__________________________________________
SEALS DO FOREIGN
INTERNAL DEFENSE, TOO
Uruzgan and Zabul 2012
SEALS TAKE CHARGE
US Army Special Forces had been in Uruzgan from the earliest days of the war, but no one had envisioned or articulated the endgame for this province, a key safe haven that insurgents used to launch attacks on Kandahar, the political center of gravity of Pashtun Afghanistan. Because of its deemed second-tier importance, it had been mostly left to the special operations teams and a handful of Dutch and Australian forces, including Australian special operators. Uruzgan was plagued by formidable terrain and by feuding among the Barakzai, Popalzai, and Ghilzai Pashtuns as well as the Hazarans. Zabul Province, next door, had been almost entirely ignored; it was a playground for insurgents who had sunk deep roots into the Ghilzai population.
SEAL Commander Mike Hayes aimed to change that state of affairs. The SEALs had been given command of a newly formed Special Operations Task Force–Southeast covering Uruzgan and Zabul provinces when the Afghan Local Police initiative kicked off in 2010. The SEALs were needed to help with this expanding foreign internal defense (FID) mission to train and advise Afghan police. SEALs had done foreign internal defense all over the world, and FID is a mission that special ops forces are assigned to carry out by military doctrine and law. This is not widely known, however, because the SEALs traditionally have emphasized direct action and special reconnaissance as their core missions, particularly in their recruiting, training, and publicity.
So, despite the fact that FID was expected of SEALs, there was plenty of grumbling all around when the SEALs were put in charge of Uruzgan and Zabul. Army special forces regarded the area as their turf and their mission. SEAL operators for the most part had joined the SEALs because they wanted to become precision raiders who conducted high-intensity, high-impact commando operations to locate, capture, or kill terrorists, hostage takers, or other evildoers. They moved into Tarin Kowt as touchy-feely recruiters of village defenders who were expected to manage a far-flung network of outposts, a managerial task for which SEAL teams were not organized, trained, or equipped. Needless to say, the first commander, J. R. Anderson, went through a lot of growing pains as his hard-charging SEAL staff learned new and mostly deskbound skills, including the lingo and hardware of army logistics and intelligence systems, since they were plugging into an army-dominated structure. Anderson was a smooth character, but he had a few run-ins with the higher command. His senior noncommissioned officer chewed nails the entire time. He had just come off a high-speed tour with SEAL Team Six, one of the United States’ tier-one special mission units. His body language made no secret of the fact that he thought this assignment was a very bad fit.{108}
SEALs had successfully conducted tactical-level foreign internal defense missions around the world—training, advising, and fighting alongside other countries’ forces. After clearing Iraq’s waterways alongside the elite Polish GROM commandos, they had trained and fought with Iraqi counterterrorism units. They had done the same with Colombian commandos and marines, with Filipino and Thai marines, and, more recently, with African units from Kenya to Cameroon. In their earliest years, SEALs had worked with indigenous forces in Vietnam. Their greatest recent success in this line of work had been in the Philippines, where SEALs and other special operators had deployed repeatedly to train, advise, and support Filipino forces fighting the Abu Sayyaf terrorist group in the fractious islands of Basilan and Mindanao. SEALs coached the Filipinos on conducting maritime raids with fast boats and were instrumental in tracking one of the Abu Sayyaf leaders using US surveillance drones. Ultimately, he was captured following a high-speed waterborne chase. The Americans sped alongside the Filipinos in their own zodiac boats, letting the Filipinos move in for the takedown.{109}
When Mike Hayes and SEAL Team Two moved into Uruzgan in 2012, Hayes was ready with guidance for his troops and a plan. He had an unusual background in that he had just left the White House, where he had worked for two years on the National Security Council staff. He had applied to be a White House Fellow, and then Denis McDonough, one of President Barack Obama’s closest advisers, asked him to stay on for another year to work on piracy issues in the Persian Gulf as well as other sensitive special operations projects. Since 9/11 a string of smart SEALs had worked on counterterrorism issues in the White House, starting with Admiral Bill McRaven, who had drafted the counterterrorism strategy later issued by President George W. Bush. Hayes was smart and ambitious and had a head for policy and strategy. He had earned a master’s degree at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and had become a member of the Council on Foreign Relations while at the White House. But he was not just a policy wonk: he had deployed multiple times to Latin America, the Balkans, and Iraq, where he was deputy commander of the special ops task force in Anbar Province. Hayes was motivated by a desire to succeed, but he was also a devout Catholic, and his religion—though he did not wear it on his sleeve—shaped his service ethic and his view of leadership. He wanted to make a difference in the world.
Hayes spent a great deal of time and thought preparing to take command in Uruzgan. Having just departed the White House, and still in close touch with his former colleagues there, he was all too aware that it was late in the war and that the administration was determined to draw down. Before he arrived in Afghanistan, Hayes laid out his guidance in twenty-five succinctly worded edicts that he thought conveyed the essential approach and mindset necessary for his team to succeed in a difficult task. His central message was to support Afghans and not act unilaterally. One edict, for example, was, “Every action should contribute to the creation of a self-reliant Afghanistan.” He exhorted his team members to eschew meaningless metrics, writing, “Don’t confuse outputs with outcomes.” He insisted that they avoid civilian casualties at all costs: “Don’t ask yourself, Can I shoot?” he wrote, but rather, “Should I shoot?” Hayes also reminded his troops to pay equal attention to governance and development and to engage with the population. He urged them to reach out to the youth, in particular, drawing a parallel that he hoped would resonate and make his men realize how profound their impact could be: “Every one of us remembers … a teacher who positively influenced our lives.…You will never know what small gesture of interaction will last a lifetime.” He concluded with injunctions to behave collegially, reminding them of the sense of commitment that had led them to volunteer.{110}
Hayes’s “Do unto others” ethic was tested right away when he discovered that his conventional counterpart, the US Army colonel in charge of partnering with the Afghan army brigade based at Tarin Kowt, loathed special operations forces. The army colonel made the depth of his animosity clear on their first meeting. Hayes bit his lip and bided his time. As the Afghans instantly took to Hayes’s polite manner, the colonel found himself the least favorite player on the team.
Hayes established three clear objectives. One was to stop the “jet stream” of insurgents using Uruzgan and Zabul as their safe haven and transit route from Pakistan to Kandahar. He would concentrate his effort on securing the central corridor of Uruzgan. His second and related goal was to win over at least some of the Ghilzai Pashtuns from the Taliban side. The third goal was to transition a number of sites to Afghan control by the end of his tour and reduce the number of teams in Uruzgan. He knew that the US forces would be expected to draw down in the coming years, and he wanted to ensure that they were positioned to sustain their gains with fewer teams.
Though Hayes was driven, he was good humored, and his staff made sure there was time for hijinks to leaven the work. On his forty-first birthday, they surprised him in his room—parading through in Ninja costumes and foam-rubber headdresses while someone videotaped his reaction. That day’s staff briefing featured outtakes spliced into the slide deck. As soon as the SEALs saw the decrepit base at Tarin Kowt, they petitioned for a new gym to replace the cramped, dark, one-room hovel that was jammed with equipment. A new gym as large as a warehouse, filled with CrossFit equipment and climbing and running machines, became a welcome retreat in which to escape for a few hours, day or night.
Stopping the insurgent jet stream was easy to say but hard to do. Special ops had been working at it for ten years already, but no one had taken a strategic approach to the problem. The critical central corridor was still not secure. The SEAL platoon assigned to the Chora District in Uruzgan was eager to find a solution that would stick, as the corridor was considered the Taliban’s main highway straight into Kandahar. Any SEALs who thought that the work of foreign internal defense in Afghanistan would not stimulate one’s adrenaline were in for a surprise. In their first weeks, the platoon in Chora was engaged in intense firefights on a regular basis. The Taliban did not shy away from close combat. These insurgents had been fighting over this ground for years, and they had every viable spot prepared for ambushes. One SEAL lost an eye due to shrapnel from a grenade. The deadly buried bombs also took their toll, blowing the legs off another SEAL. The platoon cast about for a change in tactics. Both Hayes and the special forces company commander were dubious when the platoon proposed building a wall to physically stem the flow of bad guys. Forging ahead despite the skepticism, the platoon built the wall, dubbing it “the wall of Chora.” It was a 500-meter-long barrier made of dirt-filled Hesco structures, with three checkpoints.
To their commander’s great surprise, the wall had a surprising calming effect once it went up. Feeling secure for the first time in years, the villagers came out to offer the SEALs fruit and give them tips as to where they might find buried bombs. The team began hearing less Taliban chatter on the shortwave radio. In perhaps the most telling sign that the tide was shifting, a Barakzai tribal elder who was known to be the elder in the village most sympathetic to the insurgents quietly moved away. The platoon believed it had reached a tipping point when another elder came forward one day to ask if he could be in charge of the wall. An offer of Afghan ownership, elusive for so long, had walked right up to their gate. The platoon leader readily agreed, and the team presented him with a plastic badge with a sheriff’s star. He was keeper of the wall.{111}
Over the course of 2012, a year in which violence in Chora continued to subside, incidents still occurred that showed the Taliban had not given up—for example, a motorcycle rigged with explosives was found in the bazaar. But there was a notable change. Townspeople reported what they saw, and they supported the steps taken to disarm or blow up the bombs in place. Hayes believed this long troublesome district had finally been pacified, and that the partnership with the population seemed solid enough to endure. Progress in Chora was a good first step toward securing the central corridor of Uruzgan Province.
Zabul was another matter. Everything about that province was hard, beginning with the mountainous terrain. The logistics team at Bagram considered it hands down the hardest province to resupply, and the SEALs’ site in Daychopan the hardest base to resupply in the entire country. It had a tiny drop zone ringed by houses, a cemetery, and steep mountains. When winter set in and supplies ran short, the SEALs rolled out in their all-terrain dune buggies and their heavier armored trucks in thigh-deep snow to wait for their food and water to fall from the sky. As they retrieved the scattered bundles, they would quite often find themselves under fire and would have to fight their way back home. Eighty percent of the supplies in Hayes’s provinces—twenty-one sites in all—had to be dropped by air because of the rugged terrain and lack of landing strips. Helos, when available, would make milk runs. When it was not snowing, dirt became the pilots’ biggest concern. They risked brownouts as they attempted to land in the swirling dust, a significant hazard, as the pilots could easily become disoriented. The solution devised for landing zones was “Rhino Snot”: an acrylic copolymer mixed with water to produce a thick substance that was pumped through hoses to coat the landing zone. It took only a few hours for the Rhino Snot to harden into a kind of plastic lava field.
Zabul’s human terrain was no easier than its physical terrain. The people were Ghilzai Pashtuns, which supplied most of the Taliban fighters. Its economy was so linked with Pakistan that the rupee was the common currency. Zabul was such a forgotten backwater that there was not one bank for the estimated 300,000 Afghans who lived there. Most of the Afghan soldiers posted there were Tajiks from the north, since few southern Pashtuns would join the army. The same was true of the police: only 20 percent of them spoke Pashto. The army stayed close to Highway One, and the police were largely holed up in the provincial capital of Qalat. The Taliban had virtually free rein in the rest of the province. Hayes was not so naïve as to think he could transform the entire province, but he wanted the teams to create and connect a few bubbles that Afghans could sustain. What he hoped to leave behind were districts with police chiefs who saw the value in the “pockets of excellence” that had been created in the villages where the teams had invested their efforts, and who had both the incentive and the knowledge to sustain them. “Once we’ve shown them how to grow it and connect it,” he said, “Afghans can bring to scale the success we engender.”{112}
The Afghan army brigade commander and the police chief in Zabul were considered professional officers, but the ethnic divide was a significant issue in an area where the population so deeply mistrusted the government and had relied on the insurgents for so long. Hayes hoped that the local police could be the wedge for a breakthough—but this was possible only if they could get some Zabul residents to come forward.
The SEALs had tried their best in the remote district of Daychopan in 2010–2011, but had been forced to admit defeat after braving a brutal winter. Instead of leaving it vacant, the Afghan army’s corps commander sent a large number of troops from Kandahar to occupy that rugged district with the intent of conducting operations there the following spring.
Hayes adjusted course and sent a SEAL platoon to a less remote district, to the village of Bagh. It lay astride a dirt road paralleling the Arghandab River, which constituted one of Zabul’s few easily navigable ratlines for insurgents traveling to and from Kandahar. When the SEALs first dug into their new site, it looked like it would be as hot as Daychopan had been. Every time they went on patrol they were attacked. The SEALs stood and fought, and the fierce gunfights eventually convinced both the people and the insurgents that they were there to stay. They slowly won over a few elders, who brought them a trickle of ALP recruits. The dirt road gradually became more secure, which produced their biggest dividend. The residents could travel unmolested to and from the bazaar, so business picked up and new stalls opened. The bazaar activity tripled over time, and the villagers attributed this visible, welcome change in their daily lives at least in part to the Afghan Local Police program—so more recruits began to volunteer.
As the local police program started to gain traction in Zabul, Hayes was pleased to see the provincial police chief take a great interest in it. He became very hands-on in his approach to overseeing the program, insisting on visiting the sites and approving them and any structures the special operators wanted to build, even roadside checkpoints. It was, Hayes thought, a promising sign.
While the teams in Zabul pushed out into bandit country, the teams in Uruzgan began to pull out of the villages and move to the district center. This was the necessary next step to connect the ALP with the district chiefs of police, and thus ensure that the latter would take ownership of the program in preparation for the day when the teams would no longer be there. Hayes envisioned that four teams would ultimately provide oversight from the province’s four district centers, but as an intermediate step he would keep three additional teams in Shahid-e Hasas, the biggest district in the west. A civil affairs team sergeant who worked in that district believed it had come a long way since the previous year. “This whole area was Taliban two to three years ago,” he said.{113}
Over the course of 2012, Hayes closed four sites in Uruzgan as the teams repositioned to the district centers. The teams visited the vacated sites every three weeks to make sure the police were getting paid and supplied. Mentoring the entire police force would become increasingly the focus here and elsewhere, as it had been egregiously neglected throughout the war in Afghanistan, just as it had been in Iraq. The US government could not seem to get the police mentoring model right, even though policing is the single most vital task in counterinsurgency.
While the teams worked on security and village stability in the districts, Hayes dug deep into the tribal dynamics of Uruzgan and Zabul to understand the intra-Pashtun and Pashtun-Hazara conflicts. To help him, Dan Green, a naval reservist who had served on a provincial reconstruction team in Uruzgan, returned as his adviser. And he could rely on another storehouse of firsthand knowledge in Major Brian Strickland, an Air Force engineer who was an AFPAK Hand with over a year in Tarin Kowt in the Provincial Augmentation Team.{114}
Both men were well versed in the history of Popalzai domination in Uruzgan—a history that fueled much of the present conflict. The period when Karzai’s friend, Jan Mohammad Khan, had served as governor had exacerbated the long-standing tensions. Even after Jan Mohammad Khan’s assassination in July 2011, it looked like this engine of conflict could churn on in the person of his nephew, Matiullah Khan. The special forces teams had relied on him and his highway security force to guard convoys to and from Kandahar and generally beef up their defenses. But Matiullah appeared headed down the same road of “all for the Popalzai,” nothing for the rest. He became acting provincial police chief, and his security force was grandfathered into the police force. At one juncture, Karzai sent a message from Kabul warning him to behave or he would have him fired.
Green was extremely skeptical that Matiullah Khan could be redeemed. The central Popalzai-Barakzai blood feud looked set to continue when a Barakzai who was suspected in old Jan Mohammad Khan’s assassination was killed. Some believed that Matiullah may have been responsible. Such blood feuds were all too common in Afghanistan. Strickland developed a different view from Green’s as he sat in endless meetings in Uruzgan over two years, listening and watching the governor, the police, and other Afghans. He believed that the death of Jan Mohammad Khan, Matiullah’s uncle and the main political boss and patriarch (who had fathered thirty-eight children from four wives), may have been one of those generational changes that made a different storyline possible.
Strickland told Hayes that he believed young Matiullah Khan wanted to go legitimate, just as the scions of America’s bootleggers had reinvented themselves after Prohibition ended, and just as America’s industrial “robber barons” had become philanthropists. Matiullah Khan had already amassed substantial wealth through his lucrative highway security company. After being named the provincial police chief, he told the Americans: “I have the job I want.” The Afghan intelligence service viewed him as a source of stability in the province, and Uruzgan’s literate and professional Afghan army commander was willing to collaborate with him on an operation to open up a road into Zabul, Route Whale, which had long been plagued by Taliban. Matiullah Khan, Strickland said, “had developed other tools and no longer needs to use the hammer.” Green suspected that the Afghan’s predatory instincts were only temporarily suppressed. Hayes opted for using his influence and resources to reinforce every constructive action Matiullah Khan took. He could not rearrange the players on Uruzgan’s chessboard, but he could encourage any moves they made in the right direction.
Hayes was especially keen to find a chance to make inroads into the Taliban’s base of support. The easternmost district of Khas Uruzgan was the unlikely scene of a major breakthrough. It was an impoverished, chronically violent area, riven by a Hazaran-Pashtun faultline and astride a pathway to Pakistan. The special operations team in the district got wind that a Taliban commander was ready to give up the fight. He turned out to be an important commander named Abdul Samad. He would be the most senior Taliban figure to have come into the reintegration program since it began. Hayes leaped at the opportunity and encouraged the team to explore whether he was in fact ready to make the break and to do so publicly. It turned out he was, and he would bring a number of his fighters over as well. His one condition was that the Americans guarantee his safety—a tall order. A Taliban commander who announced he was giving up in that area could be dead by dawn.
Hayes’s first move was to get all the provincial officials on board and to activate the provincial reconciliation body that had been set up to provide a path back into civil society. A formal and fairly elaborate ceremony was held in which Samad exchanged his old turban for a new one and was given a Koran. The fighters brought an assortment of weapons and turned them over. A banquet was held and speeches were made; the provincial officials asked Hayes to sit at the head table with them. Hayes had held long talks with the now ex-Taliban, curious to learn more about his views and his fateful decision. He encouraged him to persuade other insurgents to follow his path.
Hayes settled on an unorthodox solution to the problem of Samad’s security. He lobbied for an exception to the guidelines to allow Samad to form a local police unit with about twenty of his former fighters. The special operations team would keep tabs on them to ensure there was no backsliding. There were simply too few official Afghan forces available to provide Samad security, and Hayes was not sure they would do it if asked. So he took a gamble, judging that the greater danger was that if Samad was killed, any chance of more fighters in the area coming in from the cold would die with him. Samad survived and more fighters came in—eighty-four in all. Samad told Hayes that others were ready to quit, saying: “More will come in, if they see that I am being treated well. They are waiting to see what happens.” Some glitches in pay and equipment caused the former insurgent leader to grumble about the provincial government’s lack of support. The governor approved roads, a dam, and a new canal for the area; such development projects were part of the official US-funded reintegration program. Hayes’s gamble had paid off so far, but the Afghan government would have to deliver on its side of the bargain. He hoped the seeds that had been planted would take root.{115}
Meanwhile, Hayes decided that the ALP in Zabul was ripe for expansion. He would send a team from Uruzgan to establish a new beachhead far enough from Bagh to incur some risk, but close enough that if the team succeeded, the two areas could connect into a much larger security bubble. Following the normal practice, Hayes first sent Afghan commandos with their combat advisers to clear the area of Taliban before the team embedded.
COMMANDOS RAISE THE BAR
A SEAL platoon served as the combat advisers for the Afghan commando kandak based in Uruzgan. Marshall, the platoon leader, had served on SEAL Team Six, but he harbored no prejudices about foreign internal defense. He did not see FID as a lesser mission. In many respects, conducting unilateral operations with fellow SEALs was easier than taking less capable partners through mission planning and going into combat with them. The SEALs’ unofficial motto, “The only easy day was yesterday,” applied in spades to this mission.{116}
Marshall had taken stock of the 8th Commando Kandak and its leader, Lieutenant Colonel Ahmadullah Popal, when he arrived in Tarin Kowt at the beginning of his tour. Popal was experienced: he had first served in a reconnaissance platoon and then in the first commando unit when it was formed. He was also politically well connected—since he was from the Popalzai clan of the president, as his name suggested. Popal’s operations officer was especially competent; he carried his radio and notebook with him at all times and kept close track of his men. The unit’s soldiers, however, were not nearly as tactically proficient as the Iraqi special operations counterterrorism force that Marshall had trained, advised, and fought alongside on five tours in Iraq. The difference was partly due to basic educational levels, which were much lower in Afghanistan than in Iraq. The 8th Commandos, formed in February 2010, was also one of the newest commando units. The Iraqi force had benefited as well from much more intensive and longer mentoring by US special operations teams. A lot of money had been poured into Iraqi training facilities and equipment.
Marshall’s platoon devised a way to boost the commandos’ skills based on their own SEAL training. They held a competition within the commando kandak to select the best shooters, the strongest tacticians, and the fittest soldiers. These Afghans would be an internal elite cadre who would continue to train their fellow commandos when special operations teams where not there. They modeled the tryouts on the famous “Hell Week” at Coronado, a grueling week of endless running, swimming, obstacle courses, and punishing physical tasks designed to weed out the weak-hearted and leave the most determined and able SEAL candidates. The competition also spurred enthusiasm and developed esprit de corps. The Afghan Hell Week yielded fifty motivated commandos. The SEALs then worked with these men to refine their skills in close-quarter battle, the use of night vision goggles, and small arms marksmanship.
As the mission to Zabul approached, the SEALs took the commandos through every step of the preparation. They analyzed the mission order to search and clear the area, which was called Sayagaz, and then built a terrain model in a sand table to plot their scheme of maneuver. The Zabul mission into a Taliban stronghold would be difficult, as there were no forces nearby to come to their aid, and Popal wanted to be ready. He joked with Marshall, saying, “We don’t know where the SEALs have been for the last nine years but we are glad to have them now.” The thirty-year-old SEAL responded with a friendly quip, but he treated Popal with respect as his host and a senior officer in rank and age; he was very aware of the importance of dignity, honor, and position in Afghan culture. As the incidence of insider attacks mounted over the course of 2012, the US military command had pushed for tougher counterintelligence measures to weed out infiltrators, a necessary step, but also had conducted cultural sensitivity training for Afghans to help them understand the apparently rude American behavior. The ever-changing cast of conventional American units sent to Afghanistan did not help the US learning curve. Most special operators, by contrast, were on their fifth or sixth tours. Only a few attacks had occurred on special operations forces, despite the fact that the special ops soldiers lived in much closer proximity with their Afghan partners than conventional forces did—on the same compounds, and, in the case of embedded teams, often in the next room.
When dealing directly with the Afghans, Marshall emphasized his platoon’s desire to help improve their commando skills without personally denigrating the individual soldiers. In their internal discussions, Marshall, Hayes, and Haas all expressed the belief that the commandos had grown too dependent on quick missions—they were normally ferried in on US helicopters for a quick op and then back out the following day. It was time to raise the bar and begin taking them on missions of three or more days. They would not always have access to helicopters; ground movements would need to be part of the mix.
In early March, Marshall’s team and the commandos launched into Zabul, inserting by helicopter at night in the vicinity of Sayagaz on a three-day op. At midnight, the platoon and 107 commandos loaded their gear and crammed into two Chinooks and a Black Hawk at the Tarin Kowt flight line. They flew blacked out across eastern Uruzgan and into Zabul without incident, navigating mountain ridges and then dropping down into the valley. They were twenty-four kilometers away from the SEAL platoon at Bagh, so they were effectively on their own. Marshall put the commandos in the lead to see how they would do from start to finish. If things started to go south, he would step in, but he believed the Afghans were ready.
The commandos and SEALs offloaded in the planned sequence, with the lead element providing security at the landing zone until everybody was off and rucks were shouldered. So far, no incoming fire. They headed off, NODs on, to their predetermined strongpoint, a compound they would clear and move into until “BMT,” as first light was known in military jargon. Since Karzai had banned night operations, the special operators had adapted their procedures so that they would arrive at the target location under cover of darkness. But they would hold off until the earliest permissible moment before launching their operation.
The Afghans occupied the preselected qalat, set up their security perimeter, and hunkered down to wait for a few hours. Just before dawn, they stealthily moved into the edge of the village of Sayagaz, heading for the mullah’s house. Popal and Marshall had devised a new tactic that they considered a brilliant refinement of the usual practice. Normally, the Afghan commando leader would call on a bullhorn for the military-aged males to voluntarily come out of their homes, which was intended to sort the neutrals from those who would have to be fought. How much better would it be, they realized, if this call-out were done by the mullah of the village?
They stole silently to the mullahs’ house and requested that he call all the males to come out and meet at the mosque for a shura. The commandos would then clear the homes and suspected stash sites. “Mullah Sahib, we are here to do an operation. We want to meet the tribal leaders, and we will treat any sick people,” Popal told him. During the trainup, Popal had emphasized to his troops how essential it was to display deference to mullahs; they were the key to winning a welcome wherever the commandos were sent. “They teach our children, and we must show them we are the good Muslims, not the Taliban,” he said.
The commandos and the SEALs were of course poised to fight if they were attacked, but their first recourse was to avoid gunfights that would further alienate the population. The mullah in Sayagaz agreed to call out the villagers. So far, so good. Nerves were stretched taut as they moved through the streets to the mosque under the fading cover of dark. The commandos and the SEALs positioned themselves defensively around the mosque, waiting to see if they would need to shoot, as the fingers of the dawn came up over the horizon. The troops were especially on alert, as riots had rippled through the country just days before in reaction to the burning of Korans at the US base in Bagram.
The Afghan men of Sayagaz came out of their homes, slowly, at least some of them. The SEALs were certain that others were stealing away under the cover of dark, perhaps to ambush them later. No one’s guard dropped for an instant. The Afghans and the psychological operations soldiers moved to the fore to explain what was about to happen. “We want to meet and talk with you, and we are also here to look for the Taliban,” they announced. “We are here because we want peace for our country.” Popal explained that they planned to bring Afghan government, national police, and local police to the area. He described the Afghan Local Police program. The commandos completed the village search without incident that day, but the following day they came under constant harassing fire from across the river. They repelled those attacks without taking any casualties.
The commandos returned to base the following day, and Marshall and Hayes both considered the op a successful start to their Sayagaz campaign. A team from Uruzgan would move in shortly, and the commandos would go back to help if the Taliban decided to mount serious resistance to the arriving team. The team received some additional help in the form of a special forces team working with Jordanian special operators, who cleared IEDs from the road between Bagh and Sayagaz. The Jordanians were longtime US partners and had been coming to Afghanistan for years—105 were helping Hayes’s men. They were worth their weight in gold; as Muslims they were frequently asked to meet with the local mullahs.
The team in Sayagaz made headway, but slowly. The men started by distributing humanitarian assistance. The road to Bagh remained dangerous. The team was able to raise Afghan Local Police recruits, but the recruits were too afraid to secure the road by themselves. The first Afghan Local Police volunteers were reluctant to man the checkpoints the team had built or to go on patrol by themselves. So the SEALs kept the training wheels on and stood guard with them, driving the highway with the Afghans in tow. The commandos continued to run operations elsewhere in Zabul and, when required, in Uruzgan. By summer’s end, three hundred Afghans in Zabul had come forward to become local police. That was no small change in what had previously been a totally Taliban-dominated province outside of the city and Highway One.
Taking stock of the broader situation, Hayes realized that the coming drawdown would test the ability of US forces to continue to advise and mentor the entire Afghan security force—the military, a panoply of police forces, and the growing Afghan special operations forces. He was particularly concerned that the US conventional advisers embedded with the Afghan army were becoming vulnerable as the US combat formations departed, a prediction that came true when two newly arrived advisers were killed by a suicide bomber in Uruzgan. Hayes foresaw that the drawdown would put pressure on special operations to become more efficient at all levels. So why not combine the various special operations units and create a unified battalion-level and brigade-level special ops command, as they were moving toward doing at the top of the special ops hierarchy? Such ideas were heresy within the stovepiped special operations culture, but Hayes was ready and willing to help break the mold by floating such ideas. When commanders realized how few special operators were likely to be left behind after 2014, they might swallow hard and try something new.
THE FALLEN
Hayes was approaching the end of his tour satisfied that he had increased security in Uruzgan, but things were still dicey just to the south, in northern Kandahar. A sister SEAL platoon in Kandahar was partnered with the Afghan commando kandak based there. While Marshall’s platoon and Popal’s commandos were hammering on their part of the “jet stream,” the part that ran across northern Kandahar had remained problematic. The Mullah Dadullah Front had laid siege to Route Bear five years before. The highway had been reopened in 2007 and a few footholds of Afghan Local Police had been created, but their lines were not yet thick enough and the Afghan army had not wrested control of the countryside from the Taliban.
Night operations were controversial in Afghanistan, but there is a reason why special operators love the nighttime. Infiltrating under the cover of darkness is always their preferred method of insertion because it gives them the edge and reduces their own risk of casualties. In response to Karzai’s demands and the desire to minimize civilian casualties, night operations had been progressively reined in. Daytime ops stripped the operators of their cloak of protection from the Taliban’s machine guns, mortars, and especially, the ubiquitous and deadly rocket-propelled grenade launchers. The only confirmed helo downing by a surface-to-air missile had been in Helmand in 2007, but many other near misses were reported on the battlefield. These missiles posed a much more lethal threat, but a skillfully aimed RPG could bring down a helicopter, as Somali militia fighters had proven in the deadly “Black Hawk Down” battle of 1993 against Rangers, Delta Force, and special ops aviators.
The commandos and SEALs were operating without the cover of darkness on the morning of August 16, 2012, as they inserted into the rugged moonlike landscape of northern Kandahar’s Shah Wali Kot District. The plan was to clear suspected Taliban locations there and work their way north and west, with other teams following behind to set up camp and recruit local police. As they came in for a landing, one of the UH-60 Black Hawks was hit by an RPG. It spiraled down to the ground and crashed, becoming consumed in a fireball. The other UH-60 took evasive action and then maneuvered to land near the flaming crash site so the men could try to rescue their comrades. They put out a security perimeter and feverishly searched the wreckage for survivors. There were none. Reinforcements arrived in helicopters, and the sad business of retrieving comrades’ remains and investigating the crash began.{117}
Eleven men died in all, including seven Americans—the four crew of the Black Hawk helicopter, two SEALs, and a US Navy Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) technician. Three Afghan commandos and an Afghan interpreter were also killed in the crash. After recovering the remains, the even grimmer business of identifying and separating them began. At Camp Simmons the following day, a soldier came into the operations center to ask a SEAL if he could help find a toothbrush or other item that would provide a DNA sample of his deceased teammate. All of the men had been through years of war and loss, but it did not dull them to the pain of loss. Hayes had been monitoring the crash and subsequent rescue, and he prepared to fly to Kandahar that night for the memorial service. General Allen and special operations commanders would fly in from all over Afghanistan to pay their last respects.
At Kandahar Airfield, those who would be carrying caskets gathered on the patio of Camp Brown to practice for the ramp ceremony that would be held that night as the caskets were loaded onto the plane. Major Angel Martinez, one of the special operations company commanders for Kandahar, arrived for a meeting at the command and stopped to watch the rehearsal for a moment. He noticed the commandos standing at attention, listening to instructions regarding the order of the night’s ceremony. Then he saw that they were surrounded by American plainclothes security guards holding rifles. He shook his head. The special operators fought beside these commandos every day, and they had just lost three of their own. The security measures had been imposed because the US military command in Kabul was in a great turmoil about mounting insider attacks. So far in 2012, thirty-four Americans had been killed by Afghans dressed in uniforms. Two Marines special operations teams had just been hit by such attacks, and earlier in the spring an Afghan special operator had shot and killed a US team member before he was taken out. The special operations command was debating standing down all SOF operations and revetting every one of their partners, the Afghan special operators as well as their Afghan Local Police. Martinez thought that was an overreaction, but he was, above all, offended that these particular Afghans, grieving the loss of their comrades, had to be surrounded and guarded like suspects. He spoke briefly to one of the guards. “I just think that it is a shame that they have to do that so visibly,” Martinez said. “I don’t think it’s necessary.”{118}
This day of heavy loss reminded Martinez of the death of his best friend, Sergeant First Class Pedro Munoz, in 2005, in the western province of Herat. Recalling how he had failed to bring his teammate home safely to his wife and daughter, on that first of his four tours, he sat on a bench to reminisce about his friend, shedding a tear for him and the newly fallen. Reminders of special operators who had died were everywhere: their names were affixed to buildings, camps, and outposts all over Afghanistan. Pedro’s was at the entrance of their camp in Bagram, and Camp Maholic was named for one of their teammates, Thom Maholic, an avid cyclist and Grateful Dead fan who had been with them in Colombia. Brown, Vance, Eggers, Montrond, and Simmons were all special operators who had given their lives in Afghanistan and had camps named after them. The deadly SEAL crash in Wardak exactly one year earlier, in August 2011, was also on everyone’s mind that day. A Chinook full of SEALs and Afghans had been shot down as they came to the assistance of Rangers caught in a nighttime firefight. That was the worst mass casualty event in the history of naval special warfare; it took the lives of thirty-eight Afghans and Americans, including twenty-five special operators. It was also the deadliest single day of the Afghan war.
At 2 a.m. on August 18, 2012, hundreds of servicemen and women, and civilians, filed quietly out to the ramp, passing through the chain-link fence under the glaring white lights that lit the airfield and runway. Most of the people were staff and contractors who worked at the sprawling Kandahar base: their desk jobs meant that these ramp ceremonies were their most direct, visceral contact with the war going on outside the gates. The roar of transport aircraft and the occasional deafening scream of the fighter jets, the background noise of their lives, continued as people lined up in formation, two large blocks of troops at one end. The commanders formed a corridor through which the caskets would be carried into the open hatch of the massive C-17 transport plane that would bear the Afghan dead to Kabul and the Americans on to Dover, Delaware. Hayes and the other special operations commanders took their positions on the ramp. Then the field fell silent, as the takeoffs and landings were halted for the ceremony.
The hot summer wind blew over the crowd as ten RG armored personnel carriers crawled slowly along the concrete apron, their lights blinking in the night. One by one the giant vehicles turned in an arc around the plane to stop behind the assembled ranks, and the caskets were unloaded one by one. The troops were called to attention. Taps was played, then “Auld Lang Syne.” A chaplain stepped forward to a portable podium beside the plane’s belly, the ramp down and lights shining brightly within. He said a simple prayer and then read the name of each fallen warrior and his unit and hometown. One by one, the troops carried each flag-draped casket into the plane. A female soldier stood at attention off to one side. To no one but the desert night she whispered, “There are so many.”