American Spartan

by Tyson, Ann Scott

  “Petraeus was getting ready to testify on whether the surge was working, and that was a huge political reality for all of us,” said Lt. Col. John Pelleriti, who was in charge of Special Forces operations in eastern Afghanistan at the time. “We felt a sense of urgency, that we had to make VSO [village stability operations] work, and we had to do it fast.”

  In March 2011, Petraeus returned to Washington to testify. Before the cluster of microphones and television cameras at the Senate and House armed services committees, he singled out the Afghan Local Police program, saying it had emerged as one of the most important factors creating positive momentum in the war. “So important,” he said, “that I have put a conventional U.S. infantry battalion under the operational control of our Special Operations Command in Afghanistan to augment our Special Forces and increase our ability to support the program’s expansion.” Petraeus testified that seventy districts had been identified for establishing Afghan Local Police, and the police had been set up and “validated” by the government in twenty-seven of those.

  Jim’s superiors praised him for an unusual and significant contribution to that effort. Pelleriti credited Jim for allowing his command to expand from zero to more than thirteen hundred trained Afghan Local Police at fifteen locations across eastern Afghanistan. Bolduc upheld Mangwel as a shining success story in his official PowerPoint briefings on village stability operations. “Jim is a very gifted Special Forces officer and very effective in that particular area,” Bolduc said. “That region of Konar has been changed from a non-permissive environment, to semi-permissive, to permissive, in a way no one thought would happen,” he said. “I don’t think anyone else could have done it.”

  Miller said he needed more Special Forces officers with Jim’s skill and commitment. “I wish I had more Jim Gants, to be quite honest,” Miller said. “He has given up a hell of a lot of his life to be doing that and has taken the risks. You are a small element there in the middle of nowhere. It’s harder than sitting in Bagram and filling out permissions,” he said. “The real question,” Miller went on, “is can you get people to do this? Go live in Konar, that is your home. You don’t have a PX, you live with the people and eat their food. It’s kind of a romantic notion, but a lot of people don’t want to do it.”

  Now Petraeus, the senior sponsor of the local security effort, wanted to hear from the man he considered an expert tactician carrying it out on the ground.

  Petraeus and Jim walked into the Tribe 33 qalat, where Jim briefly oriented the general and then took him to meet his U.S. soldiers. Dressed in Afghan clothes with their beards trimmed to regulation and the required American flags Velcroed to their shoulders, they lined up at attention by rank.

  “Sir, just so you know, these men have been a phenomenal team and I have been honored to serve with them,” Jim said. “Just yesterday we were in a three-hour gun battle up in the Shalay. They performed flawlessly.”

  Petraeus shook the soldiers’ hands, pressing one of his metal ISAF commander coins into each of their palms in the Army custom. A general with a common touch and genuine interest in his men, Petraeus put the soldiers at ease, speaking briefly to each one. He asked Chris what he thought of living in Mangwel.

  “Sir, I love it,” Chris said.

  “How would you describe your mission?” Petraeus queried.

  Chris answered straightaway. “Defend the qalat, defend the village, defend the valley, and expand VSO wherever we can, sir.”

  Petraeus smiled.

  Down the line, he reached Miah, who wore light blue jami and a tan pakol.

  “How are you doing, Private Hicks?”

  “I’m doing fine, sir,” Miah said.

  Jim turned to Petraeus. “Sir, based on yesterday’s actions, I am going to put Private Hicks in for an ARCOM with V [Army Commendation Medal for valor].”

  Petraeus gave Miah a discerning look. “ARCOM with V, huh?”

  “Yes, sir,” Miah said, looking straight ahead.

  “Done,” Petraeus said, turning to a captain in his entourage and asking for the medal. “Congratulations!”

  Miah grinned. It was the twenty-third award for valor received by men who had fought under Jim, and he had not lost a man yet.

  Petraeus was encouraged. He saw that Jim had not only secured the area by relying almost entirely on the Afghan tribesmen but also effectively integrated the conventional infantry into the Special Forces mission. Moreover, Jim’s team was highly unusual in Afghanistan because it was technically a Special Forces team but was composed almost completely of regular infantry soldiers.

  As they left the qalat and headed down a small dirt path into Mangwel, Petraeus was struck by the sense of normalcy and calm. What a difference, he remarked, from the last place he had seen Jim, Baghdad in 2007, where every few hours a massive car bomb would cause horrific carnage. “It was the most dangerous place on earth, just as you wrote in ‘One Tribe at a Time,’ ” Petraeus said. “I will never forget those days,” he said.

  “I won’t, either, sir,” Jim responded.

  Little Malik, Noor Afzhal’s grandson, approached with a group of young Afghan boys. Jim shook his hand and introduced him to Petraeus. Jim explained that the schools and clinic were open, and families were moving back to Mangwel from Pakistan. They passed some fields and entered a narrow lane that went by a tailor’s stall and the pharmacy to the heavy wooden door of Noor Afzhal’s qalat. Noor Afzhal greeted them and they sat down for lunch in the guest room. As they broke bread, Noor Afzhal sat on a bench next to Petraeus and spoke of his affection for Jim, and how he considered him a son and a malik. Jim sat on the floor near Noor Afzhal’s feet. The extent of Jim’s connection to the people struck Petraeus as extraordinary. “He had a fantastic relationship with the locals in that particular area,” he told me later. “I just kind of marveled at what he was doing.” All in all, he said, “it was an uplifting day in a tough neighborhood.”

  Back at the qalat, Jim briefed Petraeus on his strategy for southern Konar and gave him a copy of a classified, long-term plan he had written for the area. The plan, informed by everything Jim had learned on the ground, was detailed and aggressive and pushed his unconventional style of warfare to a new level. The plan called for expanding tribal engagement beyond Konar into tribal areas of Pakistan. It involved creating surrogate forces that would operate across the Afghan-Pakistan border, conduct “red-on-red” operations that used Taliban to fight other Taliban, and promote reintegration of insurgent fighters. Jim’s plan included specific timelines, locations, and numbers of forces as well as the cost.

  As they discussed the way ahead, Petraeus agreed with Jim that leveraging tribal and village security forces was the only way to bring stability to the mountainous border province. “In places especially like those out in Konar—where you have very remote areas, very rugged terrain, limited numbers of coalition and Afghan forces—local security initiatives are the ultimate solution for those areas,” he said. “That is how you keep the extremists, the Taliban, Al Qaeda, the TTP, whomever it may be, from establishing safe havens in those areas from which they attack into Afghanistan and go back into Pakistan.” Petraeus fully endorsed Jim’s vision of how to spread local security networks through the inhabited villages and valleys along the Konar River. “You go from Khas Kunar, and sort of work your way up the eastern side of the Konar River valley,” Petraeus said. In conjunction with this plan, Petraeus authorized Jim to establish a foothold west of the river with the powerful Safi tribe and its key leader, Haji Jan Dahd. Jim was delighted—he had been laying the groundwork to engage the Safis for months.

  But the views of Petraeus and Jim diverged when it came to the potential of the Afghan government and the Afghan national army and police to back up the local forces. Petraeus was adamant that the NATO-led coalition had to staunchly back the Afghan central government, saying it simply needed more time. Afghan national security forces were not a failure and would improve, he said. But on the ground, Jim was bombarded
daily with examples of the pervasive corruption of the government and the ineptitude of its forces. He doubted their will and ability to support local security elements such as the one he had nurtured in Mangwel.

  As the U.S. military shifted responsibility for security to the Afghan government, and as the government gained control over the distribution of guns and money, politics and corruption were already bogging down the Afghan Local Police program. The Kabul government began to play ethnic politics with the approvals for Afghan Local Police in different districts. Non-Pashtun politicians worried that the ALP could grow too strong in Pashtun areas, and so they wanted to strengthen the forces in Tajik, Uzbek, and other minority ethnic areas, particularly in the north of Afghanistan. They were preparing for the civil war expected after U.S. troops departed. By mid-2011 the minister of interior, Bismillah Khan, who is Tajik, had stopped approving tashkils, or authorizations for creating new police forces in Pashtun areas, demanding that the U.S. military first establish more of the forces in Tajik and other communities. Khan had insisted on creating ALP in the northern province of Kunduz. The program was a disaster. In September 2011, a Human Rights Watch report detailed how militias in Kunduz and other northern provinces morphed into ALP and committed serious abuses such as killings, beatings, and stealing.

  A major, related problem was Afghan government interference with the distribution of guns—a form of currency in Afghanistan. Initially, U.S. military personnel drew the weapons—brand-new AK-47s—from the Ministry of Interior and took them directly to the Afghan district for distribution, sometimes dropping the guns in by air. That was how Jim and Burns’s 20th Group team received the first batch of weapons for Mangwel in November 2010—on a Chinook transport helicopter. But then the Afghan government began requiring that the guns move instead from the Interior Ministry through the provincial and district police before reaching the Afghan Local Police—and the system came to a grinding halt. New AK-47s began disappearing in the bureaucracy, in some cases replaced by inferior, plastic Czech-made guns known as VZ-58s, which were notorious for malfunctioning. Jim refused to hand out VZ-58s to his tribal police, saying to do so would be immoral. Other issues emerged around pay for the local police and logistical support including fuel. Pay initially came from U.S. military funds known as Commanders’ Emergency Response Program (CERP) funds. When the Afghan government began taking over, local police often went unpaid and their vehicles lacked fuel.

  From his vantage point living in an Afghan village, Jim understood how little confidence the Pashtun tribes placed in their corrupt government and its often predatory national security forces. The longer he stayed, the more he questioned the entire premise of the U.S. counterinsurgency strategy—that under existing time, resource, and cultural constraints the United States and its allies could build a capable Afghan government and security force and somehow connect them to the people. To Jim, the premise was faulty. And the push to transfer responsibilities to the Afghan government, and the resulting problems with tashkils, weapons, pay, fuel, and other supplies, all bore this out.

  “Sir, I need to tell you that there is no government of Afghanistan here. The district center is seven kilometers away, but it might as well be seven thousand,” he said. “Out here there are no Afghan National Security Forces,” he went on. “Any program that relies on the success of the Afghan government will fail. Any program that relies on the success of ANSF will fail.

  “I don’t have anything to tie the success to,” Jim continued. “We are in a boat floating around and we have nowhere to anchor.”

  Still, Petraeus urged Jim to write “One Tribe at a Time II” and in it to discuss how to connect the tribes to the government. Jim thought about it, and a few days later, he did. The paper was a single page, on which he typed: “It cannot be done.”

  AT THE END OF a four-hour visit to Mangwel, Petraeus approached Jim in the tent that served as his operations center in the qalat. “Hey, Jim, I have something for you,” Petraeus said. “In most cases, these awards do not accurately reflect what has been done. In this case, I think it does.”

  Petraeus took out a Joint Service Commendation Medal and asked an aide to read the citation. It said Jim “distinguished himself by exceptionally meritorious achievement while serving as a village stability platform team leader in Mangwel. Major Gant’s unparalleled dedication to the development of the concept and strategy for village stability operations has made possible the unprecedented advancement of the campaign in Afghanistan. His tremendous knowledge of the Afghan culture, tribal and political dynamics at the tribal level has been very important to VSP Mangwel’s mission success.”

  Petraeus pinned the medal, a gold star and ribbon, on Jim’s Afghan tunic.

  “Thank you, sir. It has been my honor to serve under you,” Jim said. “And,” he added, nodding at the U.S. soldiers and Afghans surrounding him, “it has been my privilege to lead these men.”

  Soon afterward, Jim walked Petraeus to his helicopter.

  “Sir, how much time do we have?” Jim asked.

  “Three years, for the coalition,” Petraeus said. “For Special Forces, it’s indefinite. And Jim,” Petraeus said, grasping Jim’s hand, “when you get out of here, don’t get too comfortable.”

  He turned and strode to the chopper.

  What Petraeus did not yet know was that Obama was preparing to announce within weeks an aggressive plan to withdraw a quarter of the coalition—thirty-three thousand U.S. troops, or the equivalent of the “surge” force that Obama ordered to Afghanistan in 2009—by the end of summer 2012. Most of the remaining coalition forces were to leave gradually and hand over security to Afghans by the end of 2014. In the June 22 announcement, televised from the East Room of the White House, Obama told the war-weary American public it could “take comfort in knowing that the tide of war is receding.” U.S. military commanders including Petraeus had argued vigorously for a more conservative timeline, advocating keeping more troops in Afghanistan until after the 2012 fighting season so that they could shift some forces from the south to the volatile eastern provinces bordering Pakistan. Obama disagreed. The clock, despite Petraeus’s efforts to slow the pace of the drawdown, was rapidly running out.

  LATER THAT DAY, JIM met with Noor Afzhal. Holding his hand and squatting at his knees, Jim read him the award citation, and then pinned the gold star and ribbon on his chest.

  “Father, without you, there is no me,” Jim told Noor Afzhal. “It is yours.”

  Noor Afzhal nodded.

  “If you got the award, it means I got the award,” Noor Afzhal said. “You and I are one.”

  “That’s right,” Jim said. “And there is no turning back now.”

  The message was clear. Jim was fighting not for his country but for his family, his men, and his tribe.

  CHAPTER 23

  “DREW, GET DOWN!” JIM yelled to his gunner that day, Pfc. Andrew Gray, as our Humvee approached a blind curve in the steep road into the Dewagal valley in Afghanistan’s Konar Province.

  Drew crouched down from the turret of the M240 machine gun, and I grabbed his leg to steady him while the Humvee veered around the turn. As the vehicle straightened out, Drew, a heavyset blond with a ready smile, stood back up in the gun. I was in my usual seat, directly behind Jim and next to several green metal boxes of ammunition. My primary job on enemy contact was to hand Drew more bullets if he ran out. I had trained with the team on the shooting range and in live-fire exercises, and had practiced firing almost every weapon they had. As I usually did on combat operations, I was wearing a dark green U.S. military uniform and boots with my hair tucked up in a baseball cap to try to prevent insurgents from singling me out as a woman.

  It was summer 2011, the heat of the Afghan fighting season, and Jim was expecting an ambush any minute. The small, two-vehicle patrol of a dozen Afghans and Americans was venturing deep into the insurgent-held valley, territory rarely covered by U.S. military units. The mission was dangerous, but it was critical to a
much larger prize: Jim’s recruitment of a new tribe—the Safis—the most powerful in Konar.

  Taliban fighters and supplies moved freely through the Dewagal. Rising from the lowland villages along the Konar River, the Dewagal spilled into the notorious valleys of another river—the Pech. The Dewagal led into the Shuryak valley, where in 2005 Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell survived a vicious Taliban ambush on his four-man team. A short distance beyond that lay the Korengal valley, where embattled U.S. troops manned several outposts until the military decided to abandon them starting in 2009. Hard-core insurgent commanders such as Maulawi Basir operated in the Dewagal. Basir was associated with the strict and violent Salafist strain of Islam. In September 2010, militants under Basir kidnapped British aid worker Linda Norgrove and hid her in a mud shack in the Dewagal until a U.S. military team accidentally killed her with a grenade in the chaos of a rescue attempt.

  Jim was deliberately pushing high into the Dewagal with the smallest possible force and no aircraft overhead in an effort to draw out the enemy and expose their locations.

  In the rocky ridges above, five Taliban fighters watched the patrol as it continued twisting up the road carved into the rugged mountainside, according to radio intercepts. Seven more fighters were dispersed in the fields of ripening corn below, preparing to strike. “We will attack when we are ready,” one insurgent radioed.