by David Loyn
This rudimentary halting progress did not offer a better alternative than the Taliban, who did not fight hard to hold on to Marjah, instead hiding their weapons and melting into the population. They still controlled the night and intimidated anyone who worked with the marines, which stalled the growth of new government machinery. With little infrastructure, no substantial towns, and farmland inhabited by illiterate landless tenants, as most landlords lived in Lashkar Gah, there was no “government in a box” that could resolve these problems quickly. Before long, McChrystal was calling the area a “bleeding ulcer.”
… AND TRANSFER
In the spring of 2010, the Obama administration went on a charm offensive with Karzai, inviting him on a high-profile visit to Washington to repair relations damaged during long arguments over the 2009 election. Holbrooke had openly maneuvered to get any result other than a second term for Karzai, whose paranoia about the U.S. was further fueled by the suspicion that the former U.S. ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad had considered standing himself. Protracted arguments over the count and the legitimacy of the election further worsened relations. In Helmand, where there had been such a committed effort to secure the safety of voting, the UN calculated that the number of actual voters was below 40,000, but 134,804 votes were recorded, 112,873 of them for Karzai. Even with this scale of apparent manipulation, Karzai was not declared the clear winner, which required more than 50 percent in the first round. After arm-twisting by John Kerry, then chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Karzai agreed to face a second-round runoff rather than contesting the result. The announcement at a press conference, with Karzai flanked by Kerry and the Kabul head of the UN, Kai Eide, with the ambassadors of the U.S., UK, and France also in the shot, looked like an international stitch-up. Karzai’s paranoia-meter went into the red zone when the American deputy head of the UN in Kabul, Peter Galbraith, was fired for campaigning against him.
With Eikenberry’s contempt public, McChrystal alone continued to back the Afghan president, sticking to the counterinsurgency requirement to build up the host government, and ultimately because he believed that Karzai was a good man trying to do the right thing in difficult circumstances.73 Prior approval for military operations was not a rubber-stamp exercise; their meetings would go on for four or five hours as McChrystal went through the military options with Karzai.74
In characteristic style, Karzai jeopardized plans for the Washington visit in May 2010 by telling a group of Afghans he might “join the Taliban” if pushed too far by the U.S., but the visit went ahead.75 He was visibly moved as McChrystal pointed out graves of soldiers he knew who were killed in Afghanistan, buried in Section 60 at Arlington National Cemetery, where the fallen of Afghanistan and Iraq are buried. From there, they went to Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where McChrystal said Karzai was “taken aback by all these young American service members missing limbs, multiple in some cases.”
McChrystal said the overall experience challenged Karzai’s deeply held view that America was only in Afghanistan for itself. He would often ask, “Why are you really here?” And McChrystal would answer, “Well, it may not be smart, but we’re here to help you. If there’s an ulterior motive, I don’t know it.”
Before going back to Kabul, Karzai visited troops about to deploy at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. The scale of the surge meant that for the first time in the war, a whole division, the 101st Airborne, was heading to Afghanistan.76 Their commander, Major General John F. Campbell, who would later command at ISAF, lined up one thousand soldiers and their families in a hangar for Karzai’s visit. Inspired by his experiences at Arlington and Walter Reed, the president made a moving speech, thanking America for its commitment and sacrifice, and then jumped the rope to dive into the crowd, picking up babies and shaking as many hands as he could. Before Karzai climbed back into his helicopter, Campbell handed him a statuette of an eagle, for the Screaming Eagles—the emblem of the 101st. McChrystal counted it a successful visit.
Campbell carried an unusual item in the large document pocket of his combat trousers when he traveled round the mountains and valleys of eastern Afghanistan where he commanded in 2010—a packet of three-by-five cards, each bearing a picture and name of every soldier who died in his command, with some details of the incident, so the sacrifice was not forgotten. By the time his deployment finished a year later, the packet was too big to go in his pocket, and he carried it in a backpack everywhere he went. He would huddle together with soldiers in some remote location and take out the cards and tell them he carried the memories so he would never forget there was a human cost.
He had commanded in Baghdad during some of the toughest fighting in that war and saw the challenges of eastern Afghanistan as “a much more complex set than I faced in Baghdad.”77 He needed to make tough decisions to withdraw troops from places with an emotional hold on the American imagination because of the blood and sweat expended, such as Korengal and the Pech Valley. Many of the remote outposts were hallowed ground, named for soldiers who had died there, such as Restrepo. With withdrawal due to begin a year after they arrived, moving out of remote places in the hills was inevitable. The shape of the troop presence changed to focus on places that could be handed over—“clear, hold, build, and transfer” in the jargon, as transfer to Afghan control was added to the original counterinsurgency trio of tasks.
McChrystal knew the eastern mountains well from his days commanding Special Forces, and early in his time as ISAF commander, he stayed overnight in a remote outpost high up in the mountains in Korengal. He quickly saw that troops had no influence more than twenty feet beyond the wire, and he accepted the recommendation that they should pull back. But the decision brought doubt into his belief in counterinsurgency. How could they secure the population if they could not get out on the ground and interact with them?
It always kind of bugged me. How are we really going to solve this shortcoming? You want to say that hopefully the Afghan people, or Afghan government and military will be able to do it, but they weren’t much better doing that than we were. So, you know, it was always a sense that, yeah, it’s the right thing to do, but it makes us wonder if we can ever really accomplish the mission.
The dangers of keeping small numbers of troops in remote locations were emphasized when eight U.S. soldiers died after a fierce Taliban assault on an outpost, COP Keating, at the bottom of a bowl, surrounded by high mountains on the frontier in Nuristan.78 McChrystal noticed how exposed the site was when he flew over, but it was where the people lived, and that was why it was there. The region had been reinforced at the insistence of Karzai, but there was little contact between the base and the population, according to the army investigation into the attack.79 For several weeks, there was intelligence that Taliban reinforcements were crossing the border to stage an attack, and there were several probing attacks to test Keating’s defenses. As at Wanat, the assault was very well planned, with early precise targeting of mortar defenses. The soldiers of Bravo Troop, 3rd Squadron, 61st Cavalry successfully repelled the attack, causing more than one hundred Taliban casualties in a day of fighting, which included hours when much of the base was overrun and the defenders were penned into a small area. The site had already been slated for closure, and although the defense of Keating was a tactical win, it was a strategic communications victory for the Taliban who shared video of their control of the abandoned base.
When Campbell took over in the east in 2010, there were still more than two hundred outposts. He continued to pull back, not least because he did not have enough civilian advisers to deliver the full spectrum of counterinsurgency operations. Although he knew there was little governance in the mountain villages, he could not solve that just with soldiers. The failure of the civilian surge had a measurable impact on the mission. “We couldn’t keep people up there, and put a Band-Aid on it, so we had to look hard at that, how we could sustain that.”
The decision had to be based on the overall mission, not on emotional connection with Am
erican losses, and the decisions needed to be communicated to soldiers so they understood the value of what they were doing. When troops finally pulled out of the whole Korengal Valley, the codirector of the Restrepo movie, Sebastian Junger, wrote that while the pullout was tough for the comrades of men who had died, they knew they had played a role in protecting the key supply routes of the more important Pech Valley. “There is no way to know what would have happened in Kunar Province—or in Afghanistan as a whole—had several hundred local and foreign fighters not been tied up in the Korengal by American forces.”80
DEPLOY, DEPLOY, DEPLOY
By 2009, U.S. armed forces were in their eighth year of continual conflict and feeling the strain. Units on tough twelve-to fifteen-month tours, fighting all the way, were turning round and going back in with little time for training and recuperation. Obama’s quick timetable to get the surge forces into place put the system under more pressure. The intensity of the workload made complex operations like counterinsurgency harder to achieve. Lute, still a serving lieutenant general until 2010, while overseeing the wars for Obama as he had for Bush, had a more acute sense than many in the White House of the reality of life for those in uniform.
You were probably reintroducing yourself to your kids, getting a divorce, settling a financial crisis. The list on the refrigerator at home was not pretty, for things that you must do, and for six months of that twelve months at home, you were preparing to go back to Iraq. So the stress level here was high and the ability of the Army to adapt was somewhat constricted, impeded by the fact that they were on this treadmill of just deploy, deploy, deploy, and they had no time to go to Leavenworth, read the field manual, absorb what it meant, get it into their training program.81
Recruiting standards were dropped to levels not seen since the Vietnam draft. In 2003, at the start of the Iraq war, 94 percent of new recruits had high school diplomas. By 2005, that number had dropped to 71 percent. The proportion of soldiers with what the army called Category IV intelligence went up from just a handful to almost one in twenty recruits. Waivers were granted for felony convictions, and physical fitness standards fell.82 Among those recruited during this time was an idealistic loner who had been thrown out of training by the Coast Guard after a month and disqualified for further service after examination by a navy psychiatrist. The Iraq surge followed by the Afghan surge had drained the well, and with a signature on a form agreed with his recruiter that he had overcome these issues, he was accepted for the army in 2008. His name was Bowe Bergdahl.
After basic training, Bergdahl was sent to the legendary 1/501—1st Battalion, 501st Airborne Infantry Regiment—who were heading to Afghanistan and short on numbers. He had not been through parachute training at jump school, in normal times obligatory for the 1/501. One night, not long after deploying to eastern Afghanistan in the early summer of 2009, he walked off the base and spent five years in captivity, held by the Haqqani network.
Two months later, again under pressure for the surge, the four thousand soldiers of 5th Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, were switched at the last minute from a planned deployment to Iraq to go to Kandahar, with no time for specific pre-deployment training. They were equipped with Stryker armored vehicles—the first time the eight-wheeled behemoths had been brought to Afghanistan. Strykers, which carry two crew and nine infantry soldiers, have an eerily similar profile in Afghan villages to the armored personnel carriers used by the Russian forces in their war in the 1980s, whose rusting hulls still litter the Afghan landscape. They had limited utility in a counterinsurgency focused on the people, or in very close country, but their commander, Colonel Harry Tunnell, had not signed up to that project. In his mind, this was unfinished business in a continuum with Iraq where he was badly wounded in the leg in the initial invasion in 2003.83 In his account of Iraq, he mourned the “political correctness” that dictated the U.S. Army was no longer able to use “oppressive measures” successful in the past. “Military leaders must stay focused on the destruction of the enemy.” He saw engagement with civilians as a distraction. “It was counterproductive for a commander to get too immersed in non-combat activity.” Heading to Afghanistan, he ordered the motto “Search and Destroy” be painted onto the side of the Strykers—in contradiction with population-centered counterinsurgency.
Tunnell’s aggressive posture in training almost led to the brigade not being certified for deployment.84 He boasted of using more ammunition in training than other units, and to gain the highest marks in combat exercises, he put his senior officers down to command platoons, which meant that the first time some second lieutenants communicated with their troops was in actual combat. He spent almost no CERP aid money and conducted no shuras, instead engaging in massive assaults in Arghandab, before pulling out and not holding ground.85 His soldiers did not patrol on foot, which would have been better both for engaging the population and detecting IEDs, but remained inside Strykers and were often hit. In one incident, where procedure ruled they should have dismounted, seven soldiers and an interpreter were killed when a bomb was remotely detonated as they drove over what an inquiry called a “suspicious chokepoint.” He lost twenty-two soldiers during his tour, a high number at that time for a brigade.
In this aggressive environment, some of his soldiers carried out random shootings of Afghan civilians and kept their fingers for trophies. Four were convicted on charges, including murder, although Tunnell personally escaped blame for this. When Major General Nick Carter arrived to command in the south, he immediately took Tunnell’s brigade out of Arghandab to patrol the main ring road to assure freedom of movement for the coalition and the Afghan population. Tunnell was furious and began to challenge “virtually every order” given, according to the official inquiry. Carter’s American deputy, Brigadier General Ben Hodges, said he should have reined him in. Both he and Carter had “lost confidence in his ability to command.”86
After leaving Afghanistan, Tunnell became a vocal opponent of courageous restraint. Carter said simply, “Tunnell was unfit for brigade command in the complex environment of Afghanistan, incapable of listening to anybody else.”87
“THE GOVERNMENT ROBS US, THE TALIBAN BEAT US, AND ISAF BOMBS US”
On January 12, 2010, rioting began in Garmser, the southern desert district in Helmand. It went on into the next day, leading to the burning down of a market area and school and the deaths of between six and eight people. The slight, dark-eyed figure of Carter Malkasian, the Pashto-speaking political officer attached to the marines in Garmser, could often be seen in the street with Afghan leaders, breaking out ringleaders and calming the crowd. But at the same time, the flames of anger were fanned by pro-Taliban mullahs. The spark that lit the flames was a rumor that during a night raid by Special Forces, a knife had been stabbed into a Quran. It later emerged that the Taliban had planted the evidence after the raid. But the rumor was enough.
It was the worst riot during the time the marines held southern Helmand, and caused by a raid that was out of their control. About twice a month, there were raids on suspect houses in their area, with little notice to the marines who had to pick up the pieces in the morning. Mostly they did not provoke a response, although Afghan officials constantly warned about the potential for trouble. Malkasian wrote that the raids were as damaging as anything done by the Taliban.
Pashtuns despised them. A home is sacred. Pashtun men are obliged to keep out all uninvited guests. Foreigners crashing through doors, stomping about, and peering in on women had the same effect as spitting on a man’s honor before his whole village. Raids pushed people towards the Taliban.88
The January riots put back the work of the marines by months. They had engaged in exemplary counterinsurgency practice, particularly under Lieutenant Colonel John McDonough of 2nd Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment. Counterinsurgency to McDonough was not a soft option. When he arrived in November 2009, he raised the tempo of patrolling, never giving the Taliban a day off. Fifteen posts had been garrisoned by the previous mar
ine battalion. McDonough doubled that by reducing the number of marines in a post and on patrols, to be able to increase the tempo and the reach of his operations. The effort enabled development spending to have some effect, while a successful police recruitment scheme turned militia fighters into uniformed local police.
The school could be rebuilt at a cost of $150,000, but the riots had a lasting impact. Enemies of Abdullah Jan, an incorruptible local leader Malkasian had supported, used the inquiry into the riots to blame him, and he was removed, with a damaging impact on stability and development.
Every district in the country could tell similar stories about the helicopters that came at night, counterterrorist fighters from the CIA, or the special operators of TF-714. The headquarters of TF-714 that McChrystal had set up in the hangar in Baghdad had now moved to Bagram as Afghanistan took priority. That increased the tempo of the night raids. And sometimes it was hard to get the truth when things went wrong.
The problem was well known to every ISAF commander and came up in every review—most memorably identified in the Ten Wars report by Doug Lute at the end of 2008. Attacks on civilians, McChrystal’s team who traveled the country for his 2009 assessment met one group of elders who put it simply. “The Government robs us, the Taliban beat us, and ISAF bombs us.”89 The problem of the lack of coordination between special and conventional operations was never solved and was a significant contributory factor in hardening Afghan public opinion against the international military presence.
On February 12, 2010, five weeks after the Garmser raid, a raid on a compound near Gardez in the east was initially described by ISAF as a success, but with a macabre twist. After a “firefight” with “several insurgents,” special operators found the bodies of three women, “tied up, gagged and killed,” according to the ISAF press release. The bodies were “hidden” in an adjacent room, “discovered” when American soldiers made their way into the house later in the night. The find was spun as a Taliban honor killing.
