17

 

 

ATTRITION

Thus the portrait of McNamara in those years at his desk, on planes, in Saigon, poring over page after page of data, each platoon, each squad, studying all those statistics. All lies.

—DAVID HALBERSTAM

 

 

THE FRENCH CALLED it le cafard. Out in the barren, windswept deserts of southern Algeria, atop the unforgiving outcroppings of the Atlas Mountains, men of la Légion Étrangère—the famous and sometimes infamous French Foreign Legion—grew bored keeping watch over the endless vistas of sun, rocks, and sand. At small garrisons, the real equivalents of lonely Fort Zinderneuf in the novel and many film versions of Beau Geste, hardened men drilled, labored, stood guard, and marched out on long, fruitless foot patrols, seeking Bedouin tribesmen who lingered forever just out of rifle range. The grueling routine wore men down. A few tried to walk away and ended up feeding the vultures. Others turned on one another, or themselves. Many drank to excess, guzzling the cheap red military-issue pinard wine, “the supreme consoler” for legionnaires. Most found rough amusements. One such involved shooting cockroaches (les cafards), no easy feat with an unwieldy long rifle.

Similar things happened on other empty frontiers where small contingents watched and waited for vicious, lurking foes. On the American Great Plains among the frontier regulars, suicides, homicides, and desertion marred the calm at many little fifty-man outposts. Out on the endless grassy steppes of Asian Russia, more than a few bored czarist soldiers passed the time shooting pistols at each other in a blacked-out cabin, a lethal game known as Can You Hear Me, Ivan? You shot at the voice, and hit all too often. Some of the czar’s men put a single bullet in a revolver and tried their hand at that grim national pastime, Russian roulette. But as only they can, the French chose the exact right name, le mot juste, for the dark phenomenon: le cafard, the cockroach, the blues, going bug-fuck.

As autumn became winter in 2011 and then as 2011 became 2012, le cafard crept through the back corners of Afghanistan. Soldiers crawled into plastic port-a-johns and blew out their brains. Marines filmed themselves urinating on Taliban corpses and posted the videos on the Internet. Denied the diversions of marijuana, hard drugs, liquor, and beer, rear-echelon types experimented with painkillers. Sometimes, alcohol was found, used, and abused. Young men huffed compressed air, a particularly risky high. The military chain of command dealt with all of this swiftly, often preemptively. Yet still it happened, a bit more with every passing month.

All of these were isolated incidents, nothing widespread, nothing akin to the much more prevalent drug abuse, fragging of leaders, and racial strife seen in Vietnam after 1970. There have always been such events in any war. Yet when a conflict drags on with not much chance of victory, morale decays. Here was the unhappy cost of President Obama’s decision to leave, but not right away. In Iraq and now Afghanistan, the thoughtful, deliberate U.S. president thoughtfully and deliberately condemned Americans in uniform to years of deadly, pointless counterinsurgency patrols sure to end in a wholesale pullout. It bred le cafard as surely as putrefaction bred its loathsome namesake.

Le cafard touched the Panjwai District west of Kandahar in the fall of 2011 and the winter that followed. The Taliban lurked on the fringes of the long-contested rural area, south of the Arghandab River and north of the red rocks of the Registan Desert. There was just enough fighting to keep things very tense, yet nothing near the brutal slugfests seen in the Arghandab in 2010. Out in the COPs, sergeants and officers kept their soldiers busy on patrol, hunting the enemy. Leadership by example, firm discipline, and hard work banished le cafard. Yet in a few dark corners, things went very wrong.

 

Combat Outpost Palace defined the middle of nowhere. The COP stood just south of the Arghandab River, a mile north of the only paved east-west road in Panjwai, surrounded by a broad plain covered with poppy fields and grape rows. An Afghan national army rifle platoon held a similar small facility just to the west. Three layers of dirt-filled Hesco containers formed a thick retaining wall nine feet tall that framed a three-hundred-by-four-hundred-yard rectangle of limestone gravel. Each corner of COP Palace featured a twenty-foot guard tower capped by a small sandbagged bunker. The compound boasted a small vehicle parking area, a platoon command post, ten metal “container housing units”—militarized versions of double-wide house trailers—a similar container rigged as a shower trailer, a small kitchen, a laundry tent, and a recreation tent. The Canadians built it and the Americans of Third Platoon, Company C, Third Battalion, Twenty-First Infantry took it over in the summer of 2011. Michael “Beau” Geste wouldn’t have felt out of place there.

Company C, including Third Platoon, suffered a rough summer. At the outset, most of the NCOs and the company commander had prior combat experience while the lieutenants and privates did not. Panjwai evened that up soon enough. In an especially bad three days from August 25 to 28, Taliban IEDs killed two soldiers and wounded four others. A buried bomb in a dirt trail flipped over an M-ATV, crushing Private First Class Brandon S. Mullins. On a foot patrol, an IED exploded, felling three. Hostile gunfire from hidden ambushers then struck the already wounded Specialist Douglas J. Green. He didn’t survive. Gunfire sounded most days outside COP Palace.

The Third Battalion, Twenty-First Infantry Regiment considered COP Palace a quieter area than most of Panjwai. Things got progressively worse as you went west, into the triangle defined by the river to the north and the desert to the south, the area the Canadians had labeled, after its shape on a map, the Horn of Panjwai. The small area teemed with IEDs and hidden gunmen. Company A lost two men in July in a single major attack, then two more in two separate incidents in mid-September. The Horn accounted for thirty-seven separate IED attacks in July, August, and September, as well as more than eighty buried devices found and cleared. The key western hamlets of Mushan with a thousand people and Doab with fifteen hundred bowed to the Taliban. Americans and their Afghan partners wanted to clear and hold both villages. With most of the action out west in the Horn, the battalion’s leadership focused there. After the August attacks, the battalion left Company C to itself.

Company C’s commander, in turn, left COP Palace to Third Platoon. He operated out of a larger base to the south and rarely got out to Palace. The Third Platoon’s riflemen kept up their missions. Contacts lessened over time as the Taliban shifted to address the American/Afghan military threat to Mushan and Doab. But one young soldier just didn’t get the hang of the rifle platoon’s routine. In an excellent unit, wiser leaders found places for such a man, maybe in front of a computer in the command post or running biometric scans of local farmers. An average outfit left a troubled soldier behind at home station to be administratively discharged, not hard to do in a volunteer army. Problem privates got out pretty quickly. But those in a less capable unit, especially one far from more experienced leaders, might apply other, more cruel solutions. Young men under extreme conditions resort to such things.

Private Danny Chen, a nineteen-year-old from New York City, deployed late into country, months after the rest of the outfit. It’s never easy to be the new guy, and this one had his issues. Sometimes confused, physically frail, the tall, thin son of first-generation Chinese immigrants struggled as an infantryman. He consistently misplaced or forgot key equipment, including his Kevlar helmet. Judged unable to go out on patrol, Chen was relegated to guard duty in the lookout towers, light menial labor, and cleanup details. With the others working long days and nights out in the deadly poppy fields and grape rows, Chen drew the ire of his sergeants and his platoon leader. His fellow junior enlisted men joined in the pressure. Over the course of six weeks, it got out of hand, way out of hand, to the point where it included physical abuse. Remedial calisthenics went well beyond building strength and endurance. Along with extended rounds of pushups and sit-ups in the blazing sun, Chen found himself low-crawling across the hot gravel, knocked about, and subject to racial slurs. Unable to “motivate” the soldier, the NCOs wanted to get rid of him, to evacuate him to Kandahar and then back to Fort Wainwright, Alaska, to be discharged. Chen acted first. Late on the morning of October 3, 2011, while standing watch in a tower, Chen shot himself in the head with his M-4 carbine.

The subsequent investigation switched on a long-overdue flood of light, sending the cockroaches running for cover. Right out of le cafard in the Foreign Legion, COP Palace gave up its sordid secrets. The lieutenant had known his men, including his platoon sergeant, possessed and drank alcohol at the outpost. He’d chosen to look the other way, and had done the same as Chen suffered. The officer also allowed some dangerous horseplay involving the detonation of a live hand grenade. Five NCOs and two senior specialists were found complicit in abusing the dead soldier. Four of the eight eventually faced formal courts-martial; all eight were punished by judicial or nonjudicial proceedings. The lieutenant and one other left the service as part of their formal arrangements. None of it brought back Danny Chen.

The chain of command, however, went beyond investigation and judicial matters. Lieutenant Colonel Steve Miller of the Third Battalion, Twenty-First Infantry relieved the absentee commander of Company C, who claimed he’d had no knowledge of Chen’s travails or any other lapses of discipline at COP Palace. The new captain took charge and reorganized, bringing in steady NCOs and a new lieutenant. The revamped Third Platoon focused on its mission. The outpost got a lot more checking, as did the other isolated elements in Panjwai. COP Palace stayed quiet for the rest of the winter.

 

West Panjwai, the Horn proper, continued to fester. Mushan and Doab villages teetered, hosting the Taliban by night and the ANA and Americans by day. Company A of 1–5 Infantry, attached to Steve Miller’s battalion, occupied COP Mushan and then pushed west, establishing COP Lion in Doab itself. Afghan soldiers of the Second Kandak, First Brigade, 205th ANA Corps joined the Americans in these posts. The enemy fought back, sowing IEDs in each hamlet and on every dirt road. On November 13, a buried bomb smashed up a Stryker armored vehicle, killing a platoon sergeant and a specialist. Three days later, another IED penetrated a Stryker hull. Two more soldiers died. In the colder months, the Taliban often fell back. But in Panjwai, the enemy fought through the winter. The opposition intended to stay in the Horn, one of their final redoubts west of Kandahar city.

Between COP Palace and COP Lion, American Special Forces worked to hold the ground gained. At COP Belambai, an SF A-team, reinforced by a squad of conventional infantry, prepared to recruit, train, and advise Afghan local police. This village militia offered a way for the Pashtun people of Panjwai to protect their families. Many belonged to the same Alkozai tribe that supported U.S./ANA operations north of the Arghandab River as well. The Taliban hated the ALP above all other Afghan forces, as these armed locals greatly constrained its freedom of movement.

Just after 3:00 A.M. on March 11, 2012, Staff Sergeant Robert Bales slipped out of COP Belambai. The NCO wore Afghan robes, including a cowl that hid his head, over his U.S. Army uniform. Bales walked with the aid of an AN/PVS-14 night-vision device, its single light-intensifying tube projecting like a snout. He carried an M-4 carbine with an attached 40 mm grenade launcher, an M-9 pistol, and a large knife. Soldiers didn’t simply leave a U.S. compound alone at night, especially in a dangerous area like Panjwai. But Bales did.

Those who later watched surveillance footage saw him slowly move out of view to the north. Gunshots sounded, not an unusual noise in this district. Then, after an hour of silence, more single shots rang through the night, this time from south of the COP. All of this activity alerted the Special Forces team, who immediately awoke all at COP Belambai. As the soldiers scrambled to man the outpost’s security positions, a head count found Bales missing. And then he wasn’t.

A hooded figure shambled slowly to the front gate. Slowly, uncertainly, the shrouded apparition placed his weapons on the ground, then stood up and raised his hands. Bales admitted, “I did it.”

By sunrise, Panjwai resounded with wailing and outrage. Bales had slain four and wounded six in the first settlement. Then he killed twelve others in the southern hamlet. The victims included four men, four women, and ten children. Bales had attempted to burn the bodies. The first Afghan national police on the scene got the same story from the survivors: One American shot them all. Later, hysterical Afghan media accounts, fanned by President Hamid Karzai, speculated that more than a dozen drunken Americans had killed the villagers. That overwrought rumor mill gradually wound down. The evidence all pointed squarely at Staff Sergeant Robert Bales.

Nobody knew why he did it. A high-school graduate with three years of college credit, the thirty-eight-year-old had served ten years in the Army, including three tough Iraq deployments. He’d suffered a foot injury on the first and trauma from a vehicle rollover on the third. His family life wasn’t always happy. He’d been passed over for promotion. He’d been drinking alcohol with others at COP Belambai the night of the murders—le cafard again, the dry rot even among the elite SF, among tough veteran sergeants. Clearly something in him had snapped, but even Bales wasn’t sure what.

The Taliban leaders chortled with glee. Bales’s horrific acts underscored every Pashtun fear of the infidels, every mistrust of the occupiers. For years, the enemy had defended the Horn of Panjwai from battalion after battalion of resolute Canadians, killing 157 of them. Now, for the few years the Americans remained in country, the insurgents fully intended to battle and best them. The Third Battalion, Twenty-First Infantry Regiment was strung out all the way into the embattled Horn, near the end of a tough yearlong deployment, one of the last U.S. Army units to serve that long stretch. How much fight could these Americans have left? Enemy halts, we harass.

 

Before they left in July of 2011, the Canadians asked Lieutenant Colonel Steve Miller to actually sign for Panjwai District. Miller framed the document. He hung it in his headquarters, down the hall from the radio room, past the row of solemn photographs of the battalion’s eleven dead, Danny Chen among them. Even before the mayhem in Belambai, it had been a long deployment.

Tall and sturdy with crewcut blond hair, a piercing gaze, and a Hollywood-issue command voice, Miller benefited from all the right preparation to command the Third Battalion, Twenty-First Infantry. He’d commanded an air assault rifle company and a long-range surveillance detachment in Korea, then saw combat in Iraq as a major with a cavalry squadron. He’d also served as an exchange officer with the British army, a valuable opportunity to learn from America’s most battle-wise ally. Calm and direct, Miller led by example. He’d been in a lot of firefights. And he kicked himself for what happened at COP Palace, a place he hadn’t gone enough, preoccupied as he was with actions out west.

At this point in the war, in the wake of the ugly suicide of Danny Chen, a more nervous chain of command might have thrown Miller under the bus. His brigade commander tried to avoid dealing with the entire sad affair. But the RC-South commander, Major General Jim Huggins of the Eighty-Second Airborne Division, backed Miller “all the way,” as they say in the Airborne community. A veteran of Panama in 1989 and Desert Storm in 1991, Huggins also served earlier in Afghanistan and twice in Iraq, the second time as a one-star during the surge. He followed the hard examples of Dan McNeill, J. R. Vines, and Rod Rodriguez, a fighter from the start. Huggins saw the same trait in Steve Miller. A Japanese American, Jim Huggins well understood the potential damage of any incident with racist overtones. But he also rapidly determined that Miller was committed to fixing his unit’s cohesion and continuing to try to clear and hold Panjwai. Jim Huggins gave him the chance to stay at it. Miller repaid that trust.

Two weeks after the Belambai massacre, the battalion’s attached Company A/1–5 Infantry and Fourth Company, Second Kandak, First Brigade, 205th ANA Corps pushed once more into Mushan village. This time, they planned to find a good, abandoned qalat—there were several—to set up an ANA outpost in the center of the cluster of one-story adobe structures. The soldiers’ coming and going just made it easy for the Taliban to squeeze the people. With but a few weeks left in country, the Americans wanted to install their Afghan partners in central Mushan once and for all. That required a lot of dirty work.

Beginning at dawn on March 26, the American and Afghan rifle companies each committed a platoon as well as a company commander. Company A added a U.S. Air Force explosive-ordnance disposal (EOD) team of three NCOs. The Afghan Fourth Company brought along its own EOD team of four. The troops approached on foot from COP Mushan to the north of the town itself. Expecting trouble, Steve Miller and his security team moved to Mushan to follow the all-day effort.

The battalion commander and his team rolled west aboard two eight-wheeled Strykers. These green armored personnel carriers ran superbly on paved roads, pretty well on dirt trails, and decently on relatively level hard ground. Each held up to a squad of soldiers, sheltered behind armor capable of shrugging off small arms and most shell fragments. The majority of Strykers mounted a .50-caliber machine gun in a small automated turret, although there were also mortar carriers, ambulances, and specialized reconnaissance models with thermal sights. To ward off RPGs, Strykers bolted on a wide cage of metal slats that jutted out on all four sides. The rows of thin bars served to pre-detonate any approaching shaped-charge warhead. The Third Battalion, Twenty-First Infantry Regiment also used a number of V-hull variants, which fared better against IEDs. The flat-bottomed types suffered more damage. Miller’s battalion employed both kinds, but clearly, the men preferred the safer V-hulls.

The morning didn’t start well. Not far from Mushan, an Afghan civil order police patrol struck an IED out on the single paved road. One Afghan tripped an IED, which took off both of his legs. A U.S. Army medevac helicopter picked up the stricken Afghan. Miller’s two vehicles moved carefully past the IED site. Scattered debris marked the blackened roadside depression, a common sight in the Horn of Panjwai.

At about 11:15, the battalion commander stopped his pair of Strykers north of Mushan. The ramps went down and the men got out, leveling their carbines. Having formed up his security element, Steve Miller walked into the north edge of the village. Captain Mike Nolan and First Lieutenant Mohammed Zacharias, both small in stature but full of energy, met the commander. All three men took in the scene. “We’re just getting started,” Nolan said. “Not many people on the streets,” replied Miller. The soldiers knew what that portended.

The American and Afghan riflemen provided security, with mixed elements one compound forward, one back, and a block over on each flank. Those men crawled over mud barriers, slid around trees, and slogged through fetid sewage rivulets, places where the Taliban wouldn’t likely put IEDs. The Afghans wore their bright green camouflage uniforms, and you could see them easily from a distance. Americans used the duller green mottled pattern commonly issued by 2012; they blended in much better. The two rifle platoons spread out as the day wore on.

One of the Afghan EOD NCOs, Sergeant Abdul Hamid, a squat young man with a fringe of beard and a broad forehead visible beneath his tilted-back Kevlar helmet, led the search of Mushan. Trained by the meticulous German advisers at the ANA EOD school up north at Mazar-e-Sharif, Hamid and his three men slowly, carefully probed their way forward. One Afghan next to Hamid used the Vallon device, about the size of a small broom. He swept it back and forth to find any buried items. The drill went very slowly.

While this tableau unfolded on their major dirt road, all of ten feet wide, the people of Mushan stayed inside. As the soldiers passed, they saw glum women, children, and old men—no young ones—in windows and doors, watching, silent, staying out of the entire episode. That night, when the Taliban males came back, the long-suffering villagers could say honestly that they’d had nothing to do with the infidels and the Afghan lackeys. It’s how people stayed alive in a place like Mushan.

At each empty house, Hamid and his team stopped. The Vallon man waved his detector slowly along the ground, paying particular attention to the doorways. Then he ran the stick up the doorjamb, across the lintel, and down the other side. Sometimes the enemy liked to rig grenades at eye level, a nasty surprise indeed. Once safely through the doorway, the Afghans made a quick scan of the dim, low hovel. They found nothing but trash and old straw. The first dozen structures, some on each side of the path, all seemed clean. Picking along like this, it took them hours to go the equivalent of a city block along the meandering lane and its fronting mud huts.

About a third of the way down what passed for Mushan’s main avenue, the column came to the town’s mosque. By far the largest adobe structure in Mushan, nearly a story and a half tall to allow a large gathering space, the mosque sported some actual glass windows, a real wooden door, and a fifteen-foot rusty iron lattice minaret topped by speakers for the call to prayer. Three preteens, two girls and a boy, stood quietly in the mosque’s courtyard. They waved at the Afghan soldiers. They stared at the Americans.

The gregarious Lieutenant Zacharias asked them where the men of the village had gone. The trio pointed three hundred yards to the southeast, toward a small hill covered with rocks and scraggly brush. Steve Miller’s interpreter stepped in close to the lieutenant colonel: “Taliban Hill.” The Americans knew it well. They had gone round and round there in previous skirmishes. Miller looked up. Above them, the flat gray clouds hung low, a heavy overcast, a gloomy day without shadows. “No more helicopters today,” the battalion commander said to Captain Mike Nolan.

Certain units might have called it a day right there, with aerial medevac and Apaches off-station, having found no IEDs, few locals to meet and greet, and no likely facility to take over as a prospective ANA outpost. But Miller trusted his people. He knew Zacharias and Nolan wanted to press on. With the Strykers a few hundred yards to the north and COP Mushan itself a mile away, the risk appeared worth taking. Of course, that’s how most really bad days in Panjwai started. But Steve Miller knew his business. They could handle whatever percolated out there on Taliban Hill.

Fifty yards south of the mosque, Hamid stopped abruptly. He stood in the narrow street between two of the larger qalats in the center of the village. Those both seemed likely spots for an ANA platoon position, and both looked to be long empty. Hamid squatted down, then pointed up at the three U.S. Air Force sergeants. The Afghan then slowly swept his arm down to the dusty opening leading into the eastern courtyard. The EOD men nodded. A thin black wire, exposed for a foot or so, ran toward the back wall and into a small, low-ceilinged mud-brick stable.

“Command wire,” said one of the Air Force sergeants. That meant the enemy triggered it with a live observer. As none were evident, it could be disposed of rather simply with some demolitions. Evidently the Taliban, too, had figured out the two best locations for an ANA COP. As usual, they prepared something to welcome the Afghan soldiers.

Like most good EOD technicians, Hamid kept track of his finds and clearances. He indicated that this was his thirty-fifth. The Afghan found the bomb itself, marked it, and then crept catlike past it, sliding to the left. He pointed at the dirt yard, just inside the door. A dull wooden board peeked through a wide patch of disturbed dirt. “Pressure plate,” said one of the American EOD men. Those types were victim-operated, which meant they went off when you stepped on them. The Taliban liked to mix varieties to cross up men like Hamid. This ANA sergeant, however, was way ahead of his adversaries.

While the U.S. and ANA riflemen kept all-round security, Hamid dipped into a team member’s rucksack. He extracted detonating cord and two C-4 plastic-explosive blocks. He carefully placed the charges, ran the cord, inserted thin silver blasting caps, and then checked his work. Satisfied, he backed into the street, pushing against the thick adobe outer wall. With a minimum of orders, the experienced soldiers got the word and settled low, sheltering in the lee of various mud-brick partitions. Almost in unison, Afghans and Americans lowered their helmeted heads. In English, Hamid announced: “Fire in the hole! Fire in the hole! Fire in the hole!”

The twin explosions thundered, belching up two tall pillars of brown dirt and bits and pieces of both IEDs too. As soon as the debris cloud dissipated, Hamid crept forward with some plastic storage bags. He wanted fragments of the Taliban hardware to bring back to the base. He’d see if the analysts could figure out who made the weapons and how they worked. Exploiting the site for intelligence—it came right out of the book. Hamid notched numbers 36 and 37.

Across the dirt pathway, in the opening to the other qalat, one of the Air Force EOD men found another pair of buried bombs. One used a metal pressure plate. The other relied on a piece of buried tire with a crush switch. In that version, when a soldier stepped on it, nothing happened right away. Then, when he lifted his boot, the trigger snapped back, closing a circuit and, the enemy hoped, taking out both the soldier who’d hit it and those behind him. The Americans showed the clever, brutal items to Hamid. The Afghan EOD sergeant turned to his partners.

Crack. Crack. Crack.

The Americans ducked. Those were AK-47s. A few heard the zip of nearby enemy rounds. Not good. About ten more single shots sounded. Of course, they came from on or near Taliban Hill.

Afghans armed with M-16s and Americans with M-4s immediately returned fire. Then a heavier sound ripped the air—an M-240 machine gun, sweeping across the crest of Taliban Hill. The machine gun always got the enemy’s attention. The American gunner worked through two twelve-round bursts, peppering the high ground where the Taliban AK gunmen likely hid. The U.S. soldiers knew it only too well.

“Medic!” Uh-oh.

Steve Miller looked up. South of the two compounds with their embedded IEDs, a four-foot mud wall ran down each side of the ten-foot-wide street. About fifty yards south, a T-intersection loomed. The left turn led due east to Taliban Hill. Both Americans and Afghans huddled against the dirt berms. The wounded soldier lay sprawled near the T-intersection.

Nolan and Zacharias moved forward at a crouch. Their sergeants and lieutenants had matters in hand. Those two machine-gun bursts had clearly done some good. No more AK-47 bullets came from Taliban Hill. Fleeting forms ran off both the north and south slopes of the low rise, seeking shelter at the base of an angular mud-brick grape-drying hut to the south and among some mud walls to the north. Maybe two went each way. Maybe there were more. You couldn’t tell. In movies, both sides see each other clearly. Not so in reality when bullets fly. Men get behind cover and try hard to stay there. What you see when you glance up might be a flash of motion . . . or nothing at all.

With the Taliban run off the crest of Taliban Hill, U.S. and ANA soldiers pushed up the left leg of the T, worming their way closer to the enemy. The AKs kept banging away in ones and twos. Some hostile shots came from both sides of the now-empty mound. Americans and Afghans replied in kind, husbanding their ammunition.

As the firefight sputtered on, the medic reached the wounded soldier at the intersection, who turned out to be First Lieutenant Patrick Higginbottom, the Company A fire-support officer. An AK slug had caught the young West Pointer squarely in the hindquarters. Fortunately, the penetration wasn’t deep. He’d be okay as long as he got evacuated and cleaned up. The medic packed the wound. Around him, his mates kept shooting.

For more than ninety minutes, from 3:45 until almost 5:30, both sides fired. Neither maneuvered much after the opening moves. Miller and his soldiers knew from previous encounters that the insurgents wanted to draw them into prepared IED belts. Taliban gunmen kept flinging odd rounds in the hope of prying loose their disciplined opponents. The Americans and Afghans anticipated the ploy. For their part, American riflemen used the dirt walls for cover, moved back and forth to get glimpses of the foe, and just kept engaging. In a contest of aimed shots, Miller’s people held the advantage.

Miller’s men nailed one black-clad foe near the southern grape hut. A machine-gun team thought they knocked over another. Going out to check would have to wait for another day, for fear of the IEDs likely planted between the two sides. The engagement kept going, mostly rifles now, with the powerful U.S. M-240 machine gun being held for an occasional burst. Rather than their all-too-common “spray and pray,” individual Afghan soldiers actually tried to find targets and shoot single rounds. Zacharias beamed.

The weather didn’t allow for helicopter support, but about 5:15, two U.S. Marine Corps F/A-18D Hornet fighter jets checked in. Miller turned to his Air Force controller. “Bring one down for a low pass to identify targets,” he directed.

A few minutes later, maybe a hundred feet up, racing ahead of its sound, a massive gray airframe suddenly materialized. It scorched overhead from west to east, both jet engines blazing like yellow-white stars. A wave of heat washed over the firefight, giving way to the throaty rumble of the jet. Pressing sensations pushed you down to the earth, even if you knew what it was, the U.S. deus ex machina come to deliver death.

As the Marine aviator pulled back up into the low clouds, his voice sounded on the air controller’s radio. Matter-of-fact, as if describing holiday traffic on the interstate, the calm Marine confirmed at least three hostiles crouched behind a wall north of Taliban Hill. The insurgents were very close, within two hundred yards. This could get tough. Maybe a strafing run parallel to the Americans might work.

Miller decided to wait a bit. He told Nolan and Zacharias to cease fire. Sometimes merely bringing in a warplane scared off the adversaries. Maybe this was one of those times.

It was.

The intelligence people later determined that the enemy lost two men. The U.S. and ANA suffered one wounded, the lieutenant hit in the first minutes of the engagement. All in all, it made for a good afternoon’s work, leading to a better week to follow. The ANA COP went into Mushan village to stay.

 

At ISAF headquarters, General John Allen didn’t know the names of Danny Chen, Robert Bales, or Patrick Higginbottom, at least not at first. A suicide, a homicide, or a soldier wounded in action constituted “significant acts,” sigacts in military lingo. The staff handled most of it. They boiled it all down, giving only the choice tidbits to the four-star commander. That’s the way Allen preferred to get his information: distilled to the essence, with details left for subordinates. Most senior officers worked this way. It certainly suited John Allen well. He consistently sought the critical measurements, the correct bits of data.

A 1976 Annapolis graduate, Allen earned his degree with honors in operational analysis, the use of numerical metrics to determine progress and value. A contemporary of the Class of 1976 West Pointers Stan McChrystal, Ray Odierno, and Bill Caldwell, Allen shunned the spotlight, although he received some press attention simply because he performed so extraordinarily well. As commander of the Second Battalion, Sixth Marines in 1995, he was noticed by author Tom Clancy. “He is always alert. If you watch his eyes, they are always moving, always taking note of details.” A gentleman in every sense, Allen treated people of all ranks kindly and listened attentively, both notable traits in a senior general, especially a Marine infantryman. Many senior officers tended to transmit. Allen chose to receive.

Allen’s background included the usual Marine assignments up through battalion level. He’d earned awards and recognition time after time, always the best, the first, the most able. But he’d performed some other duties that marked him as a man of unusual potential, demonstrating a strain of Petraeus-style political/military acumen unhampered by Malik Daoud’s more open ambition. Allen held three master’s degrees in national security studies. He’d served in the prestigious, highly selective ceremonial unit at Marine Barracks at Eighth and I Streets in Washington, and then taught political science at Annapolis. In addition, he’d attended the demanding Defense Intelligence College and graduated first in his class, a real distinction for an infantry officer. Allen’s tenure in 2/6 Marines included something far more consequential than meeting Tom Clancy: contingency operations in the Balkans and a brush with combat. After his battalion command, he served as senior aide to the commandant of the Marine Corps.

At that point, John Allen’s path diverged from the normal route. An officer like him typically commands a Marine expeditionary unit or a regiment, then earns his star. Instead, Allen commanded the Basic School at Quantico, which all new Marine officers attend. He then went on to become the first Marine appointed as the commandant at the U.S. Naval Academy. After promotion to brigadier general and duty on the Joint Staff in the Pentagon, Allen served as a deputy commander in Anbar Province in 2007 and 2008. He played a key role in accelerating the Sunni Awakening. Promoted to major general and then lieutenant general, Allen became the deputy commander at U.S. Central Command under Dave Petraeus and his successor, Marine general Jim Mattis. When asked who should follow him to command ISAF, Petraeus confidently tagged John Allen. The quiet gentleman got the job.

After Dave McKiernan’s removal, Stan McChrystal’s untimely demise, and the larger-than-life Dave Petraeus persona, taciturn, thoughtful John Allen looked to be the perfect officer to guide the transition of Afghanistan from an ISAF counterinsurgency campaign to national authority under the Kabul government. And yet, out in the force, among the upper ranks, there were reservations.

Nobody questioned the idea of placing a Marine in charge. Indeed, the generals in the Marine Corps had long overcome the prejudices once expressed by the otherwise open-minded General Creighton Abrams. Asked to accept a four-star Marine deputy in Vietnam in 1968, Abrams replied, “None in the Marine Corps have the full professional qualifications.” By the time John Allen took command of ISAF, Marines had performed with distinction on multiple occasions at the four-star level, including as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Supreme Allied Commander Europe. Since the 1990s, Marine generals had commanded U.S. Atlantic Command, U.S. Central Command, U.S. Joint Forces Command, and U.S. Strategic Command. Indeed, the founding commander of what became the vital U.S. Central Command was General P. X. Kelley, later the commandant of his service. Schooled from induction to work closely with the larger services, Marines proved able joint commanders.

Allen’s issue—for those who thought he had one—involved his lack of relevant command time, especially in combat. Service as a deputy in Anbar, however estimable, didn’t match the experience of men who’d commanded divisions and corps in both Afghanistan and Iraq. John Allen had made his name as a staffer and deputy, not as a field commander. But people had leveled that charge at Dwight D. Eisenhower, and he’d turned out pretty well. The grumbling never really went anywhere.

Like Eisenhower, Allen excelled as the commander of a large multinational headquarters. He made time for the various senior NATO officers and, like most of them, preferred to run the war from the command post. Allen cared deeply for his men and women, but didn’t mix easily with the troops. You wouldn’t find him on foot patrol in Zharay like Stan McChrystal, or out pressing the flesh and doing challenge pushups like Dave Petraeus. John Allen supervised his campaign from Kabul, via e-mail, video-teleconferences (VTCs), and occasional formal gatherings. When he got out and about, he gladly pinned on medals and thanked young people in uniform. He spoke well, and looked every bit the part of the general in command. But mainly, Allen favored conversations with senior officers and formal briefings. He especially liked to look at numbers on slides.

Few matched his nose for statistics. He absorbed numbers and sorted through them quickly, seeing subtle connections that others missed. Ever polite, he also unerringly asked the right questions. “I am going to manage you by slides,” Dave Petraeus once told his staff In Iraq. John Allen outdid even Petraeus in that category.

The trust Allen placed in the virtue of these lengthy sessions belied the presence of a key defect. The data always seemed suspect. Many metrics hung on things that defied numbers. How did you measure the annual poppy cultivation? This illegal activity provided spending money for Pashtun subsistence farmers and, incidentally, financed the Taliban. It wasn’t like the locals registered their illicit crops. Analysts resorted to guesses based on aerial surveillance and patrol reports. Then they rolled them up. Over time, the numerals gained a certainty not present when the inputs were gathered.

Similar things happened with Afghan national army and police readiness ratings. Military staffs assigned ANA and ANP units to various readiness categories—newly established, developing, effective with assistance, effective with advisers, independent—and created numeric charts of the same. Yet the underlying assessments, excepting a nose count of men and weapons, largely reflected subjective views of how the Afghan leaders performed. Again, over time, the subjective estimates were taken as concrete facts.

The problem with numbers in Afghanistan related to the overall difficulty of combat reporting. All the computers and spreadsheets on earth couldn’t change that basic old rule: garbage in, garbage out. People under fire, or those slumped in exhaustion in small malodorous COPs or cursed with balky IT systems, tended to be late and incomplete in filing summaries. Americans reported more accurately than many other ISAF partners. Afghan reporting varied from adequate to ludicrous and rarely met Western standards of timeliness and thoroughness. Initial notices seldom got it right. It took a week before anyone could figure out how badly things had gone at COP Palace, a day or so to sort out the slaughter outside COP Belambai, and it’s unlikely John Allen ever heard about that long afternoon in Mushan village. Every day, a selection of various sigacts found their way into the hourlong ISAF morning-update briefing, tagged in small, neat call-out boxes on map slides. If the day before had been slow, an incident like Mushan could bubble up. On a busy day, though, only the big ones made the cut. The Belambai killings certainly did, once it became clear something really terrible had happened.

General Allen’s daily briefing brimmed with numbers. The presenting officers read from a preapproved, fully rehearsed script. Although the array of subordinate commanding generals, such as ISAF Joint Command, NTM-A, and the special operators, all followed along on a VTC hookup, this show played to an audience of one. Earnest majors and lieutenant colonels, some not native English speakers from NATO countries, read through the patter. The great man absorbed, assented to proceed, or perhaps asked a question. The usual reply to Allen’s unfailingly courteous query became a standing joke around ISAF: “Sir, I’ll get back to you.” Answers were not in the script. So junior briefers dared not go off the beaten path. The ranks of generals and admirals who assembled daily in the ISAF headquarters typically sat mute, mesmerized by the colorful slides and soothing voices, like cobras swaying to the tune of a fakir’s flute. Day in and day out, the performance continued.

One set of numbers got the most attention. Enemy attacks became the metric of metrics, the indicator that above all measured progress for ISAF. But what constituted an attack? Certainly the fracas at Mushan that wounded Pat Higginbottom qualified. But how did the staff count the roadside explosion that took the legs of the Afghan policeman earlier that day? What of the four IEDs found and two blown by Sergeant Hamid and his American partners? Was it all one attack? Two? Three? Six? Counting rules evolved, as detailed and arcane as those developed by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. For the record, the March 26 attacks around Mushan totaled three: the initial IED on the road, the group of four IEDs in the village, and the firefight.

Brilliant mathematicians and dedicated intelligence officers sliced and diced the attack numbers, but they always showed the same two trends: Enemy action rose in the summer and fell in the winter. You could bank on that, especially in the colder, snowy east and north. Additionally, the overall attack numbers stayed about the same, with a slight decrease as ISAF forces began to reduce in 2011 and 2012. If you thought you saw anything other than a stalemate, you were kidding yourself.

The ISAF bar charts stayed stubbornly consistent. Attacks peaked during the 2010 surge (4,500 per month in the favored Taliban fighting season of June, July, and August) and fell off consistent with the U.S. and NATO troop drawdown in 2011 (4,100 per summer month) and 2012 (down to 4,000). But they never dropped back to the summer 2009 levels (2,600 per summer month), a period when Stan McChrystal assessed the campaign as failing. By cranking down to subcategories, ISAF statistics experts sifted the data ever more finely, claiming to see small but significant trends. One that grabbed General Allen’s attention indicated that, over time, more hostile attacks occurred farther away from population centers. Well, maybe . . . whatever that meant. An objective observer assiduously dug through all the figures and charged that ISAF accounting techniques “shows how a carefully rigged portrayal of the trends in EIAs [Enemy Initiated Attacks] can exaggerate progress.” You had that sick feeling in your stomach you were looking at the hamlet evaluations from outside Da Nang, circa 1967.

John Allen was an honest and honorable man. As an experienced operations research analyst, he understood that the numbers were not adding up. Directed by President Obama to transition to the Afghans by 2014, ready or not, Allen did his best to play a weak hand well. Despite his stated antipathy for senior Marines, General Creighton Abrams would have certainly sympathized with General John Allen, having endured the same bleak sequence in from 1968 to 1972 as the U.S. commander in Vietnam. It was not a happy precedent.

 

As the numbers didn’t look all that good, the ISAF commander concentrated instead on doing what he could with transition. Allen had inherited a schedule, and that number, December 31, 2014, looked likely to hold up. The north, west, and Kabul all remained fairly quiet, as did parts of the east, south, and southwest. Why not claim credit where the going was better?

The Afghans called it Inteqal, Dari for “transition.” Having prevailed in the messy 2009 election, President Hamid Karzai embraced the transition effort fully. As his minister to the Joint Afghan-NATO Inteqal Board, Karzai named his former finance minister and one-time rival Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai, America’s favorite Westernized Afghan. Glib, personable, and independently wealthy—few in ISAF asked questions, but perhaps they should have—Ghani became the authority on which districts and provinces went under Afghan government authority. The shrewd new U.S. ambassador, Ryan Crocker, who knew Ghani well from previous days in Kabul and remembered Allen from Iraq, provided an able, helpful voice alongside the ISAF general.

The Afghans placed districts and provinces into transition in several groups, known as tranches, reflective of the original British proposal that spawned the entire arrangement. The first began under Petraeus on March 22, 2011. The second (November 27, 2011), third (May 13, 2012), and fourth (December 31, 2012) happened under Allen’s oversight. By the fourth batch, twenty-three of thirty-four provinces and 87 percent of the Afghan people officially lived under the sway of the Kabul regime. Supposedly, when that occurred, ISAF forces would be greatly restricted in their operations, compelled to adhere to Afghan law, a slippery concept at best. Although they all eventually entered it, not one district ever really emerged from transition. In truth, that awaited the departure of ISAF.

It all made Ashraf Ghani and Hamid Karzai quite happy. In reality, it meant little on the ground. Karzai’s writ ran to the outskirts of Kabul. Aside from his Afghan national army and police, plus a few overworked appointed officials, most Afghan citizens got nothing from their government beyond a grasping hand. At least his obnoxious half brother Ahmed Wali Karzai was no more, having been assassinated by a rogue bodyguard the same month John Allen took command of ISAF. Things improved somewhat in Kandahar.

Even as the Inteqal process ran on, Allen devoted much more attention to ISAF teamwork. He adopted NATO’s idea of “in together, out together,” even as key countries began to shift from combat to supporting roles. Canada did so in 2011. France followed the next year. Other countries did too. It all kept the ISAF commander busy, as both the U.S. and NATO wanted him to develop options for a force to remain after 2014. Allen spent way more time than he liked flying to Brussels, hosting foreign dignitaries, and participating in hours of laborious VTCs with the U.S. Department of Defense, Department of State, and the White House. Although he had no choice but to send the surge troops home in late 2011, Allen successfully kept sixty-eight thousand Americans in country through his tenure. Come late 2013, then early 2014, though, they would begin to depart pretty quickly. NATO would do the same.

As he prepared for American troop numbers to go down, Allen faced some difficult choices. The main contests remained in the southwest, south, and east. In a perfect world, all U.S. combat power belonged there, killing Taliban and securing villages. Yet the German-led north, the Italian-led west, and the Turkish-led capital all demanded valuable American enablers: route-clearance teams, medevac helicopters, overhead surveillance drones, and certain SOF and advisory elements. Keeping the allies in country required U.S. help. It amounted to a tax of about ten thousand men and women, plus highly useful equipment, deducted from what would soon be steadily dwindling American manpower. With sixty-eight thousand U.S. troops, that levy made sense. With forty thousand or fewer, it did not. But agreeing to “in together, out together” ensured that John Allen propped up the allies. So it went, much to the frustration of understrength American elements hungry to own those less active units hanging around up north, out west, and in Kabul.

The final aspect of transition involved that most difficult of Afghan challenges, President Hamid Karzai. Compassionate and decent by nature, Allen found himself ensnared in a seemingly endless cycle of Karzai complaints, ISAF apologies, and then U.S. concessions. Within months, battered by Karzai about the supposed horrors of civilian casualties and night raids, Allen reimposed and then exceeded the McChrystal strictures on firepower. Every allegation, even the most trivial, got a full investigation, often superintended by a general officer. When American and Afghan military police soldiers at the Bagram detention center accidentally burned some Korans marked with detainee codes, Karzai went ballistic. Encouraged, street mobs did likewise in several cities. Allen came hat in hand to ask for forgiveness. And Karzai almost granted it. Then came the Belambai massacre. It was always something.

On John Allen’s watch, the U.S. formally signed over the Bagram detention facility, although Americans continued to play a very active role advising the Afghan soldiers there. Allen also agreed to significant limits on ISAF night raids, as well as certain aspects of the Afghan local police program. Given the ongoing resiliency of the Taliban, this made little military sense. But it kept Karzai quiet. And that in turn kept Washington quiet.

On May 2, 2012, a year to the day after Osama bin Laden’s death and just prior to a major NATO summit in Chicago, Illinois, President Barack Obama made a dramatic night flight to Kabul to meet with President Hamid Karzai. Together, the two men signed the “Enduring Strategic Agreement Between the United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.” Those who read it noted many word-for-word matches with the very similar 2008 document signed in Baghdad, Iraq. As Ambassador Ryan Crocker had negotiated both agreements, that only made sense. It also offered the options that Obama demanded, essentially committing America to nothing and suggesting that Afghanistan would be fortunate indeed to get what Iraq had gotten after 2011. If he’d really wanted to see what came next, Hamid Karzai should have taken a long, hard look at Baghdad.

 

The man who’d made his name in Baghdad and who’d recommended General John Allen to command ISAF also played a major role in Allen’s departure, although not intentionally. Busy running the CIA, David Petraeus got some quite unwelcome news in early November of 2012. In pursuing an Internet stalking complaint, Federal Bureau of Investigation agents uncovered evidence of an extramarital affair involving the CIA director. During his time in Afghanistan, Petraeus had developed a relationship with Paula Broadwell. One of the general’s several biographers, Broadwell was a married Army Reserve officer, fellow West Pointer, scholar, and athlete. Apprised of the incriminating information, the CIA director tendered his resignation, which the president accepted. On November 9, 2012, David Petraeus made a public admission regarding the matter. It ended speculation about the general’s future in American politics.

The fallout extended past Petraeus. Broadwell apparently suspected another woman, a Tampa socialite, of having an untoward interest in Petraeus. In the subsequent official inquiry, it turned out that General John Allen kept up a string of e-mail messages with the woman in Tampa, who was also married. The news media pulsed with innuendo linking Allen and the other person to Broadwell, Petraeus, and their activities. Suggestive articles hinted at an inappropriate relationship. A thorough investigation followed. Allen’s nomination to become the next Supreme Allied Commander in Europe hung in limbo during most of November, December, and into January of 2013. The ISAF commander tried to keep his mind on his duties, no easy task given the ongoing journalistic feeding frenzy. After months, the results came back, clearing the Marine general of misconduct.

It was too late for John Allen. His reputation unfairly impugned, a gentleman to the last, the general asked the president to allow him to retire rather than take the NATO supreme command. Obama agreed. On February 10, 2013, Marine general Joseph F. Dunford Jr. took command of the International Security Assistance Force and U.S. Forces-Afghanistan. Determined to stay out of the limelight, Dunford had one mission: Wrap it up.