In short,” Brown wrote to Kolenda after his visit, “6-4 did not appear to be conducting COIN at all.”68 (This was not, of course, how Pecha and his lieutenants saw things.)
The colonel whom Randy George would be replacing, Spiszer, had described Blackfoot Troop as the “cork in the bottle,” the roadblock that prevented HIG or the Taliban from traveling from Pakistan through Nuristan to the Waygal and Pech Valleys and possibly beyond. But Brown just didn’t see the enemy that way. The insurgents weren’t lined up on some Maginot Line, he felt certain; warfare in Afghanistan was much more complex than that. The phrase “cork in the bottle” assumed that the enemy had only one route in or out, whereas evidence suggested that many insurgents were simply walking around the few isolated American outposts in the area. When George arrived at Forward Operating Base Fenty, he was pleasantly surprised to find Spiszer amenable to his plan to close the bases. Getting supplies up to Nuristan was difficult, Spiszer confided, and imposed an increasing burden on helicopter and other assets—resources that could be better used elsewhere. The troops up there didn’t seem to be getting anywhere with the locals anyway, and critically, there had been no progress made on securing and building up the road. It was all too deadly to resupply troops on foot, and too wasteful by air. Spiszer was on board. Lieutenant Colonel Markert’s staff had in fact already twice proposed closing Combat Outpost Keating, but both times the determination had been made—with input from the brigade level—that Blackfoot Troop wouldn’t be able to commandeer the eighty Chinook trips it would take to remove all the soldiers and gear. On their second try, the 6-4 Cav planners were told that their troops could either go home on time or close Combat Outpost Keating, but not both: there weren’t enough aircraft in the area.
Spiszer’s brigade had already learned some hard lessons about how to close down a base. Combat Outpost Lybert had been built only in 2006, near the Pakistan border, but it didn’t have a particularly good view of the mountain pass that it had been set up to watch over. The troops were needed elsewhere, and the local Afghan Border Police battalion had no interest in assuming control of COP Lybert, so Spiszer ordered that it be shut down. Before the troops could move out, however, word of their pending exit spread throughout the nearby villages. Half of the Afghan Security Guards who worked at the camp up and quit. The locals were suddenly far more eager to accommodate the enemy fighters—letting them use their homes, for example—to launch attacks on the camp. After all, in a few weeks, the Americans wouldn’t be there any longer, but the insurgents surely would. Combat Outpost Lybert went from being tranquil to being a target. One of the enemy bullets killed Private Second Class Michael Murdock, twenty-two years old and from Chocowinity, North Carolina. When the U.S. troops at last pulled out of Camp Lybert, the insurgents claimed to have driven them out. It wasn’t true, but propaganda needn’t be. Pat Lybert’s mom saw YouTube videos of insurgents victoriously parading through the camp named after her late son, and it ripped her apart inside.
Spiszer told the incoming commander of Regional Command East, Major General Curtis Scaparrotti, as well as the ISAF commander, that he believed George’s proposal to shut down Keating and Lowell was a good one. He thought the generals seemed receptive to the idea.