Out of the Mountains

by David Kilcullen

  For another thing, these weren’t the usual Taliban tactics. The insurgents were creatures of habit—they set patterns, doing things the same way over and over again.5 But within the bounds of their tactical repertoire, they were tough and competent. In any serious ambush, a Taliban main force column, even just a local guerrilla group (known as a delgai), would first have blocked the road, blowing the bridge or blocking it with a vehicle, then shot us up with RPGs and machine guns from the crest line and mortars from the valley behind, perhaps with a ground assault force waiting in reserve behind the crest.6 They’d done it this way a hundred times—but not today.

  Some of our group had speculated that the car that pulled off the road, or the bicycle on the bridge, might have concealed a roadside bomb that had failed to explode. Nobody stopped to check, of course, as we were focused on “getting off the X,” but it didn’t seem all that likely. Suicide car bombs weren’t uncommon in Afghanistan, of course, but they were more an urban than a rural thing at this time—in the countryside it was more usual to see homemade fertilizer bombs, clusters of Russian mortar bombs, or stacks of Italian antipersonnel or antitank mines buried in the roadway or dug into the side of a cutting. And the bike, even with a pannier, would have been too small to hide the size of improvised explosive device needed to blow the bridge or disable an armored vehicle.

  No, the bicycle was either a coincidence or just an aiming point—a distinctive object placed at a known distance to help the ambushers set the range for their weapon sights.

  And it was unlike the Taliban to site an ambush so poorly, on the forward slope of the hillside, with no escape route. With their Pakistani advisers, decent equipment, and years of practice, the Main Force Taliban in eastern Afghanistan were getting pretty good by this stage of the war. The previous year, just northeast of here, they’d mounted a sustained assault with two hundred fighters, foreign advisors, the collusion of village elders, and supporting fire from the local Afghan National Police detachment against an outpost of the 173rd Airborne Brigade near the village of Wanat in the Waygal Valley. The attack killed nine Americans and wounded twenty-seven, along with four soldiers from the partnered Afghan National Army unit, and turned out to be one of the most intense and sustained fights of the entire war. Taliban positioning of support weapons at Wanat had been textbook perfect, and their maneuver had been aggressive, competent, and determined—nothing like the amateurish effort we’d just brushed off.7

  So, on balance, the evidence suggested this probably wasn’t a Taliban ambush. What was it, then? Perhaps, I thought, it might have had something to do with what the patrol had been doing that day.

  Provincial reconstruction teams were specialized units created for reconstruction and stabilization purposes early in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. They typically included three or four civilian experts, a combined civil-military command group, military reconstruction specialists, and fifty to seventy soldiers to provide protection, mobility, and logistical support. The first teams emerged in an ad hoc way in late 2002, but by 2009 they were part of a sophisticated, multinational reconstruction infrastructure; in Afghanistan there were twenty-seven teams at this time, twelve of which were American-led. PRTs were usually based in the provincial capital and were responsible for projects across the whole province. That afternoon we’d visited two such projects: a micro-hydroelectricity plant and a slaughterhouse. Both were highly impressive feats of engineering.

  Despite the name, there was nothing exactly “micro” about the hydro plant in the village a few miles up the valley. On the contrary, it was a major construction effort, built into the side of a ravine, with a catchment canal and holding tank at the top of the hill to contain snowmelt diverted from upriver. Water flowed down the canal into a stone basin the size of a small house, then fed into a pipe that dropped one hundred feet straight down into the gorge, to a turbine shed housing a forty-kilowatt generator. The orange turbine, about the size of a ride-on lawn mower, produced enough electricity to light more than half the village. I scrambled down the precipitous hillside to look at the turbine, climbing carefully over boulders, scree, and dirt, dazzled by the sun, with trickles of sweat itching inside my body armor in the afternoon air. Troops from the PRT perched behind trees and rocks on top of the hill, scanning the other side of the valley through their weapon sights.

  After a few minutes the Afghan engineer who supervised the project joined me, followed by Lara Logan and Ambassador Crumpton. All of them were dusty from the climb into the ravine, and the engineer carefully wiped his shiny black oxford shoes before describing the design of the micro-hydro turbine and generator system. He explained that the project had taken eighteen months, cost more than a million dollars, and employed twenty local men. He was rightly proud: the thing was beautifully engineered, and it was constructed to exacting standards. This engineer had built hydro plants all over Afghanistan, mostly for the narcotics affairs section at the U.S. mission. Installations such as this were part of a set of projects designed to offer alternative livelihoods to farmers who stopped growing opium poppies, and so were funded with counterdrug money.

  A few miles farther down the road, the slaughterhouse had just been completed. It was the main project in this area for an agribusiness development team (ADT) of the Missouri National Guard. ADTs were small units that usually cooperated with the PRT in their province, came from National Guard units in farming areas of the United States, and had a relationship with a land grant college or agricultural university in their home state. The teams made a practice of rotating back to the same area on every tour, and as farmers themselves, team members could bond with local farming communities. The ADTs’ parent National Guard units, hometowns, state governments, and universities often struck up partnerships with Afghan districts or colleges, making the ADT program useful both in a practical sense and for the political goodwill it generated. In the case of Nangarhar, where the Missouri National Guard pioneered the ADT concept in Afghanistan, the State of Missouri had committed to a five-year collaborative program that included a partnership with Nangarhar University, in Jalalabad, and dozens of projects across the province.

  This particular project aimed to improve hygiene and efficiency in local livestock markets. In Afghan villages, you often see butcher shops or market stalls with bloody cuts of meat—even whole goats or sheep—hanging in the window. In this valley, the ADT had seen animals slaughtered in the open and then butchered on the bare earth. This traditional practice covered the meat in dirt, attracted flies, and left large standing pools of blood, creating a disease hazard. Community leaders agreed that it wasn’t ideal, but they pointed out that lack of water or a suitable slaughterhouse meant that there was no practical alternative.

  So, with considerable ingenuity, the ADT designed and helped build a slaughterhouse near the main road, with a rainwater tank and an animal holding pen alongside. The new slaughterhouse took months to construct. It used solar panels made by a local Afghan company to generate electric power for lighting, water heating, and cold storage, and applied techniques to minimize the use of precious water. Working with the PRT and the community, the agriculture team helped secure land for the site, and helped the local butchers’ association negotiate an agreement so that butchers in the area could share the slaughterhouse, each using it in turn to slaughter animals under hygienic conditions. A local mullah inspected and certified the facility for compliance with Islamic religious requirements. Today, the district governor, elders, and religious leaders from the local community had come for the formal opening. The building was cool, well lit, and spotlessly clean. Our patrol stopped at the site for almost an hour while the governor made a speech, and the elders responded. It was only a few minutes after leaving the slaughterhouse that we were ambushed as we moved down the valley.

  What might these projects tell us about the ambush? Was there a connection? If the ambushers weren’t Taliban, who were they?

 
People near the ambush site lived closer to the district center than to either of these two projects. But other villages, farther up the valley, had gotten significant economic benefits—electric light and the slaughterhouse—from foreign assistance. It’s quite possible that people down the valley felt cheated when the other villages got these lucrative projects. People had seen our column heading up the valley earlier in the day, and the ambushers must have known that, with our heavy road-bound gun trucks, we could only come back out along the same route. They may have seized the opportunity while we were up the valley visiting the micro-hydro plant and the slaughterhouse to set up a hasty ambush on the bridge and hit us on the way out. Hastiness in setting up the ambush would explain its poor positioning and the lack of a roadside bomb; if the attack was intended mainly to send us a message rather than kill us, this would also explain its halfhearted nature; and if the attackers were local men rather than members of a full-time Taliban column, this would explain their amateurish technique.

  To someone unfamiliar with Afghanistan, ambushing a heavily armed patrol over something as minor as the placement of an aid project might seem like a ridiculous (and highly risky) overreaction, but this wouldn’t be the first time that perceived injustice led Afghans to take up arms against foreign aid projects or outside contractors. In one incident a year later in Helmand province, in Afghanistan’s southwest, insurgents attacked security guards working for a local contractor, killing twenty-one people. The project involved constructing a road to link the towns of Sangin and Gereshk. In media reporting it emerged that Taliban opposition to the road, which would bring security forces into an area they’d previously dominated, “meshed with opposition from villagers, who were upset that the contractor had not consulted them about building the road or asked what services they needed, nor offered local people jobs on the project.”8

  “One of the big problems that the contractors face and one reason they get attacked is because they bring people from other villages as laborers and security guards,” said Haji Abdul Ahad Khan, an elder who on Friday was attending the funeral of one of the slain security guards. “They do not ask our villagers to participate in these projects or hire them to do any of the labor. This makes our people angry,” he said. “And they start projects in our area without consulting the village elders. They start cleaning our canals for us, or building a road for us. I don’t want a road, why would you build that? We need a school or a clinic.”9

  In other words, both the insurgents and the local population had a common interest in disrupting the road project. In addition to his rather entitled attitude, it’s interesting to note that the local elder, Abdul Ahad Khan, implies (though he’s careful not to say so directly) that the elders’ anger against outside contractors may actually have led to the attack. The Taliban may have been responding to popular grievance and economic discontent, they may have acted on the basis of a shared interest with the community in stopping the road from coming into their area, or the elders may have actually asked the insurgents to mount the attack or struck a financial deal with them to drive out the contractor.

  Something like this may also have happened during the battle of Wanat, which I mentioned earlier. An investigation by the U.S. Army’s Combat Studies Institute found that the Waygal elders might have deliberately drawn out a meeting that had been called to discuss the site for the new American outpost, keeping the officers from 173rd Airborne talking long enough for an ambush to get into place to attack the Americans as they left.10 The same study found that the local community, for historical, ethnic and economic reasons, had a strong incentive to stop the U.S. Army building a road into their valley—a traditional buffer zone between two antagonistic local population groups, Nuristanis and Safi Pashtuns, who competed politically and economically and had a long history of violent conflict.11

  As in Helmand, the Waygal elders and the insurgents had a common interest in preventing the road project. The elders opposed the road because it would have connected them to ancestral enemies, undermining their safety and autonomy, while the Taliban and their sponsors in Pakistan opposed it because it brought our troops within striking distance of the major infiltration routes from their bases across the frontier. The army’s report found evidence that the elders might actually have instigated the Wanat attack or at the very least might have been fully aware of it ahead of time, and perhaps their local men played a supporting role in the fighting. One of the first warning signs that something was wrong at Wanat came five days before the battle, when the Pashtun contractor from Jalalabad hired to construct the defenses (but intimidated by previous attacks on his people and equipment) failed to even turn up—a win for the Nuristani elders, who strongly opposed outside contractors, especially those using labor from the rival ethnic group rather than their own young men. During the battle, the Wanat police detachment was also suspected of providing covering fire to the Taliban attackers from within the grounds of their compound. These police were mostly young men from the village or the local district, so their loyalty to local elders (rather than the Taliban) may have played a role in their decision to support the insurgents against both the Americans and the Afghan National Army.

  Economically driven incidents of violence have, unfortunately, become extremely common across the south and east of Afghanistan, while even in the relatively quiet north a provincial governor half-jokingly told the German commander in his area, “The Pashtuns in the south shoot at you, and you give them money. Here we support you, and we get nothing. Who do we have to shoot to get some aid around here?”12

  This pattern isn’t unique to Afghanistan. In Iraq in 2007 I spent a little time with a reconstruction liaison team (RLT), a specialist team that monitored infrastructure projects. RLTs in Iraq were fielded by Aegis, the British security and consulting firm, by far the most competent and enlightened of the many security companies operating in Iraq—or, indeed, anywhere I’ve worked. Aegis teams worked for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Each comprised eight people in two vehicles, and always included a mix of Iraqi nationals with expatriate drivers and radio operators. The Iraqis took the lead in consultation with local communities, with the expats hanging back and keeping a low profile. The proof of this low-key approach was in the results: at a time when aggressive, heavily armed security contractors were getting into firefights every day, killing dozens of innocent Iraqi civilians, the Aegis RLTs pulled off more than three hundred successful operations, in the most dangerous parts of Iraq, without ever getting into a firefight, killing a single Iraqi, or losing a team member.

  The RLT leader I was with, a cool and unflappable former German paratrooper, told me of an incident at a forward operating base in northern Iraq. A U.S. Army unit had just rotated into the area and was being mortared from a district that, until then, had been perfectly quiet. Suspecting the insurgents had sent fighters into the area, the Americans were considering a cordon-and-search operation, but first asked the Aegis team to check things out. In their quiet way, with Iraqi team members discreetly engaging the community, the RLT quickly had an answer: the local sheikh ran a construction company, and he’d been promised a contract by the outgoing unit. During the changeover between the two U.S. units, this seemingly minor detail had somehow slipped through the cracks. The new unit, unaware of the commitment, had given the contract to another company, so the sheikh was mortaring the base—in order, he said, to get people’s attention and avenge the injustice.

  Again, mortaring the base might seem like a risky overreaction to a mere contracting glitch. But the sheikh, whatever his feelings toward the coalition, had little choice: failing to avenge the slight would have undermined his authority, making him, his family, and his tribal group less safe. The loss of prestige would have weakened his ability to prevail in local disputes and negotiations, ultimately depriving his group of access to resources—and in a chaotic country with little rule of law and no welfare safety net, that was a potential death senten
ce. Thus what might look like a minor issue, and in fact was quite minor in itself, had major implications for this local leader and thus, by extension, for the American unit. It would have dishonored the sheikh to take a gentler approach (say, a phone call or a visit to complain to the new unit), since he couldn’t afford to be seen as a supplicant. Prestige was the one essential currency he had, and he had to act to preserve that prestige: he really did have no choice. He hoped the Americans would understand, he told the Aegis team, that it was just business—nothing personal. Sure enough, when the new unit, acting on the RLT’s advice, resolved the contracting issue, the mortaring stopped overnight.13

  III

  We’ll never know for certain the background to this very minor firefight in Dara-i-Nur, just one of dozens of combat incidents that happened across Afghanistan that day in September 2009. Perhaps my guess, as I pondered the attack on the helicopter ride back to Kabul, was right, and the halfhearted ambush was part of the broader aid-and-contracting-driven pattern of violence that I and many others have observed elsewhere in Afghanistan, and that the Aegis team experienced in Iraq.

  Perhaps it had nothing to do with the Taliban and everything to do with perverse incentives created by rapid and uneven development in a tribal society whose economic, social, and agricultural systems have been wrecked by decades of war. No external aid is neutral: a sudden influx of foreign assistance creates a contracting bonanza, benefiting some at others’ expense, and in turn provoking conflict. Likewise, it creates spoils over which local power brokers fight for personal gain, to the detriment of the wider community, and can contribute to a sense of entitlement on the part of locals. Access to foreigners, who have lots of money and firepower but little time or inclination to gain an understanding of local dynamics, can give district power brokers incredibly lucrative opportunities for corruption. A tsunami of illicit cash washes over the society, provoking abuse, raising expectations but then disappointing them, and empowering local armed groups, who pose as clean and incorruptible, defenders of the disenfranchised, at least till they themselves gain access to sources of corruption.14