by Mark Moyar
Vice President Joe Biden argued that sending more troops to Afghanistan for counterinsurgency was unnecessary. Counterinsurgency, Biden asserted, was focused on the Taliban, when the real enemy was Al Qaeda. As an alternative, the vice president proposed a strategy of “light-footprint counterterrorism,” in which US special operations forces and drones surgically removed the terrorists.
Gates, McChrystal, and General David Petraeus, who was now the commander of CENTCOM, countered that the United States could not get enough information to target the terrorists without a large and protracted counterinsurgency campaign in which US troops provided security and trained Afghan forces until they could take over. The counterinsurgency operations of conventional forces in Iraq, they noted, had been critical to the success of surgical-strike counterterrorism. The United States had already tried Biden’s strategy in Afghanistan between 2002 and 2008, and during that time the Taliban had increased sixfold in strength and taken control of much of the country.
Biden’s strategy appealed to Obama because surgical strikes were easy to tout as evidence of presidential toughness and did not require entanglement in messy local affairs. The president, however, was reluctant to disregard a recommendation that had been made by the commanding general and endorsed by nearly all of the administration’s top national security officials. In the end, Obama decided to send 30,000 of the 40,000 US troops McChrystal had sought. But surgical strikes by special operations forces would play a big part in this troop surge, and they would play an even bigger part after the surge, which would come much sooner than the proponents of counterinsurgency had advocated. To limit the financial and political costs, Obama chose to maintain the surge for only eighteen months, far shorter than the five years desired by McChrystal and other military leaders.
At first, it appeared that the division of labor between special and conventional units in Afghanistan would mirror that in Iraq. McChrystal directed conventional commanders to focus their troops on protecting and assisting the population, while enlarged SOF attacked the enemy’s leadership. The low profile of the special operators, McChrystal reasoned, would tamp down Afghan complaints about civilian casualties committed by coalition forces.
The areas occupied by the US Marines diverged from this model from the beginning. Confident that Marines were capable of whatever raiding needed to be done, some Marine commanders refused to allow special operators into their “battle spaces,” as the Americans called the areas that conventional units were responsible for controlling. Ongoing mistrust between Marines and special operators played its part in at least some of these decisions.
The second divergence came from within SOF. Edward Reeder, returning to Afghanistan as commander of the white special operations forces in 2009, sought ways to shift his forces from manhunting to counterinsurgency. He experimented with the insertion of Army Special Forces into Afghan villages, where they lived alongside the Afghans and helped them secure and govern their villages. Some Afghans proved highly receptive to the idea of American oversight of local security, for the Americans did not beat them or steal their sheep as the Taliban and Afghan government forces were wont to do.
Gaining momentum from early successes in organizing villages to defend themselves, the program continued to grow under Reeder’s successor, Brigadier General Scott Miller. A crossover from the world of black SOF, Miller had led the Delta ground element in Somalia during Operation Gothic Serpent and had later commanded all of Delta Force, giving him influence with the JSOC element in Afghanistan that a career white SOF officer could never have acquired. He thus was able to obtain JSOC’s help in eliminating hostile forces from Afghan villages where his white SOF were working with the locals. That assistance proved critical in breaking the Taliban opposition in a number of villages.
Lieutenant Colonel Brian Petit, a Special Forces battalion commander who oversaw some of the early efforts in southern Afghanistan, observed that convincing villages to participate in the new American program required demonstrations of military superiority and the establishment of a permanent military presence. “Villages and villagers principally aim to survive and prosper,” Petit stated. “To do so, they will visibly align or subjugate themselves to the dominant, lasting presence.” Once the village had been secured, Petit noted, governmental control could be solidified by rehabilitating local governance and bolstering economic activity.
General McChrystal was sufficiently impressed that he decided to allocate a large fraction of white SOF to the program, which became known as Village Stability Operations. To the delight of those who thought that special operations forces had been too preoccupied with surgical counterterrorism since 2003, Village Stability Operations became the top global priority for white SOF, making it the largest US special operations program since Vietnam. The white units responsible for all of the other regions of the world were required to rotate their troops into Afghanistan for their turn.
Village Stability Operations helped McChrystal correct what he had identified as a severe deficiency of the war effort—the tendency of US and other NATO forces to barricade themselves in large forward operating bases. The thick concrete blast walls surrounding these bases afforded the occupants some protection from attack, but they also encouraged risk-averse commanders to keep their troops on their bases, when they needed to be outside the wire, interacting with the Afghan population and mobilizing it against the insurgents. Under the Village Stability Operations program, the Americans rented compounds within their assigned villages, forgoing the concrete cocoons of the forward operating bases, not to mention the running water and air conditioning. Their vulnerability to attack gave them no choice but to seek the assistance of the local community. Sitting for long hours in Afghan homes, drinking tea and eating dishes that stood a good chance of wrenching their bowels, they obtained information and recruited young men into the Afghan Local Police, as the village security forces came to be called. The Americans organized community councils, funded small infrastructure projects, and mediated disputes over territorial boundaries and livestock. In company with any members of the Afghan Local Police they could muster, the Americans patrolled villages and their environs day and night.
For someone accustomed to the comforts of twenty-first-century America, the hardship, boredom, and danger of living and fighting in an Afghan village seemed a recipe for unadulterated misery. Most of the special operators, however, quickly became inured to the disagreeable aspects and were able to find an abiding satisfaction in the experience. Isolated from pesky authorities—both American and Afghan—they relished a contest in which wits, charisma, fighting skills, and endurance determined who won and lost. In a hostile wilderness on the edge of the Earth, dependence upon a small group of comrades for survival fostered the brotherly love that has bound warriors together since the dawn of time.
General McChrystal’s involvement with the Village Stability Operations program was cut short by his unexpected firing in June 2010. As someone who had spent most of his career in the shadows, McChrystal lacked practice in the public side of the national security world, where journalists and politicians scrutinized every word emitted by a top military commander. In the fall of 2009, McChrystal had made several public endorsements of counterinsurgency, which a hypersensitive White House interpreted as attempts to force the administration’s hand on strategy. President Obama’s dissatisfaction with McChrystal reached its apogee with the publication of a Rolling Stone article in which journalist Michael Hastings reported that McChrystal and his staff had made derogatory remarks about Obama and other senior civilian officials. It later came to light that most of the incendiary statements had originated with a single junior staff officer while in an advanced state of inebriation, and much else in the article was misleading, but McChrystal was summoned back to Washington with such rapidity that he lacked the information to rebut the allegations. Even had he possessed such information, he would have been reluctant to do so, imbued as he was with the principles of a militar
y that discouraged vigorous self-defense. Obama fired McChrystal during a brief White House tête-à-tête.
To take McChrystal’s place in Afghanistan, Obama appointed General David Petraeus, the man who had salvaged American equities in an Iraq War that many observers had thought to be a lost cause. In the view of Petraeus, Village Stability Operations had the potential to mobilize 100,000 Afghans against the insurgents and turn the tide in much the same manner as the Sons of Iraq. Petraeus spent his first weeks in the new job lobbying Afghan president Hamid Karzai to authorize a huge increase in the Afghan Local Police. His enthusiasm was not shared by Karzai, to whom these forces seemed dangerously similar to Afghan militias that had run amok during the civil warfare of the 1990s. Although the Americans might be able to keep matters in hand at the beginning, the Local Police could be very difficult for the central government to control once the Americans pulled back. Karzai eventually consented to a modest figure of 10,000 Afghan Local Policemen, and only on the stipulation that they be subordinated to his Ministry of Interior. That condition marked a critical departure from the Sons of Iraq program, which had been directly under American authority.
Building the Afghan Local Police turned out to be a much more difficult task than building the far larger Sons of Iraq. Iraq’s insurgents had been concentrated in towns and cities clustered along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, where 70 percent of Iraq’s population resided. Afghanistan’s insurgents were ensconced in widely dispersed villages in a country whose population was 70 percent rural. Afghanistan’s society was more heterogeneous than Iraq’s, divided into a bewildering array of ethnic groups, tribes, and clans. Communist persecution of rural elites in the 1970s, Soviet intervention in the 1980s, civil warfare and Taliban rule in the 1990s, and rekindled war since 2005 had torn deep gashes in Afghanistan’s traditional communities, many of which had never healed. The councils of elders that had governed villages for millennia had been supplanted in much of the country by violent warlords, men of charisma or military prowess who thumbed their noses at traditional deference to elders. In these circumstances, empowering a group of Afghan villagers ran a high risk of alienating rival groups to such a degree that they would side with the insurgents.
In recognition of this peril, General Miller brought in anthropologists, historians, Afghan expatriates, and local civilians to help the staff at his special operations headquarters comprehend the intricate social webs of rural Afghanistan. He required his intelligence staffs to spend several months analyzing an Afghan village before the special operators could select any of its members for the Afghan Local Police. If analysts identified an intractable social cleavage or a vacuum of local leadership, Miller refused to authorize Local Police for the village.
Despite the high priority accorded to Village Stability Operations, the number of special operations forces available for the program was modest in comparison with the magnitude of the task. Some special operations forces were still deemed necessary in a plethora of other countries in Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East, and special operators had to be rotated back to the United States for lengthy spells so that they would not burn out. Within Afghanistan, some of the white SOF were assigned to the training and advising of elite Afghan units.
A Special Forces Operational Detachment Alpha, SEAL platoon, or Marine Special Operations Team could at best hope to cover ten Afghan villages, with a total of about three hundred Local Policemen. Early experiences showed that a prolonged American presence, up to two years in duration, was required to impart the skills and attitudes that would ensure that the Afghan Local Police continued to function properly after the American mentors left. Consequently, the white SOF did not have enough manpower even to support the first 10,000 Local Policemen. Several conventional battalions had to be brought into the Village Stability Operations program, with widely varying levels of effectiveness.
Village Stability Operations and the Afghan Local Police were to achieve some noteworthy tactical successes, bringing security to districts that had been Taliban hotbeds since the war began. Afghans generally proved more willing and able to fight when assigned to their native villages, as they were under the Afghan Local Police, than when sent to distant villages, as they were under the Afghan National Police and Afghan National Army. The presence of US special operations forces on a continuous basis resulted in training, supervision, and guidance of quality and consistency much superior to what the Afghan government could offer.
The results could be stunning in their rapidity. Villages that years of counterinsurgency had been unable to free from the Taliban’s leash were suddenly rid of insurgents. In the village of Siah Choy, west of Kandahar, the Taliban had kept control of the citizens by banning cellphones, restricting travel, and putting booby-trapped bombs outside the doors of people’s homes at night to keep them from going out. When US or Afghan forces had traveled to the village, they had inevitably come under attack from the Taliban, with innocent civilians caught in the crossfire. Taliban improvised explosive devices dotted the roads into the village, blowing the legs off of counterinsurgents unlucky enough to trip the wires or pressure plates connected to the detonators.
The recruitment of a small number of resolute local men into the Afghan Local Police broke the Taliban’s grip on Siah Choy almost overnight. The Local Policemen drove the handful of hardcore Taliban from the village with ease, then helped nearby security forces identify and remove the IEDs. “There used to be fighting here every day before the ALP came,” farmer Ali Mohammed recounted. “Now, we have more security and can go out without fear.”
For every victory, however, there was a draw or a defeat. The Taliban, quick to discern the program’s potential, sent some of its best fighters to attack the Americans and the Afghan Local Police, inflicting casualties and in some instances stunting the recruitment of policemen. As time went along, changes in American and Afghan oversight together with pressure from higher authorities to expand the program curtailed the careful scrutiny of villages prior to organization of Local Police units. Partisans of ethnic groups, tribes, or families hence found it easier to gain influence over the units and use them as instruments with which to club their rivals. That sort of oppression in turn enabled the Taliban to win over the aggrieved group with offers of armed partnership against the government and the Americans.
Abuses of power were most prevalent in northern Afghanistan, where the Local Police were expanded in response to pressure from Afghan politicians desirous of resources for their districts and US officials fixated on expanding the program’s size. Rival power brokers, divided by ethnic and personal hatreds, converted their militias into Afghan Local Police Forces and wielded them in feuds over water rights, women, and “chai boys”—the euphemism for prepubescent boys sodomized by powerful Afghan men. The Village Stability Operations personnel in the districts had the unenviable task of trying to disentangle the Afghan Local Police from petty squabbles and focus them instead on promoting stability and countering extremism. “Everybody in some way or form is a bad guy here,” said one of the Americans in Baghlan Province. “So you just have to pick the people who are less bad than others to work with you.”
In the early days of the Afghan Local Police, the Afghan police chiefs and governors who had legal authority over the program let the American special operators command the units. As the Afghan Local Police matured and the United States laid plans for withdrawal, these Afghan leaders increasingly asserted authority over the local police, shifting control over the fate of the units from Americans to Afghans. Where Afghan leaders bungled or preyed on the weak, the Afghan Local Police alienated the population and heightened its receptivity to insurgents. In areas with strong Afghan leadership, the Local Police became formidable instruments in triumphant counterinsurgency campaigns. Human rights organizations denounced the Afghan leaders in some of those areas for torturing and executing Taliban prisoners—a practice Afghans justified by citing the sieve-like conditions of Afghanistan’s co
rrupt judicial system—while also reporting security improvements in many areas where the Local Police had taken root.
Constraints on the size of the Afghan Local Police would ultimately ensure that they could not exert a decisive strategic impact. Despite the aggressive efforts of some Afghans and Americans to enlarge the program, it never approached the 100,000 men envisioned by Petraeus. During the period of US involvement, its authorized strength peaked at 30,000. The Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police, with close to 350,000 troops, would, by virtue of their size, be the main tools with which the Afghan government would win or lose the war.
Whereas white SOF concentrated on counterinsurgency in Afghanistan from 2010 onward, JSOC remained focused on surgical strikes. During McChrystal’s year in Afghanistan, the number of special operations raids tripled. From the middle of 2010 to the end of that year, it tripled again. By mid-2011, special operations forces reached an operational rate comparable to that in Iraq, averaging ten raids per night.
Although the drones, linguists, signals interceptors, and technology wizards of JSOC’s behemoth intelligence apparatus all made the move from Iraq to Afghanistan, information on the enemy was much scarcer in Afghanistan than in Iraq. Afghans had fewer cellphones and computers, and insurgents intimidated cellphone companies into switching off their towers at night. Launching raids at the same rate but with smaller stockpiles of intelligence, the operators more often acted on the basis of flawed information. Half of Ranger raids failed to net any enemy suspects.
