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PAKTIKA
Paktika 2010–2011
CHAMTU
ODA 3325, like most teams, desperately wanted the commando mission. Partnering with the Afghan commandos guaranteed a tour of planning and executing raids, plenty of target practice, and night operations. “Shoot, move, communicate,” were the basics of the soldiering life, and the bread and butter of special forces work because they were doing it with their indigenous partners. ODA 3325 was a dive team, and its operators tended to be aggressively physical because their scuba-diving specialty involved grueling training and periodic requalification tests. The team’s “personality” was also influenced heavily by its captain, Michael “Hutch” Hutchinson, and his intelligence sergeant, Greg, backed up by Dustin, the team’s communications sergeant. Hutch and Greg were smart and smart alecks, and it quickly had become clear that anyone who could not hang with their pace, their humor, or their taste in music (Journey, Led Zeppelin) need not apply.
There was no arguing with the team culture, whether in the special forces, the SEALs, or any other subset of special operations forces. The club or clique dynamic would take hold and reinforce the ethos, camaraderie, and esprit de corps that is vital for cohesion in military units. It is exclusionary, competitive, and mostly beneficial. Sometimes these small cliques would go astray, if they were led by the wrong leader, or if that leader lost his way. Hutch was a cheerful product of the Midwest, set upon following his uncle into the auto industry until his mother insisted he go to college. He chose West Point, despite her dismay at his decision to join the military in the wake of 9/11.
Hutch was smart and tended to poke fun at himself and everyone around him. He was frequently in trouble at West Point, and it seemed that the long gray line might reject him if it could not break him with endless punishments and threatened demerits. Clearly, the only place that was remotely suitable for his obstreperous temperament was the special forces. He instantly bonded with his whip-smart, tow-haired intelligence sergeant, an even more irascible and condescending wit than Hutch. Their battalion commander, Bob Wilson, took a somewhat benign parental approach to the team, but the company commander was less understanding and regularly tried to ride herd on them. On one occasion after they reached Afghanistan, the company commander overruled their proposed course of action, and Hutch, hearing the news over the secure line, kicked his desk to pieces.{48}
Failing to get the commando partnering assignment, the team sought the remotest possible corner to gain the freedom of maneuver to make things happen. They wound up in Shkin, the loneliest border outpost in Paktika, right on the border with Pakistan’s South Waziristan tribal area—in other words, one of the hottest Taliban and terrorist transit zones in the country. Over the years South Waziristan had played host to a collection of Al Qaeda and allied terrorist groups, such as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, as well as a shifting federation of tribal militants. The major insurgent leader in South Waziristan was Mullah Nazir, and the US military dubbed his group the Commander Nazir Group. He expelled the foreigners but struck alliances with other groups, including the powerful Haqqani network in North Waziristan. Nazir, born in Paktika with family on both sides of the border, had amassed a fighting force of some 10,000. He had been captured by the Pakistanis but released in a prisoner swap; he reportedly helped the Pakistani government by turning on the Pakistani Taliban, which was aiming to topple the Islamabad regime. In any event, Nazir’s focus was Afghanistan.
The special forces and the CIA had been bedded down at Shkin since early 2002, but Paktika was always what the military called an “economy of force” effort—meaning few conventional troops were sent there. Paktika was the southern lobe of a three-province area historically called Loya Paktia, and in fact it made more sense to think of Paktika, Khost, and Paktia as a region than as separate entities. The military used the shorthand P2K to refer to the area. In the map drawn up for the Afghan Local Police initiative, several districts in both Paktika and Paktia were selected for ALP development. Not a single district in Khost was designated, however, because the population was considered to be hostile and therefore unreceptive to the notion of local defense. But this logic was somewhat circular, as the approach employed in Khost had primarily been one of hunting and killing, and no effort had ever been made to recruit a local defense force. In addition to the conventional brigade, which was located at the capital of Khost near the border, a large CIA-hired Afghan force—one of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Pursuit Teams, or CTPTs—focused on the cross-border threat.{49}
Hutch and Greg had done their pre-mission study of Paktika, but they were eager to get out and augment their research with a firsthand tour to meet the players. They arrived on January 19, 2010, and the team spent the first two months doing reconnaissance patrols to every corner of eastern Paktika. “You can’t succeed by doing firebase diplomacy,” the captain said. “You have to establish your street cred.”
Their CIA colleagues at Shkin were generally aloof and arrogant, even though the father of one of the team members hailed from that organization. As the team sat in Shkin’s tactical operations center one day early in their tour, writing up a report about a border op they had just conducted, a scowling black-bearded Afghan strode in and passed by them without a word. It was Aziz. They had heard a lot about him from the previous team. Aziz had been a fixture in Paktika as long as the Americans had been coming there. He had participated in Operation Anaconda in Paktia in 2002 as part of Zia Lodin’s blocking force. Aziz had then joined the Afghan Militia Force until it was disbanded, and had later transitioned over, unhappily, to the Afghan Security Guard force. But Aziz was not inclined to sit around in a guard tower like some rent-a-cop. This was his country and he planned to help take it back from the Taliban.
Aziz did not greet the team that day. He knew they were the new team he’d be working with, but his experience had taught him to be wary. Each team was different, and the coalition’s war plans had taken many twists and turns. Sometimes the coalition commander simply wanted to hunker down and ensure his men got out of these badlands alive. But the new battalion commander from the 101st Airborne Division, Lieutenant Colonel Rob Harmon, had arrived with a new approach. He gathered conventional, special operations, and civilian PRT personnel together for weekly planning meetings; it was the first time anyone had tried to lash together the scarce resources being devoted to Paktika. Hutch’s team, which would go through four battalion battlespace owners on two Paktika tours, was impressed by the way Harmon orchestrated the various military and civilian entities so that each could do what it did best.
Aziz’s fierce motivation was partly a function of his personality, but he was particularly driven by the searing experience of being the lone survivor of a bloody Taliban suicide attack while eating at a restaurant in the bazaar of his hometown, Orgun, with his cousin Sardar in 2006. Sardar and many other fighters were killed, and the badly wounded Aziz was flown to Kabul for medical treatment. Special operations forces came to find him in the Afghan military hospital. “Where is Aziz?” they asked one of the doctors, not recognizing him through his bandages. Once they found him, they took him to Bagram, where he was attended to promptly and received better care than he would have received in Kabul. When Aziz returned to Paktika, he rejoined the fight. He added two new patches to his tiger-striped uniform. One patch commemorated Sardar’s death; the other read: “Taliban Hunting Club.”{50}
Aziz had acquired serious fighting skills over the past decade of war. When the team met him, he was babysitting the Shkin base and patrolling its perimeter. But the teams based there realized they needed Aziz for combat operations, as no one else had the detailed grasp of the terrain that he had or understood enemy tactics as well. Hutch and his sergeants recognized Aziz’s tactical proficiency in the way he conducted himself, handled guns, and assessed the terrain and situation. They also observed his leadership skills and his strict discipline of his subordinates. When a truck driver who hauled supplies arrived at their outpost, Firebase Lilley, and complained that one of Aziz’s guards had tried to shake him down by demanding protection money, Aziz confined the guard for six months without pay as a demonstration to all of his men. Aziz was extremely strict with his group, which then numbered about thirty-five men, who were called his “Special Squad,” and the team observed a certain pride and esprit de corps among them. They had adopted and enforced strict standards as part of modeling themselves as an elite unit.
Meanwhile, Hutch was pleased with the way his own team was jelling. The men had been to Afghanistan on a previous deployment, but they had since gained new members—and now, a new mission. Following pre-mission training in Wyoming to prepare for high-altitude operations in mountainous terrain, they were slated to serve two tours with only a short break, and Hutch wanted to make sure they did not suffer burnout. One of his points of friction with his company commander was the high-spirited hijinks of ODA 3325: just because they liked to have fun did not mean they were not serious professionals. Before every mission, they gathered in their team room to play their favorite songs on the computer as they were kitting up. En route to the target, they cranked more tunes over the loudspeakers in the Humvees. And as they crested the hilltop leading back to the firebase, they played the team’s theme song, “Don’t Stop Believin’.”
Special operations teams are given a certain latitude to accomplish their commander’s intent, and Hutch would not hesitate to take the initiative and innovate as he saw fit. After two months of driving around and sitting with Afghans in dozens of towns and qalats, he concluded that the basic dynamic there was strength and honor. A tribe would seek and use guns and money to protect its honor, and shame or loss of honor was the worst fate it could suffer. He would play on the tribes’ desire to be strong and to protect their honor. To be effective, the team also had to establish its identity, and a reputation of strength as well as fairness. The large Waziri tribe straddled the border between Paktika and Pakistan’s South Waziristan. As the name suggested, the Waziris were the dominant tribe in Waziristan, and the Waziris in Paktika had many family and business ties across the border where most of their kin lived. The team’s academic studies had suggested that the Waziris were unalterably opposed to the Afghan government because of ideological differences and their geographical tie to Pakistan. But the team reached a different conclusion after spending time among the Waziri. They found the tribes to be overwhelmingly motivated by their own local status and concerns and largely indifferent to a government that provided them nothing and compelled nothing from them.{51}
The team ranged all over eastern Paktika—a region the size of Rhode Island—frequently encountering bands of Taliban. Speed and aggression were their friends; they learned that standing and fighting would usually cause the insurgents to disengage. They became known as the little band that would fight, not break contact. They relied on their Humvees and the Kawasaki dune buggies, since the narrow dirt mountain roads and winding trails were too tight and steep for the hulking RGs and even the smaller Military All-Terrain Vehicles, which, despite their name, were still not agile enough for this terrain. Adding weight through armor to protect the soldiers ultimately made them less safe, unless their job was to drive up and down paved roads. One of the team members called the Kawasakis their $12,000 “IED defeat machines,” because they allowed the soldiers to travel off-road and avoid the buried bombs entirely. They enabled them to escape—and therefore defeat—what had become an endless cycle of US manufacturers building bigger and bigger vehicles while the insurgents simply rigged ever bigger bombs. Physics favored the insurgents, who could pack ever greater amounts of homemade explosive powder into jugs or culverts. The dune buggies allowed the team to fight like the Taliban, but faster: they could handle almost any terrain, take unexpected routes, and pursue and overtake their attackers. The team regularly ridiculed the top-heavy, grotesquely expensive American way of war. They had been trained to think and act like guerrillas, and that meant improvising on shoestring budgets. Hutch was radical about overspending in general—he came to believe that the typical behavior of Americans actually lessened their stature in Afghan eyes. Americans constantly offered handouts with no strings attached and allowed themselves to be ripped off—and every Afghan knew it.
From their base in Shkin, the team decided to focus on the most populated valley corridor, which ran up to Orgun, where the battalion was based, through the towns of Rabat and Surobi. They chose Rabat as the place to begin their version of village stability operations. Rabat sat beside the Spedar Pass, which was a critical chokepoint for vehicle traffic traveling from Pakistan through Shkin on the border to the populated central valley and main city of Orgun and on to the provincial capital of Sharana and the intersection with Highway One. The Spedar Pass was dominated by a group of Taliban insurgents who extracted money at checkpoints through the pass and exercised control of the water resources in the area, which was a constant source of friction among Rabat’s five subtribes. The group was led by an Afghan named Chamtu who had a fearsome reputation; the team heard tales of murder, torture, and rape from Afghans who lived in the valley.
The team carefully laid the groundwork for a showdown in Rabat. Hutch, who had grown up in Chicago, proved to be instinctively streetwise in Afghan-style politics. The younger men of Rabat were tired of Chamtu’s predations and frustrated that their elders were so thoroughly intimidated. But they could not overrule their elders alone. After an April 28 firefight in Spedar Pass, when Hutch and his team killed eight of the twenty insurgents who attacked them, he decided it was time to call for a shura. He requested that the Rabat elders come to Shkin for a powwow. He had already enlisted the attendance of the Bermel district governor and had discussed the script with him and the Shkin shura leader. These two began the meeting by berating the Rabat elders for not keeping the pass open and secure. Their truck drivers were regularly shaken down and sometimes attacked. As the Rabat elders began to make excuses, the Shkin shura members interrupted them with more complaints. The pressure began to build. Then Commander Aziz asked each elder to declare which side he was on, the government’s or the insurgents’, and began to separate the elders into two groups based on their response. The ultimatum forced the elders to side with the government.{52}
Aziz then invited the district governor into a side room and showed him a document. It had been Aziz’s idea to prepare a written agreement for the Rabat elders to sign with their thumbprints. By signing, they would be committing their five subtribes to forming a local defense group to defend the pass. In return, the government would support them. The governor agreed to the idea, and he and Aziz returned to request the elders’ signatures. The elders asked for a fortified observation post to be built on the pass to help protect their men, and the team agreed. Chamtu came to Rabat two days later to berate the elders and demand that they renege, but they told him they had had no alternative.
The team was on the hunt for Chamtu, hoping to take him down. A few weeks later, on June 8, they were in Surobi at the district center when they came under mortar fire from the mountain range to the west. Three passes leading out of that range served as ratlines for the Taliban, who enjoyed sanctuary in the sparsely populated district beyond, which connected in the south to Pakistan. The team members jumped into their Humvees and headed due west to the closest ratline. At its mouth sat the little village of Nawi Kalay. Their plan was to gather the elders and try to persuade them to give them some information as to the insurgents’ whereabouts. It would be difficult. Many of those villages along the mountain range found it easier to submit to Taliban domination than to fight it. In addition, they had less economic incentive to deal with the Americans than the poorer tribes on the east side of the valley did. Quite a few of their sons worked in Dubai and sent home money. Their silk shalwar kameezes testified to their comfortable, if rural, circumstances. Hutch also had the SOT-A intelligence team attached to them monitoring the radio traffic as they sped along.
As they entered Nawi Kalay, the group came to an open area. Fifty meters off the road, near the tree line, they saw Afghans taking down mortar tubes, probably the very ones that had shot at them. The team reacted instinctively. They wheeled to the left and attacked. The sergeant in the lead Humvee led the charge into the midst of about two dozen Taliban fighters, who began running in every direction. Hutch did not need to issue orders; the team just went on automatic pilot. Every infantryman had practiced the maneuver thousands, probably tens of thousands, of times. As they closed in, the soldiers jumped off their trucks to chase down fleeing insurgents.
A few of the Taliban stood and fought. Caught at close quarters, one soldier drew his Yarborough knife, an item that every Green Beret receives upon graduating from the qualification course. The knife was named to honor William P. Yarborough, the Special Warfare Center commander who persuaded John F. Kennedy, an ardent special forces supporter, to authorize the beret as their official headgear, over army opposition. The headgear was to symbolize their special skills as well as the higher ethical standards Yarborough believed they should uphold to carry out their credo, “To free the oppressed.” The knife is usually a ceremonial item, used to cut open rations or fix gear, but in this case the soldier put it to its intended use: hand-to-hand combat. Training in close quarters battle tactics is standard in the special operations forces, as is “combatives” training, when a fight goes to ground. It is a mix of martial arts, grappling, and all-out ultimate fighting.
Very rarely had the men been in such close-range fighting, but they reacted with a practiced fury that overwhelmed their enemy. Hutch’s gun truck ran over one of the insurgents, literally mowing him down. In the middle of the firefight, a car drove down the road and was hit by a round. A ten-year-old boy riding in the car was killed.
After the fighting stopped, Greg took photos to aid identification of the fighters. They confirmed that one was the insurgent leader Chamtu. Many of his premier fighters were dead as well. They also found RPGs, cell phones, code books, and a motorcycle rigged with a bomb for a suicide driver. Greg, the intelligence sergeant, was ecstatic at the treasure trove, which would help him and the team’s intelligence analysts track down the group’s affiliates in three districts, its support network, and its contacts in Pakistan. In all, eleven enemy had been killed.
They loaded the corpses into their trucks. There was nowhere to put them but inside, under their feet. When they got back to the Surobi district center, however, the Afghan police there were too afraid to take control of the bodies. They refused, certain that there would be reprisals. Finally the operators persuaded the district governor to take custody of the dead Taliban and arrange for their burial. Hutch also explained what had had happened to the boy who was killed in the car. No outcry from the villagers or the district governor ensued, and Hutch surmised that the Afghans understood that the father had been in error to drive into the middle of a firefight with his son. In their subsequent shura with the Surobi elders, Hutch gave detailed instructions for what civilians could do to avoid harm if a battle was occurring in their vicinity. He promised his team would always seek to engage insurgents outside of the populated areas.
The next day, in the Orgun bazaar, Aziz issued a public challenge to Abdul Aziz Abbasin, the Taliban shadow governor for Orgun District and the number-two Taliban leader in the province. “Come fight me,” he said on a handheld speaker. “I will fight you anywhere.” The following day, a gas station attendant arrived with the reply: Abdul Aziz Abbasin will fight you in Pirkowti tomorrow morning. Pirkowti was the Taliban stronghold.
Challenge issued, challenge accepted. As in an old-fashioned duel, further terms were offered. Hutch relayed the message that if the insurgents didn’t use IEDs, they would not call in air support. He was confident they could win with only infantry. The team reached Pirkowti thirty minutes before dawn. In addition to their ODA, they had Aziz and his platoon, psyops, which was now called Military Information Support Operations, or MISO—a terrible acronym that spawned bad jokes about Japanese food—and the signals intelligence guys, about fifty men in all. They passed through Pirkowti itself without incident and proceeded eastward toward the next village, Shaykhan, where Abbasin reportedly lived, or at least bedded down. They took a hard right into an uninhabited area between the two villages, and as they came around a bend they encountered a flaming “jingle truck”—one of the fancifully painted and decorated trucks that hauled goods throughout Afghanistan and Pakistan, named for the bells that adorned the railing above the cab. As soon as he saw the fire leaping upward, Hutch braced himself. This is really going to happen, he thought. A split second later the barrage began, with rounds from two 82 millimeter recoilless rifles coming from the ridgeline across the road. These were the standard big guns of the Taliban, their heaviest stand-off weapons. The site was well chosen: the team was caught in a kill zone with minimal cover. The men could not drive through, guns blazing, as they normally would, because the burning truck was blocking the road. RPG fire began to come from the wadi below them on one side of the road and the mountains that rose up directly from the road on the other side. They fired back against the unseen enemy. It was about 8:30 a.m. Greg, the intelligence sergeant, clambered up the sheer mountainside, seeking an angle from which he could throw a grenade into the crevice where the Taliban were hiding. The greenery growing out of the wadi was waving with the Taliban movements.
A MISO soldier named Buck was shot. Hutch sent the medic to check on him. Buck, who had been manning the .50-caliber machine gun on the exposed back of one of the Humvees, was hurt pretty badly. He had been hit in the neck, and the bullet had traveled down his shoulder to lodge in his ribs. Hutch yelled: “What’s going on?” He wanted to push ahead, if possible. They had not yet run out of ammo, but they were getting low. Matt was on the .50-cal on the back of Master Sergeant Cameron Ua’s truck. Ua was their new team sergeant, a veteran of 1st Special Forces Group and a very calm, steady presence. He formed the perfect balance to the hyperactive and highly verbal duo of Hutch and Greg. Ua asked Matt for an ammo check, and Matt reported that he had started the day with 12,000 rounds, of which he had expended 8,000.
Then one of the attached intelligence sergeants was lightly wounded. A bullet ricocheted off an ammo can into his chest, hitting a side plate. With two down, Hutch knew they would need to call for medevac and more ammo. He hated to leave the fight, but they pulled back through Pirkowti to a big green space with a small mud hut nearby. The team checked their ammo. They were down to 10 to 40 percent of their total per truck, so they cross-loaded what was left while the call for medevac went out. At 9:15 the medevac bird came in, about forty-five minutes after the battle began. The team had preplanned an ammo resupply back at Orgun base. Ua and Jeff had packed the cans, and the packet was sitting there ready to be sling-loaded under a helicopter. But there were no gunships available. Hutch swore. The maintenance platoon at Orgun offered to drive ammo to Pirkowti in an RG-31. But there was no way that vehicle could climb into and out of the steep walls of the wadi and then navigate the narrow canyon into Pirkowti.
Hutch did not have much time to make a decision. They heard the insurgents talking on the radio; they were already flooding into the wadis to block the exit from the valley. As it was, the team would have to blow through there hard to make it out without further casualties. Dustin was Hutch’s driver; he had been a motocross racer in Oklahoma and he knew how to drive as well as fix vehicles. He’d applied directly to the special forces through the “X-Ray” direct accession program, formally known as Initial Accession, or IA. He had been assigned to the “Schoolhouse”—that is, the US Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg, and found himself on a bus out to Camp Mackall. Dustin had the air of a laid-back California hippie, and he was a true sun worshipper. No sooner did the team arrive at one of their camps than he would strip down to his Ranger panties, as their black nylon workout shorts were called, and stretch out on a rooftop or a folding camp chair to soak up some rays. But Dustin’s appearance and manner belied his mechanical and technical skill and an inquisitive, contrarian nature. There were no yes men among the sergeants. Hutch gave the order to go, and Dustin floored it. A recoilless rifle round narrowly missed them, landing five meters away. The next one shot out their satellite antenna. Greg was driving his truck, crazily, with two Afghan trucks bringing up the rear. An RPG hit his right rear, blowing out his back tire. He kept driving on the rim. The poor working dog cowered in the back, under the feet of her handler. Working dogs often suffered post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and this small black lab was no exception. She had been through a lot already.
The insurgents’ tactics were practiced. Another trap was sprung as the team left the wadi and rejoined the road. The insurgents were used to shooting at the trucks from the wadis on either side of the road. The larger mine-resistant armored vehicles were sitting ducks and had a hard time returning fire effectively. The insurgents were so close that the tall trucks could not depress the barrels of their automated guns low enough to reach such a close-in target. The latest innovation, called CROWS (for “Common Remotely Operated Weapon System”), allowed a gunner to locate and fire on targets using a joystick, video and thermal cameras, while staying safely cocooned inside his armored vehicle. The experience was something like playing a video game on a roller coaster. But the Humvees had an advantage in this situation because they were closer to the ground. Their .50-cal guns were just about level with the heads of the insurgents when they popped up from the wadi edge to fire at the team through the foliage. The team later heard intercepts of the Taliban talking about how many they had lost in that wadi and concluding that they had crept up too close.
The team pushed the Humvees as hard as they would go. They hit forty miles an hour, driving through the ambush, then jostled violently down into the wadi and over the rocky bed until they exited the valley. The team and their Afghan comrades rolled into Orgun as bystanders turned around to gawk. Their trucks were limping, full of bullet holes, windows shot out. The RPG was still sticking out of Greg’s wheel rim. Aziz took the opportunity to taunt Abbasin. “We went to meet you and you did not show yourself,” he said, issuing another challenge with his megaphone. When the returning fighters entered their base camp at Orgun, the “Rakkasans” of the 187th Infantry Regiment, part of the 101st Airborne Division, came over, offering to help fix their vehicles and refit their ammo. “It was like having a pit crew,” Hutch said of the warm welcome their infantry brethren gave them.
The team and Aziz went back to Pirkowti the next day to show the flag and see if Abbasin would give battle, but he did not. They did not want their departure the day before to be interpreted as unwillingness to fight. Hutch and his team were learning the finer points of the “Kabuki” theater of Afghan warfare. There is a show of force, and then someone loses face. Rarely are the battles fought to the last man. It is combat for position and psychological dominance. The special operations team and their Afghan allies had shown themselves to be the undaunted ones, and this narrative stuck. They picked up chatter to the effect of “if you see the Humvees, run away.”
The effects of Chamtu’s death and word of the Pirkowti showdown were dramatic. When the team and Aziz’s fighters returned to Rabat, they were greeted like heroes. Men lined up to join the local defense group and began helping to construct the fort. In addition, the young men of Rabat built a smaller observation post on the biggest mountain in the pass. When they were done, they raised the Afghan flag above both. The symbol of Taliban on motorcycles had now been replaced by a locally manned outpost flying the national flag.
As word of the recent battles and observation post construction spread, sentiments changed. Hutch and his team along with Aziz and his men brokered similar agreements with the elders in Orgun. Then they went to Surobi for a shura with the district governor and the elders there. That day, seventeen elders signed an agreement to raise a self-defense force, and dozens more signed in the coming days. The team had perfected its formula. It had shown itself willing to fight, hand to hand and face to face, and had prevailed. The psychological impact encouraged others to stand with them. The Rabat agreement was reached via a series of side deals; the power brokers of each subtribe had to be engaged away from the rest, not at the shura. Once they had agreed to come forward publicly, their assent would pull the other, more reluctant tribes along. This was how Afghan decision-making occurred. The real decisions did not occur in the shura; the shura or jirga was the place where decisions already reached behind closed doors were ratified, positions aired, and terms of the deal recited. It was politics in action.
In a place as intimidated as Paktika, villagers were not going to come forward unless they were convinced the new leaders stood a chance of winning. The climate of fear had to be dispelled by demonstrating a willingness to fight fire with fire; this is what Hutch meant by saying firebase diplomacy alone would not work. They had to establish their warrior credentials before people would begin to have hope. The pervasive belief had been that the Taliban would inevitably come back to rule the province; a new dynamic had to be set in motion for the people to believe they could shape their own fate.
The team’s success quickly outstripped its ability to provide quick reaction forces for all of the mushrooming local defense groups from the base at Shkin on the border. After an elder in Surobi was kidnapped and executed, Hutch realized he should have enlisted the help of the 1-187 infantry company at Orgun as a 911 responder. From the team’s base in Shkin it was a two-hour drive to Surobi. It was not so much deaths as the lack of support that mattered to the Afghans; having someone come to back them up showed that they had allies and thus superior strength and standing vis à vis the insurgents. Hutch had been in enough firefights to know this; it was all about standing with those who stood up. He would have to construct a better support network, using the conventional forces, his team, and the Afghan partners to shore up Surobi’s fledgling defense force.
The team managed to reach an agreement with the elders in Pirkowti, with the district governor’s help, but the elders in this insurgent-dominated area buckled under the pressure, finding legal loopholes in their agreement that allowed them to continue business as usual. The team would have to take on Pirkowti again in its next tour.
The members of ODA 3325 went home to North Carolina for a short hiatus in late 2010 before returning in 2011 to pick up where they had left off. The command had finally learned how critical it was to send the teams back to the very same places they had been before, as they had with the team in Maiwand. Aziz greeted the team warmly, and the various ALP commanders were ecstatic to see them again. Although Pirkowti remained solidly in enemy hands, the team’s plan had survived and flourished in the central corridor of eastern Paktika running from Shkin to Orgun. The observation posts were like a magic talisman. Once they were established, the Taliban, in the great majority of cases, effectively conceded the area.
Hutch had heard insurgent talk on the radio many times: “Why haven’t you attacked yet? You have over fifty men.” “They built OPs, we can’t do anything.” Villages along the route clamored for observation posts to be built. Hutch and his team obliged where it made sense to do so—that is, when the area was strategic and not within range of an existing OP. In the end the team built fourteen posts, manned with local Afghan police. The structures were simple affairs made of the same Hesco barriers that the Americans used to ring their bases. Someone had likely made a mint on the simple design: canvas was stretched over a collapsible metal frame that formed a box; the men popped the box open and filled it with dirt or sand to create a five- to ten-foot-thick barrier, depending on the size. It was impenetrable to the insurgents’ firepower; the only way to inflict casualties was by indirect mortar or artillery fire or by overrunning the post. The roof was a simple plywood sheet overlaid with sandbags. Concertina wire was then strung around the top of the Hescos as an outer perimeter. The Afghans could fill the barriers by hand, though the work was more quickly done by a Bobcat, if an engineer battalion was around to loan the team the machinery.
ODA 3325 had adopted its own unorthodox approach to building local police forces. They had departed from the village stability operations model in that they did not embed in a single community but instead worked to raise village defense groups all along their corridor and beyond. They had determined that embedding with one tribe or subtribe would only inflame tensions among the other tribes of Paktika and limit their reach. They were experiencing catastrophic success with their approach, and they needed to manage it carefully to ensure it did not go off the rails. Instead of “one tribe at a time,” the formula advocated by an early proponent of tribal engagement in Afghanistan, Major Jim Gant, Hutch and his team wound up winning over twenty-five subtribes with a population of more than 100,000 in a 1,200-square-kilometer area. In this way, they achieved more than local, tactical impact.{53}
To mentor Paktika’s burgeoning local police force, which now numbered 550 in all, the team split into two and sometimes three units. They maintained a split team in Shkin and one in Orgun. The team scouted various locations as Hutch debated where they should expand next. The border was too hot to expect locals to risk their necks: conventional troops at Forward Operating Base (FOB) Tillman and Combat Outpost (COP) Margah right on the border were getting hammered daily by artillery from Pakistan. The frequency of this cross-border fire quadrupled over the course of 2011 as US-Pakistan relations deteriorated. Using a map that covered the wall of his office at Orgun, the battalion commander pointed out a dozen locations where the fire was coming from. These “points of origin” had been definitively located by radar, thermal, or video detection. They were all within sight of, if not directly emanating from, Pakistan Army or Frontier Corps outposts.{54}
Hutch decided to keep his focus on the most populated area of the province and expand his current corridor of security west from Orgun to link it with Sharana, the provincial capital. Greg took a few team members to Sar Howza, outside Sharana, to lay the groundwork for expansion of the Afghan Local Police. In Sar Howza, the conventional battalion commander was eager to get involved, so Greg was happy to give him and his company commander the lead in expanding the local police initiative there. This would ease the burden on the team, which was already geographically stretched to its limit. The tempo of activity was also beginning to wear on the men.
Greg and Hutch improvised by relying on partners, whether conventional forces or Aziz and his men. Greg and the team would provide oversight and mentoring, while the training would be conducted by Commander Aziz’s men. The team had no hesitation about outsourcing the training: all of the special operations teams who had worked with Aziz judged his men to be the most tactically proficient of any force in Afghanistan—more so than the regular army and even the commandos. The reason was continuity: for a decade Commander Aziz had been their leader, and most of his men had been part of the original Afghan Militia Force recruited by special operations teams and had partnered with them through every rotation since 2002.
The combined effort would expand the security zone through the last rugged mountain range separating Orgun from Sharana, a pass that was jokingly called the Gates of Mordor from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings by the unlucky soldiers who had to drive resupply convoys through this guerrilla-infested zone. The Taliban had planted the mother of bombs here, so large and powerful that it had flipped one of the mammoth 52,000-pound RG-33 armored vehicles end over end. Since the soldiers inside were all strapped into their five-point harnesses, no one was killed. But two of them had not been riding with their feet on the foot straps hanging above the floor. Instead they were resting their feet on the floor, and the gigantic blast had broken their legs. A gaping twenty-foot crater at the scene of the attack served as a reminder to all who passed.
The road from Shkin to Orgun became passable thanks to the defense pacts between the tribes and the district governors and the constant vigilance of the local police standing guard in their checkpoints. Hutch then launched his team into development and governance activity in earnest. He believed that paving roads was the development initiative that would pay the greatest dividends. The road was the economic lifeline of the population, so Hutch first sought to pave the entire stretch and make other infrastructure improvements. This would help Afghans get their crops to market and improve commerce, which in turn would stimulate the businesses of shopkeepers and others.
Hutch railed at new restrictions on their contracting authority that had been imposed after contracting abuses received widespread attention. The problem was real, but the fix was wrong. The team had a better grasp of which contractors were reliable and what work should cost than a distant contracting officer in Kabul, who inevitably went to an Afghan company with ties in the capital, which allowed several layers of middlemen to take their slices of the pie, greatly inflating the final price. The team, the US officials in Kabul, and the Afghan contractors in Orgun wrangled over the final stretch of unpaved road for months.
Afghans were also keen to expand cell-phone coverage in eastern Paktika, so Hutch’s team got involved in pushing for this. The towers that did exist were turned off at night by the cell-phone companies at the Taliban’s demand. The Taliban knew that one of the principal ways they were tracked was through their cell phones. The companies were not about to risk their investment when the government provided no help to rebuild dynamited towers.
The effect of the road improvements and increased security was dramatic: Shkin became self-sustaining once it was connected to the rest of Paktika, and Orgun in particular. Orgun’s bazaar grew from 5 shops to 1,500. The complaints that used to revolve around shootouts in the bazaar suddenly were about sewage and lack of parking. Motels sprouted along the highway, and the number of gas stations grew from one to seven. So many jingle trucks plied the route that traffic jams even occurred. The towns with OPs did not fight each other, and in fact began to serve as quick-response forces for those who were attacked. In a watershed moment, a Tajik OP came to the aid of a Kharoti OP and evacuated the post’s wounded to the hospital in Orgun. It reaffirmed Hutch’s view that the Tajik minority and the welter of Pashtuns—Kharotis and Waziris, with their two main subsets of Ahmadzai and Utmanzi—could, with the right incentives, start to see themselves as Afghans. The self-interest of each tribe along the highway was now aligned, and they had a vested interest in maintaining their newfound security.
Although Hutch’s sergeants would much rather be out hunting bad guys, they set to the tasks they were given. One sergeant was assigned to help draw up a city management plan for Orgun, and another worked with the civilian agricultural experts at Orgun’s base to understand what the most effective programs were. The civilian district support team included Mary Kettman, a veteran USAID official who had spent years in conflict-ridden corners of Africa—including Sudan, Kenya, and Somalia. She had arrived in Paktika in September 2009 and would extend her tour to stay for two and a half years, making her the American on the ground in Paktika with the longest tenure by far. “We started to make a lot of progress, so I wanted to stay on,” she said. One evening, Hutch and a sergeant came to her tent to ask if they could use her Internet access, as theirs was down. She realized as she overheard their discussions that Hutch was serious about stability operations, not just bagging Taliban trophies. Of course, he was also interested in the latter, and his team was quite proud of having rolled up five of the high-value targets on the JPEL (Joint Prioritized Effects List) that the special mission units had hunted.{55}
Kettman was impressed that Hutch even knew what her part of USAID—the Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI)—was. For their part, the team members came to see Kettman as an impressively intrepid civilian who could hold her own with them. Hutch joked that she had originally seen the team members as wild-eyed killers, but had wound up being as enthusiastic as they were after a successful mission. Outwardly an odd match, the peace-loving development expert and the rowdy team forged an effective partnership and even friendship over their two years in Paktika.
When Hutch’s team organized its first big shura with the provincial governor, the chief of police, and all the district governors to formally kick off its ALP/VSO effort, Kettman realized that the initiative, if it worked, would facilitate her entry into many communities that she had not been able to work in before. She arranged to send her Afghan partners into a village right after the team conducted a mission. USAID is a hydra-headed organization with many divisions and projects; the one Kettman represented, the OTI, focused on small-scale, grassroots projects that would have an immediate impact in rural areas or conflict zones. OTI was the most expeditionary of all the civilian agencies; it prided itself on recruiting adventuresome souls who were ready to work in war zones or other disasters. OTI was unique in that it maintained control of its program design and could overhaul programs that were not working; most other USAID programs were entirely outsourced to implementing partners. In the case of Paktika, Kettman used Development Alternatives, Inc., which hired Afghans to enter the communities and do the work, but she trained them and kept oversight of all of it.
OTI projects were funded through small grants of no more than $50,000 each. This was far more than the Commander’s Emergency Response Program (CERP) money the team could readily authorize, so the team would usually start off funding whatever small project the elders agreed upon, and OTI would follow on with more sustained programs. Some grants went to improve roads, but many were used to train farmers in more productive agricultural techniques; to construct gabians—simple wire-mesh baskets of rocks that slowed erosion and reduced flooding; and to clean karezes of trash and debris so water would flow to more communities. Shkin was the easiest place to start, since a relationship had already been forged with Waziris there who supported the government. OTI helped to pave the road to the border and also trained local farmers in beekeeping and orchard techniques. Work farther north, in Bermel, was stopped after a bomb killed construction workers. Kettman then focused on Rabat, Surobi, and, with three different governors, Orgun for the rest of her tenure. She was even able to do some work in Pirkowti after the initial agreement was signed with the elders, with farmers from the area going to Orgun and Khost for training. She held seminars in conflict mediation also, which the feuding Utmanzai and Ahmadzai Waziris attended. Although Pirkowti remained problematic, she believed these seeds might later bear some fruit.
Kettman was convinced that training and education were the way to make a lasting difference, as the adage about teaching a man to fish implied. A literate local official armed with good management and accounting techniques could turn around unpopular perceptions of the Afghan government. But the American military and civilian incentive structure, internally, revolved around expenditure of authorized dollars. If program monies were not spent, that was considered a demerit. Eastern Paktika received $2.89 million in development funding in 2010, and West Paktika ten times that. Hutch argued that for $5 million he could amply fund development, security, and governance in eastern Paktika. This was a far smaller sum than the $1 billion it took to maintain an American brigade there annually. And, he noted, the United States paid $400 million to lease the base at Shkin each year.
TO PIRKOWTI AGAIN
The virtuous circle of security and commerce resulted in an increasingly peaceful Paktika as the team’s tour progressed. This set of circumstances left the sergeants crestfallen—try as they might, they could not get into a firefight. Then one day in October 2011 they picked up chatter that Abdul Aziz Abbasin—the Taliban shadow governor—was back in Pirkowti. He was on the United Nations blacklist and had recently been added to the asset forfeiture list of the US Treasury Department, but those sanctions had not touched him. The arm of the Haqqani network in Paktika, he was responsible for ambushing and killing many US soldiers and ran a training camp that still turned out Taliban fighters.
The team dropped everything and went into mission planning mode. Abbasin had eluded them before, but the team was determined to get him this time. Aziz and his lieutenant strode into the operations center to discuss the mission to Pirkowti that would kick off that night. Hutch and Greg engaged in extended negotiations throughout the night with their counterparts in Task Force 310—the special mission unit charged with hunting high-value targets in the region—and the CIA. The task force wanted to wait for more signals intelligence to confirm the target’s location and identity. The CIA’s Counterterrorist Pursuit Team, which was located in an adjacent camp, decided to send a small contingent along. The Afghans in the CTPT drove trucks and wore different uniforms from others in the alphabet soup of the Afghan security forces. Their chain of command ran through the intelligence hierarchy.{56}
At 3:30 a.m., the team rolled out of the Orgun gate, stopping to pick up Aziz and his men, whose base adjoined the American one. The US team was loaded into three Humvees, and the Afghans were in an assortment of Humvees and trucks. They drove under night observation devices (NODs) toward Pirkowti until day broke, the sun rising just as they climbed down the banks of the wadi and began the jostling, splashing drive up the riverbed. Their target was actually beyond Pirkowti, at Shaykhan, the town where they had been ambushed by Abbasin’s forces the year before. The line of vehicles, Cameron’s in the lead, pulled out of the wadi and quickened its pace as it entered Pirkowti, then sped through and made the sharp right turn down into Shaykhan.
The surveillance aircraft overhead was supposed to be jamming communications, but for some reason Hutch was picking up insurgent traffic. He did not need to wait for translation to be relayed. “Run, run,” the insurgents said. “They are coming.” Someone had tipped off Abbasin, and he and his men were fleeing Shaykhan. “Step on it,” Hutch relayed, urging his men forward into the town. They pulled into their predetermined spots, one Humvee parking on a high street to oversee the town’s rolling landscape, and then sprinted through the street, ducking into the target houses. Oddly, a helicopter had been spotted overhead as they arrived—a sure tipoff that Americans were on the way. The team never found out whose bird it was.
Commander Aziz led his men into homes they had targeted where Abbasin and his men were known to sleep. They searched them thoroughly. Then Aziz called for the elders to gather the young men in the village for an impromptu shura. They came out reluctantly, but without resistance, and sat on their haunches, Afghan style, in front of a building on the main street. Aziz reminded them of the agreement they had signed the year before, to defend their village against the Taliban. He said they had breached the agreement repeatedly and had lost their honor by behaving in this fashion. Hutch stood by but did not speak. This dialogue was more effectively conducted among Afghans. Aziz’s men spotted two young Afghans they said had ties to the insurgent leader and recommended they be taken for questioning by the NDS, the Afghan intelligence service. Two dwarves joined the gathering, and Aziz and Dustin began chatting with them playfully, attempting to lighten the mood. The sun was well up, and Hutch was ready to go. They had failed to bag their prey once again.
The convoy loaded up but was briefly delayed by a caravan of brightly clothed Kuchi herders who were making their way into town on several camels and horses, their children and belongings piled high on donkeys’ backs. Women and dogs on foot rounded out the slow-moving parade. They had stayed clear of the town until they were sure it would not become a battle zone. Hutch had planned a stealthy raid this day, but his standard practice, when issuing challenges to the Taliban, was to let villagers know beforehand. The team would challenge the insurgents to show themselves outside of town at such and such an hour to do battle. If the insurgents failed to show, they lost face before their kinsmen. And if they showed, they would be outgunned in short order. The villagers were glad to have the advance warning to stay off the roads, and it minimized the risk of civilian casualties.
Hutch was dead set on bringing Pirkowti around before the end of the team’s tour. Before he went on leave, he suggested that the team propose a combined operation to the conventional battalion commander at Orgun. The latter agreed, but his commander then retasked him to ferry their armored vehicles out of FOB Tillman on the border to refit them with heavier armor. The scheme exposed the truck drivers to attack along the narrow ambush-prone road. In the end the battalion expended an entire month in the final stretch of its tour pulling out ninety vehicles for refitting, suffering several wounded in the process. The team went ahead without the battalion to Pirkowti, again with Aziz. They hit an IED in the wadi, but no one was injured. They came up empty-handed again; they did not capture Abbasin, and the villagers were not inclined to help. The team was frustrated. It would take more time and more maneuvering to bring Pirkowti around.
While ODA 3325’s energy and acuity—and the decision to send the team back to eastern Paktika—were major factors contributing to the quantum leap in security, stability, and renewed economic activity that the region experienced between 2010 and the end of 2011, the team was quick to say that the improvements would not have been possible without the Afghan partner force led by Commander Aziz. He and his men played key roles in brokering deals and bringing the various district governors and elders into the fold. The province had been cowering under Taliban intimidation, and none of the appointed leaders or army or police commanders had demonstrated any leadership in the effort to change matters. But they did follow Aziz.
However, a different version of Aziz was circulating. Stories from Pirkowti and other Utmanzai Waziris were shared with United Nations officials, who wrote a report that was sent to the coalition. The ISAF headquarters investigated the allegations against Aziz, which included acts of murder, abuse, and pedophilia in 2009, but found no corroborating evidence. Then the UN report was given to a Kabul-based freelance reporter, Julius Cavendish. Hutch was with Aziz when the reporter called to ask him to respond to the allegations. Aziz hotly denied the charges. He was incensed by the first question he said Cavendish asked him: “Are you a Muslim?” Aziz felt the reporter was prying into matters that were none of his affair. The article was published in Time magazine in October 2011, and Aziz became the target of renewed questions and inquiries.{57}
When Hamid Karzai asked his aides about Aziz, he received favorable reports. The deputy NDS director, who was from Paktika, made positive comments. Mohibullah Samim, the governor of Paktika, and his chief of police, Dawlat Khan, also told the president of the helpful role Aziz had been playing. These high-level Pashtuns brushed aside the article’s implication that Aziz, a Tajik who had been born and raised in Orgun, had a vendetta against Pashtuns. The village elders had endorsed the commanders that Aziz had nominated. The force now included 625 Pashtuns and 66 Tajiks. The provincial council chief, a Pashtun, decided that more needed to be done to rebut the claims, and he urged village elders and district leaders to go to Kabul and seek an audience with Karzai to convey their view that without Aziz, eastern Paktika would not have moved forward. If he was removed, the relative peace and security might quickly unravel.{58}
The police chief told Aziz that Karzai wanted to meet him face to face. Aziz told Hutch he was going to Kabul in a taxi, unarmed. “Are you crazy?” Hutch said. But Aziz would not listen. The president wanted to meet him, and he wanted to clear his name. He drove to the presidential palace and met Karzai. The president heard him out, and, according to Aziz, began crying. Karzai also received a delegation from Paktika, which convinced him that this Afghan had been slandered. The Utmanzai Waziris, particularly those from Pirkowti, had an incentive to spread stories: Aziz was the most formidable enemy in Paktika of anyone linked to the Taliban, the Haqqanis, or the Commander Nazir Group.
The matter was put to rest, at least from an Afghan standpoint, when the Afghan officials and elders publicly rallied around Aziz. Jess Patterson, the US State Department head of the provincial reconstruction team based in Sharana, knew that the provincial governor and police chief both strongly supported Aziz. She believed he had been effective in bringing security to the province, but she did not know whether the specific allegations were true or false. “I’m sure he is no angel,” she said, but added that “the accusation that he was on some kind of anti-Pashtun crusade has no credibility.” Most of his force was Pashtun, as were the governor, the police chief, and the head of the provincial council, who were all from different subtribes (Andari, Zadran, and Kharoti, respectively). ODA 3325 had been in combat with Aziz countless times, but Hutch and Greg said they had never seen him execute anyone in cold blood. Any incidents that took place in 2009 would have occurred before the team arrived, but Hutch and Greg said that some of the alleged crimes were linked to combat operations in which Aziz had not even participated.
Aziz, who felt his honor was gravely injured, wondered why the reporter had not come to interview him in person. “I am ready to meet him at any time,” he said. “Why would he say these things?” Aziz said he had not pulled Chamtu from a mosque and killed him; he had never been in a heliborne operation; and he was in the hospital at Bagram recovering from injuries on one of the dates when the reporter alleged he had flown to a qalat, burned it down, and killed two women and children. The special forces had been with him on all of his operations. “If they don’t believe me, ask the teams,” Aziz said. What he viewed as a smear campaign seemed like it would never end: “The Taliban are now saying that this is what happens to those who are allies of the United States.”{59}
Hutch and his team had succeeded by unorthodox methods, and Aziz was undoubtedly a departure from the model. He had not come to the team through the village elders, but through his long association with special operators. He had been embraced by the local elders and officials, however. Nonetheless, Aziz’s situation was precarious from a practical standpoint because he held no formal position within the Afghan security forces apparatus. He was not a member of the Afghan Local Police or of the Afghan Uniformed Police. He was paid out of US Afghan Security Forces Funds in an arrangement that was due to expire as the security forces came under the Afghan government’s purview. He had been made the trusted agent or paymaster of the Afghan Local Police by the provincial chief of police, and he was clearly functioning as the primary trainer, quick reaction force, and intermediary between the provincial and district police. To regularize the role of Aziz and his Special Squad, the special operations company commander suggested in the spring of 2012 that his group be named the Village Response Unit and that the Afghan Ministry of the Interior pick up his salary. The provincial police chief, Dawlat Khan, did not want to lose Aziz as his ally and asked him to become his deputy. Aziz wanted to remain in Orgun, however, rather than move to Sharana, the provincial capital. He was willing to do whatever Khan asked, but he wanted to do it from his home city. He also did not want to lose his tie to the special forces. “I work for them,” he said. “I work with them.”{60}