by Steve Coll
Next thing I know we are entering right at the middle of the first field of the west part of the compound. Ok, well we made it up to that point alright and then an ANA soldier stepped on a small I.E.D., but he was fine, since only the blasting cap went off. He said his foot hurt a little bit. Ok . . . pretty good indicator of how much this place is going to suck. We moved our security positions into place and then we began going into the compound and clearing. Now I should have supervised SGT Stout more and forced him to be more thorough. We “cleared” the first field and Building One. So then he continued to clear Building Two. . . .
SGT Stout had torn up his pants just like mine . . . but his were much worse than mine were. . . . SGT Stout just happened to not be wearing boxers. One of my last memories of SGT Stout was him standing there with everything hanging out. He was exhausted as we all were so I gave him my 5 hour energy drink. . . . He was real pumped up about it. At that point we had gotten to about Building Four and it was slow going. . . . Right as I got into the first courtyard of the east side I saw Stansberry walking towards the west and then there was a huge explosion. No one knew what had happened. I looked around the corner and I saw half of a body laying in the middle of the intersection. . . . His head was back and not moving [and] he did not have any legs at all. . . . We started moving up that way and then all of a sudden there was an explosion right in the middle of the group of us. It was SGT Stout, SGT Hubbard, SGT Hatton, Alec, me. . . .
As the dust cleared I saw someone on their back with their helmet blown off and they were missing both legs from what I could see. I looked around at first, a little stunned and didn’t know what to do. I was scared to go up because of secondaries. I ended up just running up and pulled out a CAT and began putting it on SGT Stout’s left leg. . . . I saw his face as he looked down all confused and then he saw his legs and just let his head fall back. . . . When I got closer I saw that his left arm had been blown off as well. . . .
[They stayed in the fight for three more days.] The last night I was there I ended up sleeping in a body bag because it was so cold and we had nothing else. We all felt like gypsies. I think SGT Stout was fucking with us and looking out for us because a dud—the only one in the three days we were mortared—landed right in the middle of the platoon. . . .
We all had to sit down with CPT Stone to talk about everything. We had to say where we were and how we felt when it happened. It was really hard and there was a lot of tears let out and a lot of anger. There are a few guys that are psych casualties and are going to KAF. . . .
We have been here for two months [and] 5 days and I don’t know how we are all going to make it another 10 months. One of the worst parts was when I had to go back over with [the bomb disposal squad] to be their local security. I didn’t want to send my men back over there. I was scared shitless, to be honest. I had to see the crater from the IED that hit SGT Stout. There were pieces of his flesh all over the area and bees were eating it. . . . It was horrifying. I felt compelled to pick them up and bury them in the crater. I know it is disgusting but it just didn’t feel right. . . .
I can’t remember what I have said and what I haven’t. I guess I’ll go back and edit later if I get around to it. Life is too fragile and short to worry [about] all this inconsequential shit. Things really get put into perspective out here. I never want to leave on a bad note with anyone back home.
—Journal of Lieutenant Tim Hopper
In Kabul, among N.A.T.O. ambassadors and the generals and colonels at I.S.A.F.’s command headquarters that summer, it was regarded as an open secret that President Obama’s heart wasn’t in fighting the Afghan war to the last Taliban. It was equally well understood that many of Obama’s advisers on Afghan strategy at the White House, including Doug Lute and his deputy, the former Navy SEAL Jeff Eggers, did not believe the surge of American troops into Kandahar and Herat and the plans to connect the Afghan people to a reforming Karzai government would produce durable success. At best, the doubters in Kabul and at the White House thought, the sacrifices made by the likes of Kyle Stout would buy the equivalent of what Henry Kissinger, speaking to Richard Nixon about withdrawal from Vietnam, once cynically described as “some formula that holds the thing together a year or two, after which . . . no one will give a damn.”25
Yet Petraeus was revered by some of Obama’s most forceful foreign policy critics in Congress, such as Republican senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham. Whatever Obama thought privately about Petraeus’s prospects in Afghanistan, the president had clearly handed the war to the most qualified general available. Yet all the skepticism, ambivalence, and signaling of withdrawal plans from the White House frustrated Petraeus. Of course there was no purely military solution in Afghanistan, he argued, but there was a military context, and unless they seized the time they had to change facts on the ground, to discourage and set back the Taliban significantly, there would be no hope for diplomacy, either. Obama’s reelection and legacy were at risk in Afghanistan. Why give the enemy hope?26
Petraeus had no on-the-ground experience of Afghanistan. He had served two tours in Iraq before leading the Baghdad surge of 2007. He had developed an informed understanding of Iraqi politics, particularly the critical position of the country’s Sunni minority, whose grievances had fired the anti-American insurgency after 2004 and opened space for the rise of Al Qaeda in Iraq. Petraeus had no comparable knowledge of the Taliban or the grievances the movement had exploited while reviving itself with I.S.I. support. Instead, in talking about the problem of political legitimacy after he arrived in Kabul, Petraeus often reduced the Karzai problem to “corruption,” which he vowed to eradicate through investigations and prosecutions, as if the war-bloated Afghan political economy could be quickly reshaped by technocratic or judicial effort.
After Petraeus arrived at I.S.A.F. headquarters, the general often said he understood that Afghanistan was different from Iraq. He had produced papers spelling out the differences—the absence of resources in Afghanistan, the lack of infrastructure, the massive problems of corruption and drugs. Yet he couldn’t help himself—he spoke repeatedly to Afghans, N.A.T.O. generals, and his command team about how he had succeeded in Baghdad. He made Freudian slips, saying “Iraq” when he meant to say “Afghanistan.” His references to Iraq deeply irritated European colleagues in Kabul, as well as Afghan counterparts.27
By now counterinsurgency theory, which had thrilled so much of Washington in 2007 and 2008, had lost its varnish. An anonymous wag at the U.S. embassy in Kabul dispatched a mocking “Sensitive But Unclassified” cable to Washington titled “A KEY STRATEGIC TIPPING-POINT GAME-CHANGER.” It posited:
The primary challenge in Afghanistan has become the ability to get fidelity on the problem set. Secondarily, we need to shape the battlefield and dial it in. Whether or not we can add this to a stairway to heaven remains to be seen, but the importance of double tapping it cannot be overlooked. After getting smart so that we do not lose the bubble, the long pole in the tent needs to be identified. Once we have pinned the rose on someone, then we must send them downrange. Then we must define the delta so it can be lashed up. This can be difficult, as there are a lot of moving parts; in the end, it is all about delivery.
To some American generals and colonels who worked with Petraeus that summer of 2010, he seemed tired and worn out. He had been going hard since 2003; this was his fourth overseas command in seven years. He had endured radiation treatment for early-stage prostate cancer the previous year. In addition to seeming run down, he also seemed impatient. Petraeus seemed to have an unshakable theory of the case in Afghanistan, namely, that he could recreate in the country a version of the “Sunni awakening” in Iraq, in which the United States had supported and paid Sunni tribes as they turned against Al Qaeda. Petraeus pressured Hamid Karzai to back his plan to rapidly arm and pay village levies around Afghanistan. Karzai feared creating more fragmented militias beyond anyone’s control but reluctantly gave in. His a
nd his cabinet’s ambivalence slowed the program. In any event, relatively few Taliban took the offer to “reintegrate,” certainly not enough to change the war’s contours. If Taliban soldiers or units wanted to leave the battlefield, they mainly just retreated to Pakistan and settled there.
The PowerPoint slides displayed by the general’s counterinsurgency advisory team, describing the structure of the Taliban insurgency, showed big red lines emanating from Pakistan. There was not a counterinsurgency campaign on record that succeeded when the guerrillas enjoyed a deep cross-border sanctuary, the team’s briefers conceded; they would have to hope this would be an exception. Petraeus’s strategy included energizing Special Operations Forces that conducted night raids and direct assaults on Taliban commanders. He sought to dramatically increase military pressure on the Taliban in a short time; the clock was ticking, as the first surge forces would start to leave in a year. To Petraeus, this was the war’s biggest factor: that Obama had imposed a deadline and seemed determined to follow it, no matter the facts on the ground. To do something fast about corruption, Petraeus appointed a charismatic one-star general he had worked with in Iraq, H. R. McMaster, to run a kind of organized crime strike force in Kabul. Somehow, when all this pressure and effort came together, Petraeus believed, enough Taliban field commanders and fighters would change sides, from the grass roots, to swing momentum in the Kabul government’s favor and buy time for the buildup of Afghan security forces. When officers held over from McChrystal’s tour questioned his assumptions, Petraeus could be direct: He was tired of debating his strategy, he was going to prosecute the war violently on the short time line available, and he needed people around him who would execute and not create distractions.28
At a hollow square table in a secure inner room at I.S.A.F. headquarters, with regional commanders around Afghanistan piped in by video, Petraeus presided each morning over an update briefing. European generals in attendance that summer, as well as some of McChrystal’s holdover American command, were shocked by how Petraeus proceeded. The general seemed much more interested in body counts and Special Operations night raids than they had expected, given his reputation as a politics-and-people-minded general. Petraeus went out of his way at the morning updates to praise news of midlevel Taliban commanders killed or detained. When J.S.O.C. presented its overnight body counts, Petraeus “was all huzzahs,” as a senior participant put it.29
Petraeus remained a multidimensional general interested in such matters as economic development, the future of Afghan mining, regional diplomacy, and counternarcotics. Yet night raids by American Special Forces grew fivefold between 2009 and the end of 2010. Between early May and early August 2010 alone, by I.S.A.F.’s count, American Special Forces killed 365 Taliban “commanders” and captured some 1,400 Taliban foot soldiers in nighttime operations. Petraeus felt that he had inherited a crisis of confidence among the troops under his command because of the way McChrystal’s euphemism of “courageous restraint” had played with the rank and file. He was determined to use all the forces he had as aggressively as he could, to take back districts from the Taliban and hand them over to the government, which Petraeus was trying with equal speed to clean up.30
The general regarded Kandarian’s campaign in the Taliban heartland as central. “The Taliban are now losing infrastructure, in Panjwei and Arghandab. It’s really very impressive,” he said as the fighting in the green zone raged. That area constituted the Taliban’s “most important sanctuaries in Afghanistan,” he continued. “They’ve lost their infrastructure. They’ve lost massive amounts of weapons and I.E.D. materials. They can’t go back—not easily.”31
September 9, 2010: The last month has been a blur of shittiness. Today LT Weaver the new platoon leader for 1st Platoon was killed by a pressure-plate I.E.D. They were out setting [an] ambush and while he was emplacing a security position he hit the I.E.D. He was a triple amputee and had a large laceration on his neck. He was done by the time Shannon (Doc) got there. . . . These are people’s lives that we are playing with here. The entirety of that did not hit me until I got letters from SGT Stout’s family and saw his memorial DVD. This shit is fucking with me. When I go home I am going to break down bad. . . . I am going to need Jenny in a bad way. When someone is killed out here it is not just an NCO, soldier, leader, etc. . . . It is someone’s uncle brother cousin friend boyfriend husband son father etc. . . . LT Weaver was 26 years old and his daughter just turned one a couple of weeks ago.
—Journal of Lieutenant Tim Hopper
Combined Task Force Strike’s Operation Dragon Strike opened early in September, in the midst of Ramadan. After a summer of walking probes and hard learning, Kandarian launched a systematic campaign of air assaults by helicopter and infantry backed by air support to clear out Taliban and push the area of American control toward the Arghandab River. The Combat Aviation Brigade eventually mounted 863 air assaults in the green zone, or just under three a day. These included everything from operations that lifted a platoon by Chinook behind Taliban positions to full-on rocket and bombing assaults by Apaches and fighter-bombers. On the ground, every hundred yards remained a slog. Operation Dragon Wrath followed and then Operation Dragon Descent. Eventually Kandarian built a huge ten-foot concrete wall in the green zone, similar to Israel’s security wall in the West Bank, to make it harder for the Taliban on the southern side to creep back up toward Highway 1. By November, as the foliage browned and thinned, the Combat Aviation Brigade could fly with greater freedom, mapping and attacking Taliban positions. By the time they had finished, there could be no doubt that Kandarian had won the tactical battle in the green zone, killing or removing Taliban from large sections south of Highway 1. It would require two more years to fully clear the zone, however. The question remained: Would the territorial gains endure, and even if they did, was such sacrifice in lives and limbs necessary to protect vital American interests?
The purpose of the assault on the green zone in 2010 was to strengthen the “transfer” phase of the troop surge plan, to partner with Afghan forces that would soon take the lead. Yet unbeknownst to Kandarian and his lieutenants fighting through the “blur of shittiness” on the front lines, Hamid Karzai had lost faith in the American military’s ability to achieve shared objectives.
During Ramadan that September, Zalmay Khalilzad was in Kabul sharing iftar, or fast-breaking dinners, with Karzai. The former ambassador had maintained his relationship with Karzai despite the strains of 2009. Khalilzad tried to make himself useful to the Obama administration by reporting on what he heard privately from Karzai. His reports from the iftar dinners in the middle of Operation Dragon Strike were stark.
Karzai “thinks the United States is undermining him,” Khalilzad relayed. “He does not believe in Petraeus’s strategy.” He believes there is “too much American face on the war” and that he has been treated with “total disrespect.” Karzai told Khalilzad that he wanted “the U.S. to stay for a hundred years, but this can’t succeed, the way [counterinsurgency] is being carried out. The real war is in Pakistan.”
Alarmed at his alienation, Khalilzad told Karzai in reply, “You can’t destroy the whole country for a personal vendetta.”32
At the platoon level, increasingly the estrangement was mutual. There was no way to generalize about relations among American and Afghan soldiers under the pressure of the green zone’s intense combat. They often fought hard together, sacrificed for one another, took extraordinary risks, and chased off Taliban in tandem. I.S.A.F. statistics showed that joint patrols were attacked less often than when Americans went out alone. Yet there was rampant indiscipline among the Afghans and it was no small problem among the Americans. One of Sergeant Josh Strickland’s soldiers made a bong out of an apple and got his whole squad stoned before battle, a practice inspired by routine prebattle smoking by their Afghan counterparts. (“When I smoke hashish, I fight and I’m brave,” one Afghan soldier explained to Hopper. “When I don’t smoke hashish,
I hide behind a rock.”) The more serious issue was an atmosphere in which both sides knew that intramural violence—what I.S.A.F. would later label the “insider threat” to American troops—could erupt at any moment. Strickland alone counted four serious incidents. An American sergeant asked an Afghan counterpart carrying a loaded weapon on base to put the safety on and the Afghan sergeant responded by putting the barrel of his gun in the American’s mouth. (He did not fire.) Another time, Strickland joined colleagues in a weapons-drawn standoff with about twenty Afghan National Army allies before reason prevailed. An A.N.A. unit once shot at Strickland while he was maneuvering with a small “kill team” against the Taliban. On another patrol, the A.N.A. appeared to tip the Taliban to where Strickland’s platoon would arrive; the enemy had three or four snipers in position. By late 2010 I.S.A.F. command’s “shoulder-to-shoulder” slogans sounded increasingly strained to soldiers on the front lines.33
It would be the following spring before the Second Combat Brigade could go home. Its platoons endured 116 Taliban I.E.D. detonations while on foot patrol in the green zone over eleven months—in the toughest period of the summer and early autumn of 2010, they took an average of about one booby-trapped or pressure-plate strike every other day. Sixty-five of their soldiers died. Four hundred seventy-seven were wounded, 60 percent of those so badly that they had to be medically retired for life. The wounded included thirty-three single, double, or triple amputees.34
Among those who survived intact was Lieutenant Tim Hopper. Between patrols, he relieved stress by playing Call of Duty: Black Ops on a PlayStation. He listened to music and tried to keep his platoon safe. Outside his tent hung a welded sign that had been sent in a care package by the father of one of his men. The sign memorialized informally I.S.A.F.’s naming of a newly built combat outpost on the frontier of American control in the green zone, near Objective Bakersfield: C.O.P. STOUT.35
