One Hundred Victories (27 page)

Back at Ezabad, Chris, the team sergeant, was furious at the news of the wounded soldiers. Furious, but not surprised. He knew that hasty plans resulted in mortal risk. The one bright spot was the stellar performance of his medic, Dan, under an extreme test of his skills. Keeping two multiple amputees alive so far from any base was a feat in itself. Chris knew this firsthand, as he had been a medic before becoming team sergeant. Dan was talented, and Chris praised him in the typical tough-guy way. He teased him by calling him “Handsome Dan”; the young man was indeed movie-star handsome, a Josh Hartnett lookalike. But he was modest and serious, unaffected by his own good looks. He had not chosen to be a medic, but once he began the training he had taken to it, and now he planned to pursue it as a career when he left the service. He had kept his head in the chaos and taken every step to stabilize the gravely injured men. The initial care usually determined the chances of survival.

A few days later, the team received a video greeting from the wounded Afghan soldier that had been sent by one of the company’s sergeants who had visited him in the hospital. The young man, conscious and propped up in his bed, offered a wan greeting to his fellow soldiers with his bandaged arm. Hansell immediately went to find Najibullah to share the video with him. Two weeks later, however, they received the news that after receiving multiple surgeries, Louis had passed away in San Antonio.

The grievous injuries at Deqobad affected morale, which was already low. Half of the team remained at Ezabad to oversee the ALP operations in central Maiwand; these operators captured some massive caches in southern Maiwand, but they were forbidden to recruit ALP there. Hansell’s half of the team recruited men for the ALP at Deqobad and trained police in Zhari at the base a few kilometers to the north, a dual tasking that was stressful and exhausting for a handful of men operating in an unfamiliar, hostile area. Training Zhari police in eastern Maiwand did not sit well with the team; it was contrary to the special operators’ procedure. Teams normally trained recruits near their homes so they could continue to vet them and their families and learn about any Taliban ties they might have. It was part of the continual intelligence-gathering that provided crucial insights and kept the men working with them safe.

But RC-South cared about output: the command wanted 120 more police recruits and wanted them fast. Hansell went to have dinner with the Maiwand police chief, Sultan Mohammed, to appeal for his help. Over dessert, as they sat among the lush grass and fragrant basil bushes of the district center garden, the chief promised to send his crack IED detector and a few men to help staff the police post. He called over his deputy to give him the order. Hansell knew that the chief saw an opportunity to expand his poppy-taxing scheme, and this had tipped the scales in the Afghan’s decision, but Hansell had little choice but to accept the tacit bargain. His team needed help securing the area and conducting its dual mission. He and his team had relied heavily on Najibullah and his men, but Najibullah was leaving in a few days to visit his wounded soldier and take his long postponed leave. Hansell would remain haunted by that man’s life-changing injury and Louis’s death.

Jan Mohammed came to Ezabad one day to see Hansell, who had been spending most of his time in Deqobad. “We’re not going south, are we?” the old Afghan said to him sorrowfully, more as a statement than a question. He would soldier on, just as he had after his son was wounded, but he was disappointed. Hansell did not have the heart to lie to him.

After a long military career and a decade at war, Hansell’s company sergeant major, J. R. Jones, was steeled to accept the loss of men and decisions that went against the views of soldiers on the ground. It was all office politics to him, or “militics,” as another senior noncommissioned officer dubbed it. But others who were less stoic had a harder time swallowing what had happened: it was heartbreaking to lose men because commanders could not come together around the right plan. Special forces tended to view themselves as the stepchildren of the army, unloved by their “big army” brothers, but that fatalism did not help solve the problems created by a dual chain of command.
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Jones took a long view of the special operations effort in Afghanistan: he had spent most of the past decade in that country. He was emphatically in favor of building local police, but, like Chris, he doubted that the special operators would have enough time to make a local police force succeed in Afghanistan. “We did this hamlet program first in Vietnam,” Jones said. “But we are working on a compressed timeline here.” He ticked off the benefits of local defense forces. “The local police know what is going on. They tell us who is who. The conventional [US] forces do not see what is going on. They do not know which ones are carrying guns or planting bombs,” he said. The Afghan army could not do the job alone, he added, especially in a rural insurgency. “You can’t just surround the enemy and squeeze him in a rural fight like this. If you don’t have police and government, you will not win,” he said. But time was the critical ingredient: the triad of competent army, police, and government could not be built overnight.

Although Jones often self-deprecatingly referred to his Mississippi origins, he spoke with authority grounded in his training and experience in war zones. Jones, Navarro, and Jones’s company commander, Angel Martinez, had not only been in and out of Afghanistan for a decade. During that same decade, when they were not in Afghanistan, they had been deployed to Colombia. The two experiences offered a stark contrast. The three men had been intimately involved in what turned out to be a successful mission in Colombia that was little known outside the circle of special operators who had spent time there, patiently assisting every branch of the Colombian military and its special police units at every level all over the country. They had helped to build a proficient special operations brigade in a comprehensive and continuous program carried out with a few hundred American advisers, and they had supplied advisers to other units and commands. The US government had also sent development aid, helicopters, and counternarcotics assistance totaling about $7 billion over the decade—a large amount in terms of the US foreign assistance budget, but a pittance compared to the cost of the war in Afghanistan.

Colombia had been transformed dramatically. The once besieged government pushed the fifty-year-old insurgency out of the half of the country where they held sway, and captured or killed most of the top leaders. The remnants had recently opened peace talks with the government, heralding a possible end to that war. How was it that the United States had succeeded so well in helping Colombia and lost its way in Afghanistan? Why had it taken eight years to adopt the right playbook in Afghanistan—just as the American public had grown exhausted with the effort? Colombia was a more developed country, but its government had been riddled with corruption, its military ill supported, and the guerrilla groups strong. One key difference was that the United States had never doubted that its central mission was to advise and assist—to help the Colombian government beat back the threat and strengthen its military and government—rather than to kill and capture. Another important difference was that success had been achieved through a succession of strong ambassadors, a unified military, and interagency effort. The efforts in Colombia had not been derailed by infighting among generals. Would it be possible, in the time left, to change the Afghanistan playbook to more closely mirror the successful formula used in Colombia?

CHAPTER EIGHT

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SEALS DO FOREIGN
INTERNAL DEFENSE, TOO

Uruzgan and Zabul 2012

SEALS TAKE CHARGE

US Army Special Forces had been in Uruzgan from the earliest days of the war, but no one had envisioned or articulated the endgame for this province, a key safe haven that insurgents used to launch attacks on Kandahar, the political center of gravity of Pashtun Afghanistan. Because of its deemed second-tier importance, it had been mostly left to the special operations teams and a handful of Dutch and Australian forces, including Australian special operators. Uruzgan was plagued by formidable terrain and by feuding among the Barakzai, Popalzai, and Ghilzai Pashtuns as well as the Hazarans. Zabul Province, next door, had been almost entirely ignored; it was a playground for insurgents who had sunk deep roots into the Ghilzai population.

SEAL Commander Mike Hayes aimed to change that state of affairs. The SEALs had been given command of a newly formed Special Operations Task Force–Southeast covering Uruzgan and Zabul provinces when the Afghan Local Police initiative kicked off in 2010. The SEALs were needed to help with this expanding foreign internal defense (FID) mission to train and advise Afghan police. SEALs had done foreign internal defense all over the world, and FID is a mission that special ops forces are assigned to carry out by military doctrine and law. This is not widely known, however, because the SEALs traditionally have emphasized direct action and special reconnaissance as their core missions, particularly in their recruiting, training, and publicity.

So, despite the fact that FID was expected of SEALs, there was plenty of grumbling all around when the SEALs were put in charge of Uruzgan and Zabul. Army special forces regarded the area as their turf and their mission. SEAL operators for the most part had joined the SEALs because they wanted to become precision raiders who conducted high-intensity, high-impact commando operations to locate, capture, or kill terrorists, hostage takers, or other evildoers. They moved into Tarin Kowt as touchy-feely recruiters of village defenders who were expected to manage a far-flung network of outposts, a managerial task for which SEAL teams were not organized, trained, or equipped. Needless to say, the first commander, J. R. Anderson, went through a lot of growing pains as his hard-charging SEAL staff learned new and mostly deskbound skills, including the lingo and hardware of army logistics and intelligence systems, since they were plugging into an army-dominated structure. Anderson was a smooth character, but he had a few run-ins with the higher command. His senior noncommissioned officer chewed nails the entire time. He had just come off a high-speed tour with SEAL Team Six, one of the United States’ tier-one special mission units. His body language made no secret of the fact that he thought this assignment was a very bad fit.
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SEALs had successfully conducted tactical-level foreign internal defense missions around the world—training, advising, and fighting alongside other countries’ forces. After clearing Iraq’s waterways alongside the elite Polish GROM commandos, they had trained and fought with Iraqi counterterrorism units. They had done the same with Colombian commandos and marines, with Filipino and Thai marines, and, more recently, with African units from Kenya to Cameroon. In their earliest years, SEALs had worked with indigenous forces in Vietnam. Their greatest recent success in this line of work had been in the Philippines, where SEALs and other special operators had deployed repeatedly to train, advise, and support Filipino forces fighting the Abu Sayyaf terrorist group in the fractious islands of Basilan and Mindanao. SEALs coached the Filipinos on conducting maritime raids with fast boats and were instrumental in tracking one of the Abu Sayyaf leaders using US surveillance drones. Ultimately, he was captured following a high-speed waterborne chase. The Americans sped alongside the Filipinos in their own zodiac boats, letting the Filipinos move in for the takedown.
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When Mike Hayes and SEAL Team Two moved into Uruzgan in 2012, Hayes was ready with guidance for his troops and a plan. He had an unusual background in that he had just left the White House, where he had worked for two years on the National Security Council staff. He had applied to be a White House Fellow, and then Denis McDonough, one of President Barack Obama’s closest advisers, asked him to stay on for another year to work on piracy issues in the Persian Gulf as well as other sensitive special operations projects. Since 9/11 a string of smart SEALs had worked on counterterrorism issues in the White House, starting with Admiral Bill McRaven, who had drafted the counterterrorism strategy later issued by President George W. Bush. Hayes was smart and ambitious and had a head for policy and strategy. He had earned a master’s degree at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and had become a member of the Council on Foreign Relations while at the White House. But he was not just a policy wonk: he had deployed multiple times to Latin America, the Balkans, and Iraq, where he was deputy commander of the special ops task force in Anbar Province. Hayes was motivated by a desire to succeed, but he was also a devout Catholic, and his religion—though he did not wear it on his sleeve—shaped his service ethic and his view of leadership. He wanted to make a difference in the world.

Hayes spent a great deal of time and thought preparing to take command in Uruzgan. Having just departed the White House, and still in close touch with his former colleagues there, he was all too aware that it was late in the war and that the administration was determined to draw down. Before he arrived in Afghanistan, Hayes laid out his guidance in twenty-five succinctly worded edicts that he thought conveyed the essential approach and mindset necessary for his team to succeed in a difficult task. His central message was to support Afghans and not act unilaterally. One edict, for example, was, “Every action should contribute to the creation of a self-reliant Afghanistan.” He exhorted his team members to eschew meaningless metrics, writing, “Don’t confuse outputs with outcomes.” He insisted that they avoid civilian casualties at all costs: “Don’t ask yourself, Can I shoot?” he wrote, but rather, “
Should I shoot?
” Hayes also reminded his troops to pay equal attention to governance and development and to engage with the population. He urged them to reach out to the youth, in particular, drawing a parallel that he hoped would resonate and make his men realize how profound their impact could be: “Every one of us remembers … a teacher who positively influenced our lives.…You will never know what small gesture of interaction will last a lifetime.” He concluded with injunctions to behave collegially, reminding them of the sense of commitment that had led them to volunteer.
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