Sent: Sunday, April 10, 2011 7:40 AM
To: Loftis Email
Subject: RE: Arrived in Kabul
. . . We finished our classes today. The language classes were very useful, and some of the culture classes were interesting, but there was a lot of PowerPoint as well. Worse yet, it was Afghan PowerPoint. The older I get the harder it is to stay awake during boring presentations.
We have so far had a mullah, some elders, an Afghan general, and a member of parliament come and speak to us. They were all very interesting. . . .
We had a mock shura for the last day of language training. I had to play the part of a village elder, and I had to speak Pashto and sometimes Dari, since the other students are split across both. There’s a picture of me in an Afghan hat and shawl looking really tired. . . .
Remember my joke: What kind of Mexican food may or may not happen? (Inshallada.) An Arab American who lives in California liked it and he asked permission to use it. I of course agreed.
John Darin Loftis, a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force, was forty-three when he arrived in Afghanistan on his second tour. He had been drafted into the AFPAK Hands program (for Afghanistan and Pakistan) as a specialist in Afghan languages and culture. He was about five feet eight inches and had a stocky “Celtic build,” as his wife Holly put it, referring to his Irish heritage. He had a soft neck, brown hair, and an open face. He was straitlaced, a committed Christian who seemed to go out of his way to identify the best in others. He avoided even mild profanity but could be forthright and direct, even when speaking to superior officers.1
Officers who became AFPAK Hands committed to at least two field tours in Afghanistan. Loftis studied foreign languages avidly but he had been reluctant to join because it would require long separations from Holly and their two daughters, Alison, who was twelve, and Camille, who was almost ten. Ultimately, however, senior officers in the Air Force had all but insisted that he become a Hand because of his language ability; he was one of a handful of Pashto speakers in the Air Force. He and Holly felt he had no choice but to serve.
Holly and the girls remained at the family home in Navarre, on the Florida panhandle, near Hurlburt Field, home to the Air Force’s First Special Operations Wing. The base had a view of a nearby bay. Airmen enjoyed picnics on the Gulf of Mexico’s immaculate beaches. Loftis had been posted at “The Schoolhouse,” a facility at the U.S. Air Force Special Operations School. He taught officers and airmen about what they would encounter in Afghanistan. He shared the teaching load with a female Air Force intelligence officer who had immigrated to the United States from Afghanistan at the age of twelve. She spoke native Pashto. Loftis had learned his Pashto at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California. The pair became fast friends while devising skits and role-playing games for their curriculum. When new military students arrived, Loftis and his partner would separate the men and women to introduce Afghanistan’s gender segregation. They would ask the men to hold hands, as Afghan men do. They dressed female students in burqas so they would know what it was like to wear one. They walked their students through pretend Afghan villages so they could practice talking to wary residents. They recited poems in Pashto and Dari. Among the many roles Loftis played during Schoolhouse skits, he was particularly brilliant as a tea server—even when bantering Air Force generals tried to induce him to speak or break character, Loftis would bow his head and refuse to glance up, to demonstrate his socially prescribed subservience.2
He painstakingly taught departing American generals an icebreaker they could memorize in Dari. A man knocks on his neighbor’s door and asks to borrow his donkey. The neighbor says he has no donkey. “But I heard it braying.” Nope, no donkey, the neighbor insists. Just then arise the sounds of a donkey knocking around inside the house. “Who are you going to believe?” the exasperated man asks. “Me or the donkey?”
The purpose of the AFPAK Hands program was to leverage the expertise of American officers who served multiple tours in Afghanistan, to help win over Afghan hearts and minds. It was a phrase Loftis didn’t like “because it can be twisted to just about anything,” as he once put it. The Schoolhouse curriculum was one aspect of the counterinsurgency campaign, but it also had a defensive purpose, to prevent misunderstandings between Americans and Afghan partners that might escalate into intimate violence. By 2011, this was a rising problem in the war.
“Everything over there is about relationships,” Loftis and his teaching partner emphasized. Yet there was an obvious tension in their curriculum. On the one hand, they taught: Build relationships with Afghans who are your counterparts. At the same time, they warned: Watch your back.3
Loftis had grown up in Murray, Kentucky, a town of about fifteen thousand in the southwestern corner of the state. He was the first in his family to attend college, at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. He met Holly Brewer there. They lived in the same foreign-language hall as sophomores; the residents were supposed to speak Spanish as much as possible. She was the daughter of a cardiologist and a schoolteacher. He had little money and made it through Vanderbilt on scholarships and loans. They bonded deeply. They both were children of divorce. They yearned to live abroad. The summer after they graduated, they married and applied to the Peace Corps. They assumed they would go to Latin America because they both spoke Spanish. One day they got a call reporting that they had been assigned to Papua New Guinea, the island nation near the equator in the Pacific, one of the poorest countries in the world.
In 1992, they arrived in the Southern Highlands, a remote forested area populated by the Duna people. They lived for two years in a village that had no electricity and no piped hot water. They both learned Melanesian pidgin, a patois of English, German, and tribal languages. They also acquired a little Duna. The long months of working side by side amid such ingrained poverty “changed our perspective on things—not bleeding heart but more in just learning about development, to see how slowly things can happen and how everything can get caught up in local politics.”4
In 1994, toward the end of their Peace Corps work, Darin thought about joining the military. He was twenty-six. The Air Force accepted him into Officer Training School in Alabama. Loftis had studied engineering as well as languages at Vanderbilt. Commissioned as a second lieutenant, he became a missile man and worked on classified space and nuclear programs. Holly taught preschool for a while as they moved from base to base. On September 11, 2001, they were living at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. Holly heard the news of the attacks on National Public Radio, then turned on CNN and sat in front of the television most of the day, shocked and transfixed. As George W. Bush’s global war on terrorism unfolded, Darin was ordered to Schriever Air Force Base and then Cheyenne Mountain, the Cold War–era nuclear command bunker near Colorado Springs, Colorado. He hoped for a position in the Air Force that would use his gift for languages and enthusiasm for foreign cultures. Eventually, Darin applied to become a regional affairs strategist, an Air Force role that would require him to study a foreign language at Monterey. The application form asked what language he would prefer. Loftis wrote “needs of the Air Force” as his answer. His superiors chose Pashto.5
—
Major Jeffrey T. Bordin arrived in Afghanistan on his latest tour in June 2008. He was a research psychologist who specialized in the causes of failed military and intelligence decision making. He had also spent more than three decades serving in various branches of the military reserves, law enforcement, and the Air National Guard. Among other projects, Bordin had conducted war crimes and human rights investigations in combat zones. After September 11, he deployed to Afghanistan as a civil affairs planner, an adviser on law enforcement issues, and a trainer of the Afghan National Police, working with U.S. Special Forces. He deployed in areas that saw significant combat, such as the Pech Valley, the Korengal Valley, and Nuristan.6
Bordin’s work contained an emphatic streak of skepticism about commanding generals. His doctoral dissertation at Claremont Graduate School had explored “how elite governmental decision makers come to ignore or refute valid information during their deliberations.” The paper began by recounting how, during the late 1930s, naval officers discovered serious quality problems in torpedo manufacturing, yet the officers “acquiesced to both political and organizational pressures to ignore” the defects. Then, in 1942, at the Battle of Midway, nearly a hundred American airmen flew torpedo-armed planes against a vastly superior Japanese force. “Despite the Holocaust they were flying into,” Bordin recounted, “every aircrew pressed their attack—many while literally engulfed in flames.” Yet their bravery came to naught because “not a single torpedo detonated against a Japanese warship.” This failure “enabled the Japanese to launch a devastating counterstrike that culminated in the loss of the USS Yorktown and 141 American lives. The title of Bordin’s work signaled his perspective on these and similar cases: “Lethal Incompetence: Studies in Political and Military Decision-Making.” Early in his career, Bordin worried that he had been too hard on the commanders he chronicled. Later, he decided, “I wasn’t hard enough.”7
By 2010, Bordin had become all too familiar with a disturbing trend: a rising incidence of murder of American and European soldiers by uniformed Afghans who were supposed to be allies. The military called these murders “green on blue” killings. Since the spring of 2007, there had been more than two dozen murder or attempted murder cases in Afghanistan where soldiers or police working alongside American or European forces had turned their guns on their partners, killing at least fifty-eight. By 2010, the pace of fratricidal killings was rising, to the point where an Afghan ally murdered an American or European soldier once a week, on average, according to Bordin’s findings. In July, an Afghan soldier killed three British troops in Helmand and then fled to the Taliban. A week later, an Afghan soldier killed two American civilian trainers in northern Afghanistan. The next month, an Afghan employee shot dead two Spanish police officers. Yet no one had ever ordered a study of the problem and its causes.
Bordin had been out on operations with the Afghan National Police in remote areas since 2004. On patrol, he had sometimes felt that he was just as likely to be shot in the back by an Afghan police officer as to be killed by a Taliban insurgent. There were always a handful of Afghan comrades alongside him who had a hard stare that Bordin felt as hostility. He decided that an ethnographic study of the attitudes of Afghan and American soldiers toward one another might be insightful.8
The green-on-blue murders rising during 2010—and the shock effect they had on public opinion, particularly in Europe—threatened President Barack Obama’s strategy to try to engineer an exit from the Afghan war without leaving violent chaos behind. At the heart of Obama’s plan lay the counterinsurgency campaign now led by General Petraeus, which sought to suppress the Taliban long enough to train and equip Afghan security forces so that they could replace American and European troops and allow them to go home, starting in 2011. This expanding training mission required closer and closer interaction between American and European soldiers and Afghan allies. If such collaboration repeatedly gave rise to misunderstandings or resentments that led to cold-blooded murder, the strategy might fail.
It required another tragedy to jolt the Army to take an initial step to investigate as Bordin proposed. On November 29, 2010, in the Pachir Agam district of eastern Nangarhar Province, an Afghan border policeman participating in a joint operation with U.S. soldiers turned his gun on his allies and killed six Americans—the worst mass-murder case involving the United States in the Afghan war to date, and among the worst of its kind in American military history. That attack at last led U.S. Army commanders to authorize a “Red Team” research project about the apparent alienation between Afghan trainees and foreign advisers. Red Team studies at the C.I.A. or in military intelligence seek to step outside prevailing assumptions. Regional Command–East, as the section of the Afghan battlefield to the Pakistani side of Kabul was known, commissioned Bordin to conduct a Red Team study into fratricidal violence in Afghanistan.9
He designed his ethnographic research so that it would meet the peer review standards of social science, but in essence the design was simple: The Red Team researchers would ultimately ask more than 600 Afghan soldiers, police, and interpreters, as well as about 120 American soldiers, to talk openly about how they felt about one another. (The team also asked another 136 American soldiers to fill out a questionnaire assessing their Afghan counterparts.) Bordin directly solicited comment on misunderstandings and grievances between the two groups. “Okay, we won’t give you the regular ‘Smiley Face’ answers; we will tell you the truth,” an Afghan National Army sergeant told his interviewers.10
The research team reached Laghman Province on December 8, 2010. After Christmas, they tramped around Kunar and Nangarhar, through the end of January. They worked on Afghan bases, not American bases. The Afghan soldiers and police they interviewed offered a critique of American conduct that did not sound very different, at times, from the Taliban’s critique. The Afghans said that the Americans carried out too many violent night raids; that their home searches looking for insurgents humiliated ordinary Afghans; that they did not respect Afghan women; that they drove local roads arrogantly; that they fired their weapons recklessly if attacked; and that they killed far too many Afghan civilians.
“They get upset due to their casualties, so they take it out on civilians during their searches,” one interviewee said.
“They take photos of women even when we tell them not to,” said another.
“A U.S. [armored transport vehicle] killed six civilians traveling in a vehicle; it was intentional.”
“U.S. soldiers killed two youths. Their mother became a suicide bomber; she was provoked by this atrocity. She went to Paradise as a martyr.”
“They cause many civilian casualties; they apologize, but they keep doing it. This isn’t acceptable.”
Bordin’s research team analyzed categories of complaint and built matrices to show which grievances stung most. They identified examples where the Afghan allies attributed violence to Americans that had actually been the Taliban’s responsibility.
The American officers and soldiers Bordin interviewed also had a jaundiced view of the Afghans they were training and fighting alongside:
“They are stoned all the time.”
“We can’t leave anything out; they steal it.”
“I wouldn’t trust the ANA [Afghan National Army] with anything, never mind my life.”
“I was fired on by ANA personnel multiple times during my deployment.”
“It would benefit Afghanistan to disband the ANA and start over again.”
“We are interfering with Darwinian theory!”11
—
On May 12, 2011, Bordin published a seventy-page paper titled “A Crisis of Trust and Cultural Incompatibility.” It provided a raw, highly detailed account of estrangement between American and Afghan allies. The testimony in the report included some from American soldiers who described lethal attacks where they believed Afghan soldiers or police had partnered or been complicit with the Taliban. Bordin found a “rapidly growing systematic threat” and a “crisis of confidence” among the Western trainers preparing the Afghan National Army and police to carry the war against the Taliban on their own.
Bordin was particularly scathing about what he described as a pattern of denial among American commanders. Generals dismissed green-on-blue killings as “isolated” and “extremely rare,” Bordin wrote, statements that “seem disingenuous, if not profoundly intellectually dishonest.” The willful “cognitive dissonance” of those leading the war “perpetuates an ongoing blindness towards acknowledging this murder problem.”12
His judgments implicated General David Petraeus, who by now had been named to lead the C.I.A. Petraeus had a doctoral degree in international relations from Princeton. He surrounded himself with Army officers who also were graduate degree holders, many of them social scientists. Yet although he was often described as an intellectual, Petraeus did not have a particularly searching or questioning mind. He projected unshakable confidence and he was masterful at shaping his own reputation. He understood as well that in an era of global media and asymmetric terrorism and insurgency, wars turned as much on what people thought as on the territory they controlled. Bordin’s work undermined the public narrative of the Afghan war Petraeus had tried to shape.
Colonel John Angevine had recently arrived at the I.S.A.F. headquarters to run Red Team studies. He read Bordin’s report, talked with the author about the possibility of working further together, and, on June 3, 2011, told Bordin that he was going to pass the study up to Petraeus. Three days later, Bordin learned that I.S.A.F. had ordered that his study be classified, to prevent further distribution beyond those with appropriate clearances. The command had also declined to renew his contract and withdrawn an informal offer to further study mistrust between American and Afghan soldiers.
Petraeus said later he had never heard of Bordin, never read the study, and never took any steps to suppress its findings. Angevine had passed the study to Petraeus’s command staff but had no way to know whether the general had received it or looked at it. Angevine did conclude that Bordin had broken trust with the command by publishing the study as an open source document in a publicly accessible military knowledge-sharing database before he had authorization from the very top. Bordin thought this was a shoddy excuse for suppressing his findings; he had published through the appropriate channels, in a routine manner. He saw his work as the clarification of inconvenient truths in wartime, in the tradition he had long chronicled, and he believed his work undermined public statements by Petraeus about the war’s progress. In any event, I.S.A.F. did not renew Bordin’s contract. Someone else in Petraeus’s command—it is not clear who—ordered “A Crisis of Trust and Cultural Incompatibility” to be classified. Angevine and other officers in I.S.A.F. discussed Bordin’s research and debated his conclusions. The question was whether cultural incompatibility was really the cause of fratricidal violence or merely one of many contexts in which such intimate murders occurred, perhaps because of deliberate Taliban infiltration. It was a sensitive matter because the Bordin thesis of fundamental incompatibility leading to repetitious mass murder offered weary European publics and politicians a clearly lit exit ramp out of an Afghan war they no longer wanted to fight: We’ve overstayed, they all hate us, it’s hopeless.13
Bordin had no alternative but to go home. He thought the transparent evidence he had assembled spoke amply for itself and that the Petraeus command was in denial. As he departed Afghanistan, he thought privately, “A lot of people are going to get killed unnecessarily.”
Two weeks after Bordin was effectively fired, a Wall Street Journal reporter obtained a copy of the study and wrote about it. A spokeswoman for Petraeus’s command denounced Bordin’s work as methodologically flawed and not reliable. The position of Petraeus and his advisers was that they were aware of the problem of fratricidal violence and were taking preventive measures, many of them involving classified security procedures, to stop the killings, to the degree possible. There was no way to stop all of the insider attacks, but they were alert to the threat and doing what they could.
As Petraeus departed Kabul for the C.I.A., he and his staff organized transition briefings for Marine General John Allen, who would take command of I.S.A.F. on July 18. Petraeus and his lieutenants presented to Allen at least three formal briefings on the Afghan war. In addition, the incoming commander dined with Petraeus almost every night. Not once—not even in staff-level briefings—did Petraeus or his officers mention the trend of fratricidal murder.14
Sent: Friday, November 11, 2011 3:10 AM
To: Loftis Email
Subject: Re: Miss you
It has gotten cold here, too. I was on duty last night, and every time I stepped outside I felt sorry for the guards who were out all night. They were bundled up, though, and one of them was watching TV in his cell phone.
There’s another one who is really friendly and really loud about it. He only speaks Dari, and he’s illiterate. When I asked him if he could read, he said, “No, but I can really fight!” and he started maneuvering around with his gun and making sounds. He’s a real trip. I’ve been teaching him one phrase of English a day and he is tickled to death. . . .
I’ve made really good friends with the janitor who cleans our building at ISAF. Today I introduced him to an AFPAK Hand (Larry, who is still finding his feet in Dari). At the end of our basic conversation Basir said his hope is that our children can be good friends, too.
Another janitor, the one who cleans our part of the MOI building, doesn’t have his fingers on his right hand. I finally got close enough to him to ask about it, and after he closed the door he said it had been Taliban cruelty. (I had suspected that.) He then insisted that I translate it for COL Green, who was also in the room. You’re the only other ones that I have told. He shakes our hands without any shame or discomfort, though.
He also has nine kids, and I got to meet one of them. COL Green got him a nice Eid present.
I wish it were safe enough to bring you all here so you can see my world. But I like the one at home a lot better. . . .
L, D2
It had been apparent for years that Western military discipline and doctrine might be difficult to teach to Afghan soldiers and police, given that they struggled with high rates of illiteracy and impoverishment. Many American and European training officers had developed a nuanced appreciation of the problem. They did not expect Afghans to celebrate the presence of foreign troops in their country or to perform to the standards of armies in the industrialized world. The training mission was to prepare Afghans well enough to defend their own government and people against a second Taliban revolution, after the Americans and Europeans departed.
“They smoked strong hashish and mild opium. They couldn’t map read,” recalled Patrick Hennessey, a young British officer who, in 2007, oversaw the training of an Afghan kandak, or battalion, in Helmand Province. “They lacked everything that British Army training believed in and taught—and fuck me if most of them hadn’t killed more Russians than we’d ever seen. . . . I liked that they had more balls than I ever did to just stand up and say ‘Why’ or ‘No’ or ‘I don’t care if there is a war on and a massive IED threat. I like watermelon so I’m going to steal a car I can’t drive and run a Taliban checkpoint in order to go to the market.’ I couldn’t train them at all.”15
The potential for misunderstandings between f-bombing Western trainers and pious, prideful Afghan soldiers to erupt into gun violence was a problem “too sensitive to put in the formal briefings,” as Hennessey described it, but this gap did not seem to pose a strategic crisis.16 The murder rate grew only after 2007 as the war’s violence spread and as tens of thousands more American, Canadian, and European troops arrived to fight in Afghan towns and villages. It seemed remarkable that Afghans accepted the inevitability of American battlefield errors and the necessity of violent raids on private homes as much as they did. It was hardly surprising that personal bonds on joint bases frayed nonetheless as isolated American units lost discipline, killed civilians in the plain sight of Afghan partners, urinated on household walls in front of Afghan women, shot dogs for sport, or called their Afghan colleagues “motherfuckers,” even if the foreigners intended the phrase only in mild censorship.
Increasingly, too, as it became clear that American and European troops would not remain in Afghanistan in large numbers for the long run, trainer and trained harbored distinct assumptions. The Americans and their Canadian and European allies were in a hurry to get the Afghan army and police organized, so they could go home. The Afghan soldiers being trained could not withdraw from the challenge of the Taliban, so they were open to local truces and other improvised, even cooperative strategies with the enemy to avoid direct combat.
During 2011, fratricidal attacks surged in number and lethality. On October 29, an Afghan army trainee at a base in Kandahar Province opened fire on Australian soldiers, killing three of them and wounding seven others before the shooter was felled by return fire. On November 9, an Afghan soldier shot and wounded three Australians in Uruzgan Province. On December 29, an Afghan soldier shot and killed two members of the French Foreign Legion in eastern Afghanistan. Ten days later, during a volleyball game on a base in Zabul Province, an Afghan soldier murdered an unarmed American.
In January 2012, a video of U.S. Marines kicking and urinating on Taliban corpses appeared on YouTube. It went viral and generated news coverage worldwide.
On January 20, on a base in remote Kapisa Province, an Afghan soldier murdered four unarmed French soldiers while they ran for exercise. The killer later told investigators that he was outraged by the abuse video.17
One problem was that Afghanistan’s Ministry of Defense had no counterintelligence capabilities—no systems or trained personnel to detect Taliban infiltrators or other insiders who posed a threat. The Afghan spy service, the National Directorate of Security, or N.D.S., did have counterintelligence officers. Yet the N.D.S. had roots in Afghanistan’s brutal period of Soviet occupation, when the K.G.B. had trained and supported the security service. The Afghan army’s leaders had long memories and they did not want K.G.B.-trained officers rooting around in the Afghan National Army’s ranks, looking for Taliban spies, inevitably roughing up innocents or torturing suspects into false confessions.
The latest murders revived attention to Bordin’s work. General Allen read summaries of the study and looked into its history but he thought that if Petraeus didn’t think the work was credible, then it probably wasn’t. Allen told colleagues that Bordin seemed too hooked on culture and misunderstanding as a problem between Afghan and American forces. Allen had commanded in Iraq on battlefields where American and Iraqi soldiers fought side by side in circumstances that were at least as challenging as in Afghanistan. Of course, there were frictions, but they were not fatal to the mission and could be overcome with deliberate work. Allen was wary, too, about how politically convenient the “cultural incompatibility” thesis was at a time when public opinion in Europe and America was swinging against the war. Was this reliable social science or just an excuse to go home? Allen’s intuition was that the murders more likely constituted an insurgent strategy of infiltration and disruption—a deliberate strike at the core of N.A.T.O. cohesion.18
That winter, one of General Allen’s lieutenants, Major General Sean MacFarland, put together a self-protection guidebook for N.A.T.O. soldiers, called the “Green on Blue Smartcard.” It advised, “The key is for local Commanders to prevent complacency and conduct risk assessments with Green-on-Blue in mind.” The Smartcard recommended that N.A.T.O. officers include Afghan partners and promote cultural sensitivity: “Respect Islam,” the guidebook suggested, and “avoid arrogance.” Commanders should involve Afghan soldiers and officers in patrol briefings and “social/sport activities,” the document urged. Yet it also laid out procedures for how to train for gun battles with inside murderers, how to eliminate shooters decisively and quickly, and how to maintain armed vigilance, including the oversight of Afghan allies, “before, during and after military operations.”19
Wed 2/15/2012 9:44 AM
Holly,
I had another Afghan Hands experience today. General Dawood invited Nea (another APH in our office) to his house for lunch today. The main reason was so Nea could talk to his wife about her health condition so we can try to set up some treatment for her if necessary. So we donned our civilian clothes and hopped in his police truck and went to his house. It was an extremely modest setup, not at all like one might think a general would live in. We had the standard Afghan meal of rice, bread, beef, chicken, and salad, and it was tasty. In true Afghan fashion they insisted we eat more and more. . . .
We believe the reason they live so modestly is that they spend a lot of their money on education. His wife teaches geography and the other two women—I think they were daughters or nieces—teach math, all at the same high school. . . .
Nea also pointed out that the reason he may be waiting so long to pin on his second star is that he is honest, leads an honest-yet-modest lifestyle, and refuses to pay a bribe to get his star pinned on. That’s just speculation on our part, but it’s plausible. . . .
I just thought you’d like to know of my adventure today. . . .
L, D2
In early 2012, the largest American-run prison in Afghanistan was the detention facility at Parwan, adjacent to Bagram Airfield, about forty miles north of Kabul. Taliban prisoners held there used the facility as a makeshift command center, passing messages to one another and outside. I.S.A.F. had assigned a military police unit and a Theater Intelligence Group counterintelligence team to stop the Taliban prisoners from communicating. In late 2011 and early 2012, the team received “multiple intelligence reports” that the Taliban were using books in the prison library “as a medium of communication within the detainee population.”20
On February 18, about a dozen American soldiers and civilian linguists searched the prison library. One of the linguists identified books that he thought contained “extremist content.” He concluded upon further investigation that perhaps two thirds to three quarters of the library’s books and pamphlets “should not be read” by prisoners. On this advice the American counterintelligence team pulled aside about two thousand books and decided to burn them. The team included only a handful of Arabic and Pashto speakers. Only they understood clearly that the books included copies of the Holy Koran.21
The team hauled the offending books to a burn pit. Afghan colleagues warned them not to go forward because they feared locals working at the incinerator would recognize religious materials in the load and might react violently. The leader of the American team heard this warning but did not act.
At the burn pit, another Afghan National Army officer and his translator saw Korans in the pile slated for destruction and again warned the Americans to stop. They, too, were ignored. Minutes later, an Afghan civilian employee operating the incinerator noticed that Islamic religious books were on fire. He shouted for help, doused the flames and tried to rescue partially burned Korans. As word spread, more Afghans rushed to the burn pit. The Americans present “became frightened by the growing, angry crowd and rapidly departed the area.”22
—
Darin Loftis turned forty-four years old on February 22, 2012. He spoke to Holly that day for ten or fifteen minutes. His colleagues were planning a surprise party for March 28—which Loftis knew about—to celebrate his return home to Florida.
Darin worked for Jean-Marc Lanthier, a Canadian brigadier posted at I.S.A.F. headquarters. He held a shura for I.S.A.F.’s operations group leadership, known as the J-3, most Saturdays. He regarded Loftis as “one of the most brilliant human beings I’ve seen, in or out of uniform.” Loftis could afford to be skeptical about “ambitious generals,” as he once called them. He planned to retire from the Army soon and go back to school. In Afghanistan, he would not hesitate to challenge the most senior officers if he felt they had the wrong assumptions. Some of his American and Canadian colleagues “would be dismissive of the Afghan point of view,” as Lanthier put it, but Loftis “would always bring us back to the truth.” He tried to make them understand why it was important to let the Afghans do it their way, and yet “he hadn’t gone native.” He would also challenge the Afghans about their assumptions.
Lanthier struggled to assess the rising incidence of fratricidal murder. It was uncomfortable to think the Taliban had the ability to threaten the coalition by placing infiltrators in their midst. But Lanthier and his colleagues felt exceptionally safe at the Ministry of Interior. They assumed the ministry’s security guards were reliable because Afghan security had vetted the guards to protect Afghan generals who also worked at the compound.
The Ministry of Interior was a downtown Kabul fortress ringed by iron fences, concrete walls, barbed wire, and armed guards. There were hundreds of Afghan and international troops on the premises or nearby. When Lanthier visited, he walked around without body armor and asked his bodyguard to stand outside his office, to signal to his Afghan colleagues that he trusted them. Afghans were not allowed to carry guns. The compound seemed as secure as any place in Afghanistan.23
—
At Forward Operating Base Lonestar, near Jalalabad, in eastern Afghanistan, American soldiers and military police trained Afghan units. T. J. Conrad Jr., of Roanoke County, Virginia, the married father of a one-year-old son, served as an instructor. He had arrived in Afghanistan only in January. During calls home, he told his father “he felt like on some of the patrols they went on that they were being set up” by the Afghans they were training because they would arrive at target compounds and it seemed that the enemy had been tipped off beforehand.24
On February 23, hundreds of shouting Afghans gathered outside the gates of Lonestar to protest the Koran burnings at Parwan.
The Americans shouldered weapons and watched the protesters warily, but held fire. Suddenly an Afghan soldier on the base trained his automatic rifle on his American colleagues.
Conrad sought cover and fired back but the Afghan soon shot him dead. The shooter killed a second American, Joshua Born. Other American soldiers returned fire and wounded the assailant, but he stumbled off the base and into the crowd of protesters.
The base’s intelligence unit had launched a surveillance drone that day to watch the protesters. The drone’s cameras now followed the shooter as he escaped. Outside Lonestar, four people helped him before a large Pashtun man in civilian dress, who had apparently been waiting for the killer, hoisted the wounded man over his shoulder, carried him half a mile on foot, and then loaded him into a white vehicle. The drone followed as the vehicle sped away but it escaped.25
General John Allen called his counterpart, Sher Mohammad Karimi, the Afghan chief of army staff, and proposed that they fly together to Lonestar. In the base’s small mess hall, where a large American flag had been hung on the wall, they spoke to survivors.
“There will be moments like this when your emotions are governed by anger and the desire to strike back,” Allen said. “These are the moments when you reach down inside and you grip the discipline that makes you a United States soldier. And you gut through the pain. And you gut through the anger. And you remember why we are here. We are here for our friends. We are here for our partners. We are here for the Afghan people. Now is not the time for revenge.”
Karimi spoke. “Your sacrifice is not wasted,” he said. “This enemy fighting against us is not an enemy of Afghanistan. It is an enemy of the whole humanity. I think we are fighting together for a noble cause.”
“We admit our mistake,” Allen concluded. “We ask forgiveness. We move on.”26
—
On the afternoon of Saturday, February 25, Darin Loftis went to work in the Interior Ministry office he shared with Major Robert Marchanti, a logistics specialist. Marchanti was forty-eight, a bear-size man with a crew cut. He had served in the Maryland National Guard for twenty-five years. At home in Baltimore, where he had grown up, he had taught physical education in public schools. This was his first Afghan tour. He was trying to learn Dari and Pashto. He ate regularly with Afghans at their dining hall at the Ministry of Interior.
His church back home sent coats and children’s gear to him in Kabul that winter. Marchanti distributed the gifts to a local orphanage. For the U.S. Army, his job was to order supplies and manage deliveries around the country.27
The room Loftis and Marchanti shared was on the second floor of an auxiliary building on the Interior Ministry compound. Marchanti had mounted a Baltimore Ravens pennant on one wall. A map of Afghanistan hung on another wall. Both men had been caught up that week in conversations about the Koran burnings at Parwan. Loftis had pledged to Lanthier to draft a paper that explained Islam and Afghan culture to I.S.A.F. soldiers so that, among other subjects, they might better understand the significance of the Koran.
Darin Loftis routinely lingered with Afghans on the Interior Ministry compound. He had only a passing acquaintance with Abdul Saboor, a slight man who kept his head shaved.
Saboor had managed two months earlier to win a transfer from duty as a soldier to a job as an Interior Ministry driver. The new position allowed him greater access to compound buildings.
Early in February, Saboor knocked on the door of the office Loftis shared. He asked to have his picture taken with Loftis, Marchanti, and a third American, Colonel Jim Green. They smiled for the camera.
“I’m checking the Taliban Web site tonight,” Loftis joked when Saboor was gone. “Our pictures will probably be there.”
Saboor was an ethnic Tajik who spoke Dari and hailed from the Salang area of Parwan Province. This was a profile that seemed to mark him as a reliable American ally, because he belonged to one of the northern Afghan ethnic groups that were in the main ardent enemies of the Taliban. It later emerged, however, that Saboor had left Afghanistan and studied at a Pakistani madrassa before returning to Kabul to take his position at the Interior Ministry.
Shortly after 2:15 p.m. that Saturday, Saboor again entered the office where Loftis and Marchanti worked. They would have had to let him in because a coded lock secured the door; no Afghans were provided with the code, but they routinely were invited in to access the snacks, bottled water, and medicine stored in the room.
Saboor crossed the room, raised a Smith & Wesson 9mm pistol and shot Marchanti in the head.
He shot Darin Loftis in the back; Loftis fell facedown. The killer leaned down and fired again into the back of his victim’s head.
Saboor descended the stairs. At the building entrance he told an Afghan colleague that the two American advisers had just shot each other. He walked past security guards and concrete barriers into the streets of downtown Kabul and disappeared.28
General John Allen arrived at the compound in a Mine Resistant Ambush Protected transport vehicle, a hulk of plated metal designed to shield occupants from even the heaviest improvised bombs planted on roads by the Taliban. Allen stepped out in full battle gear and climbed to the office where Loftis and Marchanti still lay in pools of blood. He kneeled and prayed over the bodies.29
—
Allen ordered American advisers withdrawn from all Afghan ministries and pledged to develop new protocols that might keep American and European trainers safe. The murders of Darin Loftis and Robert Marchanti on one of the most heavily guarded compounds in Afghanistan, a short walk from the American-led war’s command center, stunned I.S.A.F.’s leadership. Despite Bordin’s warnings, a few dozen Afghan killers working behind American fences had managed to call the exit strategy of the world’s most formidable military alliance into doubt.
It would require another eighteen months of secret intelligence investigations to identify the causes of the green-on-blue murder wave, and to start to stymie its effects.
“What do I tell his family today?” Senator Barbara Mikulski asked Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at a hearing on February 28, 2012, addressing the death of Robert Marchanti.
“Was it worth it? Because they’re angry. People in Maryland are angry.” Mikulski added of the now decade-old Afghan war, “We went there with the best of intentions.”30
—
Holly Loftis flew to Dover Air Force Base, in Delaware, to receive Darin’s remains. She met Peggy Marchanti. An honor guard carried their husbands’ caskets from the plane.
On March 8, at Hurlburt Field, another dress guard carried Loftis’s casket across a tarmac to a funeral service with full honors. The Air Force awarded Darin Loftis a posthumous Bronze Star, his second. The base named a classroom at the Schoolhouse in his memory. Holly’s brother, the Reverend Dr. Brian Brewer, led the remembrances. He remembered a photo of Loftis taken during his first Afghan tour, in 2009, when he had served on a Provincial Reconstruction Team in Zabul Province, in the Taliban’s heartland. The picture showed Darin offering himself playfully to a group of Afghan children. Referring to the image, Brewer told the mourners, “It is representative of the ideal.”31