One Hundred Victories (33 page)

At a security shura in Orgun in late 2012, the topic came into full view. The Orgun district chief of police raised the issue, saying he was concerned about the Afghan CIA force that operated in eastern Paktika. Some of its members regularly came to the bazaar high on hashish, and no one would control them. When complaints were brought to Commander Wazir, the Afghan head of the unit, he shrugged them off. Other Afghan officials then chimed in with their complaints. Aziz acknowledged the issue, adding that the Afghan Local Police commanders complained that they were losing men whom they had already trained to the CIA force, which paid triple the wages. Others chimed in on that point; national police and army soldiers were apparently also being lured away to join this force. The Afghans all seemed to agree that there were significant problems, but no one knew what to do. Absent from the discussion was the National Defense Service, Afghan intelligence, which nominally controlled the force. It did not appear that any of the Afghans around the table expected the NDS to address their concerns.
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A special operations officer in the room listened silently as the discussion proceeded. As the only American official in the room, he felt that it was important to clarify one key issue. He did not have authority to speak about the counterterrorism force, but he could see the consternation it was causing among the Afghan security forces. He leaned forward from his seat against the wall to make his only statement of the meeting. “You all are the government of Afghanistan. This is your country. If Afghans are violating your laws, you are completely within your right and responsibility to enforce the law. That is your job.”

The special operations officer was well aware of the brewing complaints. This was not the first time he had heard them. He had tried to raise the issues with the CIA base chief, who blew him off. The existence of yet another armed entity operating under a separate chain of command was bound to trouble any military professional. A senior special operations commander in the United States had previously suggested a possible solution: the force should be folded into the Afghan military chain of command, perhaps under the tutelage and advisory oversight of special operations forces. If the US military left, and the CIA army remained, its loose command and control could result in the very militia running amok that the special operators were constantly accused of creating. The special operators tended to keep a tighter rein on their partner forces than the CIA did. Quite a few in the US military said the Agency’s paramilitary operatives often behaved as if they were answerable to no one, and by and large they were not. The formal purpose of the force was supposedly to run cross-border intelligence operations, but in fact it was operating well inside the border. A small border force might be justifiable, given the likelihood that the threat from Pakistan would continue. But it had become something else entirely.

The CIA’s future orientation became a point of discussion during the confirmation hearings for John O. Brennan’s nomination as the next director of the Central Intelligence Agency in the spring of 2013. Brennan suggested that it might be time to recalibrate the Agency’s focus away from its paramilitary endeavors of the past decade and back to its national strategic intelligence mission. This could entail changes in both the armed drone program run by the Agency and its on-ground paramilitary activities. Although he endorsed the need for some covert paramilitary capacity at the Agency, the question of scale, scope, and mission appeared to be open for reexamination. These same issues were raised, according to a
Washington Post
report, by the president’s intelligence advisory board.
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For all the problems caused by the lack of coordination and command and control, the Agency force fulfilled its intended purpose of targeting insurgent leaders. Paktika’s top insurgent leader, Mullah Nazir, had been living across the border in South Waziristan. In January 2013, he was killed by a drone strike. Given his prominence, his passing would likely change the dynamic of the insurgency in a large area. But would it be a change for the better? If the leadership vacuum was filled by the Haqqani network based in North Waziristan, it might not have the beneficial effect hoped for. In addition, Nazir had expelled foreign fighters from South Waziristan, and a new leader might allow them to move back in.

Kim pushed doggedly ahead with his six-month plan. After plugging the gap with a new checkpoint in Nawi Kalay, he built another checkpoint to further solidify the line in Surobi. Then he moved north to set up a checkpoint manned with new local policemen at a location that would support his move into the long-troublesome Pirkowti Valley. In early January 2013, he teamed up with the US conventional battalion and the Afghan army to make an assault into the valley. The ensuing fight seesawed back and forth for over a week. The battalion commander pushed the Afghan army to commit to stay there, and they built a fort using materials from the dismantled Tillman base. Kim thought the location, atop one of the highest hills in the valley, was perfect; it would give them visibility up and down the main route of the valley and would be hard to take by surprise. The team brought elders of Pirkowti together for a meeting and reminded them of the commitments they had made two years before to Hutch’s team. The elders were doubtful that the Afghan security forces would stay to provide a security blanket for their sons, but finally they agreed to put forward twenty volunteers. Kim’s team began training the first class of recruits in the last week of January.
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The elders were justifiably concerned about the possibility of being left to fend for themselves. In the winter months, the fledgling local police in the new sites were not attacked, but that was certain to change once spring arrived. Insurgent chatter about the new outposts spiked as soon as they were built, so Kim knew it was just a matter a time before they would be tested. The insurgents were likely to hit them hard in an attempt to take back their valley sanctuary. The border area was likely to be plagued indefinitely by attacks from the sanctuary in Pakistan. But Kim believed the Afghan solution might be coming together in Paktika. If the Afghan army, the local policemen, and Aziz began to cooperate routinely, he believed they could hold the bulk of the province. But in the spring, the ISAF command began to bulldoze the base in Sharana, the provincial capital, as the US forces drew down. The Kabul government intervened to stop them. Although the Afghan Air Force was still years from maturity, the government wanted to preserve the runway, which would help resupply and connect the province to the rest of Afghanistan.

As ODA 1411’s tour was nearing its end in March 2013, the team was attacked upon returning from a patrol to the base at Orgun. In the crossfire, Kim was wounded in the head. He was evacuated to Bagram. His senior engineer, Sergeant First Class James Grissom, thirty-​one, was more severely wounded. He was flown on to Landstuhl, Germany, where he died on March 23. Kim underwent surgery for shrapnel removal, but pressed the doctors to allow him to get back to Paktika. After keeping him under observation for his head injuries for a week, the doctors cleared him to return to his team. Kim knew the team was rocked by the loss of their teammate. Grissom, a quirky and witty Californian, had volunteered and come straight into the special forces after graduating from the San Francisco Art Institute. His creativity had blossomed early in life, and he had expressed it in art classes and construction projects. As a youth of eleven, he had built a tree house for neighborhood kids, and as a teenager he had singlehandedly constructed a set for a high-school musical. His teacher said, “It looked like the facade of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre; it was three-​dimensional. It was astounding. He did it by himself in about six hours. He was a wonderful artist.”
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Whenever the team deployed, Kim recalled, Grissom would immediately set about building something with whatever materials he could scavenge to make their locations more comfortable and fun.

Kim left Afghanistan with the conviction that Aziz had been—and would continue to be—an essential part of the Afghan security formula for Paktika. He credited Aziz with vital assistance in building Afghan Local Police in Pirkowti and other sites. His leadership was on display at a weekly security shura held at Aziz’s compound adjoining the US base in Orgun. Aziz presided at the head of the table; the various commanders of the national and local police as well as the border police and army units were arrayed on either side. The district governor sat next to Aziz. Aziz was courteous to the officer representing the Afghan army, but the officer said very little. He sat with his head bowed, scribbling in his notebook, as Aziz succinctly framed the issues and asked relevant follow-up questions. Each security official took turns giving an update on his area of responsibility; the meeting was run as efficiently as any US military update briefing. When they reached the open discussion portion of the shura, Aziz tabled the most urgent issue for the group: whether Afghans were going to continue to man the border posts and attempt to keep them open, and what the consequences would be if they did not. He clearly wanted to rally support among the officials and persuade them to take up their responsibility to defend their borders. He did not blame the United States for leaving, but simply stated, “It is time for us to take over.” He proposed that a vote be taken at the next meeting to force matters to a head.

Kim’s boss hoped to shepherd the conversion of Aziz’s force into an official Provincial Response Company (PRC) before his tour ended.

Other provinces had such paramilitary special police units, which were mentored by multinational special operations forces. Such a move would finally resolve the question of Aziz’s status and make his men a formal part of the Afghan police. The role that Aziz had been playing in the province coincided with the PRC’s functions. The provincial police chief was certainly in favor of the idea, but the question had languished for months. Aziz did not know it yet, but the plan was to move all of the special operations teams to Ghazni, along with the company command. He would be on his own in a very short while.

CHAPTER TEN

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HIGHWAY ONE

Ghazni and Wardak 2012

UPRISING

In the second half of 2012, the special operations command became seized by the desire to focus on Ghazni Province. There were two reasons behind this change of focus. The first was a spontaneous uprising that offered a potential springboard for creating Afghan Local Police in the province, which had not been targeted in the initial program’s design. The second was that the looming US drawdown and transition to a noncombat role in 2014 had galvanized the US and Afghan militaries to work on securing the critical arteries—Highway One between Kandahar and Kabul, and Highway Seven from Kabul to Nangahar. The latter was fairly secure already; the two gaping holes in security along Highway One were in Ghazni and Wardak provinces. The coalition had assigned security in Ghazni to the Polish Army, but its Task Force White Eagle, viewed by many Afghans as Soviets, had largely hunkered down, which did little to pacify the province. Wardak, the object of intermittent waves of intervention and neglect, remained a bleeding sore, a virulent and mountainous insurgent safe haven less than an hour’s drive from Kabul. So in the waning year of combat operations, the rush was on to turn both provinces around.

A special ops team sent to Ghazni quickly developed a sober outlook for their prospects. The history of the province had not been encouraging. The only prior attempt to build local police and conduct stability operations in Ghazni had been made by a SEAL team the previous year in a southerly district called Gelan. The population in Gelan had proved to be entirely unreceptive. Moreover, a conventional battalion attached to the special operations command in Ghazni provided little help and was plagued by internal problems of morale, discipline, and drug use. The only other special operations activity in the province had been raids conducted by Polish special operations forces that were partnered with the Ghazni Provincial Response Company, the paramilitary special police unit. The Poles were new and active members of a growing international special operations consortium, and the mission in Afghanistan, as in Iraq, provided them a valuable training ground to enhance their already considerable skills and to solidify their relations and familiarity with US special operations tactics and equipment. The same was true of the Romanian special operations forces, a newer but equally eager ally, which partnered with the Provincial Response Company in Zabul.

The spontaneous uprising against the Taliban, which occurred in April 2012, was triggered by a Taliban edict to close a school, which the villagers protested. The school was then burned down, prompting men in seven or eight villages south of the district center to take up arms against the Taliban. But by the time the special operations team arrived, several things had occurred to complicate the situation. The original leader of the uprising had been killed in the fighting, and a political figure associated with the Hezb-e Islami Gulbuddin (HIG) faction had subsequently insinuated himself to assert leadership over the movement. The Afghan intelligence service was also involved in backing the defenders, spurred on by the service’s chief, Asadullah Khalid, who was a native of Ghazni and a former governor of the province.