American military officers criticized the French—and later the South Vietnamese forces—for their “outpost” mentality. But in an armed insurrection, areas not controlled twenty-four hours a day by pro-government forces become, ipso facto, areas of insurgent influence, if not dominance. If outlying areas are visited only in daylight by occasional government security patrols, which flag flies over the area at night?
—George Allen, None So Blind, 2001
The U.S. counterinsurgency strategy (COIN) in Afghanistan calls on the military to secure key areas—“clear” and “hold”—while USAID and its counterparts follow up with the “build” and “transfer” phases. The goal is to provide security, strengthen local government institutions, and build critical infrastructure, such as roads, schools, and clinics. In theory, these steps can improve lives and weaken popular support for the insurgency.
—U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Evaluating U.S. Foreign Assistance to Afghanistan, 2011
The simple mud fort was old and battered. Home to more than a dozen members of the Afghan National Police (ANP), the “fort” had once served as a family’s home and was located in a green blanket of vineyards that stretched in every direction. A dirt track beside the house led deeper into the fields. Two hundred meters to the south, taxis, cars, donkeys, and trucks swooshed by on a freshly tarmacked road. With easy access in all directions, the house was a natural strongpoint for the ANP’s use.
The police were posted there to keep the Taliban out of neighboring villages. Every few days Lt. Colonel Payne’s soldiers, who were based up the road, stopped by to determine if the police had seen any Taliban or if they needed any help, and then they would do a patrol in the area. The U.S. patrol leader usually asked the checkpoint commander to send two or three of his men out with them to patrol. Patrolling helped to discourage insurgents from lingering in the area.
On this day when the American soldiers arrived, the police were being recalcitrant. Standing at the rear of the mud house, beside soot-encrusted cooking pots and a battered cot, the Afghan and American leaders glared at each other. The angry ANP officer thought the Americans came by too often and brought too little with them. He blamed them for his lack of supplies and fuel.
It didn’t matter that resupply was the responsibility of the Afghan police commanders in Kandahar City and not this group of U.S. soldiers. All the ANP commander’s frustrations poured out, built up over weeks of running a poor, ill-equipped checkpoint forgotten in some vineyards in the middle of nowhere. He chided and shouted.
“No!” he exclaimed. It was too much. “I will not go, nor will I send anyone else either.”
There was more to it than that of course. There always is. The ANP and Americans at this checkpoint did not enjoy a great relationship. The police in this sector had been caught red-handed as they fouled up. Five kilometers down the road to the west lay the village of Bellanday. There the ANP moved into the village school, and they refused to move out again. They’d stolen furniture from the classrooms and then burned it for fuel or sold it.
Worse, the ANP checkpoint farther east had been caught hosting insurgents inside the post. Taliban fighters had spent time drinking tea with police working there.
This post also had problems. These guys were so busy swearing and shouting that they rarely did much patrolling. It was like pulling teeth to get them out for a few hours.
There was little the American captain could do. Not officially in charge of mentoring these police and solving their problems, he just happened to live at a U.S. base down the road. Lt. Colonel Payne’s soldiers weren’t official police mentors at all. That title belonged to a group of U.S. soldiers who lived at the base next to the district center about nine kilometers to the east. That unit’s tour of duty was devoted to improving ANP’s performance and logistics. They rarely made an appearance, instead spending most of their time trying to whip into shape the police leadership at the district headquarters and helping them to solve their logistics problems.
Lt. Colonel Payne had an agreement with the official mentors that his soldiers on the ground would help out the police, who were the only Afghan security forces in the district by late 2011. The soldiers followed some ideas sent along by the mentors and tried to train the police as best as they could, usually by patrolling with them or teaching first aid. But the soldiers were powerless to solve any problems of substance; only the official mentors had the connections to do that. A poor situation, it satisfied few of the American soldiers, who had responsibility but no power to help beyond occasionally bringing in a few supplies.
On bad days like this, it meant the patrol leader received the brunt of the police commander’s misdirected angst.
The ANP supply chain left the police on this day in late November with too few winter clothes, too little fuel, and a sense of abandonment. All in all, it was a bad situation. The ANP adapted to their circumstances by sitting in the shade and smoking hashish all day.
These pathetic police were located just a few miles from the turbulent and hostile fringe of Dand District, which made matters worse. No one could afford to have these guys not doing their job.
This was not a new problem, nor was it limited to Dand. The ANP had been underperforming across the country for years. Everyone knew the ANP logistics could often barely deliver food, let alone other necessary items such as ammunition, fuel, winter coats, blankets, and clean water. Logistics consistently failed to deliver what was needed, where it was needed. Part of it was cultural; warehouse staffers preferred to keep items on the shelves rather than dispense supplies. An Afghan supply officer considered himself powerful if he had a full warehouse, because his services and assistance were regularly solicited by Afghan officers from many different bases. The supply officer who kept an empty warehouse felt less powerful, because no one would seek his help if he had nothing to offer. So he avoided empty shelves at all costs. Dispensing too many items cut directly into his opportunity to increase his personal power and prestige.
Problems also arose from the poor quality of police officers higher up the chain, the ones who often could neither read nor write nor were immune from corruption. The system, which gave a new meaning to the word cumbersome, depended in large part on handwritten records, and few items could be released without forms making their way through several offices. Nor was the system designed to be responsive to emergencies, and outposts under attack could not be sure their supplies would be restocked later.
In this case it turned out the ANP had no winter clothing, because four months before, in July 2011, the U.S. Army command in charge of assisting the Afghan police stopped supplying uniforms, including winter coats, and had handed off the responsibility to the Afghan government. The ministries couldn’t handle the task. When the ministries did order winter clothing, the contract had to be torn up because the clothes didn’t come from the United States; they had to be made in America because that was the rule set by the Americans who paid the bill. The winter-clothing football was kicked back and forth between the U.S. side and the Afghans for the next few years, and in the fall of 2015 the Office of the Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, found that the security forces would lack adequate winter clothing “for the foreseeable future.”1
The upshot of these supply problems was that many of the Afghan police, even those assigned to high-risk rural outposts, had no winter coat and little more than a single magazine of thirty bullets, sometimes even less. In turn that meant the police were less willing to take actions that could disrupt the Taliban, who might then attack. This was no imagined threat; the police took the heaviest casualties of all the security forces. The system was flawed at almost every level, despite the considerable bravery shown by individuals at many police outposts.
The Afghans’ problems with equipment covered more than beans and bullets. Afghan forces lacked basics such as night-vision goggles, enough helicopters to move around the battlefield for a few high-risk missions, and mine detectors to find the IEDs littering the roads.2 And on this morning at this outpost in Dand they lacked fuel and winter coats as the cold weather set in.
These issues were widely known in the U.S. community. About this time, in January 2012, SIGAR recommended “improving ANSF logistics, enhancing the capacity of the ministries of Defense and Interior, and sustaining infrastructure” (ANSF, the Afghan National Security Forces, includes both the police and the army).3 Police training and morale were also key issues. The Afghan police had for many years taken advantage of the people they were meant to help. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. representative to the region, had called the police “an inadequate organization, riddled with corruption.”4
Also notorious was the way the foreigners had addressed the problem. For years police training was neglected as NATO failed to provide meaningful instruction.5 Yet the situation was routinely summarized as “significant challenges remain but progress is being made.” Like the end of the rainbow, solutions to the problems were always near at hand but never quite realized. In mid-2015 a top-ranking U.S. general in Afghanistan conceded to a reporter that the logistics system for the army and police still had “capability gaps.” But he claimed the Afghans “conducted deliberate, planned operations that are well resourced and they’ve performed very well.”6
In 2012 one courageous U.S. Army officer described his dismay at the misinformation concerning Afghan forces in an article published in the Armed Forces Journal, a heavyweight magazine of commentary published for U.S. military leaders. Lt. Colonel Daniel Davis wrote of his tour in Afghanistan,
What I saw bore no resemblance to rosy official statements by U.S. military leaders about conditions on the ground. Entering this deployment, I was sincerely hoping to learn that the claims were true: that conditions in Afghanistan were improving, that the local government and military were progressing toward self-sufficiency. I did not need to witness dramatic improvements to be reassured, but merely hoped to see evidence of positive trends, to see [Afghan] companies or battalions produce even minimal but sustainable progress. Instead, I witnessed the absence of success on virtually every level.7
In response Lt. General Curtis Scaparrotti issued a familiar-sounding rebuttal, insisting that Afghan forces could eventually look after themselves, though he “acknowledged that Afghan army and police still had a way to go.”8
For years I had seen the poor performance of the police in a number of places where people had complained that their local force extorted money and didn’t pursue insurgents. The problem existed nationwide.
In 2007 I was reporting in Khost Province on the eastern fringe of the country, on the border with Pakistan. I joined a team of U.S. soldiers who were mentoring an ANP unit that patrolled some of the worst areas of an unstable province, where insurgents routinely crossed the border in large numbers and bypassed small police outposts. Villagers stayed strictly neutral. Many had entirely forsaken the government. Once while patrolling the main highway connecting Khost to provinces farther inside the country I asked a U.S. mentor if he felt outraged that the police he risked his life to help were extorting money from travelers.
“No,” he replied wearily. “The police only get paid about seventy dollars a month. If they didn’t take the money, their families would starve.”
To him the system that paid the police too little was a bigger problem than the resulting corruption. This too was a nationwide problem, and once corruption crept in it became very difficult to stamp out.9
Now, at this outpost in Dand, the ANP were resentful because they saw Americans with plenty of gear and boxes of ready-to-eat meals and cases of water on their armored trucks. The ANP had enough food of the most basic variety, mainly rice and vegetables with a little chicken and not much else, nor any real hope that with winter coming things would improve anytime soon. Of course they were annoyed.
As for the American soldiers, what could they do? Their platoon wasn’t part of the official police mentor team for Dand; they had no real control over the police in this outpost nor any way to help them besides reporting their problems. The soldiers couldn’t offer more supplies for the ANP. They wanted to improve security and keep out the Taliban. They needed local beat cops to walk with them through the fields, which would be difficult if the local cops refused to leave the run-down mud house that served as their outpost.
Eventually the American captain tired of arguing. He walked away from the police outpost and headed down a dirt path deeper into the vineyards, his men hefting their weapons and walking after him. In some sort of face-saving gesture a couple of ANP detached themselves from their mud house before the Americans turned out of sight. They tagged along behind the Americans like an unwanted kid brother. It wasn’t pretty, but in this context it represented success.
Luckily for Dand, the police in other parts of the district were better than this group in the northwest sector. Elsewhere the ANP were also reluctant to patrol; the lack of fuel and winter clothing was universal. But this particular area was notorious for its police consistently doing the wrong thing. The district police chief eventually tired of the constant issues with this group and switched them out, sending them farther south into a quieter area and replacing them with police brought up from the south. This tepid effort to solve the problem only shifted the issues to another location. At least some action was taken, which meant progress of a sort.
One indication that security in the northwest was bad was because it was so quiet. Insurgents regularly passed through the area and were known to stage nearby—to the west, just over the border in Panjwai, and to the north, closer to Kandahar City. If the ANP were doing their job you might expect to see some firefights, IEDs, or other activity as the two sides jostled against each other. There were none, which suggested that the Afghan police were ignoring the problem. Paradoxically in a counterinsurgency even good areas can have a trickle of violent events. This trickle might last for years, as it did when an IED exploded in late November in northern Dand. Another went off in eastern Dand in March 2012, when a suicide bomber detonated his three-wheeled motorcycle in the middle of a U.S. patrol, wounding half a dozen Americans. These developments were not good, but they were the cost of doing business. And it was probably better than absolute silence, such as in the northwest, where we had a genuine problem.
As autumn faded into winter in 2011 the ANP were almost the only game in town as the bulk of the Americans steadily pulled out of Dand and shifted to where the action was, in Panjwai District. But although Lt. Colonel Payne was leaving Dand with only one infantry company in the south of the district, he wanted to ensure Dand remained stable and able to defend itself.
With insurgents constantly coming from Pakistan into Panjwai and Kandahar City, Dand could easily become a target again. The Taliban might push back into villages no longer covered by daily or even weekly patrols. Pulling out U.S. and Afghan soldiers from Dand was an enormous gamble. Just a year earlier the Taliban had been very active in Dand. A year prior to that the government had had little influence in many areas. Amazingly, not much happened as the Americans left in 2011.
The major reason for that quietude was that Nazak kept a tight rein on his village leaders. Under their influence the villagers continued to support the government. Without their support the Taliban could filter in without anyone informing the police. One of the measures Nazak used to figure out how well he controlled the villages was whether they grew poppy or not. Nazak took pains to ensure this did not happen. It was sometimes harder to tell which he opposed more—the Taliban or poppy. He took any poppy planting as a personal affront.
At most of the twice-monthly meetings he held with village elders, he reminded leaders they needed to work together and avoid poppy, especially in the fall, when farmers decided what they would plant.
At a typical gathering in mid-November Nazak drew about twenty elders together in the district center’s long meeting room. The men sat along the sofas lining the wall, and the chief of police sat beside Nazak. A handful of Americans squeezed into one of the corners. We never took center stage in Nazak’s meetings; our best position was in the corner—if not out of the minds of the assembled elders, at least not conspicuously in sight. Nazak didn’t need our help to run his meetings, nor any reminder of our indirect influence.
Opening the meeting, Nazak said, “The last time we met we discussed poppy, and we’re going to talk about it again.”
He and they knew this was the decision time for farmers. Poppy would be in the ground by early December, and the poppy seed in Kandahar would push out its first tendrils within a month. By March the poppy flowers would blanket some unfortunate districts such as Zhari, Panjwai, or Maiwand. In May all fighting and other farming came to a halt as the Taliban and itinerant farmers pitched in to harvest the crop at the princely wage of eight dollars a day. The time to stop the cycle was in October and November.
“When I first got here, I went to one village and eradicated all the poppy with a tractor,” Nazak reminded his audience. “In Nakadak,” he said, referring to a village near Panjwai District where poppy growing was rampant, “you guys need to be careful not to plant poppy. You maliks own a lot of land there. You can tell tenants they need to plant wheat. If they want to plant poppy, don’t give them a lease.”
Some of the elders objected.
“Last year you eradicated my poppy and it was a small piece. But you left some other places inside their compounds,” one complained.
“If they grow just half an acre of poppy, they will go to jail,” Nazak replied. “The more land, the more jail time, and the bigger the fine.”
Another elder objected. “Last year you eradicated my poppy. My people went to prison. But in the next village over they planted poppy. That was in Niko Karez, and this year too they are planting it.”
Nazak held up his phone. “I’ll call the chief of police and give the order to get rid of it if someone tells me what is happening. I need you to inform me, and I’ll get it sorted out,” he said.
The police chief shifted in his upholstered chair. Short and wide, Major Rahmatullah had run the ANP in the district for more than a year.
“I have intel that Mard Qalah and Rawanay are also growing poppy,” Rahmatullah said. “People will plant or decide to plant poppy. I will prepare fifty ANP to go to these villages where people plant it. The maliks need to let me know which villages plant poppy. I have the authority to destroy the poppy. If maliks do not let me know, the maliks will be held responsible.”
Nazak turned from the chief of police back to the elders. “Five people are responsible. The police checkpoint commander, the malik, the farmer, the tenant, and the owner. You all should let the chief of police know.”
One of the maliks piped up. “I’ll give you all the information about Niko Karez.”
“I’ll call the commander of the area to go get it fixed,” replied Rahmatullah.
Echoing New York City’s zero-tolerance policy, Nazak and the maliks worked toward a policy of complete prevention. The policy aimed to be 100 percent effective in eliminating poppy, and it represented a cornerstone for security in Dand. Poppy attracted the Taliban, who were known to fund farmers, provide them with seed, and cooperate with the drug networks that grew and transported the crop. The Taliban made millions of dollars a year from poppy. Nazak considered it a political and a security issue that he could not ignore if he was to maintain control.
Nazak also sought to solidify his hold over the villages by getting the mullahs on his side. He considered the mullahs to be the most important group of people in the district, and he wanted them working for him. Even a medium-sized village might have up to five mosques in it, with each mullah leading prayers five times a day. Should mullahs preach every day against the government, there could be catastrophic effects on his plans to keep villagers on his side, especially as security forces left the area.
Nazak told us soon after I arrived, “If the village is progovernment but the mullah is against the government, then the village will be against the government.”
He said the mullahs were resisting his efforts to register them, and they feared this would be the first step to being co-opted.10
Ideally Nazak wanted to pay the mullahs, but he quickly ran into trouble getting money to do so. Instead he tried to reach out to them directly, either through phone calls or through the village elders. He closely monitored them. The village maliks who worked with Nazak kept close tabs on the political leanings of the mullahs. He knew, for instance, that some mullahs in eastern Dand sympathized with the Taliban and probably helped their operations. It proved difficult in practice to displace them, because they were installed by the village elders and it risked an offense against Islam to move one out without extraordinary cause. Mullahs routinely played upon the ignorance of the people, who were generally poorly educated and vulnerable to manipulation.
Many mullahs also hesitated to talk with the district government because, as high-profile leaders of their villages, they were subject to Taliban intimidation. That was why Nazak had been happy to have the ANP pretend to rough up a mullah who visited him at the district center.No mullah could be sure whether a display of a progovernment attitude would be reported back to the Taliban, with potentially fatal results.
Nazak’s used this strategy with the mullahs for months. At a meeting in October hosted by the Afghan army at its large base near KAF and attended by district governors and chiefs of police from the three districts flanking Dand, Nazak recommended bringing the mullahs on board with the government, as he claimed he had been doing for months.
“The mullah registration process is about done in Dand,” Nazak told the audience, seated in rows of folding chairs. “ISAF should register mullahs too. We have been most successful.”
Despite Nazak’s exaggerated claims, his premise was sound, though it was unlikely ISAF would focus on bringing mullahs into the fold.
But Nazak kept hammering at the issue. When American members of the provincial reconstruction team came to see Nazak in mid-December, he complained to his visitors, who were seated on the sofas and chairs in his office with steaming cups of green tea in front of them, that his mullah strategy needed money but that there was no money at the provincial level to support his efforts.
“We don’t have funds to get the mullahs to be integrated with the district center,” he told them. “Mullahs are a sustainable move for Dand.”
A cheap investment, they would provide a lot of security for years to come. But the PRT had no money to offer. In the end Nazak relied on a carrot-and-stick approach for the mullahs. Even as he continued his personal overtures, in the autumn of 2012 he deported thirty of them to Pakistan, accusing them of fomenting rebellion against the government.11
One of the reasons Nazak pushed the mullah idea for so long was that he was concerned about the future. Security and assistance were changing.
As Lt. Colonel Brian Payne pulled troops out of Dand in the latter half of 2011, he made sure the government had plenty of economic support lined up from the battalion’s discretionary funds for development projects and incidentals, named the Commander’s Emergency Response Program (CERP). On top of that, in the fall USAID pushed in more than a million dollars in projects.
But all that began to recede as 2011 ebbed. Lt. Colonel Payne’s outfit, the 1-5 Infantry Battalion, was rotating fully into Panjwai before it headed back to the United States. In late December it was replaced by a new unit, the 5-1 Cavalry Squadron, which would be headquartered in Dand but whose focus was mainly on stopping the rocket attacks on KAF, fifteen miles to the east of the district center. The attacks came from villages outside KAF that were mainly on the border with Daman District, a no-man’s-land that no one had spent much time trying to control.12
That meant the military force focused most of its attention on the villages in eastern Dand along its border with Daman. This eastern fringe had been somewhat neglected by Nazak, both because the villages were dispersed and also because he’d feuded with the most powerful elder there, a man called Haji Hayatullah, who did not recognize Nazak’s authority. Reconciling the political situation and patrolling near KAF to cut the number of rocket launches would take up much of the new unit’s energies in coming months as it pivoted the bulk of its military and civil efforts eastward.
Aid money from the new squadron was considerably less than that provided by Lt. Colonel Payne and Matt Kotlarski. It would be increasingly difficult to keep projects going, such as the women’s training initiative and the mobile well-repair program. Creating new projects that affected the entire district soon became almost impossible. Meanwhile we waited for any increase in official Afghan government funds. In early 2012 our USAID-funded programs became almost the only game in town to help the villagers.
Luckily USAID continued to improve roads and distribute seed to farmers. Some U.S. programs, such as agricultural support programs with acronyms like AVIPA, CHAMP, and later S-RAD, were helpful, even though others, involving legal training, a microcredit initiative, and the training of the district council, produced little impact. For now the money available propped up the security situation. Security held, though the expected trickle of violence continued.
As a result, even as the security forces thinned out, the villagers kept their bargain with Nazak. People still felt safe enough to talk freely with the district government, and they received enough projects to make the risks of cooperation worthwhile.
The danger was that, as U.S.-Afghan patrols ceased, people would feel unprotected, so when insurgents knocked on their door, they might not feel safe telling the government. Warning calls to the police and DG Nazak could dry up. The risk was very real. For years the Taliban had been killing influential people, with a twofold purpose: to stop them from working with the government and to intimidate other people. Over the previous ten years five hundred prominent individuals across the province had been killed, including the deputy provincial governor, the mayor of Kandahar City, and hundreds of tribal and village elders.
As 2012 began, some worrying trends developed. The trickle of insurgent attacks rose slightly and then plateaued. The village of Karz, the home of the Karzai family, became a major insurgent staging area, where bomb-making materials destined for Kandahar City could be hoarded and assembled. In March 2012 Karz was the site of a roadway suicide bombing that wounded a half dozen U.S. soldiers. The number of IEDs ticked upward. A police subcommander was shot dead near the district center while riding his motorcycle. Maliks were abducted and intimidated. But the village elders still cooperated with Nazak.
The security situation was stable for now, but what would happen to it as the amount of money we spent on projects steadily diminished? USAID funding was on a sharp downward trend. Because projects underpinned the political system and security, would the system weather a drawdown in money for development projects too?
The chief of police vigorously lobbied the province for more police to augment his 340-member force, but he had little success. He said the number of ANP personnel allocated to Dand might be cut in coming years.
As winter set in, with freezing nights and sunny but chilly days, we faced a number of fresh hurdles. We couldn’t help but wonder if the money promised from the Afghan budget, and the projects it might bring, would ever arrive in Kandahar Province.