One Hundred Victories (25 page)

True to his nature, Chris found the existence of a Taliban-controlled village—Eshqabad—right across the wadi from their outpost to be intolerable. He viewed it as both an unacceptable security risk and an affront to his warrior nature. The previous team had engaged in endless negotiations with the village elder, who played both sides of the fence and filibustered successfully to avoid taking a stand: he would tell the Americans in private what they wanted to hear—that he was all in favor of raising a local defense force—but no sooner had they departed than he rushed to placate the Taliban and assure them he would do no such thing. The slugger had his own brutally effective negotiating style. One day the team visited the elder, and Chris cornered him into walking with them to the site he had suggested as an ALP checkpoint. Once there, he put the Afghan on the spot and asked him to announce to the villagers who had gathered around that the first checkpoint would be built there. Next, Chris requested that he convene a meeting of the villagers and invite them to volunteer family members for police training. The villagers complied, but the day after the shura, the sons who had been volunteered left for Kandahar City. Undeterred, Chris went ahead and built the checkpoint as agreed. He then turned to Jan Mohammed, the stalwart, squint-eyed ALP commander, who stationed his son and his local police squad there.

In addition to addressing the security threat in Eshqabad, Chris was determined to see what the team could do for the village of Moshak farther north, which remained firmly in the Taliban’s grip. The team arranged a medical and humanitarian mission to the town, which was so poor that little children ran around with no clothes on. They brought a truckload of food, medicine, and clothing and distributed it. The next day, the Taliban roared into town and forced the villagers to bring out all of the donated goods and put them in a pile, which they then set on fire. The message was clear: don’t let the foreigners in, or you will pay for it. The team was not ready to give up, however; they decided to try stealthier means. One of the ALP commanders, Abdullah Hakim, was fanatically committed to the anti-Taliban fight. Two of his sons had been beheaded by the Taliban, so neutrality was not an option for him. He told the team he would go in under cover and attempt to find allies in the town and some useful intelligence. Hansell worried about the risk, knowing that Hakim would be killed if he was caught, but Hakim insisted. “He will do literally anything we ask,” Hansell said in amazement. Hakim was old and weathered, but he had the heart of a lion. A farmer stepped on a mine next to his field, and Hakim came to his rescue. He put a tourniquet on the man’s severed leg, as he had been taught in the ALP’s first aid class, and then carried him on his back to the team medic’s shed. With men like Hakim, Jan Mohammed, and Najibullah, Hansell believed Maiwand had a fighting chance.

Moshak proved impervious to their efforts, however, so Hakim and another ALP commander moved south of Highway One in the first of several sequential moves that Hansell had planned. Hakim used his own home as his base, sandbagging its walls, and began recruiting new trainees. To prepare for the subsequent move farther south into the Taliban no-man’s-land, Hansell wanted some cover for his lightly armed Afghan police. He asked the US battalion commander to build a small observation post and persuaded the local Afghan army commander to man it with a few soldiers. Even though the conventional battalion commander was shutting his main base in preparation for the conventional forces’ departure, he was willing to lend Hansell a hand.

The next move south would be key. The plan was for Jan Mohammed to move into the house he owned in Pir Zadeh, halfway into the Taliban zone. Securing that area would lay the groundwork for the major landowner, Kala Khan, to move back into the zone, where he would use his influence to support the recruitment of local police among his fellow Ishaqzai tribesmen. “We share the same cemetery,” Jan Mohammed said, explaining how close their connection was in Afghan terms. Kala Khan had an economic incentive to support the move: he wanted to resume cultivation of his land and get his products to market. Kala Khan was considered by some military intelligence analysts to be too close to the Taliban to trust, but Hansell believed the road to success in Maiwand ran through Kala Khan, and that his return would bring recruits and momentum to an area long dominated by the Taliban. Kala Khan cut a somewhat mysterious figure. He dressed in the traditional long shirt and a silvery turban, but he always, indoors and out, wore black Ray Ban sunglasses. Hansell was willing to bet that bringing Kala Khan, one of the dominant Ishaqzai figures, into the circle and increasing security for the Ishaqzai population would make them feel less shut out by the majority tribe whose members held the top district jobs and controlled the opium trade.
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By addressing their concerns one by one, Hansell also persuaded the district officials that they would benefit from a larger security bubble, just as he had won the agreement of the ALP commanders to move south. Hansell could talk and plot for hours on end, and Afghans readily took to the energetic extrovert. He would meet Jan Mohammed or the other commanders at their houses, where they would spread a blanket or carpet outside and drink chai as they debated their next moves. Such confabs seemed tedious to his action-oriented sergeants, but Hansell would just stretch out his long frame on the Afghan bolsters and keep up his end of the dialogue. Meanwhile, his team and the local police kept watch or patrolled the nearby field or the alleys between the qalats. Hakim needed no cajoling. He reached out to his contacts in the south and began to collect intelligence on massive troves of arms and homemade bombs the team and the ALP would later seize.

In this most vital aspect of his job—building bridges and reaching agreements with Afghans—Hansell knew he was extraordinarily lucky to have an interpreter of the caliber of Abdullah Niazi. Very few teams, companies, battalions, or even brigades had Category 3 interpreters, the rating the US military gave to its most fluent and highly skilled translators. Niazi’s value and role extended far beyond his linguistic skills. He was intuitive and empathetic, and he could read people in both cultures. Niazi had the skills of a diplomat and was personally attached to the mission. Some interpreters worked for the money, and many Afghan nationals hoped to gain an American visa, but Niazi could return to his business in San Francisco any time he wished. He was there to help his native country regain its footing. He did not want to see the Taliban return to power, and he was distressed by both the violence and the corruption. Niazi tried his best to serve as a bridge between the blunt American culture and the polite Afghan one; many soldiers had caused offense with crude, ignorant, or bullying behavior, often without even realizing it. Many of them had no idea how deftly Niazi smoothed over such affronts with his own warm, humorous touch.
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Hansell did listen closely to “Abdullah Khan,” as he called him out of respect and endearment. Niazi, though, was soon exhausted by Hansell’s pace and penchant for nighttime meetings. He would sigh and brew a new pot of tea to keep himself going. Hansell worked virtually around the clock, napping for an hour or two on the couch in the operations center. Like many operators, he availed himself of the steady supply of energy drinks in the team’s cooler. Sugar-free pomegranate Pit Bull was his favorite. To lay the groundwork for their move south, Hansell and the team made forays there in the dead of night to meet secretly with sources and potential allies who could not be seen with them in daylight. Other times they would bring the Afghans into the shura room in the qalat.

Abdullah Niazi believed that Hansell was on solid ground in building his strategy around the one-eyed Jan Mohammed, who he believed had the character, leadership, and standing in Maiwand to be an enduring pillar of the ALP. The old Afghan had committed himself and his sons to the fight, was respected as a warrior from the Soviet era, and had deep roots in Maiwand. His craggy face was softened by a grandfatherly gleam in his eye. He had cast his lot with the Americans to support the government, and he had the backbone to persevere in the face of adversity. One day in the spring, Jan Mohammed and his son were crossing the wadi from Eshqabad. The son’s truck was in the lead and hit an IED. The bomb blasted through the floor, killing the driver and tearing off the son’s arm as he sat in the passenger side of the cab. The entire front of the white Toyota was twisted like a pretzel, its engine block damaged beyond repair. Miraculously, the son survived. Jan Mohammed was outraged at the injury to his son, but he was not about to abandon the checkpoint or cede the battle for Maiwand.

An even greater threat to Hansell’s forward momentum than the attack on Jan Mohammed occurred just a few weeks later. Early on the morning of March 11, Hansell received word that a mass shooting had occurred in Panjwayi District next door—at the exact spot where a special operations team was based. Hansell was ordered to halt all operations and keep his team inside the compound while his superior officers looked into what had happened and what it might mean for them. It turned out to be far, far worse than any of them could have imagined. In the middle of the night, Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, the head of the conventional infantry squad that was attached to the special operations team to provide security at Camp Belambay, had walked out of the camp’s compound and gone berserk. He systematically went into homes in two villages where he shot and killed sixteen Afghans, including children, and then piled up some of the bodies and set them on fire. It would later come to light that Bales had been drinking as well as taking drugs. There were rumors of marital problems and a missed promotion, but it was not immediately apparent what had triggered such senseless savagery.

Hansell, following the instructions he had been given, immediately instituted a lockdown. His men were forbidden to communicate with anyone. The conventional infantrymen attached to his team were from the same platoon as Bales, including the platoon leader, who was frantic to find out what had happened to Bales. Hansell felt strongly that he needed to be out communicating with Maiwand officials and the population, but the orders from Kabul were unequivocal: no one was to leave their bases. The only thing he was permitted to say was that a shooting had occurred by a lone gunman and that the matter was being investigated.
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Afghan national and provincial leaders moved swiftly to pacify hundreds of outraged villagers who gathered at the gate of the Panjwayi base and district center. The elders put the burned bodies of children into trucks and brought them to the growing crowd. American helicopters ferried the president’s brother, Qayum Karzai, as well as the governor and other top officials, to the district to meet with them and calm the crowd. The Afghan leaders suggested that the American commanders stay out of sight as they worked to defuse the situation.

Meanwhile, in Maiwand, Hansell asked Captain Najibullah to take his special forces team out on patrol to talk to people in the district center and surrounding villages. Najibullah went without hesitation. Hansell then turned his attention to the members of Bales’s platoon who were there in the qalat with his team. He called a meeting in the plywood operations center. The young men shuffled in, hushed and downcast. Hansell told them that a chaplain would be available to talk to them individually. He emphasized again that no one was to say anything about the matter—not on the phone, not on the Internet. As an extra precaution, he told them, he had suspended the Internet hookup on the communal computer in the dining hut. The soldiers shifted uncomfortably, avoiding each other’s eyes. No one said anything, and Hansell dismissed them. They had felt like outsiders before, and now they felt like pariahs.

General Haas, the special operations commander in Kabul, had issued the orders because evidence-gathering and due process were critical issues from the moment the killings were discovered: any investigation could be easily tainted if it was not handled by the book. Haas expected one of the senior military commands to take over; he only had one young military lawyer on his staff, and his command did not have general court-martial convening authority. But no one did. In the days and weeks of meetings and video teleconferences that followed, Haas’s lawyer, a major from Florida, found herself bombarded by demands from other commands and pressured to make facts public quickly. Haas told her he would support whatever she needed to protect the integrity of the investigation. The other commands’ judge advocates were advising their commanders to stay clear of the controversy so they would not be tainted or burdened by the tough choices that would have to be made. Haas was chagrined, but at this point he was not surprised. He regarded the pressure being placed on his young lawyer as unlawful command influence. Of his stalwart young major, he said, simply, “she is my hero.”
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Thanks in good part to her effort, the procedures were followed to ensure due process despite the remote, war-torn location of the crime. Investigators made it to Belambay to gather evidence, witnesses were identified and deposed, and Bales was sent back in chains to his home base of Fort Lewis, in Washington, which was set as the venue for the trial. At a preliminary legal hearing at Fort Lewis, tearful survivors recounted the grisly details of the systematic shooting over a video link. The massacre was the My Lai moment of the Afghan war. The military prosecutor asked for the death penalty, but Bales pled guilty to avoid that sentence.

US commanders credited Afghan officials’ actions with containing the fallout from the massacre. Raziq, the police chief, gave the surviving family members free, permanent housing in a building he owned near the police headquarters. The US military paid millions of dollars in compensation. At first the families refused the payments. At the meeting where they eventually accepted the money, one of the Afghan men emphasized that their acceptance of the payment did not constitute forgiveness. A young girl who was badly wounded was flown to California for extensive medical care. It had been quickly agreed that the team at Belambay should be moved elsewhere; after such a catastrophic event, there would be little to gain and much to risk from their continued presence. Another team would remain at the district center. The special operations battalion commander for Kandahar, Lieutenant Colonel Richard Navarro, went to Belambay with his company commander and sergeants major the morning after the massacre. It became clear that Bales had been drinking with other squad members in violation of General Order Number One Bravo, which applied to all servicemen and women in Afghanistan, as well as taking steroids and other drugs. Navarro found no evidence that the special operations team leader had been complicit, and the team sergeant had been at Kandahar Airfield recovering from an IED attack.
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This egregious crime fed Haas’s growing concern, however, that the US military was suffering a breakdown in discipline after a decade of war. For those troops posted at the remote special operations bases, an extra measure of maturity and discipline was required to cope with the dearth of recreation and support services, the heightened threat, and a heavy workload.