__________________________________________
WILL THE VALLEY HOLD?
Kunar 2012–2013
A BAND OF BROTHERS
The successes in both Paktika and Kunar contrasted with the failures in Wardak. Indeed, like Paktika, Kunar emerged in 2012 as one of the clear successes of the Afghan Local Police program. The southern Kunar population was receptive to the local defense initiative, in part because it was anchored in the reliable and sober local police commander Nur Mohammed, whose good reputation extended beyond his district. He encouraged Afghans in the surrounding districts to join the program, and once their leaders were selected, he formed a close working relationship with them.
But the promising trajectory in Kunar was threatened by three factors: the safe haven available to the Taliban in Pakistan, haste, and ego. The Pakistan safe haven posed a particular threat because Kunar’s populated areas were a few hours’ march from the border. From Kunar’s capital, Asadabad, it was less than a two-hour drive south through a broad valley to Jalalabad, the principal city of eastern Afghanistan—and if those two cities fell it would be difficult to hold Kabul. Yet the safe haven in Pakistan was a fact, like the weather; for all the teeth-gnashing, intelligence operations, and pinprick drone strikes, there was little that could be done to alter it. Pakistan’s internal dysfunctions had bred the insurgent stronghold, and only fundamental change would alter the country’s self-defeating approach to security. Unlike Paktika, whose populated areas were farther from the border, Kunar’s populated areas were right on Pakistan’s doorstep, and the province would have to be more proactive in its defense if it was to keep the badness at bay.
That meant the local police force had to be solid, and it had to be backed up by the other Afghan security forces. Unfortunately, the coalition was in a hurry to leave Kunar. The culmination of two years of effort in Kunar was jeopardized by ISAF’s plan to pull back to Highway One and Highway Seven and effectively abandon critical areas such as Kunar. No official would admit it, but the US military had adopted the same strategy the Soviets had twenty-five years earlier. US commanders rationalized their decision as necessary, however: they would focus on what the Afghans could hold, even though the Afghan military protested some of the moves. Afghans knew their history. The Soviet Army had withdrawn from Kunar in mid-1988, and by the end of the year its capital, Asadabad, had been in the hands of the mujahideen.{154}
The Taliban was certainly aware of the significance of this territory. Qari Zia Rahman, the Taliban commander for Kunar and Nuristan, told a Pakistani journalist in 2008 that “from the Soviet days in Afghanistan, Kunar’s importance has been clear.” He added: “This is a border province [with Pakistan] and trouble here can break the central government [in Kabul]. Whoever has been defeated in Afghanistan, his defeat began from Kunar. Hence, everybody is terrified of this region. The Soviets were defeated in this province and NATO knows that if it is defeated here it will be defeated all over Afghanistan.”{155}
The second factor, haste, could lead US forces to depart too rapidly from Kunar, short-circuiting the emerging victory in the southern part of the province. The commanders had to carefully consider how much and what type of support the Afghans would need to hold it.
A third factor, ego, also threatened to derail Kunar’s progress in the spring of 2012. After Matt’s team left, Major Jim Gant was to move down from his mountain lair to Combat Outpost Penich in the valley to oversee the continued expansion of the Afghan Local Police. Gant had been one of the first special operators in Kunar. A paper written under his name, “One Tribe at a Time,” recounting his experience of tribal engagement, had gained him a wide following and a degree of fame within the military community. He had been permitted to return to Kunar for a two-year tour in a somewhat unorthodox arrangement. Normally, a special forces major would be a company commander overseeing teams that were doing tactical missions. But Gant had grown deep roots in Kunar. His relationship with the “Sitting Bull,” as he dubbed the tribal chief in Mangwal, was, by his own account, like that of father and son.
Gant styled himself as Afghanistan’s Lawrence of Arabia, but turned out to be closer to Colonel Kurtz of Apocalypse Now. While he did lay some of the groundwork for the expansion of ALP in Kunar, he spent most of his time in Mangwal with his favorite tribe. There were rumors of unauthorized cross-border operations, questionable tactics, and unaccounted expenditures. His superiors grew uneasy, telling one visitor he had become “uncontrollable.” Gant was seen zooming around in a Kawasaki dune buggy with antlers tied to the front. Finally, a young conventional infantry lieutenant attached to Gant’s ad hoc team decided to blow the whistle after being asked to falsify a situation report. “This is just not right,” he told Gant’s superiors, adding that things were out of control in the camp. The command ordered an official “health and welfare” inspection of Gant’s camp in early March 2012. It appeared that Gant had been living out some kind of a sex-, drug-, and alcohol-fueled fantasy, becoming, as one officer put it, “a legend in his own mind.” Alcohol and steroids were found in his hooch, along with large quantities of Schedule II, III, and IV controlled substances and other drugs. Classified material was also found unsecured in his quarters, a violation compounded by the fact that Gant had been keeping a reporter-turned-lover at the camp, moving her around to prevent his superiors from learning of her presence. Gant had suffered multiple head injuries, including from IEDs and other explosions, but it was unclear whether he was technically unfit for duty. He had suffered a concussion after a fall in January 2012. In any case, it was clear that Gant had gone off the reservation. He was so lost in his own misplaced sense of entitlement, his superior officers said, that he refused to acknowledge any misdeeds and had to be forcibly removed. The woman, a former Washington Post reporter named Ann Scott Tyson, also reportedly refused to leave. The US embassy in Kabul had to send personnel to remove her.{156}
Brigadier General Chris Haas wanted to throw the book at Gant, but Gant had many supporters in the higher ranks, which may have helped him stave off a court-martial. He spent months at Fort Bragg awaiting the outcome of the Article 15-6 investigation. No charges were brought in the end, but he was relieved for cause and ejected from the US Army Special Forces. One general said, “Breaking the arrows [the crossed-arrow symbol of the Special Forces] is a very serious step.” He was taken off the promotion list for lieutenant colonel but allowed to retire with his pension—and to face whatever personal fallout would come with his wife and family.{157}
In his final months of command in Afghanistan, Haas had grown extremely concerned about discipline in general. The shootings allegedly perpetrated by Staff Sergeant Robert Bales on March 11 were an egregious example, but the Gant case hit home, too, given Gant’s relative prominence within the military. He was an experienced officer who had been awarded a Silver Star for valor in Iraq, a seasoned combat adviser accustomed to working in all kinds of conditions, and had thus been given wide latitude. His behavior gave ammunition to critics of special operations forces and reinforced a stereotype of them as defiant of authority and scornful of procedure. The cowboy attitude of immature operators was not just unprofessional but, more importantly, could cost lives—and had cost lives on Haas’s watch. He related one account of a team sergeant who, shortly after arriving in Afghanistan, had led his team into an ambush without doing the necessary pre-mission analysis. It cost him his life and the team its leader.
So Gant’s fall was a blot on the reputation of special operators. But it had a concrete impact as well. It deprived Kunar’s fledgling local defense forces of experienced guidance at a critical juncture. The special operators were seeking to triple the police ranks and their reach in the coming year. Because Gant was out of the picture instead of being moved to Penich, Nur Mohammed lacked the backup that he needed for the coming fighting season. This became especially evident one day in March, just as Gant was being ejected from Kunar, when Nur Mohammed’s forces were attacked at one of their checkpoints. The boom of an RPG hitting the checkpoint could be heard across the river at COP Fortress, and a puff of smoke went up, followed by gunshots. The soldiers watched from the ramparts of Fortress to see if anyone would come to their aid, but no one did. Later that night, on the phone, Nur Mohammed said his men had had to fight off the attack alone. They had called Penich, where a rump staff told them to call another base. “We asked for air support” from Penich, Nur said, adding that his men had hit an IED in the course of going for help. As usual, Nur was calm and analytical as he pointed out the larger significance of the day’s events. “If there is no backup, that only will encourage more attacks from the Taliban. We need a team at Penich if one is available,” he said. Nur himself was also in the crosshairs: the NDS intelligence officer in Khas Kunar had twice warned Nur that suicide bombers had been sent to find him. The insurgents knew he was the lynchpin of the local police, and they were set on taking him out.{158}
It was a lot to expect of Nur Mohammed’s lightly armed Afghan Local Police to hang out in their checkpoints, exposed to frontal attacks, IEDs, and ambushes, if they could not count on anyone to come to their aid. They were supposed to be one layer of a multilayered defense. So where were the other layers? The Afghans did need to start backing each other up, but Afghan army units were notoriously reluctant to come out of their barracks. When they did, they chose the safer western side of the Kunar River rather than the IED-laden route on the eastern side, much like the US conventional forces. The work of mentoring and stitching together the various Afghan police and army forces had been secondary for years as US forces focused instead on their own combat operations. Furthermore, the restrictions on border-zone operations had made it easier than ever for the insurgents to creep down the lateral valleys to the populated Kunar River Valley and then scoot back to their safe haven on the border.
To relieve the pressure on Nur and the populated valley, the special operations command won permission for their first near-border mission with Afghan commandos since the previous November, when Operation Sayaqa had precipitated the international crisis with Pakistan. The location was the Ganjgal Valley just north of Nur Mohammed’s district, where the Battle of Ganjgal had taken place on September 8, 2009. For his heroism in that battle, Marine Corporal Dakota Meyer had become the first living Marine since the Vietnam War to receive a Medal of Honor. The 4-kilometer buffer zone established after the cross-border attack in November 2011 was still in effect; Ganjgal village, population 500, lay 4.7 kilometers from the border.
The 1st Commando Kandak and its partner special ops team, led by Captain Alex Newsom, lifted off in helicopters from Camp Dyer in Jalalabad at 1 a.m. on March 6. Their approved landing zone was 6.5 kilometers from the border, so the 140 men put on their NODs and stole toward Ganjgal in the darkness to preselected houses where they would await first light. Setting a watch, they hunkered down at these strongpoints at about 4 a.m. for a two-hour wait. The new rules for night operations would soon force them to infiltrate just before dawn, at “nautical twilight,” which meant they and their aircraft would be visible to insurgents. At 6 a.m., the troops moved out toward the village, knowing that it was just a matter of time before they took fire. They took fire from the northern ridge at 9 a.m., and seconds later the ridge to the south opened up as well. Within eight minutes, they were taking fire from four or five locations. The ground commander declared troops in contact over the radio, which gave them priority for air support. Conventional forces and Afghan army troops blocked the route behind them along the highway. At Camp Dyer’s op center, intelligence officer Captain Rick Holahan tracked the battle and updated his Google Maps laydown of the operation as it progressed. It provided an excellent 3D model for after-action reviews. He put a digital “push pin” at every location where gunfire was reported.{159}
Fog created a low ceiling, so the attack helicopters were forced to wait for it to burn off before they could take off, which occurred at 11:36 a.m. But a blimp was up, with a camera and thermal sights, and it had spotted the hot barrel of a PKM medium machine gun on the north ridge at 9:51 a.m. The team called in the fast movers, and they dropped a bomb on the site, killing one insurgent. Shortly thereafter, another location on the south ridge was pinpointed and a second bomb was dropped, killing two insurgents.
The team’s company commander, Major Kent Solheim, had come along on the mission and was up in the mountains on the north ridge, where he and his men spotted Taliban ducking in and out of a network of caves. They called in an A-10 Warthog, a slow-moving beast of a plane beloved by ground troops for its accuracy. It strafed the positions repeatedly. Solheim watched in amazement through his rifle scope as Taliban fighters popped out of the caves to fire off their AK-47s at the plane, hoping to bring it down. Solheim’s own mettle awed his subordinates. An amputee from a previous combat deployment in Iraq, he was a dedicated runner and fierce competitor. He clambered through the steep mountains with the best of them.
The insurgent fire was suppressed for the time being, though the air weapons team overhead spotted reinforcements moving from the north. While the commandos entered the village below to begin meeting with elders, the troops on the ridges climbed up to the machine-gun nests to take photos of those killed in action. Solheim had learned the value of photographs on his very first commando op of this tour, in northern Kunar. Villagers alleged that commandos had killed women and children, and the provincial governor had repeated them, leading General Allen to ask the team for evidence of the operation. Luckily they had photos. The special operators with multiple tours in Afghanistan had grown used to all kinds of accusations anytime they conducted an operation. The troops in Ganjgal that day could not reach the highest point, about 6,100 feet up, which they believed was the Taliban commander’s location. It lay 1.56 kilometers inside the forbidden buffer zone. But they did get photos of the others, as well as samples for DNA testing, which later led one fighter to be identified definitively as a Taliban IED maker.
As it turned out, Gant’s departure did not stop the forward momentum of the Afghan Local Police in Kunar. Nur Mohammed soldiered on, and across the river, two special operations teams worked to build the program in two districts, Narang and Chowkay, over the spring and summer of 2012. One of those teams, ODA 3436, had been deployed to Uruzgan the previous year. The team members had hoped to return there, as they had mastered Uruzgan Province’s intra-Pashtun and Hazara politics and knew the physical terrain like the back of their hands. But they took up the job in Kunar, grumbling aside, and found a ready ally in the acting district governor, a pharmacist who had lobbied for the Afghan Local Police program to be started there. An educated man, he volunteered to teach the class on the Afghan Constitution and Afghan law that was part of the ALP curriculum. The governor was impressed by the team’s energy. “In a few months, they brought in solar-powered streetlights, built sidewalks and taught basic hygiene,” he said. The team medic—who held a master’s degree and spoke Pashto—conducted a health assessment, prepared packages of tailored supplies to be given out in the villages, and oversaw a $25,000-upgrade of the clinic, which saw some four hundred patients a day. “I think we’re making a difference,” the medic said. “Just by getting them to boil water, we are saving babies’ lives every day. But they can’t figure out the piss tubes,” he added with a laugh, referring to the pipes that the team inserted in the ground as urinals. This was a simple method the special operators used in the field for urination to avoid contaminating the ground water, but Afghans were used to squatting and not inclined to use the tubes.{160}
ODA 3436 expanded the ALP force, running forty recruits at a time through the three-week class. The team reserved half of its two hundred approved positions for a second recruitment up Badel and Waygal valleys on the western side of the Kunar River. These bisecting valleys led to the Pech and Korengal no-man’s-land farther north, and Taliban regularly traveled down them to stage attacks, lay mines, or cross over to Pakistan. As the operators trolled for recruits, they looked for Afghans with family ties in the valleys to help them move into those areas, and the district governor volunteered to go with them to recruit. The team sergeant, who planned to retire after twenty-three years in the army and six tours in Afghanistan—and many more in Africa, Haiti, and elsewhere—felt they had found a plucky ALP commander, Wazir. “He’s a pipe-hitter,” he said approvingly of Wazir’s willingness to foray out into risky places. The team operating in the adjacent district also found ready recruits. The plan mirrored that on the other side of the river: to build a force that was strong and thick enough to hold the main populated area and seal off insurgents farther north among the tribes who wanted to be left alone to ply their timber-smuggling business.
THE LAST TEAM
By October 2012, the ALP program in southern Kunar was on a solid course. A new team, ODA 3131, arrived to pick up the baton for most of the province. This team was given the task of overseeing local police in four districts while also, in a fifth district, revetting and converting a force that had been formed by US conventional forces into Afghan Local Police.
Fortunately, the four ALP commanders of the districts of Narang, Chowkay, Khas Kunar, and Sarkani were sufficiently competent already. They were a band of brothers who could rely on each other even if the regular police or army did not come to their aid. Their relationship was evident one cold but sunny morning at the Chowkay district commander’s headquarters located between the highway and the meandering riverbank. The commander, Asim Gul, pulled webbed cots outside into the sunshine to provide seating for the special forces team. And no sooner had the team members taken their seats than the Narang commander, Wazir, pulled up in his truck to see what was going on. His local policemen, who were posted along the highway, had alerted him to the gathering. Wazir and Asim Gul sat next to each other animatedly sharing the latest news. They had been friends since childhood and were on their way later that day to a funeral for Nur Mohammed’s aunt across the river.{161}
The commanders had a functioning network that reacted when any one of them came under attack. Nur had responded with his men several times when Wazir and Asim Gul had called for help. The commanders stayed in touch with each other by cell phone, and their policemen stood watch day and night at the bridges, in the culverts, and in other areas that had been targeted. They enjoyed varying degrees of support from the district chiefs of police, although the pay did arrive regularly. The police chief in his district, Wazir said, was corrupt. Wazir’s men had detained an insurgent leader at the bridge a month earlier, and the police chief, Wazir said, had released him. “He had 250,000 Pakistani rupees and a Pakistani ID,” Wazir fumed, referring to the insurgent leader. The man, Wazir added, was a Taliban judge who had ordered the beheading of two policemen; he had also routinely sent out night letters to intimidate people in the valley. Just that morning, Wazir’s men had seen a truck driver carrying a load of illegal timber pay a bribe to pass through a police checkpoint. Wazir had called the provincial police chief to report this, he said, since he did not trust the district chief.
The men had more regard for the Afghan army, but they wanted the army to help clear insurgents from the troublesome bisecting valleys. “The commandos came last summer, for the first time in a year,” Asim Gul said. “Now the fighting up north is pushing the Taliban back down into our valleys.” He and Wazir then excused themselves, saying they were late for the funeral.
After they left, Brandon, the ODA 3131 team sergeant, remarked, “Wazir is a heroin addict, but he’s a functional one. He has guys posted at all the culverts, and every time we show up he comes to meet us in five minutes.” The vetting rules established by the Afghan Ministry of the Interior permitted the Afghan Local Police recruits to test positive for hashish but not opium. However, the team was not inclined to derail an alliance with Wazir that seemed to be working well. Brandon assigned a sergeant to be the liaison to each district; the liaisons were to visit weekly with the ALP commanders and check in with them more frequently by phone. On a tour of the area, the team members stopped to talk with several policemen at their checkpoints. One man named Said Mohammed with a bushy white beard stood guard at the bridge across the river. “We are okay here; the Taliban is up in that valley,” he said. The next checkpoint was manned by two men who thanked the team for delivering them a used “man can” so they could sleep in shifts.{162}
On the other side of the river, Nur Mohammed was adjusting to life without a special operations team in his district after Gant’s departure. He was concerned that his men would not have any air cover in the event of a major attack. COP Penich had been turned over to the Afghans, who immediately began carting away equipment and furniture. “Khas Kunar is 98 percent secure,” Nur said. “The government has been able to reopen schools in Walay and Shalay valleys.” But the insurgents were still using Maya on the border as a base to launch from, and he believed another commando operation was needed in that area. “We’ve been attacked three times,” he said, “but we have been able to repel them and kill four enemy.” He was constantly struggling to get supplies for his men: the provincial police headquarters was slow to provide trucks and fuel, but at least, he said, his district police chief was now passing their requests up the chain.
The new team, ODA 3131, multitasked in a frenzy of activity to assist the police in these four districts while also getting their conversion project started in the district of Marawara. For the previous two years, teams had usually been responsible for one district, but this team would end up covering the entire Kunar Province. It would be a test of just how much one team could do. They were to convert Marawara’s 120-member local defense force, which had been created by US conventional forces, into an ALP force. Previously, this would have been considered a full-time job. Marawara was a troubled district on the border with Pakistan that was also the refuge of Qari Zia Rahman, or QZR, as they called him. Rahman was the top Taliban commander in Kunar Province. His refuge, like Maya village, was conveniently located in the four-kilometer buffer zone in a village called Barawolo. The US forces were still banned from conducting combat operations there, but some Afghan development workers had been in the village.
ODA 3131 had its hands full in the southern half of Kunar, but another conversion was under way in the far northeastern corner of Kunar, deep in the Hindu Kush and smack up against the Pakistani border. Here a CIA-trained force was being converted into an ALP force because the Agency was closing down its base. No one would be left to conduct overwatch of that force except for ODA 3131, yet the team members could not possibly travel there and still complete their duties in the other five locations. Were they supposed to conduct overwatch by telephone?
Marawara was the team’s priority for two reasons: first, it was the home of the top Taliban commander in Kunar, and second, it was a straight shot, thirteen kilometers, from the Pakistani border—and his lair—into Asadabad, the provincial capital. Qari Zia Rahman commanded insurgents throughout Kunar and Nuristan and across the border in Pakistan. He was Afghan, but the US military considered him an Al Qaeda affiliate, rather than just a Taliban leader, because his forces included a mélange of Central Asian and Arab fighters. “He is the nastiest guy around,” said Holahan, the intelligence officer.{163}
Students of the Soviet war in Afghanistan were familiar with the fierce battle of Marawara in 1985. In the fall of Asadabad, the mujahideen had come through Ghaki Pass. Yet no special operations team had been assigned to Marawara for four years. Some villages in Marawara had asked for help in early 2012, after nine insurgents were captured, but there was no plan at that time to build an Afghan Local Police force there. Nor was there a local tashkil, or allotment of positions, for doing so. Holahan had fretted: “I worry that if we do not take it up we will miss the opportunity. The villagers stick up their head and ask [for help] and will not likely wait that long.”
For their part, US conventional forces had launched repeated operations without finding a formula to hold the district. The solution to the puzzle, in a broad sense, was simple: unless an Afghan force remained behind, all their efforts would be for naught. Yet Americans continued to focus on combat operations rather than constructing this hold solution. In April 2010, the 2nd Battalion of the 503rd Infantry Regiment had fought at Daridam, the first insurgent stronghold in Marawara’s Ghaki Valley, killing 100 of the enemy. Two months later, in June, the conventional battalion that replaced the 2/503, the 2nd Battalion of the 327th Infantry Regiment, returned to Daridam and again killed over one hundred insurgents. The sixty Afghan soldiers who accompanied the 2/327 retreated in the face of the withering battle. Even the US troops were fainting from lack of fluid and running out of ammunition. On the second day of battle, Afghan commandos were dropped in to assist. But no one remained behind to secure the village, and the police failed to show up. The next month, the battalion launched a one-day operation with 425 troops in search of Qari Zia Rahman in the village of Chenar, the next insurgent stronghold down the valley, but QZR was gone, along with most of the villagers. The following spring, the 2/327 launched another foray into the valley, this time as far as Barawolo, in a ten-day operation aimed at capturing QZR in his new hideout. It resulted in eighty enemy killed, but no QZR. Since then the village had been ruled off–limits, as it lay within the four-kilometer buffer zone.{164}
This final mission, operation Strong Eagle III, represented an advance in that the coalition had taken more Afghan army units out into battle for longer missions than ever before—and they had gone to multiple villages—but the Afghan army was not yet an expeditionary force. The Afghan army had many decent officers, but it was challenged by shortfalls in logistics and equipment; even the Americans had difficulty hauling ammunition to high-altitude combat locations. The Afghan Border Police post at Ghaki Pass, once resupplied by coalition air support, made occasional overland trips for supplies.
The team hoped, in the little time it had left, to fashion an enduring solution for the valley’s, and therefore Kunar’s, security. The operators believed that Asadabad’s security required securing Ghaki Valley. They intended to do it primarily with residents of the valley, so they lobbied to double the Marawara local police allotment to 250 slots. That way, they could station 50 local police in the district center and recruit the rest from the villages leading down the Ghaki Valley to the border. They would work their way down the valley, building local police forces one village at a time. The plan was ambitious, but if successful, it would do more for Kunar Province and beyond than the endless game of Whac-A-Mole that had been the status quo. If they could at least build local police halfway down the Ghaki Valley, they could buy Asadabad four more kilometers of defensive perimeter.
ODA 3131 was an experienced, cohesive team. The men had deployed together to Kandahar the previous year, with the exception of the captain, who was on his first tour in the Special Forces. The team sergeant, Brandon, thirty-five, had eighteen years of military service, and the chief warrant officer was a fifteen-year army veteran. Brandon was a giant redheaded bear of man with a steady manner and six deployments under his belt. He was a stickler for sound tactics and scrutinized everything the sergeants did to ensure there were no lapses. Their battalion had taken heavy losses since they arrived—they had been among the teams sent to Wardak and Logar—and Brandon was determined not to add to that count.
The team’s chief warrant officer had deployed six times to Afghanistan and twice to Iraq. On two of the tours in Afghanistan he had been detailed to the CIA, and he had adopted the Afghan name Jawad for his undercover work. “Jawad” had been to “the Farm” for Agency training and taken the special forces Level 3 source development training (as had the team medic, Dave). Jawad led the team’s planning and intelligence. He had an easy way with people and a talent for improvisation. From the moment he and Dave hit the ground they began to build a network of Afghans and colleagues in the province who would exchange information about people and events. Jawad’s Agency time earned him immediate credibility with the CIA personnel in Kunar, and he met with them daily.
The team also was fortunate to have a civil affairs team working alongside it, led by Captain Tim Ambrose. Late in the war, special operations commanders had begun to revive this once-standard practice of using special forces, civil affairs, and psyops soldiers as a combined team. Ambrose dug into the Marawara human map and discovered some interesting connections. It appeared that one of the dominant elders of Marawara, Haji Hazrat Rahman, might be the uncle of QZR, and in any event carried great weight with the tribes in the Ghaki Valley. Rahman had been extremely standoffish, declining to attend any meeting or shura convened by the team. The Kunar provincial reconstruction team had built a model farm on land he owned, however, and Ambrose was eager to find a way to benefit from the knowledge of the US development workers and their relationships with the locals. He made overtures to the head of USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives, who had spent two years in Kunar and was now running the program from Kabul for the entire country. Ambrose hoped to tap into her network, although civilian officials were often reluctant to work with the military. In some cases, the reluctance was grounded in a concern for Afghan personnel working in remote conflict zones. Any sharing of names might expose them, and the insurgent retaliation would be swift and deadly.{165}
Just revetting and training the Afghan Local Police force at Marawara’s district center was a fairly dicey proposition, to say nothing of recruiting police all the way to the border. ODA 3131 began training the first forty recruits in the abandoned police station at the district center, which sat at the mouth of the Ghaki Valley. The district governor had come back to work since the team had arrived, but it was still considered enemy territory. About an hour after arriving, the operators would usually come under fire from either a DShK machine-gun nest implanted in the ridge over the next village down the valley or 82 mm mortars launched from the mountain ridge.
As if on schedule, an artillery round exploded on the hillside next to the class about an hour into the session one day in early November 2012. Brandon snapped his head around to look at the puff of smoke made by the impact. “Did anyone shoot?” he said. He and other sergeants took cover and looked through their rifle scopes at the surrounding ridges. The gunners in the trucks swiveled their cameras over the horizon and down the valley. The captain called the conventional unit at the main remaining conventional base, FOB Joyce, which had an artillery section and attack helicopters, and asked for an air weapons team to launch and locate the insurgents. He requested a 155 mm artillery round to be fired in response. “Have you done a CIVCAS assessment?” the ops watch officer replied. The rules of engagement required an analysis of the potential for civilian casualties. After further discussion, Joyce decided that it could not fire in the populated area down the valley where the mortar had likely been launched. However, it could shoot a deterrence round into a nearby unpopulated hill. In twenty minutes, a distant thud marked the return of fire. Shortly afterward, two Kiowa helicopters flew into sight from the south and circled around the mountains. Whoever had been there was surely long gone. It was not exactly the kind of quick response that would strike fear into the insurgents’ hearts.{166}
The team was also trolling for information about an Afghan soldier who had reportedly been captured by QZR’s men the day before, on November 6, 2012. An Afghan arrived to report that the soldier had been taken down the Ghaki Valley, and that QZR had threatened to behead him the following day. Brandon sprang into action. He thought it sounded like a perfect mission for the Kunar Provincial Response Company, which was advised by Hungarian special operations forces and was based at FOB Joyce. But when he called, the US adviser there told him that the unit had not yet been validated for combat operations. He then called US advisers to the Afghan army battalion, which also declined to act. Next he called the district chief of police, who said he could not take action without orders from the provincial chief.
Brandon and the captain discussed their very limited options. The local police whom they were training were untested and were not supposed to go on offensive operations. The special ops team’s Air Force combat controller was back at base recovering from surgery to remove wisdom teeth. Brandon’s men wanted to load up and charge down the valley with their Afghan special forces partners, but it would not be wise to go into this heavily controlled insurgent area without a combat controller. They would very likely wind up in a fight and probably a big enough one to require air support. Brandon was frustrated that he could not goad Afghan forces into acting. “I made eight calls to eight different units and not one responded,” he said. “I pulled the trigger and nothing happened.”
The discouraging day ended on a bit of an up note. When the team arrived back at their base for the evening, Jawad, who had stayed behind, told them that the Afghan countermine group trained by special operators had found a mine and called the police. The countermine group also alerted the team base. It was a massive bomb, made of old antitank mines from the Soviet era, and buried in a hole in the road. A bomb of that size could take out the heaviest of the American armored vehicles. The Afghans planned to blow it up at dusk.
A few team members hopped onto their Kawasaki ATVs and zoomed up the rocky mountain trail behind their base, Camp Wright, to a picturesque red-brick turreted outpost overlooking the camp and the river. The mountains of Pakistan were clearly visible from the outpost, which was called OP Shiloh. To the north the breathtaking expanse of the Hindu Kush rose above the curving Kunar River. The outpost had been built by the Russians, as was the camp below, which the Americans now called Wright after Sergeant Jeremy Wright, a special operator (and all-American cross-country runner) who was killed in Kunar in 2005. After a frustrating day in which he felt his hands were tied, Brandon was pleased to see the far-off flash of the detonation in the valley below as the sun’s last rays fell on the glistening river. “This is what we call success at our level,” he reflected.
The team was eager to forge ahead with its push down the Ghaki Valley. Over the fall the team conducted several patrols to the first three villages. “If you poke the hornet’s nest, you can find out who’s who,” Jawad said. Working in tandem with the CIA, the operators identified six or seven QZR subcommanders. Their visits into the first two villages had encouraged the residents to reopen their school. When they reached the third town, Daridam, however, they got into a heavy firefight. It was the site of the Soviets’ Battle of Marawara in 1985, in which a Spetsnaz special forces company had been ambushed and pinned down on a reconnaissance mission that turned into a two-day battle, with thirty-one Russians killed. From the same mountaintop firing positions the Taliban let loose with DShK machine-gun and mortar fire raining down on the American special ops team. The team was in a bad tactical position, and the Taliban obviously did not care if they caused casualties among the villagers. The combat controller called in air support, which eventually chased the Taliban away. At the same time, Afghan commandos and their special ops partner team flew in from Jalalabad to hit Chinar, the next village, in a simultaneous helicopter assault designed to show QZR that they intended to bring the fight to him in a sustained way. In subsequent weeks, the team made two additional patrols into the valley, bringing the district governor and police chief, who had not visited the villages for several years, with them. In shuras they described the Afghan Local Police program and made a pitch for volunteers.{167}
But it was not to be. The higher command nixed the team’s plan to recruit ALP in the Ghaki Valley. The team was told to focus the Afghan Local Police initiative on the Marawara district center and thicken the defenses there. They were not to build something that the Afghans would be hard pressed to sustain by themselves.
The company commander, Major Ben Hauser, did not have the heart to tell the team all the bad news. He had led ODA 3131 as a captain, and Brandon and others were his former teammates and friends. Hauser was under enormous pressure to move all the teams out of Kunar right away to begin building Afghan Local Police along Highway Seven down in Nangahar, as part of the pullback to reinforce the country’s two main highways. The move to Nangahar was also a response to a political demand from its governor, Gul Agha Shirzai, a major Pashtun figure who was planning to run for president in 2014. At the special operators’ blue-and-white tropical-muraled base in Jalalabad, Hauser relayed the order in a deadpan fashion. “This is a strategic withdrawal plan,” he commented drily, pointing out the troop movements on the wall map in his office at Camp Dyer. A red marker showed the repositioning that was already under way and the scheme to move all teams in Kunar to create new ALP sites in Nangahar.{168}
The officers who had occupied this office at Camp Dyer before Hauser had all been in the business of expansion—more ops, more troops, more territory. Hauser instead faced giving up the gains for which they had bled. He did not like it; no commander would. He believed in the special operators’ mantra of working themselves out of a job, but he was close enough to the ground truth to know that a total withdrawal from Kunar at that time was premature. His superior, Lieutenant Colonel Chris Fox, was so annoyed he would not even discuss it during a visit to his small base in Bagram’s sprawl. “Kunar is not in the IJC plan,” Fox said tersely, referring to the three-star ISAF Joint Command.{169}
When Fox’s superior, Colonel Tony Fletcher, who was in charge of CJSOTF-A at Bagram, was asked to identify the threat that warranted the increase in special operations teams in Nangahar, he said, “It’s an insurance policy. The idea is to thicken the defenses.” And what was the plan to support Afghans in Kunar? Fletcher was equally terse: special mission units would run periodic disruption operations.{170}
It looked as though the province’s future defense plan rested on pinprick strikes. Many operators knew that this was a weak reed, and even such sporadic operations would depend on intelligence gathered on the ground. They received a reprieve when the next conventional division arrived to lead Regional Command–East in the spring of 2013. The new command put the brakes on the total pullout of special ops from Kunar, allowing ODA 3131 to stay for the remainder of its tour.
That also gave the team and the special operations command the opportunity to compose a well-thought-out plan for maintaining a small footprint in Kunar for the immediate future. Such a plan would need to help the Afghans to pull their security forces together, and it would need to encourage district and provincial police chiefs to fully embrace the local police, leveraging them as a critical asset for village and valley security. It would also require reliable human intelligence for any counterterrorism operations and, more generally, the kind of situational awareness that can only be gained by having eyes and ears on the ground.
Camp Wright, in theory, could be maintained as a model of the small footprint presence that US special ops leaders discussed and which the US national defense strategy envisioned. Maintaining a team with the right enablers made a lot more sense than consolidating special operators at Bagram, where they would have no idea if insurgents were massing in Asadabad, much less be in a position to help orchestrate an effective Afghan response. Camp Wright was becoming the final frontier as US bases farther north, including Bostick, Monti, Falcon, and Honaker-Miracle, closed down one by one.
Camp Wright had everything needed to sustain operations; it was a small but sturdy base with solid mortar-and-stone walls built by the Russians, and was well positioned on a mountainside close to Asadabad. The two turreted observation posts above Wright provided early warning lookouts, coupled with two more posts on the other side of the river. They were manned by a CIA-trained Afghan force that was nominally led by the Afghan intelligence service. The camp was outfitted with a forward surgical team capable of treating the most severe wounds and stabilizing trauma cases for evacuation; it was also a forward ammunition and refueling point, with ammo and fuel for soldiers, helos, and drones. Giant bladders of fuel ringed the landing zone. It had generators and water purification equipment, and, at least for the time being, a route clearance unit of vehicles equipped with mine-detecting equipment. It could serve as a remaining outpost from which air and ground operations could be conducted if both the US and the Afghan governments decided that some stay-behind American presence was needed to bolster the Afghan forces for a time.
Camp Wright was an ideal small-footprint stay-behind base, but it would take the right people to pull it off. Namely, it would require a mature special operations team like 3131, led by someone like Jawad, with the understanding and credibility to interface with a CIA team, which the Afghan government might also choose to keep in place for the cross-border operations needed to gather intelligence. The basic situation resembled the one in Paktika, where special ops teams and the Agency occupied the same space. But in Kunar, the frictions between special ops forces and CIA teams were less prevalent than elsewhere because of Jawad’s tours with the Agency and the relationships that he had forged. He spent a lot of time with the Agency team trading information. “Can you see how much better we’d all be if we shared everything we had?” he pleaded with them. Security classification and an institutional reluctance prevented his vision from becoming reality, but Jawad’s friendly ways won over most of the CIA team in Kunar, one member of which was a woman codenamed “Rosebud.” Since they would soon be the two remaining teams left in the province, both knew they would be more effective if they were on the same page. A clear division of labor was needed, however, and a clear chain of command under Afghan authority. Cross-border intelligence operations might be warranted, with Afghan concurrence, in a few critical spots, but they had to be contained and kept from contaminating the primary mission of enabling Afghans to secure their own territory.
The lack of US-Afghan agreement on these issues burst into the headlines in April 2013, following a battle in western Kunar’s Shigal District. In this battle, a CIA officer was reportedly killed, and three other Americans employed by the CIA were wounded. Seventeen Afghan civilians, including twelve children, died when an airstrike was called in; according to an Afghan delegation later sent to investigate, a house had collapsed on them. President Karzai’s chief spokesman, Aimal Faizi, made extensive comments to Western news media in which he criticized the CIA-run force. “It was a joint op at most in name, but really in fact a CIA-run parallel security structure, and such structures have been a factor of insecurity themselves,” Faizi told the New York Times. “We are informed five minutes before they are conducting an operation, and our security agencies do not have authority over them.” The Afghan intelligence chief for Kunar was fired, and Karzai ordered a review of all the counterterrorist pursuit teams.{171}
The division of labor became muddled as well in the selection of the ALP commander for Marawara, and the mingling of defensive and offensive missions and security and intelligence functions created confusion and potentially counterproductive effects. When it began the Marawara ALP program, the ODA 3131 team had spotted a candidate with good standing among his peers and the majority tribe there. The elders engaged in a long debate, but failed in three meetings to agree on a leader. They ultimately opted for a different fellow named Gudjer, who had worked for the CIA. He had a checkered past, one that had been extremely valuable for the Agency’s purposes. He had fought in the war against the Soviets as part of a force led by the prominent mujahedeen commander Haji Qadir, and he subsequently had lived on the Pakistan side of the border in Bajaur as part of another militant group. He eventually broke with the group and its Pakistani intelligence handlers because they had wanted him to attack a target, which he would not name, that he refused to attack. In 2008 he returned to Kunar, where he was hired into the CIA force. He had conducted many cross-border missions to track and tag targets for the CIA. Gudjer’s background made him less than ideal to lead the local police, however, which was defensive in nature and required close interface with the Kunar provincial police hierarchy. He was chosen anyway, perhaps because the elders expected his established American ties to deliver benefits, or because he reflected their own divided loyalties, as had occurred in Wardak’s Chak Valley. At any rate, Gudjer seemed to think his main job was to go get QZR, the Al Qaeda–linked Taliban leader holed up in Barawolo, rather than help the population defend itself. “They expect me to stop QZR, and stop him from kidnapping people and taking livestock,” he said.{172}
While side-switching was a deeply rooted part of Afghan culture, the selection of Gudjer made ODA 3131 uneasy. “If we don’t make sure these are good guys,” Jawad, the chief warrant officer said, “we’ll be back here in twenty years having to fix the mess.” Since the team could not overturn the elders’ decision, the operators planned to watch Gudjer closely and work with him to influence his development. Their favored candidate was elected deputy commander, so he would provide a second channel to guide and monitor the evolution of the force.
If special operations forces were designing a dream team for a small-footprint stay-behind mission in Kunar, another desirable component would be civilian development experts. In El Salvador and Vietnam, aid missions had formed a useful triad along with the special operations and intelligence teams. The provincial reconstruction team at Camp Wright, housed in a funky wood-front building with a verandah that looked like a movie set for the OK Corral, was slated to shut down along with the rest of the PRTs in the country as the 2014 transition approached. But if a few civilian experts were to stay to assist with development and governance, that would provide a natural and productive link to the civilians while the military advisers focused on security.{173}
The idea of a small footprint with a combined military and civilian advisory team had precedents in both the CORDS model of Vietnam and in Central America in the 1980s, but the civilian agencies had become much more risk-averse since then and were often less inclined to work alongside the military. As of 2013, most US embassy personnel were being pulled back to Kabul. The US embassy’s regional security officer had mandated that no Kabul-based personnel could spend the night at outlying bases. The USAID Office of Transition Initiatives reached the most remote locations of any civilian entity, and it still had a robust program in Kunar, but its director could not get out to oversee it. The intrepid personnel of OTI had conducted 112 different activities in Kunar as part of its Afghan Stabilization Initiative, ranging from water-management projects to civics education and training of local officials.{174}
In the waning afternoon sunlight as he sat on an Adirondack chair on the verandah, Jawad reflected on the type of people drawn to this type of work. The advisory mission was often dismissed as less important than the direct-action special ops assignments. Little glamor or career-enhancing incentives were attached to it, though it demanded a very high degree of skill and probably some inborn talent. Because it was not valued, often the US troops who were assigned to advisory missions were not cut out for the work. Jawad also lamented that Americans tended to look down on their Afghan comrades, and in many cases treated them poorly. They may be poor or have less formal education, he noted, “but they have a PhD in Afghanistan.” The desired attributes for advisers were not hard to identify. “What we really are is teachers,” he said. It was not possible to be happy in this line of work unless one enjoyed teaching, learning about foreign cultures, and dealing with people in general. The other dynamic he saw at work was the struggle over sovereignty. Most US commanders were trained to be in charge and to dictate the terms of a relationship. “But this is the Afghans’ country,” he said.
Jawad, Brandon, and many of their teammates were suited for these challenges, but many younger members of the special operations forces were not. Jawad recognized that the “commando” image that had drawn many young American men into special operations had left some of the newer operators feeling disillusioned. At least two members of ODA 3131 had decided to leave the service after completing their tours, a pattern repeated in other teams. One senior sergeant on a team in Paktika put it bluntly: “All of the guys on this team are leaving. They do not like this mission. They feel the recruiting video sold them a bill of goods.” The recruiting video created at Fort Bragg emphasized a Call of Duty vision of special operations—direct action gun-slinging, popping targets in raids, jumping out of planes and helicopters. The future of special operations forces would depend on attracting and keeping people who were drawn to working with indigenous cultures—and good at it.{175}