The Field of Fight

by Lieutenant General (Ret. ) Michael T. Flynn

  However, like all wars, you can never discount your enemy and one of the welcoming messages from the Taliban was a massive vehicle-borne improvised explosive bomb (VBIED) delivered to the front entrance of ISAF HQ early one morning. This came only a few days after General McChrystal had assumed command. It was the Taliban’s way of saying, Welcome to Afghanistan.

  The attack happened in the middle of our early-morning battlefield update. It was so large, so explosive, that it shook the entire compound. The explosion seemed to lift the building we were occupying. Everyone started to run outside when General McChrystal very calmly directed everyone to stop and get back into their seats and focus on what we had to do—fight and win this war. He was right. And at that moment, at least those in the HQ knew that McChrystal was deadly serious and that a laser focus on winning was now going to be the norm. There would be little time to worry about all the nonsense we found upon first arrival to Kabul. Things had to change and change fast—we were losing.

  All of this took place in the first couple of weeks.

  After these initial days, some discipline returned to the HQ, and Stan and I and other staff conducted a “listening tour” around the entire country. The results were ugly: we knew very little about the population we were here to supposedly protect, and we were alarmingly ignorant about the strength of al Qaeda and the Taliban. This tour was a descent into some of the most notorious places in Afghanistan, but it was indispensable. We met with our commanders and their staffs at their various operational HQs (down to platoon and squad level), but more important, we met with Afghans. We went into remote and rural villages and cities, we met with local tribal leaders and provincial governors. We met with police officers and many in the Afghan military. There were battlefield updates from our forces about how well we were doing (most all of it subsequently demonstrated to have been BS) and numerous but mostly whispered complaints about the extraordinary level of corruption rampant inside the entire ecosystem—including our own people.

  As is often the case, the most accurate information came from the lower levels of our fighters. They did not bullshit us. They didn’t have time to waste our time for any nonsense, nor did they have the resources from the policymakers they badly needed. They also didn’t know many of the basic things they needed to know if we were going to prevail; they lacked any real intelligence other than what they discovered on the terrain they were operating on. I felt bad. I had come from the world of special operations where we brought intelligence to the forefront of our operations. We had changed the mentality from fighting a plan to fighting our enemy—we had operationalized intelligence and we did so for our most elite military forces. I was proud of that, but I saw in our conventional forces a complete lack of real intelligence support.

  All the baloney you hear about “national to tactical” is crap. Here we were in the first decade of the twenty-first century and despite advances in technology, our conventional military forces fighting at the edge of the battlefield were very limited in their vision and understanding of the battlefield. There was simply no good technology down to the local level enabling them to “see” the enemy the way higher headquarters were able to see them. There was a need to change what we were providing our troops at the edge and we proceeded to do that. In the meantime, thank God they were so brave, ingenious in how they executed their mission, extremely well trained, and innovative. There is something about the American soldier—despite our best efforts to shit on them, they rise to the occasion and perform miraculously.

  Before going back to Afghanistan in June 2009, I had most recently served at Central Command and for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs in the Pentagon, pristine areas where you get all the intelligence you want and on a constant basis. The problem is, that intelligence doesn’t do you a bit of good if you aren’t able to get it to those who can actually do something about it. And in those assignments, I found that “intelligence,” the really sensitive stuff, was routinely outdated and therefore irrelevant. I was quickly starting to see that the world of open source information from media on the battlefield was becoming more and more useful—this would pay off later on with the rapid rise of social media.

  During this listening tour, many soldiers and civilians we spoke to complained about the disconnect between the government of Hamid Karzai, the international community, our military forces, and the rest of the country. Nearly everywhere we traveled, whether by helicopter, foot, or vehicle, there was this incredible loss of confidence stated by everyone. They lacked confidence in us, and they especially had zero confidence in their own government.

  Our investigation took us into early July, but it was only a first take. I needed to know a lot more. It was clear that the intelligence system was badly broken. There was nothing remotely approaching what we’d created in Iraq. There were few resources and an almost complete disconnect from what our men and women saw on the ground to what we were reporting up to our higher HQ. Overall, the Taliban had returned, al Qaeda was back (and stronger than before) and were now in possession of large swaths of Afghanistan. Even though the president of the United States said that Afghanistan was his main priority, the Pentagon and the rest of the system, the intelligence community included, simply could not and did not adjust. The focus was still on Iraq.

  In mid-July 2009, I took a small team back around the country examining the intelligence operations in a far more detailed way. Speaking to many of the Afghan people as far down into the various villages as we could go was essential. I also started to develop relationships during this period with some very notorious characters. One was Colonel (now General) Abdul Razziq of Spin Boldak in southern Kandahar Province, another was Ahmed Wali Karzai (AWK), half brother to President Karzai.

  They weren’t Boy Scouts. Razziq was known for his narcotics and poppy smuggling down across the Pakistan border at a place called Friendship Gate—though there were no friends nor anything friendly coming across that gate. He was a slim, wiry, and extremely tough guy. He showed me a couple of bullet wounds he had taken fighting the Taliban. Most Americans likely only see such a person in National Geographic. The Taliban had killed at least two of his brothers and had tried to kill him on more than one occasion. Despite his many unsavory characteristics, I liked Razziq; he was straightforward with me, as I was with him. We actually got along with each other and this paid off down the road. It was the first time anyone from the ISAF level or even the government had paid any attention to him and he was in charge of a large portion of an extremely important and very dangerous piece of geography, southern Kandahar. It was the gateway to Pakistan’s southern border region and directly across the border from the Taliban’s HQ in a notorious place called Quetta.

  I didn’t like what he represented nor what he did, but we needed him badly. He maintained stability in his tribal areas, he knew what was needed, and he ruled with an iron fist. He also knew things our troops desperately had to know. I traveled with him in a beat-up Toyota truck one day through his turf. As we drove through some villages, he would veer off the road and along what can only be described as a path that, he knew, was clear of mines and other explosives. Men and young children (girls and boys) would come up to him and he would hand out Afghan money. I felt like I was with someone out of a Robin Hood story. They loved him.

  He showed me that the human terrain in Afghanistan and the fabric of the society were vastly different from Iraq and we could not impose similar actions on this environment, as we had in Iraq. Getting tribal leaders to come over to our side was going to be very difficult and if we were going to use this type of approach, we would have to work just as hard in multiple areas of the country, and with multiple tribal leaders—there would be no Anbar Awakening in Afghanistan as a whole. We were going to have to do it piece by piece. It would take far more time and more resources, but I strongly believed we could prevail.

  From an intelligence perspective, we needed a far more granular sense of the ground. We were in a race for knowledge and
we were losing. Through Razziq, I met other Afghans and because I treated him with respect, when I met with others, I got respect back—I needed it in some of the places I ended up going into.

  I took Razziq along with Lieutenant General Mohammad Noorzai (commander of the Afghan Border Police) for a visit to the Torkham Gate in the east, as well as up to one of the northern border crossings, to show him what we needed him to do at the Friendship Gate and throughout the challenging southern part of Afghanistan. This trip was an eye-opener for him and me. It was the first time Razziq had ever been in a plane (at first he thought I was there to have him arrested). The objectives of this trip were to develop a stronger relationship with someone we needed on our side, and to show Razziq what a more organized border crossing looked like. The former was what I was looking for in this trip; to achieve the latter at Friendship Gate in southern Kandahar would eventually take well over a year to even get started.

  Razziq’s suspicions about me potentially arresting him weren’t just paranoia. We had arrested Razziq’s fellow provincial border chief of police in Helmand, the guy who ran the infamous Pakistan border town of Baramshah. Baramshah was a lot like Tombstone in the Wild West movies, but on poppy-filled steroids. There were all sorts of nefarious activities in and around that town. One of the things the Helmand chief of police did that government officials were willing to arrest him for, was steal money from families of Afghan soldiers. He was essentially collecting money from the families of his dead police officers. The government was still paying for them and he was reporting they were still alive. I found this practice to be rampant around the country—this may still be the case, although we tried to stop it—but at the time, there was no system in place to correct this behavior other than to stop paying the entire police force. Looking back, we probably should have taken that extreme measure to send a message that we were serious about corruption.

  The minister of the interior, Hanif Atmar (a man trained by the Soviets), agreed with our plan to have one of his “leaders” arrested. It was a pretty dramatic operation. We flew a plane down to Kandahar airfield, deceived the police chief into thinking he was attending a meeting with his leadership at the airfield, and upon his arrival had him arrested. He was placed on the aircraft, brought back to Kabul where he faced a kangaroo court–type hearing that summarily removed him from his position and subsequently released him back out into the wild. He returned to Helmand Province in a new role, as a fighter in the ranks of the Taliban! You cannot make this stuff up.

  By 2011, the Marines had largely succeeded at their intended task of subduing Helmand, and the Army had achieved similar results in Kandahar. Given that severely under-resourced U.K. forces had been fighting from 2006 to 2010 without relief, that’s a pretty impressive accomplishment. In 2013 there was a widespread grassroots tribal rebellion among several of the senior Pashtun tribes that could have provided us with an Awakening-like opportunity, but alas it wasn’t supported by the Karzai government or resourced by the international community. The predictable, heartbreaking result was that everyone who trusted us was abandoned to the tender mercies of the terrorists—similar to what occurred in Iraq.

  Subsequently, the Taliban and its allies have regained their lost territory. The problem is that because those strategic opportunities weren’t understood at the time (much like the assessment of Anbar in Iraq on the eve of the Awakening), hardly anyone recognizes just how close we actually came to winning in Afghanistan. But then, as in Iraq, winning isn’t going to be durable if your next move is retreat.

  As in Iraq, I worked alongside General McChrystal, and as in Iraq, it was necessary to totally revamp both the way we did intelligence and the relationship between intel and operations.

  3

  The Enemy Alliance

  Democracy’s greatest weakness is foreign policy, as Alexis de Tocqueville wrote way back in 1831. We are slow, and we can’t keep secrets very well, whereas an effective national security policy often requires secrecy and high speed, lest our enemies get even stronger and are justifiably confident that they know what we will and won’t do.

  Therefore, it is often impossible for democratic leaders—even if they do see what is happening and have enough vision and courage to respond—to take properly prudent and timely action before the full onset of a major crisis.

  Winston Churchill, one of the few British leaders to see the Nazi threat early and fully, was widely ridiculed until the Second World War was already under way. In America, months before we were attacked at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, it took all the political skills of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to gain congressional approval for the military draft, by a single vote, in August 1941.

  The slogans of political correctness have reinforced these weaknesses. If, as PC apologists tell us, there is no objective basis for members of one culture to criticize another, then it is very hard to see—and forbidden to write about or say—the existence of an international alliance of evil countries and movements that is working to destroy us.

  Yet, the alliance exists, and we’ve already dithered for many years.

  The war is on. We face a working coalition that extends from North Korea and China to Russia, Iran, Syria, Cuba, Bolivia, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. We are under attack, not only from nation-states directly, but also from al Qaeda, Hezbollah, ISIS, and countless other terrorist groups. (I will discuss later on, the close working relationships between terror groups and organized criminal organizations.) Suffice to say, the same sort of cooperation binds together jihadis, Communists, and garden-variety tyrants.

  This alliance surprises a lot of people. On the surface, it seems incoherent. How, they ask, can a Communist regime like North Korea embrace a radical Islamist regime like Iran? What about Russia’s Vladimir Putin? He is certainly no jihadi; indeed, Russia has a good deal to fear from radical Islamist groups to its south, and the Russians have been very heavy-handed with Radical Islamists in places like Chechnya.

  Yet the Russian air force and Iranian foot soldiers are fighting side by side in Syria.

  Somehow, Russian antipathy toward radical Islam does not prevent the Kremlin from constructing all the Iranian nuclear power plants, nor does the doctrinaire Communist regime in Pyongyang hesitate to cooperate with Tehran regarding nuclear weapons, missiles, petroleum, and tunnels.

  Iran is the linchpin of the alliance, its centerpiece.

  The Pyongyang-Tehran partnership is quite long-standing and extensive:

  Both Iran and North Korea were part of the A. Q. Khan (nuclear weapons) proliferation network, and bilateral trade in oil and weapons has continued despite UN resolutions designed to stop it. Ballistic missile cooperation is documented, and nuclear cooperation has been an unspoken theme in Washington. Pyongyang helped Damascus, Iran’s ally, build a secret reactor. There are reports that North Korean experts visited Iran in May [2015] to help Iran with its missile program. Pressed by reporters on the subject of North Korea–Iran nuclear cooperation a few weeks ago, even the State Department acknowledged that it takes reports of such cooperation seriously. (www.jewishpolicycenter.org/5643/does-iran-already-have-nuclear-weapons)

  There is a considerable volume of air traffic between the two countries, and the North Koreans have long assisted the Iranians in digging tunnels. More important, in early September 2007, Israeli forces allegedly destroyed a potential nuclear weapons site in Syria that was under Iranian operation and had benefited from North Korean technological assistance.

  At the time, I was the senior intelligence officer at the United States Central Command. We spent many sleepless nights planning a series of operations to strike these facilities. The more I studied the extensive construction, the number of sites, the connections between North Korea and Iran as well as the operations security that kept these facilities hidden for nearly ten years right under our noses, I grew more irritated and angry than being simply disappointed in our intelligence system. Missing this site was beyond being an intelligence failure, it
could have caused a nuclear war in the Middle East.

  And according to the German press at the time—Der Spiegel—there were at least two other nuclear weapons facilities in Syria as a result of Iranian–North Korean efforts. One was an underground location near the Lebanese border. The other was said to be at a “secret location.” In the end, we were lucky the Israelis decided to attack and destroy Al-Kibar—today, ISIS owns that territory and would likely own a nuclear weapon.

  Iran

  If you go to the official Web site of the Iranian supreme leader, Ali Khameini, you will find him described as “the leader of the Muslims,” endowed with the authority of the ancient caliphs to lead all Muslims, not just the Shi’ites.

  Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s revolution in early 1979 toppled not only the shah, but traditional Shi’ite doctrine, according to which civil society must not be governed by clerics until the return of the “Vanished Imam,” whose reappearance would usher in the millennium. In contrast with Sunni doctrine, the Shi’ites had long insisted that the mosque was the rightful place for religious leaders, leaving government to secular power. Khomeini himself assumed power in Iran, and put in place a stern, oppressive system that drove women from public life, enforced puritanical regulations on the population, and carried out mass executions of those who challenged him.

  It was, and remains, a classic example of clerical fascism. Like the leaders of other fascist states, the mullahs who have ruled the Islamic Republic have claimed universal authority in the name of their doctrine, not of their country. And they say they are prepared to die—along with their followers—to accomplish their mission. As Khomeini put it shortly after the occupation of the American embassy in Tehran in 1979: “We do not worship Iran, we worship Allah.… For patriotism is another name for paganism. I say let this land burn. I say let this land go up in smoke, provided Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world.”