by Steve Coll
Combat engineers also erected tall observation towers where soldiers on watch could look out directly at the foliage. It was sometimes easier for the Taliban to spot the Americans in the towers than vice versa, however. In June, a Taliban sniper killed Brandon King, of the 1/320th, shooting him square in the face as he stood on watch in a tower.
Forward American units detained suspected insurgents and used retinal scanners to log them in classified databases. But interrogations and human intelligence collection in Kandahar that summer rarely produced insights beyond the known fact that many Taliban fighters were from or trained in Pakistan. More useful tactical intelligence about Taliban positions and movements came from listening to their radio communication. The enemy had no means to encrypt their chatter, which was easily intercepted and translated. That monitoring allowed American platoons to anticipate ambush attempts and to stay ahead of the Taliban’s reactions during combat.
By far the most urgent intelligence requirements were to map the enemy inside the green zone and avoid I.E.D.s. The blimps and R.A.I.D. cameras could spot Taliban if they moved in open areas but were less helpful in identifying enemy infrastructure and supply lines underneath the vines and orchard canopies. As the fighting intensified that summer the Combat Aviation Brigade’s S-2, or chief intelligence officer, undertook an elaborate mapping exercise to try to infer hidden Taliban positions from the sources of their firing. She plotted every engagement with the Taliban—air-to-ground, ground-to-ground, and ground-to-air—as well as trajectories of fire. The map lines were all color-coded. As the colors thickened over time, she hypothesized that the Taliban must be moving through the green zone underground, in a tunnel network. Guerrillas would pop up, fire, disappear, and then reappear across the map in a pattern that only tunnels seemed to explain. Kandarian sent platoons to the places she identified and, sure enough, they found tunnels, some running almost the length of a football field. Engineers blew the tunnels up with high explosives. This became part of what Colonel William Gayler, the aviation brigade commander, dubbed the Enemy Tactical Infrastructure Reduction Campaign, which went on well into the autumn.13
A problem, it turned out, was that some of the tunnels were part of an ancient irrigation system called the karez, an informal network of sediment tunnels managed by local Afghan communities for vital water supplies. Some karez tunnels had been watering fields in Kandahar Province for centuries. There were similar systems throughout South Asia, the Middle East, and China. The tunnels were not on the maps the Americans had brought to battle, however. After commanders realized what they might be destroying, the Army Research Office hired Rolfe Mandel, a University of Kansas archaeologist, to map Kandahar’s karez system, in order to protect it. American forces “had inadvertently destroyed some or contaminated some and really irritated the people,” Mandel noted. The Americans destroyed some of the tunnels; the Taliban blew up others and blamed the Americans.14
July 3, 2010: So we ended up pushing out today. It was definitely strange being out there for the first time. I thought it was going to be much more high strung and that everyone would be more stressed out, including myself. Instead it was more like a Sunday stroll, granted it was with about 70 pounds worth of gear and it was 110 degrees . . . almost like a maze of mud walls ranging from six to twelve feet high. CPT Shaffer stopped off and spoke with the Mullah while we hung out on the street and talked with some kids. I gave this one kid some Sour Warheads and his face was priceless when he tried it. I offered him sweet or sour. He proceeded to chuck it over a wall.
Platoons depended on their most experienced sergeants to survive. Sergeant Josh Strickland had served two tours in Iraq and one in Afghanistan before joining Third Platoon, A Battery, of the 1/320th, the artillery misfits. During his first couple of weeks at Combat Outpost Nolan, Strickland’s patrols could not walk a hundred yards without hitting an I.E.D. or getting lit up by Taliban from several sides. Listening to enemy radio talk, they learned the enemy knew they were artillery, not infantry. The Taliban said, “These are not real warfighters.” They were wrong, but it took time and heavy losses for the 1/320th to prove it. The first time Strickland’s platoon got hit, he saw a young artilleryman burst out crying. The soldier screamed again and again, “I didn’t sign up for this shit!”15
In general, Strickland thought, the lowest-ranking first-time soldiers adjusted to the stress better than the more experienced artillerymen because the rookies had no expectations from prior deployments. Because of Strickland’s experience and uncanny ability to avoid I.E.D.s, soldiers continually asked him to walk point on their patrols. He chose to walk ten to fifteen feet ahead of everyone else so that he could carefully identify the best route, and so that, if he did make a mistake, it would cost one life instead of several. He was ultimately wounded and medevaced to Kandahar Airfield four times. Each time, as he recovered in the hospital, a doctor would ask Strickland if he wanted to go back or go home. “What am I going to say?” he thought. He went back. Day after day, in platoon after platoon, they shouldered their loads, stepped out on “presence patrols,” and hoped for the best. They walked past villagers near their outposts who were neither helpful nor hostile. One elder near Strickland’s base kept a pigeon that he would let fly every time a platoon departed, apparently to let Taliban know they were on the march.16
By July, the I.E.D.s and the escalating casualties had rattled even the most experienced infantrymen. In Zhari, the four companies of the 1/502—Alpha, aka “Hard Rock,” the “Bull Dogs” of Bravo, Charlie or “Cobra,” and Delta or the “War Dogs”—stepped down paths that the Taliban had been implanting with I.E.D.s for at least a month before the battalion arrived. Every soldier carried seventy to ninety pounds of gear, water, and ammunition. They patrolled at night to avoid the sun or drank water continually to stave off dehydration in heat that soared daily above 100 degrees. The I.E.D.s were so thick around the Bull Dogs’ encampment that they had to clear a hundred yards at a time from the HESCO walls out. A lot of soldiers struggled with the stress. The First Platoon of the 1/320th started out with nineteen men; after three patrols, they had six remaining. Eighty percent of Bravo Company’s personnel had to be replaced during Strickland’s tour because of combat deaths, severed limbs, concussions, and other injuries.17
July 12, 2010: It was much better moving around at night, although it was pretty eerie at 3:30 a.m. when we were walking through the village and all of [a] sudden the call for prayer came on. I felt like I was in Call of Modern Duty Warfare. We walked in the canal down to the fields we were going to move towards the 2nd canal and we had SPC Spalding using the Gizmo which is our metal detector. Spalding is usually an iffy soldier but he was pretty on it with this thing. I guess death is a good motivator as everyone says. We got set up in the field and held it for an hour or so and right as we were about to leave we got PID [Positive ID] on one insurgent firing towards Bravo’s position. We all cracked off some shots and then we ended up being there for another few hours. . . . So we came back from that 7-hour mission, racked out for like 2 hours, and then woke up and kicked back out for another mission that ended up being 12 hours. . . . I don’t even know what we did but I do remember it sucking and there being a huge fucking I.E.D. that went off about 200 meters away from us, right where our original plan had us cutting across the river. Second time we’ve been lucky.
—Journal of Lieutenant Tim Hopper
Major Kevin Moyer commanded the Second Combat Brigade’s engineering company, about one hundred specialists in construction, breaching walls, bridging rivers, and blowing things up. He talked with Kandarian’s operations and intelligence officers about the I.E.D. problem. A lot of antimine equipment deployed previously in Kandahar had been designed to clear roads. This included Mad Max–inspired bulldozers rigged with armored plates. Those wouldn’t work on the narrow footpaths in the green zone now claiming so many.
Moyer and Lieutenant Colonel Clint Cox, the brigade’s operations offic
er, fell into conversation about a Cold War–era antimine weapon called the Mine Clearing Line Charge, or MICLIC, referred to as a “mick-lick.” As a concept, the system dated back to the First World War. A modern MICLIC resembled a two-hundred-foot fire hose packed with explosives. A rocket was fitted to one end of the hose. When fired, the rocket shot out and laid the hose in a straight line on the ground. Then the rocket set off all the explosives in the hose. That massive detonation in turn set off any buried I.E.D.s across a fifteen-foot-wide path—a cascade of thunderous booms. When the dust cleared, presto, infantrymen had a reliably safe path one hundred yards long and fifteen feet wide to walk. MICLIC systems had been sent out in small numbers to Afghanistan but they had never been used because they were considered too destructive for wars where hearts and minds figured.18
Art Kandarian was ready to bear that risk. The problem was, because of the length of its explosive hose, a MICLIC had to be moved around on a wheeled trailer, which made it unwieldy in the dense green zone. Moyer was talking to other engineers when one mentioned a portable mini-MICLIC called the Anti-Personnel Obstacle Breaching System, or APOBS. An APOBS consisted of two twenty-five-foot explosive hoses that soldiers could carry in backpacks, fit together, and then detonate to clear out a fifty-yard walkway. It turned out there were ten APOBS stored at Kandahar Airfield. Special Operations Forces had brought them out thinking they might need them someday, but they had never been used. Moyer thought this was “the coolest thing ever.” They tried them out. It was fun to set off such huge explosions and the systems offered the closest thing to a guaranteed safe walking path as there could be in that terrain, even if the path was only forty yards long. And as the APOBS came in, engineers also started to clear road sections with the larger Mine Clearing Line Charges. The weapons were not panaceas—they were heavy and awkward to deploy, they did not detonate every single buried I.E.D., and the Taliban could implant new explosives overnight. But they were a lot better than the grappling hooks and improvised booby-trap detectors platoons had been given at the start.19
When Art Kandarian learned how effective the explosive hose systems might be, and how they raised troop morale, he tried to order as many as he could find. But the Pentagon balked. Army lawyers responsible for enforcing the battlefield’s rules of engagement worried the explosive force was too great and too indiscriminate—there might be farmers hidden in the orchards who would be killed inadvertently. Kandarian created a PowerPoint deck arguing that the need was urgent and that more lives and limbs would be lost needlessly if the Army did not move fast. Petraeus endorsed Kandarian’s position and peppered the Pentagon with e-mails to get the systems moving to Afghanistan. They found some lying in storage in Kuwait and had them shipped in. When Defense Secretary Robert Gates visited Kandahar in late summer, Kandarian used his time with the secretary to persuade him to speed up shipments, which Gates did. But it still took months to receive the approximately 250 APOBS and 100 MICLICs that Kandarian wanted. By the end of its tour the Second Combat Brigade had detonated 207 explosive I.E.D.-clearing hoses in order to fan out through the green zone. They also used highly flammable white phosphorus to burn out dense vegetation. They destroyed acres and acres of farmland but slowly, over months, the brigade moved from desperation to tentative offense.20
Kandarian also begged Petraeus and Gates for help in obtaining more bomb-sniffing military working dogs; they had only six at the start. After MICLICs, dogs were the most popular anti-I.E.D. system at platoon level. The dogs’ effectiveness in identifying buried explosives was debated. The extreme heat took a toll on the animals. Also, a bomb-sniffing dog’s effectiveness depended on his training and human handler, which meant that quality varied. Still, the dogs’ companionship was comforting and helped with the stress, and there were sergeants like Strickland who saw the dogs point out I.E.D.s and save lives. Kandarian sent through to his companies as many working dogs as he could obtain. They, too, were frustratingly slow to arrive.
July 17, 2010: I am getting pretty sick of these walk-around-Jelawur patrols and SLEs [Street Level Engagements]. I am starting to feel like this is pointless. . . . We just walk around and talk to people. It is just starting to turn into a grind. Well, coming up on the 25th there is a big security/clear operation so we’ll see what that does. . . . I am so thankful that Jenny is such a faithful, loving and good wife. Two of my soldiers and my P.S.G.’s [wives] are leaving them. I can’t imagine doing all this with that weight hanging on my soldiers. Well, I am exhausted today since we spent all day dicking around. I’m going to go get some sleep.
—Journal of Lieutenant Tim Hopper
“Secure the People . . . Connect the Government to the People . . . Improve Quality of Life.” The “lines of operation” on Art Kandarian’s PowerPoint decks seemed increasingly at odds with the sheer amount of explosives and white phosphorus deployed to rip the Taliban out of the Arghandab’s foliage. Before arriving in Afghanistan, some of the brigade had trained at “Freedom Town” at Fort Sill in Oklahoma. Freedom Town was a training village set up to imitate conditions in Afghanistan. The soldiers practiced rudimentary Pashto and studied Islam and Afghan culture. Their scenarios had not touched upon how to convince Afghans that blowing up orchards one hundred yards at a time would contribute to their well-being.21
Counterinsurgency doctrine had a solution: cash payments. After the 1/320th managed to clear at least some of the nests of I.E.D.s around Combat Outpost Nolan, officers initiated a “cash for work” program to employ local villagers to clean up canals and fields. The 1/320th was largely responsible for destroying the area; now they paid the locals by the hundreds not to fight back. Officers had backpacks with one to two million Afghanis to fund these improvised payrolls. (The exchange rate was about forty Afghanis to one dollar at the time.) Villagers turned up at the outpost gate each morning for assignments. The soldiers used R.A.I.D. cameras to watch them from behind their HESCO walls, to make sure the Afghans performed the work. Then they handed over cash at day’s end.
The brigade laid out larger sums as compensation for property destroyed by American operations—tens of thousands of dollars at a time, sizable fortunes locally. Army lawyers at Kandahar Airfield ran a kind of arbitration court to consider claims. The Second Combat Brigade had bricks of cash to pay successful applicants. The brigade’s officers were scammed, initially, at least by the standards of American law. Sharecroppers and day laborers in the green zone presented claims for damaged fields and buildings as if they were the owners. They accepted the biggest paydays of their lives and then disappeared. Only gradually did the Americans come to understand that the real landowners were in Kandahar City or Quetta. At one point, Karzai sent a commission to the province to investigate whom the brigade was paying. Karzai suspected an American conspiracy to undermine him politically; ignorance was the reality.22
July 26, 2010: So last night . . . it was super-eerie when we were walking through an open field with loose dirt and hearing the insurgents out there talking about us. Last night was the first time I prayed. I was really nervous going through those fields. The fields had been flooded so we were walking through tomato fields [where] the dirt was the consistency of thick chocolate pudding. So here we are, 100 men strong, sludging through fields of chocolate pudding with half the people not having NODs [Night Optical Devices] or speaking the same language while the enemy watches us as we approach the area where they plant all sorts of I.E.D.s . . . very comforting. So we were the platoon to push across the 2nd Canal to set up security around the compound we were supposed to seize. . . . I had waterproofed my stuff but apparently not well enough because the water was up to my chest at points as we crossed. All my stuff got soaked and I almost fell over because the current was so strong.
—Journal of Lieutenant Tim Hopper
Objective Bakersfield was a four-way intersection of raised road controlled by the Taliban, naturally fortified by a large canal on one side. Beside the intersection was a co
mpound of thick mud walls three to eight feet high. Along the roads near the intersection were other heavily armed Taliban compounds. According to the Second Combat Brigade’s study, during the 1980s, the C.I.A.-backed mujaheddin had managed to hold the intersection throughout their combat with Soviet forces. The Canadians and the American Stryker units deployed in 2009 had failed to take it. Whoever controlled the intersection could influence traffic between Kandahar and Zabul Province. In late July, Kandarian prepared to have the 1/320th assault the objective. Captain Venkat Motupalli, the battalion’s intelligence officer, estimated that, on average, there was one hidden antipersonnel I.E.D. every six meters.23
The platoons, including Hopper’s, opened the Battle of Bakersfield on July 30. Hopper moved with a team leader he called his “war dog,” a young Texan named Kyle Stout. They had played golf a few times before the Afghan tour and had become friends. Stout had two big blue stars tattooed over his nipples; he was a character, but also squared away as a soldier. The assault on Bakersfield was by orders of magnitude the most intense combat either of them had ever experienced. “They quite literally charged across an open field into enemy fire, straight out of a video game or movie,” as Motupalli put it. “They kept going for four straight days.”24
August 4, 2010: Sergeant Stout is dead. Objective Baker’s Field 1 was [a] goddamned hellhole that was rigged to kill everything that went in there. . . . I don’t even know where to start. The operation began with us getting pushed back 24 hours and LTC Flynn telling us we need to change our plan because he wanted us to tighten up a few areas of it. Somehow we still ended up rushed and didn’t have enough time to plan out things well and rehearse them. . . .
