The insider attacks threatened the Obama administration’s drawdown schedule. The U.S. military planned to gradually cede responsibility, district by district, to the Afghan security forces by the end of 2014. At that point, the Afghans would take charge of the fight throughout the country, with U.S. and NATO forces playing an advisory role.
By September 2012, the U.S. military had reduced its presence to 77,000 troops, down from a peak of 100,000. As Obama campaigned for reelection that fall, he promised to end the war entirely if voters elected him to a second term.
But the deaths that month of the four soldiers in Zabul forced the U.S. military to hit the brakes. Three days after the attack, Marine Gen. John Allen, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces, ordered a temporary halt to joint operations. Practically and symbolically, it was a major setback.
Normally a reserved, soft-spoken optimist, Allen expressed fury at the Afghan security forces’ inability to stop the fratricidal killings. “I’m mad as hell about them,” he told the CBS News program 60 Minutes. “We’re willing to sacrifice a lot for this campaign, but we’re not willing to be murdered for it.”
The two sides resumed joint operations within ten days. But the concept of working together as brothers in arms never recovered. U.S. and NATO officials demanded that the Afghans re-screen the backgrounds of their soldiers and police. They also instituted a “guardian angel” program that assigned U.S. and NATO soldiers to keep a constant lookout for traitorous Afghans.
Army Maj. Christopher Sebastian, a signals officer who mentored the Afghan army from 2011 to 2012, recalled attending a graduation ceremony for the Afghans at a training academy in Kandahar. An infiltrator had placed a small bomb under the seat of an Australian colonel. When the officer stood up to shake hands with the graduates, the device detonated. Amazingly, no one was hurt. But Sebastian said the incident shattered everyone’s nerves and solidified doubts that the U.S.–Afghan partnership would ever work.
“There was always a persistent feeling of dread as you went about your daily duties just because you always had to be looking over your shoulder,” Sebastian said in an Army oral-history interview. “So, to expect that we are ever going to reach what the American army would consider success, I don’t think that jives with reality.”
The insider attacks generated waves of negative news coverage in the United States, Canada and Europe questioning whether the Afghans were trustworthy allies or deserving of support. Afraid that public opinion would turn decisively against the war, the U.S. military dusted off an old tactic: It buried the extent of the problem.
Military spokesmen deemphasized the attacks as “isolated incidents,” a description at odds with the Pentagon’s own assessments. In 2011, a U.S. Army behavioral scientist based in Kabul conducted an internal study titled “A Crisis of Trust and Cultural Incompatibility” that concluded insider attacks “are no longer isolated; they reflect a growing systemic threat.”
To further minimize the issue in public, officials at military headquarters in Kabul routinely failed to disclose insider attacks in which troops were only wounded or escaped unhurt. And even in fatal cases, officials released brief, perfunctory statements that shed little light on what happened, or why.
After the four U.S. soldiers were killed in Zabul in 2012, the U.S. and NATO joint command in Kabul issued a press release consisting of three sparsely worded sentences. Details of the soldiers’ deaths would never have become public had it not been for Adam Ashton, a reporter for The News Tribune of Tacoma, Washington.
Ashton had embedded in Afghanistan with another part of the soldiers’ brigade from Joint Base Lewis–McChord, near Tacoma. For more than fifteen months, he wrote a series of articles that pieced together what happened. He interviewed Army contacts and used the Freedom of Information Act to pry loose a heavily redacted copy of the official investigation into the killings.
His stories revealed that there were six assailants—all members of the Afghanistan National Police. The Afghans had accompanied six U.S. soldiers to the observation post for a forty-eight-hour shift to look for Taliban fighters who had been launching mortars at a nearby U.S. base, Combat Outpost Mizan.
The turncoat police killed four of the U.S. soldiers and wounded the other two. One of them, Specialist David Matakaiongo, 26, another newlywed with a baby son, barely survived after AK-47 rounds shattered his legs and ribs.
Matakaiongo later said he sensed bad vibes from the Afghans and admitted the attack didn’t come entirely as a surprise. “We knew what they were capable of,” he said in an interview with Ashton. “I’m looking at these guys and thinking, ‘You’re going to shoot me.’ ”
Another survivor, Specialist Devin Wallace, miraculously avoided major injury. He played dead until the shooters ran off, then radioed for help. He told investigators he had been suspicious of the Afghans too and that they had turned noticeably sullen before the attack.
The Army investigation disclosed that the Afghans shot and killed a seventh person—a fellow Afghan policeman. Investigators believed he was targeted because he had befriended the Americans and refused to join in the attack.
The shooters escaped, vanishing into the valley. The investigation uncovered evidence of their ties to insurgents and found that Afghan police officials in Zabul had vouched for their reliability when they enlisted. But the Army redacted details of those findings from the report, leaving important questions unanswered.
The outbreak of fratricidal attacks jangled the nerves of U.S. troops throughout Afghanistan. Maj. Jamie Towery, an Army officer who served as a liaison to a NATO police training command in Mazar-e-Sharif from 2010 to 2011, said he constantly worried that an Afghan officer—even a trusted one—might suddenly go rogue.
He recalled an incident in August 2010 when an Afghan driver fatally shot two Spanish police officers who had worked closely with the driver for six months. “Really the most stressful place or time while I was there was when we would go to the range with students,” Towery said in an Army oral-history interview. “We’d just never know when they might turn on you.”
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The insider attacks were just one of many systemic problems that continued to grip the Afghan army and police. Even after a decade of handholding by the United States and NATO, the Afghan armed forces struggled to operate independently.
The national army accounted for about two-thirds of the Afghan security forces. It reported to the Defense Ministry and included the Afghan air force, commando units and other troops.
The national police reported to the Interior Ministry. More of a paramilitary force than a crime-fighting agency, the police guarded the border, staffed checkpoints and held territory that the army had cleared of insurgents.
The Afghan forces grew in poorly planned spurts. After initially trying to cap their numbers at 50,000, the Bush administration set a long-term goal in 2008 to field 134,000 soldiers and 82,000 police. But when Obama took office the following year, his administration decided those ambitious targets were still insufficient to meet the rising Taliban threat. General McChrystal, the commander at the time, recommended a near-doubling of the Afghan army and police to 400,000 personnel combined. Obama and Congress settled on a slightly lower total of 352,000.
At that size, the Afghan army and police forces looked robust on paper. But a large percentage materialized as ghost billets, or no-show jobs. Afghan commanders inflated the numbers so they could pocket millions of dollars in salaries—paid by U.S. taxpayers—for imaginary personnel, according to U.S. government audits.
By the end of Obama’s second term in office, U.S. officials determined that at least 30,000 Afghan soldiers didn’t exist and removed their positions from the army payroll. A year later, the Afghan government erased an additional 30,000 ghost police officers from the ranks.
The United States eventually insisted that the Afghan government collect biometric data, including fingerprints and face scans, to verify the existence of people in uniform. But i
t took years to get the checks in place and they failed to eliminate the problem entirely.
The quality of recruits continued to pose an existential challenge. Jack Kem, a retired Army colonel, served as deputy to the U.S. general in charge of training the Afghan security forces from 2009 to 2011. He estimated that only 2 to 5 percent of Afghan recruits could read at a third-grade level despite efforts by the United States to enroll millions of Afghan children in school over the previous decade.
“The literacy was just insurmountable,” Kem said in an Army oral-history interview. Some Afghans also had to be taught how to count. “I mean, you’d ask an Afghan soldier how many brothers and sisters they had, and they couldn’t tell you it was four. They could tell you their names, but they couldn’t go ‘one, two, three, four.’ ”
Recruiters had a herculean job because of the high rate of attrition. When Kem arrived in Kabul in 2009, the Afghan army and police forces were shrinking because so many personnel were going AWOL. Despite intensive efforts to stanch losses, the problem persisted. In 2013, about 30,000 soldiers deserted from the Afghan army, roughly one-sixth of the force.
Those who stayed faced high odds of death. The casualty rate for Afghan soldiers and police became so bad that the Afghan government kept the exact numbers a secret to avoid destroying morale. By November 2019, researchers calculated that more than 64,000 Afghans in uniform had been killed over the course of the war—roughly eighteen times the number of U.S. and NATO troops who lost their lives.
Some U.S. officials blamed White House and Pentagon policies for the fiasco. “Thinking we could build the military that fast and that well was insane,” an unnamed former senior State Department official said in a Lessons Learned interview. “We can’t even stand up a sustainable local police unit in the U.S. in eighteen months. How could we expect to set up hundreds of them across Afghanistan in that time frame?”
The colossal training program did not suffer for want of money. At the peak of the war in 2011, Washington set aside nearly $11 billion in annual security assistance for Afghanistan—about $3 billion more than what neighboring Pakistan, which had a stockpile of nuclear weapons and a far more capable army, spent that year on its military.
Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, the White House’s war czar, said Congress appropriated so much money for the Afghan army and police that the Defense Department didn’t know how to spend it all. “We can’t just shovel one-year money at this problem,” he said in a Lessons Learned interview. “You can’t possibly build the [Afghan security forces] that fast.”
In public, however, U.S. military commanders exuded confidence about what they were building. They repeatedly proclaimed that the Afghan security forces were improving and that U.S. troops soon would no longer need to serve in combat.
In a September 2012 briefing with reporters at the Pentagon, Army Lt. Gen. James Terry, the bootlegger’s grandson who had returned to Afghanistan to become deputy commander of U.S. forces, sidestepped a barrage of questions about insider attacks and described the Afghan army and police as on the verge of taking over the fight. “There is progress over here in the campaign. We have momentum,” he said. “And the Afghan national security forces, again, are steadily moving out into the lead.”
As U.S. troops gradually withdrew and handed over responsibility to the Afghans, however, the Taliban took advantage. Insurgents expanded their spheres of control in southern and eastern Afghanistan, knocking Afghan forces back time and again.
The Pentagon’s senior brass downplayed the reversals and continued to issue glowing report cards to their Afghan partners. In September 2013, Army Lt. Gen. Mark Milley, the new deputy commander of U.S. forces, boasted that “the conditions are set for winning this war.”
“This army and this police force have been very, very effective in combat against the insurgents every single day,” he said in a press briefing from Kabul. “Have there been one or two outposts that have been overrun? Yes. But you’re talking about 3,000 or 4,000 outposts that are in the country. So the bottom line is, the Afghans have successfully defended the majority of the population of this country.”
The truth was, Afghans abandoned their outposts with alarming frequency. American generals liked to pretend otherwise, but their troops in the field described many of the Afghan forces as incompetent, unmotivated and corrupt.
Maj. Greg Escobar, an Army infantry officer, spent 2011 trying to straighten out a dysfunctional Afghan army unit in Paktika province near the eastern border. The first Afghan battalion commander Escobar mentored lost his job after he was charged with raping one of his male soldiers. The commander’s replacement, in turn, was killed by his own men.
Escobar said he came to realize the whole exercise was futile because the U.S. military was pushing too fast and the Afghans were not responding to what was, in the end, a foreign experiment. “Nothing we do is going to help,” he said in an Army oral-history interview. “Until the Afghan government can positively affect the people there, we’re wasting our time.”
Army Maj. Michael Capps, a military police officer, trained the Afghan police at border areas along the Khyber Pass for a year. When he returned to the United States in 2009, people asked him: Can we win there?
“My answer would be, ‘You could be at double-arm interval over every square meter of Afghanistan and still lose,’ ” he said in an Army oral-history interview, referring to military formations in which soldiers stand two arm-lengths apart. “You could lose that place covering every inch of ground. It’s so porous, it’s so different, it’s so backward.”
Other Army officers who trained the Afghans recounted scenes of mayhem and chaos that bode poorly for how they would perform on the battlefield. Maj. Mark Glaspell, an Army engineer with the 101st Airborne Division who served as a mentor to Afghan forces from 2010 to 2011, said even simple exercises went haywire. In an Army oral-history interview, he recalled trying to teach an Afghan platoon in the eastern city of Gardez how to exit a CH-47 Chinook, a heavy-lift helicopter used to transport troops and supplies. They lacked an actual Chinook to practice on, so he lined up rows of folding chairs instead and instructed the Afghans how they would safely disembark.
“We were working on that and it was going pretty good and all of a sudden this Afghan soldier walks up and he and one of the guys in the class started to get into an argument,” Glaspell said. Then a third Afghan soldier picked up a folding chair and pounded the first guy over the head.
“Well, then it was a brawl; it was on,” Glaspell added. He let the Afghans duke it out until they got tired. “My interpreter actually looked at me, shook his head and said, ‘This is why we’ll never be successful,’ and he walked away.”
Maj. Charles Wagenblast, an Army Reservist who deployed to eastern Afghanistan for a year as an intelligence officer, said he learned the hard way that American logic did not always mesh with Afghan thinking. In fall 2010, he and other U.S. officers reminded their Afghan soldiers that winter was coming and suggested they might want to prepare, given that they had no fixed source of heat in their barracks.
“It was getting cold, ‘Have you guys thought about getting some firewood?’ That’s how they heat stuff there. They say, ‘No, it’s not cold yet.’ ”
“But it will be cold, I’m pretty sure,” Wagenblast replied. Yet the Afghans refused to take his word that the weather was destined to turn frigid. “And they’d say, ‘Yeah, but how do you know that?’ Wow. How do you argue with that? ‘You guys need coats.’ ‘No, it’s not cold yet. We’ll get coats when it’s cold.’ ”
Meanwhile, corruption coursed through the Afghan army and police from top to bottom. Government ministers parceled out generalships and command assignments in exchange for cash or as part of patronage rackets. Commanders in turn hogged a cut of their troops’ salaries. Front-line soldiers and police lined their pockets by extorting the citizenry.
Over time, the Afghan public became so disgusted that many debated who represented the bigger evil—th
e Taliban or the Afghan government.
Shahmahmood Miakhel, a senior official in the Afghan defense ministry, said he once got an earful from district tribal leaders who could not stand either side.
“I asked that why is it possible that a large number of about 500 security forces cannot defeat about twenty or thirty Taliban. The community elders replied that the security people are not there to defend the people and fight the Taliban, they are there to make money” by selling their U.S.-supplied weapons or fuel, Miakhel recalled in a Lessons Learned interview.
He said he told the tribal elders, “ ‘Okay, the government is not protecting you, but you are about 30,000 people in the district. If you don’t like the Taliban then you must fight against them.’ Their response was that we don’t want this corrupt government to come and we don’t want Taliban either, so we are waiting to see who is going to win.”
In Lessons Learned interviews, U.S. officials complained incessantly about the Afghan police, saying they performed even worse than the Afghan army and did not care about protecting the population.
Thomas Johnson, an Afghanistan expert and Naval Postgraduate School professor who served as a counterinsurgency adviser in Kandahar province, said Afghans viewed the police as predatory bandits, calling them “the most hated institution” in Afghanistan. An unnamed Norwegian official estimated that 30 percent of Afghan police recruits deserted with their government-issued weapons so they could “set up their own private checkpoints” and rob people.
Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador from 2011 to 2012, said in a Lessons Learned interview that the Afghan police were ineffective “not because they’re out-gunned or out-manned. It’s because they are useless as a security force and they’re useless as a security force because they are corrupt down to the patrol level.”
The Afghanistan Papers Page 23
