by David Loyn
As the withdrawal rolled on, ISAF troops became more vulnerable. The marines killed in Garmser in August were in one of just three bases left in the district, down from sixty at the peak.17 “Our troops and Afghan troops absolutely in the field eat together,” said the British brigadier in charge of transition to Afghan control, Richard Cripwell. “There are unquestionably some very close relationships all over the country between ISAF forces of all nationalities and the Afghans.”18 This closeness made the attacks more lethal than normal combat. The ratio of wounded to dead in combat is around 12 to 1; with green-on-blue attacks, it was 1.5 to 1, causing nearly a quarter of coalition deaths in 2012. Attacks during missions outside the wire were rare. Most were carried out inside compounds when ISAF troops were relaxed and not wearing body armor.
New analysis of the motivation of the attackers came from a psychiatrist, Marc Sageman, brought to Kabul in September 2012, the month after the worst spike—twelve attacks in August. Most of his previous career was in the CIA, including time working with the Afghan mujahideen during the war against Soviet occupation in the 1980s.
Sageman disagreed with Bordin, and his report carried more weight since he interviewed surviving green-on-blue shooters in jail, not troops on the ground as the Red Team report by Bordin had done. Bordin recorded incidents of personal humiliation and cultural incompatibility, but that did not explain motivation for attacks. Sageman showed that the actual attackers were mostly strangers; none was reacting to a personal slight. Most significantly Sageman believed that 75 percent of the attackers had some link with the Taliban—a conclusion that faced considerable pushback. The view inside ISAF until Sageman arrived was far closer to the “cultural incompatibility” argument put by Bordin, which concluded that the Taliban were not responsible for the upsurge in attacks. Bordin’s research had fitted an easily understandable narrative, that Americans and Afghans did not like each other and never would. If Sageman was right, though, it meant there could be a solution, since preventing Taliban infiltration “was easier than trying to teach your soldiers to be good Afghans.”19
Sageman found that fellow soldiers would often know an individual was planning an attack. But one obvious answer, better intelligence inside Afghan ranks, was blocked by security ministers. The interior minister, Bismillah Khan, and the defence minister, General Abdul Rahim Wardak, had both commanded mujahideen forces in the 1980s war against Soviet occupation and remembered the excesses of the Soviet-backed KHAD secret police. They did not want KHAD’s successors spying on their soldiers and police to save the lives of Americans. It was only when Afghan soldiers too became the subject of insider attacks that they agreed to the plan. Allen was in a meeting at the Ministry of Interior when he saw the change. Interior Minister Khan was called away from the room and returned with the news that ten Afghan police had been shot dead by a fellow police officer at a checkpoint in Farah Province in the southwest of the country—a “green-on-green” attack. Khan and Wardak were now more receptive to putting spies into the ranks.
As well as better intelligence, responses included armed “guardian angels” always present when Afghan and coalition forces were together, better monitoring of recruits, and discharge of some soldiers. Allen ordered all U.S. troops to carry a loaded weapon at all times.
The measures finally turned the tide on the problem. But the new security regime changed advising and mentoring; trust was never as complete again as when gifted linguists like John Darin Loftis had worked as an adviser in the Ministry of Interior, a valuable asset, as he conversed easily in both Afghan languages. He was shot at his desk with colleague Robert Marchanti in February 2012, a month after the killing of the five French soldiers. The attacker escaped and was never identified. Allen arrived while the bodies were still lying in pools of blood and knelt to pray.20 After that incident, scarce security assets that could have been better deployed pointing outward had to point inward to protect advisers on the core mission. And even with tighter security and better intelligence, some attackers still got through. As late as 2014, Major General Harold Greene was shot by a soldier inside the officers’ training academy at Qargha, west of Kabul, the most senior American officer to die on active service since the Vietnam War.
METEOR STRIKES
Abdul Basir, the soldier who opened fire on French soldiers dressed in T-shirts and shorts as they finished a workout, told Sageman that he carried out the attacks because he was outraged by a video of U.S. Marines urinating on Taliban corpses. He did not see the video, which Allen quickly ordered to be taken down from the internet wherever it could be found, but he had a dream that international troops were in Afghanistan for the purpose of defiling Islam, and that inspired him to turn against the French soldiers. Another green-on-blue attacker in January told Sageman that he too was inspired to act by the report of the video. A month later, waves of anti-American rioting raged across the country after U.S. soldiers were discovered burning copies of the Quran at the country’s biggest military detention facility, Parwan, inside Bagram Air Base. Almost five hundred Qurans, and more than one thousand other religious texts, were taken from the prison library after interpreters said they contained handwritten extremist messages. Acting only on the word of the interpreters, and against rising warnings from other Afghan soldiers, boxes of books were hauled to the burn pit. After many had been thrown into the flames, other Afghans gathered and called colleagues to rescue the books. The Americans withdrew “frightened by the growing, angry crowd.” A later inquiry showed that the markings in the margins of the books were mostly names and addresses, not extremist messages. But the damage was done. There were several deaths in street riots as Afghan police fought to regain control.
Sageman connected a spike of green-on-blue attacks to the burning, among them a bizarre attack on the Camp Bastion airstrip at the giant joint ISAF/Afghan base21 in Helmand. An Afghan interpreter grabbed a vehicle and drove at a group of dignitaries waiting for the arrival of Secretary of Defense Panetta. He narrowly missed them before driving into a ditch and setting light to himself. Sageman saw these attacks not as cultural incompatibility but a clear causal link between what Allen called “meteor strikes” and the decisions of young soldiers to turn on their ISAF mentors.
Meteor strikes were events that came unpredictably out of the blue and absorbed a huge amount of time and effort to limit damage. The year 2012 brought a shower of them. In March, U.S. staff sergeant Robert Bales walked off his base in Panjwayi in Kandahar and killed seventeen civilians in their homes. In September, there were nationwide protests over the production of a movie titled Innocence of Muslims, a crudely made low-budget production, lasting just fourteen minutes on YouTube, described by one prominent film critic as a “bigoted piece of poison calculated to inflame the Muslim world.”22 Both the film and the Bales attack led to clusters of green-on-blue attacks. Afghan forces were supportive. When Allen visited Marjah in Helmand while violent protests following the Quran burning were at their peak, Afghan troops told their U.S. marine partners to stay in the base. They said, “Let us patrol outside the wire for a couple of days; we have this for you.”23
The meteor strikes further strained relations with Karzai, who said after meeting survivors of the village shot up by Bales that he was “at the end of the rope.” He publicly questioned the American account that only Bales was involved. “This behavior cannot be tolerated. It is past, past, past the time.” Speaking after Friday prayers in the mosque in the garden in the Arg, he said that American forces and the Taliban were “two demons” ravaging the country. As so often during the long war, at times of high tension when anti-American feelings ran high, the Afghan president did little to calm public anger.
SNAKE CHARMERS AT NIGHT
Karzai liked Allen personally, calling him to express condolences when Allen’s mother died, although Allen had not told anyone in the Afghan administration that he was returning to Virginia to bury her. His wife of thirty-five years, Kathy, both of whose parents had died t
he year before, nursed Allen’s mother at the end, not disclosing the extent of the threat until she died so as not to distract him from his mission. It was a typically selfless gesture from a family committed to public service. After the funeral, he was in a restaurant with Kathy and their two daughters in his favorite place in the world, the Shenandoah Valley, when he got a call from the Arg to say Karzai wanted to speak to him. “So I’m in the parking lot, it’s just surreal,” he said, “talking to the president of Afghanistan, who is gripped with emotion saying words to the effect that our mothers are so precious to us.”24
But whatever the personal warmth, for Karzai, “relations with America had gone totally to nil.”25 Actions now mattered more than personalities, in particular to reduce civilian casualties from ISAF strikes and to end night raids. Allen recognized that he needed to walk the Afghan president back from ordering a total ban on the use of U.S. airpower, which he was close to ordering. He issued a new tactical directive, significantly tightening the occasions when there could be the use of air strikes or artillery and ordering more thorough investigation on the ground of allegations of civilian casualties. Researchers investigating civilian casualties had more access to higher levels of the ISAF command than before. They said they found soldiers concerned not just for “what they could legally do in a given situation, but what they should do.”26
This most methodical of commanders established that the number of times it was necessary to engage air strikes or artillery on a building to accomplish a mission without knowing who was inside was so small, that he could tighten the rules without damaging operational effect. “It was quite controversial, I got some pushback from below and from above on that issue.” Apart from the propaganda value for the Taliban of air strikes on civilian targets, Allen felt the human cost. “We had wiped out, sometimes, entire families, not one person left alive. And I tell you that really, for me, was so tragic I can’t even begin to describe it.”
The new rules changed the burden of proof on the part of troops who wanted to call in an air strike. They now needed to presume that every Afghan was a civilian, and all buildings were civilian unless proved otherwise. The rules were tightened still further in June 2012 after eighteen civilians, including seven women, five girls, and a baby, were killed in an attack where the target was a gathering of Taliban commanders in Logar Province.27 Allen now ordered that there should be no air attacks on civilian buildings, unless in extreme circumstances, and then only if sanctioned by senior commanders. Allen would take the phone calls from special operators who had tracked a target into a building. “My question was always, who’s in there? Do you know that person is in there, yes or no? ‘Yes, I know he’s in there.’ Who else is in there? ‘I don’t know.’ All right, do you have heel to toe, unblinking, full motion of that structure? ‘Yessir, I do.’ Okay, so he’ll probably have to leave eventually. Since we don’t know if somebody’s in there or not, don’t strike that structure because you don’t know who’s in there.” Allen made the bold claim at the time that the changes meant civilian casualties caused by air strikes would “plummet immediately,”28 and so it proved.29
Another tactical directive tightened rules on night raids, which had gone up significantly with Petraeus’s relentless “killing and capturing” of the enemy, with fifteen operations a night. Allen recognized that this had become the most pressing issue for the Afghan president, not least because among those killed by mistake at the height of the campaign in March 2011 was Yar Muhammad Karzai, a relative of the president, shot when U.S. Special Forces arrived at night in the family ancestral village of Karz, near Kandahar.30
Not only did special operators conducting the raids sometimes have faulty intelligence, they were entering homes where every male occupant had a weapon as a matter of course. In May, they killed a fifteen-year-old boy sleeping in a field in Nangarhar Province, mistaking the hunting shotgun he had next to him for a more offensive weapon. A baby died in the same attack, which came just three days after a twelve-year-old girl died nearby in a raid on a house owned by a member of the Afghan police.31 The Nangarhar raids provoked angry street demonstrations, causing the police to open fire, killing another young boy.
The number of night operations reduced considerably after Allen took command, to less than half. But he was keen not to lose the capacity altogether, since “the Haqqanis are operating twenty-four hours a day.”32 With superior night vision and communications, U.S. Special Forces had a significant advantage at night, and night raids had a measurable effect: in 83 percent of cases arrests were made, either of the target or a known associate, and shots were fired in less than one in ten operations.33 A tribal elder in Helmand Province, who welcomed them as a key factor in better security, used a graphic image in an interview for The New York Times, that the Taliban were like snakes and night raids were snake charmers.34 Allen told a Senate committee that in 9,200 night operations, the number killed and injured was just twenty-seven. “That would argue for the power of night operations preserving life and reducing civilian casualties in all other kinds of operations.”35 But what was not measurable was the alienation and loss of support caused by the continuing sound of drones and the threat of boots through the door at night.
Allen’s two new tactical directives on air strikes and night raids at the end of 2011 came just after a Loya Jirga where Karzai sought support from his nation to impose conditions on U.S. troops if they were to be allowed to remain after the end of combat operations in 2014. After several exhausting rounds of talks with Karzai and his anti-American national security adviser, Rangin Spanta, Allen tightened the rules further, agreeing that in the future, Afghan forces would always take the lead in night operations. In practice, Americans still played a significant role in planning and execution. “It all adds up to U.S. boots on the ground,” said a CBS report, “if not inside the house.”36 But the deal was a step on the road to Afghan sovereignty that Karzai was now on. Another step that would take hours of negotiations, and not be fully resolved in Allen’s time, was the management of detainees.
TORTURE OR RELEASE
Karzai had been demanding full control of detention centers since 2005 without success. His opening gambit ahead of talks in January 2012 was to insist that all detainees should be handed over to Afghan authorities in a month. The main location at issue was the Parwan Detention Facility at Bagram, where more than three thousand prisoners were housed. It was designed as a state-of-the-art facility, replacing earlier makeshift prisons like the CIA’s notorious “Salt Pit,” set up in an abandoned brick factory near Kabul, where prisoners died in brutal interrogations in the freewheeling early years of Bush’s war on terror, when there were few checks. A senior CIA officer said just being in the Salt Pit was an enhanced interrogation technique. Detainees were “kept in complete darkness and constantly shackled in isolated cells with loud noise or music and only a bucket to use for human waste,” according to a Senate Intelligence Committee report.37 One inmate is known to have died of the extreme cold. Detainees were routinely stripped naked, bound with Mylar tape, and beaten while being dragged by a rope along a corridor. The Salt Pit was closed with other CIA black sites in an executive order by President Obama in January 2009. Detainees had died at the Parwan Detention Facility too, but by 2011, Allen believed that the abuse had ended.
Allen’s concern in handing over detainees to full Afghan control was that they would be tortured in the Afghan system—risks highlighted in October 2011, when the UN mission in Kabul reported the results of a nationwide investigation. Around half of the men they interviewed in the custody of the Afghan security service, the NDS, said they had been tortured.
Detainees described experiencing torture in the form of suspension (being hung by the wrists from chains or other devices attached to the wall, ceiling, iron bars or other fixtures for lengthy periods) and beatings, especially with rubber hoses, electric cables or wires or wooden sticks and most frequently on the soles of the feet. Electric shock, twisting an
d wrenching of detainees’ genitals, stress positions including forced standing, removal of toenails and threatened sexual abuse were among other forms of torture that detainees reported.38
Allen immediately ordered that no more detainees should be sent to the worst of the Afghan facilities, including one in the center of Kabul. Since General McChrystal had first put the detainee issue at the forefront of military concerns in Afghanistan, there was another concern with that of torture in Afghan jails—that detainees would be released. American troops did not want to risk their lives taking dangerous men off the battlefield, only to find them quickly back in circulation.39
After months of tough negotiations, in March 2012, the U.S. agreed to hand over the Parwan Detention Facility six months later. At the time of the deal there were 3,100 detainees in the large hangar-like buildings of the jail. The twin U.S. concerns—that detainees be tortured or too easily released—led to more being kept in American-run facilities during 2012, against the plans for phased handover to Afghan control. And by the fall, there were a further 600 detainees at Parwan. They included foreigners—Pakistanis captured fighting with the Taliban, and some brought by the CIA from other countries like Yemen and Egypt, and kept in the same suspended legal status as those at Guantanamo. It became inevitable during the year that part of the Parwan facility, and many hundreds of detainees, would be kept under American control for longer than Karzai wanted.
