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INTO THE VILLAGES
Kabul 2010–Kunduz 2011
THE BATTLE FOR BUY-IN
Scott Miller, the special ops general who took over in March 2010 after Reeder’s departure, would take up the torch of civil defense and add his own, significant twist during his year and a half at the helm. But first he needed to bring the rest of the military, the US embassy, and the Afghan government on board. Civil defense may have been an old idea that special operators had just rediscovered, but it was controversial in Afghanistan. The biggest objection was the fear that any such effort would empower the warring militias that had viciously torn apart the country in the 1990s. Proponents of the idea emphasized that what they had in mind were small, village-based defensive groups. Historically, Pashtun tribal elders had raised lashkars or chalwesti, armed defense groups from the community, to respond to threats and then disbanded them when they were dealt with. This was quite different from the large militias, some numbering 30,000 or more, that were formed in the 1980s by Afghan mujahideen and warlords to fight the Soviet occupation.{20}
This Afghan history was complicated by the succession of programs the United States had backed or started since arriving in 2001, none of which had calmed concerns, and which led many to assume that the same ad hoc, offensive-minded, and manipulation-prone results would ensue this time. Opposition extended from Afghans—although Karzai had periodically favored the idea of self-defense for Pashtuns, and his brother Qayum certainly did—to nongovernmental organizations, such as human rights groups, to retired general Karl Eikenberry, whom the Obama administration had appointed as ambassador to Kabul. Reeder thought Eikenberry would support the Community Defense Initiative because these groups were to be strictly defensive, but a ninety-minute meeting failed to persuade him.{21}
Eikenberry’s skepticism extended to the entire US venture. He doubted that Hamid Karzai was “an adequate strategic partner,” as one of his leaked cables put it. The debate over local defense was only one element of a remarkable and crippling struggle over US policy that continued even after the Obama administration completed its extended policy review in 2009. The administration defined the US objective narrowly—preventing the restoration of an Al Qaeda safe haven in Afghanistan—and gave the US military 33,000 troops and two years to achieve it. The bureaucratic warfare raged on, pitting those who felt the policy goal could be achieved by hitting Al Qaeda targets as they popped up against those who believed it required an Afghan government and security force capable of defending its territory from terrorists and other threats. McChrystal (in a somewhat paradoxical evolution, given his background as the master black ops terrorist hunter) became a vocal proponent of the latter counterinsurgency approach. An additional cohort believed that the Karzai government’s corruption and parochialism were a principal cause of the reborn insurgency and that reform should be the central focus.{22}
McChrystal devoted a lot of time to building a relationship with Karzai and devising ways to promote better governance and economic development. He remained somewhat lukewarm about local defense—perhaps because he and Reeder never got along well—until the arrival of Reeder’s successor, Brigadier General Austin Scott Miller, in March 2010.
Miller had been serving as director of the Pakistan-Afghanistan Coordination Cell (PACC) at the Pentagon, which made him McChrystal’s primary link to Washington. A rising star in the special operations community, Miller had earned McChrystal’s trust as the commander of the Delta task force under McChrystal’s Task Force 714. Miller’s quiet manner contrasted with the brasher egos of his club, but his pedigree spoke for itself: he was a Delta Force veteran of the 1993 “Black Hawk Down” battle in Somalia, and he had commanded Delta Force in Iraq during the raging years of the Iraq War. He had helped to hunt down the number-one target in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was killed in June 2006. Miller’s sincerity exerted a charismatic force that drew people into his orbit.
After 9/11, McChrystal and Miller had revolutionized special mission units. These units were already known as the most proficient shooters and rescue forces in the US military before 9/11. But the most difficult part of hunting terrorist leaders is finding them, not killing them, so McChrystal and Miller introduced three changes. First, they brought technical intelligence and intelligence analysts into their fold; second, they replaced a hierarchical command-and-control structure with a flatter organizational model that fostered constant communication and encouraged subordinates to take the initiative. Then they set a relentless pace powered by the first two changes.{23}
Miller took the same meticulous approach as he prepared to take over for Reeder: assembling the expertise, building a network, and preparing it to work overtime. The secret to special operators’ tactical prowess was constant training and careful preparation of their kit, and Miller believed in the same zealous attention to detail as a commander. He was keen to prove himself on a new mission in a new theater. Although he was known to Delta, as well as to Rangers and SEAL Team Six, for the first time he would be leading a force that included other SEAL, special forces, civil affairs, and psyop units. He was acutely aware that some in the special forces hierarchy viewed him as an interloper from the “black side” of special ops and were discouraging those who wanted to join his team. Miller recognized that special forces were trained to work with indigenous populations and had spent the past decade in Afghanistan, and he augmented their expertise with social scientists and created a program called Afghanistan-Pakistan (AFPAK) Hands to produce a deeper bench of knowledge.
When he arrived in Kabul in March 2010, Miller had ideas for the local defense program aimed at increasing its chance of success and decreasing the risk that it would spawn out-of-control militias. First, he needed to bring McChrystal fully on board. Shortly after arriving, Miller gave him a briefing that one aide described as “transformative.” McChrystal, now fully convinced of the need to address Afghanistan’s conflict at the village level, agreed to seek Karzai’s formal and public concurrence so the machinery could be created for a full-fledged government program.{24}
McChrystal did not carry the ball very far down the field, however. His military career came to an abrupt end following the publication of a Rolling Stone article on June 22, 2010, in which he and his aides were described and quoted as criticizing the White House and Vice President Joe Biden in scathing terms. McChrystal flew to Washington with a resignation letter in hand, which Obama accepted on the spot. The next day, Obama asked General David Petraeus, then the head of Central Command in Tampa, to take the post, which he did on July 4.{25}
Petraeus did not need to be sold on local defense; he believed it was a potential game changer in a war that was going badly. Given that most Afghans lived in villages, Petraeus felt that “bottom-up” efforts would temper the highly centralized government system in which all provincial governors, mayors, district subgovernors, and generals were appointed by the president. Petraeus had done something similar in Iraq with his Sons of Iraq initiative, which started in Anbar as the “Sunni Awakening” and which he extended throughout greater Baghdad in 2007 and 2008. But the Sons of Iraq movement had been undertaken rapidly, with few guidelines and—most important—without the endorsement of the Iraqi government. Iraq’s Shia government later largely reneged on its commitment to incorporate Sons of Iraq into the regular police or army—a commitment extracted under duress and late in the game. By making the Afghan local police an Afghan government program from the start, Petraeus hoped to avoid those pitfalls.{26}
Before deciding whether to endorse the program, President Karzai presided over several contentious meetings at the presidential palace, which was nestled in a wooded park a few blocks from the yellow and burgundy mansion that housed ISAF headquarters. It took the single-minded Petraeus only ten days to secure Karzai’s agreement to the local defense initiative, which was renamed Afghan Local Police (ALP). On August 16, Karzai signed a formal decree spelling out the specific terms of the program.
Karzai insisted on a key feature: that the Afghan Ministry of the Interior would administer the program. The ministry would validate Afghan Local Police guardians, who would be recruited and vetted by local Afghan shuras, and they would report to Afghan police chiefs. Americans would train the recruits and pay their part-time salaries of $120 monthly plus a $65 food voucher until they were put on the ministry payroll. The ministry would provide pay, weapons, ammunition, uniforms, and radios. The program would sunset in three (later extended to five) years. The total force was to be capped at 30,000, and no more than 300 defenders would be recruited from any one district. These provisions were intended to ensure that the force would be carefully formed and closely overseen.{27}
MILLER’S NEW IDEA
Miller’s mission was to ensure that the program worked as intended and that the many pitfalls were avoided so that the local defense effort would contribute to a turnabout in the war. Ironically, Miller pushed the local defense concept even further than its original framers had envisioned. “It took a black ops guy from [the special mission units] to understand the limits of kill and capture,” his command sergeant major, J. R. {28} Miller’s new idea was village stability operations: that Afghan local policemen by themselves were not sufficient to bring peace to rural Afghanistan, and the country had to be stabilized from the village level up. He got the idea while reading about pacification in Vietnam in a 1999 book by Lewis Sorley, A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and the Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam. Miller renamed the program “Village Stability Operations/Afghan Local Police,” or VSO/ALP. The name was cumbersome, but he wanted to stress that the goal was community mobilization, to help villages identify and address the problems that were creating conflict and instability in their area. Special operations teams were ordered to focus on village stability operations as a first step, and only if and when the villagers decided they needed and wanted to form a local police group would they proceed to do so. Under the Community Defense Initiative, development assistance had been provided to villages, but this new approach made governance and development coequal legs of the triad. The closest parallel in recent special operations history had been the deployment of special forces teams to villages all over Haiti after Haiti’s military junta was ousted and the elected government restored in 1994.{29} Miller’s plan was to rebuild Afghan stability one village at a time. It was nothing if not ambitious.
Miller wanted to find an enduring solution, not quick fixes that would later unravel because teams were relying on dubious characters or had failed to understand village dynamics. He tapped development experts from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and RAND social scientists whom he invited to join his staff. It was his trademark move, to create a big tent of diverse talent. He had done this in Baghdad when he had convened a weekly video conference of all the conventional brigade commanders in order to share what his Task Force 16 operators were up to and to exchange information. For years special operators had not shared information with each other, let alone with their conventional brethren, who were, after all, the “battlespace owners” working there every day. This practice quickly reduced the tension and grudges that had built up in four years of night raids by the door kickers. In a similar move, when Miller set up the Pakistan-Afghanistan Coordination Cell in the Pentagon, the walls were literally taken down in the national military command center in the bowels of the building to create an open bay of cubicles where the intelligence, plans, and operations staffs were relocated to work side by side. Every Friday, he presided over what was probably the largest regular video teleconference in the US government. At these “Federation Forum” meetings, a think-tank researcher or another expert would present new analysis, and McChrystal or his deputy and a dozen or more outposts in Afghanistan would tune in to give updates and join the discussion. The Pentagon conference room was crammed with an assortment of academics, analysts, and officials, with the White House, State Department, USAID, and multiple other agencies on the video link.
Miller used his network of experts and operators to figure out exactly what needed to be done, how to do it, and where to do it, and—perhaps most important—to design measures to ensure continuity of effort as units and commanders came and went. It was vital to stop the churn and ad hockery that had characterized special operations and prevented them from achieving lasting impact. First, a four-step process was fashioned that teams were directed to follow: shape, build, hold, transition. An SOF team was first to tour an area to gauge whether there was potential support for such a program. The “shaping” phase would usually entail some combat operations to reduce the insurgent presence and to create breathing room for villagers to begin to take charge of their affairs, but the combat was to be carried out by other forces—commandos or Afghan soldiers, or, if none of these were available, another coalition force. Only a few operations or detentions might suffice: Taliban domination was due in many cases to the absence of any government security force, officials, or services in much of rural Afghanistan. After the shaping operations, the SOF team, if invited, would move into the village or in the vicinity to begin phase two, building the program. As the villagers began taking ownership of their own security and resolving their issues, ideally with the help of the local district government, the effort would move into the third, or “hold,” phase. Finally, the SOF team would transition the area to local control, while returning for regular visits to provide some fallback support.
Four basic criteria were developed for selecting the villages in which to embed the special ops teams. First, since the program’s premise was helping Afghans who wanted special operations assistance, the teams would have to be invited in. Second, the villages should be ones that had already demonstrated the desire to resist the Taliban. Third, the location had to be logistically sustainable so that the teams could receive food, water, fuel, and ammunition. Fourth, the location should be consequential to the overall fight. This criterion was difficult to define and was interpreted in various ways. The basic idea was to look for and support resistance to the Taliban in the corridors and sanctuaries that led directly to population centers—in the words of one operator, “where the ratlines met the population.”{30}
To avoid duplication of effort, the staff planners intended for the teams to avoid areas where conventional forces were already operating. But in some areas conventional forces might seek help, because they rarely reached below the level of the district center—which was equivalent to the county seat—to the villages where most Afghans lived. The same was true of the civilian coalition presence, where the lowest-level entity was the district support teams (DSTs) manned by personnel from the State Department, USAID, and sometimes the US Department of Agriculture. Fewer than fifty districts had DSTs. At the height of the surge, 1,040 civilian officials were sent to Afghanistan, but most of them remained in Kabul, or, at best, provincial capitals. Even where DSTs did exist, their ability to reach villages was limited by safety rules imposed by the US embassy. The essential difficulty in combating a rural insurgency resides in its dispersed nature, which requires commanders to make accurate decisions about where to place scarce manpower. It was easy enough to ascertain which of Afghanistan’s thirty-four provinces mattered most in terms of insurgent threat, population, and political-economic value. The Taliban dominated a broad swath of rural Helmand, northern Kandahar, Uruzgan and Zabul, and the eastern border provinces, which were laced with ratlines that intersected population centers of varying size. Highway One, the major artery running from Kandahar through Zabul, Ghazni, and Wardak to Kabul, was bisected by many valleys where the Taliban rested and resupplied themselves and through which they moved. The difficulty lay in deciding where to focus within the key provinces: Which of Afghanistan’s 398 districts and 30,000 villages ought to be the focus of the teams’ efforts?{31}
The list of districts that special ops teams would scout for willing villages was determined in conjunction with the newly appointed minister of interior, Bismullah Khan Mohammedi (BK). One hundred districts were initially agreed upon. The majority of the districts on the list were in the south and east, where the vast majority of the insurgents were located, but approximately one-third of the districts BK endorsed were in the north and west. Local defense was justifiable in some strategic and vulnerable spots—for example, the districts around the Salang Tunnel, the principal transportation artery to the northern border, or critical passes in the west. And in the largely Tajik and Uzbek north, some pockets of Pashtuns had become insurgent havens. But BK and Vice President Mohammed Qasim Fahim Khan saw the program not so much as a tool to combat insurgents as an opportunity for a jobs program for their Tajik constituents, and perhaps a way to rebuild militias that had been demobilized in 2002 and 2003. Even if the insurgency was largely in the Pashtun south and east, they were not keen to create a force of 30,000 armed Pashtuns.
Implementing the program would take all the special forces, SEALs, and Marine special operations teams the United States could muster. A few teams remained partnered with the Afghan commandos, and the Task Force 535 units remained focused on counterterrorist raids. Admiral Eric Olson, the four-star admiral in charge of US Special Operations Command, pushed through requests for more army special forces teams as well as special operations civil affairs and military information support (psyops) teams. Between April 2010 and March 2011, the number of special operations forces assigned to the mission doubled, increasing from 2,900 to 5,900.{32}
Even with the extra special operators, Petraeus saw that they would not have enough manpower for the widely dispersed rural sites. In November 2010, he asked the army for a conventional army infantry battalion that he would place under Miller’s operational control. The army was not enamored of this idea, but Petraeus insisted that it was critical to the success of his campaign. The army was loath to chop conventional units away from their chain of command to work under special operators. Even more unpalatable was that the battalion’s squads were to be parceled out to help secure the teams’ remote sites and thicken their patrols. It was a huge responsibility to levy on young platoon and squad leaders, and discipline would be at risk. Moreover, the battalion commander’s career path could be compromised, because he would not be leading an intact unit in the traditional way.
On short notice, 1-16 Infantry Battalion of the 1st Infantry Division at Fort Riley was sent to Afghanistan in January 2011. Petraeus requested a second battalion, and the 1-505th of the 82nd Airborne Division arrived in June 2011. The latter battalion had the advantage of a longer lead time to prepare for the unusual mission, and since it was based at Fort Bragg, it linked up immediately with the US Army Special Operations Command and the 3rd Special Forces Group for training. The 82nd Airborne tapped one of its best young officers, Lieutenant Colonel Curtis Buzzard. He selected those of his battalion he believed were best suited for the task. Many soldiers who had served in Iraq during the surge had rotated through small outposts, but this time they would be serving an extended tour out in a very primitive, rural environment. It was to be a round-the-clock, months-long experience of going native. Young soldiers used to Wi-Fi, Facebook, video games, chow halls, and regimented formations would have to adapt.
Buzzard was named the commander of Special Operations Task Force–North (SOTF-N) based in Mazar-e Sharif. Special forces battalions retained command of the teams in the south and east. Navy SEALs took command of a newly formed Special Operations Task Force–Southeast, covering Uruzgan, Day Kundi, and Zabul. The Marines and the 1st Special Forces Group traded command of teams in the west and southwest. Marine Special Operations teams made up the majority of teams assigned to the west and to Helmand, where Marines had assumed control of the battlespace from the British in 2009.
All these battalion-level SOTFs reported to CJSOTF-A, now led by Colonel Don Bolduc, who in turn reported to Miller. Bolduc was every bit as driven and meticulous as his boss, although the personalities of the two men could not have been more different. Bolduc was outspoken—known to challenge men to pushup contests—and toyed with the idea of running for political office when he retired. He wrote articles and enjoyed attention, whereas Miller did not relish the limelight. The CJSOTF oversaw the tactical day-to-day operations and the resupply of the far-flung teams. Bolduc pushed authority down to the teams to conduct patrols as they saw fit within their designated “ops boxes,” only requiring approval of about 8 percent of the missions where contact with other forces or combat was deemed likely.
FROM BLACK OPS TO VILLAGE OPS
For the emphasis on village stability to be more than rhetorical, Miller set up an apparatus to ensure an equal focus on the governance and development elements of the program. He knew that special ops teams would have their hands full focusing on the security leg of the triad. So he created Village Stability Coordination Centers (VSCCs), which were located alongside the battalion SOTF commands, and sent his trusted lieutenant, Lieutenant Colonel Scott Mann, who had been part of Reeder’s original design team, to Kandahar as the first VSCC-South coordinator.{33} The VSCCs were not intended to do governance and development work themselves, but rather to help teams find governance and development resources in the Afghan government and the coalition. The VSCCs were to tie the “top down” to the “bottom up.” They were expected to reach out to the regional commands and their civilian counterparts and find those with expertise, programs, or funds. In addition, they would engage with nongovernmental organizations and cull or produce analysis to better understand the specific districts. The VSCCs embodied the network ideas that Miller had employed as a terrorist-hunter.
Miller also formed a national-level node of the VSCC at ISAF in Kabul to reach out directly to the Afghan ministries responsible for local governance, rural development, and agriculture and help bring their programs to the districts once the teams had achieved sufficient security. The national coordinator, Colonel Randy Zeegers, the 20th Special Forces Group commander, formed an especially close relationship with the Ministry of Rural Reconstruction and Development, arranging visits for its officials to newly secure districts so they could assess the situation for themselves and authorize the formation of community development councils and the initiation of projects the villagers chose.
A third layer of the network consisted of the Provincial Augmentation Teams and District Augmentation Teams, dubbed PATs and DATs. These positions were manned by the AFPAK Hands program that Miller had launched while on the Joint Staff with backing from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mike Mullen. Military personnel who volunteered to become AFPAK Hands were asked to commit to serving at least two tours in Afghanistan, and in return they were provided with language and academic training and stateside positions that would allow them to remain engaged in between their tours. The objective was to develop a cadre of expertise that had been lacking since the beginning of the war. Miller was the first AFPAK Hand, and many special forces officers signed up as well, in addition to Air Force and Navy personnel.
Miller stayed in Afghanistan longer than most commanders, from March 2010 until July 2011. His headquarters was located at the New Kabul Compound at the bustling traffic circle a block from the US embassy and the ISAF headquarters. Many Afghans thought the base was a prison because of its prominent guard towers and high walls, which were topped by green netting that obscured views into the camp. High-wattage lights mounted on poles glared out to the street all night long. But inside the compound, three drab beige and brown buildings were surrounded by a warren of Quonset tents and a two-story stack of “man cans,” trailers that contained beds, flimsy wardrobes, and, occasionally, desks. The ground was covered with fist-sized gravel, which crunched under the booted feet of the troops. The grim, utilitarian military architecture of concrete walls and concertina wire did evoke a prison, an aesthetically numbing environment in which military personnel and contractors measured their days in chow hours and physical training (PT) breaks from their deskbound labors. In a bit of gallows humor, the gym in the basement of the main building was named the Dungeon.
Miller’s diverse staff hailed from every tribe of the special operations community. His chief of staff, Geno Paluso, a SEAL captain, and his army command sergeant major, J. R. Stigall, ran a tight ship. His deputy commander was Pat Mahaney initially, and then Alex Krongaard, another SEAL captain who would soon be promoted to rear admiral. Describing Miller as “a shorter version of McChrystal,” Paluso said, “There are a lot of general and flag officers here. Very few of them could’ve done what he has done.” Paluso had arrived in December 2009 and would stay for two and a half long years. Miller inspired intense loyalty among his staff by working even harder than he drove them. Unlike his former boss, McChrystal, Miller did not post a sign, but the staff understood that the same rules applied: they were expected to work seventeen hours a day and use the other five for sleep, exercise, and meals.{34}
Miller brought two practices with him from his black ops experience, in addition to the punishing work pace: flat networks and communications. He convened VSCC and other video teleconferences that consumed hours each day: these kept Miller in touch with every echelon and allowed the lowest levels to raise concerns or express opinions he might not otherwise hear. “Over-communicate” was one of his mottoes. It was Miller’s preferred method of command, whether he was hunting terrorists or stabilizing villages. He always checked in with Petraeus and other senior commanders before reaching out to their subordinates, and Petraeus increasingly trusted him to deal with senior Afghans.{35}
Miller was also determined to fix the problems of continuity that had plagued the special operations effort in Afghanistan until now. In addition to holding commanders conferences that cast a wide net, he and Scott Mann institutionalized a week-long predeployment course in the United States called SOF Academic Week. It offered up an extensive curriculum on the methodology they developed for local police and village stability as well as a rich menu of Afghan, Pashtun, and Islamic expertise, with native speakers, experts, retired intelligence officers, and returning operators. It was open to conventional units as well, and soon over a thousand soldiers and general officers were signing up to attend whenever these were held. Miller’s staff and the RAND experts in his initiatives group produced videos, research papers, and manuals. One of the special forces officers who attended the SOF Week training voiced amazement at the degree to which Miller had embraced and elevated the standards of what building and advising indigenous forces should mean. “He gets it more than many of our own,” he said.
Miller spent four or five days each week visiting his troops around the country. He wangled funds from Central Command for a fleet of a half-dozen Beechcraft 1900 contract planes to ferry special operations personnel around their bases. One of the most important functions of Miller’s circulation was to try to ensure that his teams were receiving the support they needed from the two-star regional commands and their subordinate brigades, which were called the “battlespace owners.” The special operations teams had their own chain of command straight up to the four-star ISAF headquarters, which did not include the conventional forces’ regional commanders and their brigades, but the latter could exercise the “choke-con” of special operations forces by withholding airlift, attack helicopters, or convoys to resupply food, fuel, and ammunition. As a one-star general, Miller was a junior in a sea of generals, but his prior relationships with other commanders, many of them forged in Iraq, enabled him to have more influence than he otherwise would have had.
Miller traveled constantly—not only to stay in touch with the situation, but also to provide direct moral support. “What do you need?” was his constant refrain. Although many officers asked this question, the general had a way of making people feel like he genuinely cared. On one occasion, he flew to Mazar-e Sharif for a promotion ceremony and to award Purple Hearts and met with his battalion commanders from the north, south, east, and west who had flown in for the event. Later, Miller spoke frankly to his subordinates about the casualties that operators had incurred and demanded better attention to their needs. He then sat down for a briefing from the captain whose team was the partner for the Afghan commandos assigned to the north. Miller arranged for him to try out for Delta Force. Then he boarded a Chinook to fly east to neighboring Kunduz Province, where he attended a graduation ceremony for newly trained members of the Afghan Local Police, along with the German general who was the Regional Command–North (RC-North) commander. The Afghans sat uncomfortably under the blazing sun in red plastic chairs lined up before a stage as they were called up one by one to receive their diplomas. Miller, the introvert, was equally unhappy to be on stage, his smile more of a grimace. He had also wrenched his back lifting weights. He stood at attention as the team members—decked out in new, sharply pressed shalwar kameezes, or man jammies, as soldiers called them, and the wool muffin-shaped pakol hats commonly worn by the Tajiks of the north—shook hands with every new graduate.
Miller gained an education in the complex national political dynamics of Afghanistan as he spent an increasing amount of time on Tajik demands and reactions to any instability in the north. Hamid Karzai was a Pashtun, but he had struck key Tajik alliances. For most of Miller’s tenure, BK ran the Ministry of Defense and Fahim Khan was one of the vice presidents. Both were Tajiks. Another Tajik, a rival Northern Alliance commander, the powerful Atta Mohammad Noor, was governor of Balkh Province, where Mazar-e Sharif was located. In addition, the top ranks of the Afghan army and police force, as well as the NDS, the Afghan intelligence service, were largely occupied by Tajiks from the Northern Alliance. For all intents and purposes, Tajiks ran Kabul, and thus the country, from a security perspective. Karzai had reinforced this power-sharing arrangement in his reelection bid by making Fahim one of his vice presidents, thus ensuring the support of this powerful, organized minority. Karzai maintained and controlled a shifting cast of ministers, commanders, and provincial and district governors through a heavily centralized constitution, which granted him authority to appoint all of these positions. Late in Miller’s tour, after the police commander in the north was assassinated by a Taliban suicide bomber, he watched with concern as the Tajik leaders rallied former militia members to gird for the possible return of the vicious civil war of the 1990s. “They are getting the band back together,” he muttered with foreboding.{36}
Miller did not sugarcoat the difficulty of what they were attempting. After a visit to Zabul Province, he said grimly, “There is not one district that isn’t controlled by the Taliban,” dismissing official reports that glossed over this inconvenient fact. But that did not mean he was pessimistic about the prospects for village stability and the local defense effort. He kept after the teams to be rigorous in implementing the procedures they had so painstakingly crafted. “The population will see if they do not pick the right leader or recruits,” he said. So the ultimate failsafe would be for the teams to keep their ears and eyes open and to correct course if they got it wrong.
Miller had imposed a new standard for detailed planning and execution of special operations, but he understood that success or failure would ultimately be determined at the ground level. He could try to set the conditions for success, but the art of the endeavor was practiced by the teams. Although he had formed an analytical assessment cell to develop ways to measure progress or the lack of it, it would take time to know whether the teams were able to midwife stability in the villages, much less whether their efforts would have any impact beyond the immediate environment. Would the Afghan district and provincial police chiefs prove capable of overseeing the new force? Would the initiative in fact help turn the tide of the war, as Petraeus and others hoped? They might not know until long after they departed whether they had left Afghanistan better able to fend off the Taliban. All Miller could do was give the teams and their Afghan partners a fighting chance.
First, they would have to survive. Since the beginning of the war, army special forces teams had been living out in the hinterlands in about a dozen small firebases along the border and in parts of the rural south, but they were now going even farther off the grid. Not since Vietnam would so many special operators be scattered in small teams living in such remote, hostile places. Dozens of teams were moving into remote villages where they were much more exposed to ambush and attack. Their first line of defense was to get to know the Afghan villagers among whom they were now living, and quickly build a human intelligence network while practicing good security tactics. If that failed to deter attacks, the teams were equipped with an arsenal of ground-based power, including individual and crew-served weapons such as M-16s, M240 squad automatic weapons (SAWs), .50-caliber machine guns, and miniguns. If they were overrun, the teams’ vital link to external defensive and offensive power was the Air Force combat controller from the special tactics squadrons who was assigned to each army, SEAL, and Marine team. He would talk to the overhead surveillance assets and call for air support. On high-risk patrols, he would request an air weapons team to be on call, and in emergencies he would place the 911 call to any birds in the area. The air weapons team might be attack helicopters from a conventional unit controlled by the regional command, fast movers such as F-16s or F-15s controlled by the theater command, and/or one of the special operations command’s own AC-130 gunships, a lumbering plane that packed a fearsome array of firepower.
The catch was that all of this awesome firepower had to be applied in very precise conditions to avoid civilian casualties. Living among the villagers would severely constrain the team members. The special operators were no longer supposed to be conducting set-piece battles such as those Pat Mahaney had led, but rather, teaching the fishermen how to fish.