The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice

by Gezari, Vanessa M.

  He left Afghanistan in 2004 and spent much of the next four years in and out of Iraq, where most recently he had been mentoring a team of Iraqi bodyguards protecting Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. But that job had ended abruptly when Maliki dismissed the American security advisers in early 2008, choosing to rely entirely on his own people. The Human Terrain System recruiter had called when Ayala was looking for work. He would be trained in Iraqi, Afghan, and Islamic culture, the job description said. He would learn local languages. He flew home from Baghdad and arrived at the Human Terrain System training facility in Leavenworth, Kansas, less than a week later. At first, the project wanted to send him to Iraq. They assigned him to classes in Arabic language and Iraqi culture. He had been craving something like this, a new challenge, but the instruction wasn’t as challenging as he’d hoped. He and the other trainees were taught military rank structure, as familiar to ex-soldiers as the alphabet and as alien to many social scientists as the language of an uncontacted tribe. One goal of the Human Terrain System was to help the military understand the web of relationships that connected Afghans or Iraqis living in a particular area so they could figure out how power and influence worked. As a research manager, Ayala was taught to use social network mapping software to link villagers by ethnic group, tribe, and political affiliation. For a class project, he used the software to trace connections between President Karzai and powerful people in his government. It reminded him of the Kevin Bacon game.

  The Human Terrain System’s mission appealed to Ayala. He knew the military needed something like this. After training him for Iraq, the program had sent him to Afghanistan, in part because he had lobbied to go there. He liked the place and the people, always had, but there was something else. The leader of this particular Human Terrain Team, a barrel-chested former Marine infantry officer named Mike Warren, was one of the few men in the program under whose leadership Ayala had felt comfortable deploying. Warren had worked for Blackwater and other private security firms before joining the Human Terrain System. He had come to know Afghanistan in the early years after the invasion, when it was a macho fantasyland of muddy pickup trucks, guns, and no rules. Back then Warren had supervised Afghan security guards protecting laborers building the Kabul to Kandahar highway, the most important American-funded reconstruction project in the country. Warren at least knew what he was getting into in Maiwand, but Ayala suspected that many of the civilians he’d met in training would be unable to work or even survive in a combat zone. There was a reason that people like Ayala had trained the way they had, a reason for Ranger school, where they woke you up every half hour and made you sit on watch half the night, then woke you again before dawn to do pull-ups, eat on a three-minute clock, run drills, suffer through classes, and take tests until they saw who could handle it and who would break. What the Army needed, Ayala thought, were sharp observers who understood the mission and had enough of the human touch to talk convincingly to locals. Ayala was no anthropologist, but you didn’t have to be an anthropologist to turn a would-be enemy into an ally; he himself had plenty of experience talking drunken men out of stupid bar fights. He felt lucky that Paula Loyd wasn’t one of the fakes. She was an Army vet, after all. She was cordial, focused, and soft-spoken, but there was a stubbornness about her. She knew what she was talking about and she would tell you what she thought, even if you didn’t like it. She was in excellent physical shape and had village savvy in spades. Her boyfriend, Frank Muggeo, had met Ayala before they left Kansas, and maybe it was the unspoken bond of the Special Forces, but Muggeo immediately trusted him. ‘Make sure you stay next to Don,’ Muggeo had told Loyd. Ayala felt a special responsibility to protect her.

  Loyd and her teammates had landed in Maiwand at a moment of renewed hope for the Afghan war. The apparent success of the surge in Iraq had vaulted Petraeus to a supervisory role in America’s two Middle Eastern conflicts, and in the fall of 2008, he and his bosses in Washington surveyed the military’s Afghan project and found it wanting. They urged the recently appointed NATO commander in Afghanistan, General David McKiernan, to adopt a strategy that focused less on killing insurgents and more on protecting the Afghan people. But McKiernan was an old-school commander, and he lacked sufficient forces for counterinsurgency. While he continued to pursue a conventional mission, the political winds were shifting in Washington. “We can’t kill our way to victory,” Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress just days before Loyd and her teammates landed in Kandahar.

  Loyd was one of two social scientists assigned to the seven-member Human Terrain Team known as AF4, the fourth team to be sent to Afghanistan and the first to venture into the deep south, where the Taliban were strongest. The team was attached to an Army unit, known as Task Force 2–2, that constituted the first significant deployment of American troops in this stretch of desert since the beginning of the war. The brigade’s other battalions were stationed in and around Kunar, a mountainous province in northeastern Afghanistan where thick forests encouraged gunfights, but the 2–2 had been split off and sent to Maiwand by presidential order after the Canadians stationed around Kandahar had threatened to withdraw if they didn’t get reinforcements. The 2–2 was an anomaly: an American unit under Canadian command, sent to a dangerous place to sustain a fraying international partnership.

  At first, the Americans thought Maiwand was tame. The land stretched flat and silent into the distance, but the silence was a trick. The place had a history of resisting invaders. East of the half-built American bases and north of the paved highway, on an open plain ringed by mountains, Afghan fighters had overwhelmed the British in one of the most stunning military defeats of the Victorian era. This was the age of the Great Game, when Afghanistan lay restless and mercurial between Russia and British India, and both empires sought to dominate it. The plain was not then, and is not now, an advantageous place to fight. One British officer called it “a military rat-trap.” On a blistering summer day in 1880, the British forces—overburdened with baggage and servants and poorly prepared for the heat of the march—dug in near the center of Maiwand at a place called Kushk-i-Nakhud. They hoped to block the advance of an Afghan prince, Ayub Khan, who had marched across the Helmand River from the west to take Kandahar. Local volunteers had joined Ayub’s forces, tribal fighters and ordinary people armed with swords, spears, and old muskets copied from European designs. There were ghazis, too, “killers of infidels,” who wore white robes that resembled shrouds and signified their willingness to die.

  By the day of the battle, the Afghans significantly outnumbered their British opponents. They hid in shallow wadis, surprising the British and outflanking them. But the British hammered them with artillery until, exhausted by the heat and eager to evacuate their wounded, the Afghans wavered. At that critical moment, an Afghan woman named Malalai stood and urged the fighters forward. She was the daughter of a shepherd from a nearby village, and when the Afghan standard-bearer fell, Malalai lifted her veil as a flag and led the column forward. The Afghans rolled over the British line like a wave, decimating the soldiers at close range with swords and knives.

  A century later, a pious peasant arrived in Maiwand. His name was Muhammad Omar, and he was the son of a religious teacher who had died when Omar was a boy. As a young man, Omar studied at a religious school in Kandahar, and in the village of Singesar in Maiwand, he led prayers and opened a small madrassa. Between 1989 and 1992, he fought the Russians and the Soviet-installed Afghan regime of President Mohammad Najibullah. He was wounded several times, and lost his right eye. When Najibullah’s government fell, Afghan militia commanders turned their guns on each other. Local big men kidnapped women and children as consorts and hung chains across roads, stopping cars and collecting tolls. In the spring of 1994, one story goes, Omar’s neighbors told him that a local commander had kidnapped two teenaged girls. The commander had the girls’ heads shaved and took them to an armed outpost where they were gang-raped. Omar gathered about thirty men and set
out to free them. With only sixteen rifles between them, they rescued the girls, hanged the commander from the barrel of a tank, and made off with his guns. A few months later in Kandahar, two commanders fought over a boy they both wanted to sodomize, killing bystanders in the bazaar. Omar and his fighters intervened and freed the boy, and people started asking them for protection from the warlords and help resolving disputes. The Taliban movement was born.

  The American-led war had been going on for seven years by the time Loyd and her teammates arrived, but in Maiwand it was still year one, only much worse. In the beginning, there had been a sense of possibility, a feeling that something might change. But in the early years after the American invasion, Afghans in Maiwand had been exposed all over again to the depravities from which they had begged the Taliban to save them. In 2001, the American-supported governor of Kandahar was Gul Agha Sherzai, a thuggish personality with reported ties to the drug trade. Sherzai’s chief factotum was a glib, unctuous man named Khalid Pashtoon, whose fluent English and intimacy with the governor made him one of Kandahar’s most powerful people. American Special Forces listened to Pashtoon because he was one of the few Afghans they understood. But many powerful Afghans and their allies saw the invasion as an opportunity to get rich, and they found ways to make money off people living in the countryside around Kandahar, especially those whose tribes they opposed. Maiwand was one of their favorite targets. After the invasion, well-connected Afghan strongmen harassed people and shook them down. The people had no recourse. The Taliban had promised to get rid of the warlords, and for a time, they had. Now, the Americans had revived them.

  With the Taliban gone and the soil parched, many farmers in Maiwand and the other districts around Kandahar planted poppy. After the harvest, commanders raided people’s homes and seized their stores of raw opium. Some farmers were given a choice: split the drugs with their pursuers, or they would be sent to the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. This was no idle threat; everyone knew that the raiders had the ear of the Americans. Afghans connected to the Kandahar government also ran a kidnapping scheme, picking people up on fake charges, holding them in private prisons, and extorting huge ransoms. In the early years of the war, Hajji Ehsan, the Maiwand District representative on the Kandahar Provincial Council, told me that he himself had paid thousands of dollars to buy the freedom of two men from Maiwand being held in one of these private prisons. The corruption and venality of the U.S.-backed government made people crave the stern order of the Taliban. As the months and years passed and the Taliban began to trickle back in from Pakistan, people in Maiwand did little to oppose them.

  Maiwand’s value to the insurgents and their business partners lay primarily in the ribbon of asphalt running through it. The road and its tributaries cut east to west, from the Pakistani border through Kandahar and Helmand, where more than half of Afghanistan’s opium is harvested, and on to Herat at the edge of Iran. It was part of the ring road that connected Afghanistan’s major cities, and it had been repaved after the invasion with American tax dollars. The U.S. military called it Highway 1. Whoever controlled this road could move drugs, weapons, and smuggled goods to markets all across southern Afghanistan and into Iran and Pakistan. Whoever controlled it could extort money from truckers ferrying supplies to U.S. and NATO bases. Near the center of Maiwand, gas stations lined the road. Bazaar stalls selling puffed corn, meat, tea, and lumber clustered up to the asphalt, and little boys yelled, “Fuck you!” at passing NATO convoys. It was so quiet—more truck stop than town, an in-between place that looked like nothing on a map—that in the early years of the war, the Americans and their international allies had paid it scant attention, and that was just what the people moving men, guns, cash, and drugs between Pakistan and Helmand wanted. They didn’t want to get into a shoot-out, not here where the ground was flat and the dunes stretched into the distance.

  The soldiers of the 2–2 landed in Maiwand in mid-August 2008. As the first American unit deployed there, they knew very little about the place, its politics, or its people. They had ten months to learn, and to execute a mission the military called “clear, hold and build,” the bone structure of counterinsurgency. When the battalion was fully deployed, some nine hundred soldiers would live on three bases around a district roughly the size of Rhode Island. They would map the place from scratch, seeking to make sense of this parallel world where they hoped to survive long enough to get home to beer, girls, and mom and dad. They would meet with local elders, befriend farmers, walk all day, and sleep on rocky ground far from their bases. They would quickly expel the insurgents, win local trust, and build roads and schools. That was the vision, at least. The reality was something else. The flat earth over which they sometimes walked but mostly drove concealed a murderous subterranean landscape of bombs—metal cooking pots filled with fertilizer, nails, and ball bearings and wired to rudimentary fuses. Every day, it seemed, someone got hit and the wrecker went out to recover a twisted, charred hunk of metal. A Humvee blew up, killing a soldier and severely burning a young lieutenant. For a time that fall, more buried bombs were found in Maiwand than anywhere else in Iraq or Afghanistan.

  The soldiers rarely saw these attacks coming. With each one, they grew angrier, more suspicious. They retreated behind the walls of their bases where the bombs couldn’t reach them. Their mission was to win Afghans away from the insurgency, to strengthen the local government, but they quickly found that it was impossible to know who was friendly and who wanted them dead. They passed their days in frustrating conversations with Afghans, conversations that led nowhere. A man cleaned his teeth with a stick as the soldiers passed, eyeing them sideways, spitting in the sand. Was he a Taliban spotter, or just some guy? What was the default setting for dealing with Afghans, the soldiers wondered, and what was America doing out here anyway—was this a war or an aid mission? It wasn’t so much that counterinsurgency was impossible or that these kinds of wars were inherently unwinnable. What was impossible, or very nearly, were the emotional demands that counterinsurgency made on the individual American soldier who had neither been adequately trained nor sufficiently prepared for what he was asked to do.

  The Human Terrain System had been created to deconstruct places like Maiwand, to determine what political and social networks, what tribes and subtribes, what economic interests held them together. But Maiwand was so far from being controlled by U.S. forces that Ayala began to feel that the Human Terrain Team’s presence there was premature. The territory was still in the throes of serious combat; maybe this wasn’t the time for civilians to be wandering around asking questions. And yet, the whole point of the program was to understand the ground for soldiers before they screwed things up, favoring one tribe over another for a road contract, arresting a man on the false accusation of a local rival. Ayala and the Human Terrain Team’s leader, Mike Warren, discussed the risks over cigars in the evenings, but they were warriors who enjoyed a challenge. Paula Loyd didn’t share Ayala’s doubts, at least not that her teammates could tell. But she was franker with a close friend, a development worker with whom she spoke often on the phone that fall. “She didn’t necessarily feel that the protection was as good as it should have been,” Loyd’s friend recalled.

  Loyd also harbored doubts about the validity of the data she and her teammates were gathering. Interviewing Afghans through an interpreter, surrounded by armed soldiers, was far from ideal, and she knew it. But whatever her reservations, she persevered. She wanted to teach farmers about drip irrigation, a less wasteful alternative to flooding their fields. Don’t treat the locals badly, Loyd and her teammates counseled the soldiers. You’re just going to make enemies. Get to know them. Be patient. The soldiers listened, trying to get their heads around this. Gentleness, patience, respect—when your buddies were getting slaughtered, anything would be easier.

  Paula Loyd’s fellow social scientist on AF4 was Tim Gusinov, a stubby, crude-humored Russian who had been a student at a Soviet military academy when his cou
ntry invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Trained as an Afghan area specialist and Persian linguist, Gusinov had served two tours with the Red Army in Afghanistan in the 1980s, advising Soviet-backed Afghan troops and acting as an interpreter and cultural adviser to Spetsnaz, the Soviet special forces, whose job, he would tell me later, involved “mostly killing people.” In the 1990s, with his country in turmoil, Gusinov moved to the United States and found work as a Russian translator. After the Afghan invasion, he parlayed his knowledge of Dari into a job as a contract linguist with the military. He quickly determined that the Americans on the big base where he was stationed might as well have been on the moon. One officer, a devout Christian, was convinced that Afghans worshipped demons. When a Human Terrain System recruiter called, Gusinov eagerly signed on. “I saw such great potential in that,” he told me.

  In Maiwand, Gusinov affixed himself to the hip of the 2–2’s commander, a wry, forty-year-old lieutenant colonel named Dan Hurlbut. Observing that the Americans were sometimes poorly served by their Afghan translators, Gusinov often acted as Hurlbut’s interpreter during meetings with the Maiwand District governor, a onetime anti-Soviet resistance fighter. The Americans loved watching the Russian talk to his former enemy. “He’s like a rock star,” Hurlbut would gush when I met him. “He knows the culture, he can get in with them, and they don’t hear the accent like we do.” Of course the Afghans heard Gusinov’s accent, nor was the significance of the U.S. military’s decision to hire a former Soviet officer lost on them. But Gusinov’s Russian-tinged Dari and his long experience in the country also opened doors. He could tell where explosives were buried because the stone piles insurgents used to warn civilians resembled those the mujaheddin had used years earlier. He was so skilled at engaging Afghans in casual conversation that an American officer praised him for “getting more information accidentally” than the unit’s military intelligence team gathered on purpose. Indeed, Gusinov had been trained by the Soviets to gather intelligence, and he was good at it. “It goes with the language, it goes with my ability to open something in Afghans, it goes with my skills to push the right buttons,” he told me. “Even cultural knowledge can be intel.”