One Hundred Victories (34 page)

In late September, three teams arrived in Ghazni: one in Andar District, where the uprising had occurred, and two in districts farther south on Highway One.
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ODA 1326, led by Captain Terrence Jackson, moved into plywood huts in a small base adjoining the Andar district center, where the governor and police chief worked. The team launched into action to recruit, vet, and train local police according to the standard methods, and by mid-November it had trained and fielded thirty-nine policemen.

The team referred to these as “legitimate” ALP, to distinguish them from the original defenders. Jackson’s police were selected, vetted, trained, and equipped in the manner approved by the Afghan Ministry of the Interior. The team was essentially trying to set up a competing local defense force that was not under HIG influence. In the face of the Taliban’s concerted counterattack, that original group of defenders had dwindled from about 250 to 150. “They are not very proficient tactically,” Jackson’s intelligence officer said. “Basically they are a bunch of farmers on motorcycles.” The Taliban had long held sway in northern Ghazni and would not leave without a fight. They killed and kidnapped several of the resistance fighters and burned two houses, and in October, three more men in the resistance were killed by a grenade. Jackson’s intelligence officer offered up a grim overall assessment: the entire anti-Taliban resistance was quailing and might collapse under the steady barrage of counterattacks.
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The anti-Taliban factions needed help if they were going to hold the line. No Afghan commandos were available to go to Ghazni, but three Afghan special forces teams were sent there to reinforce the three American special forces teams. They were not there long before they came under attack. In November, the Taliban ambushed the new police and the US and Afghan special ops forces while on patrol. Amid the firefight, an IED exploded, and the Afghan special forces captain and his driver suffered concussions. As the captain recuperated in his plywood quarters at the spare base, he said that the outlook was not good. “The population here does not support the government, so they are not giving us information,” he said. After his Humvee had been blown up, his team resorted to foot patrols to avoid IEDs. The captain had fought in seven different provinces over the past five years, and he said that the fighting in Ghazni was heavier than anywhere else he had been except for Helmand.

Greater optimism prevailed higher up the chain of command. The special ops company commander, Major Jason Clarke, had an ambitious plan for building Afghan Local Police in the four districts of Ghazni that straddled Highway One. His teams would have to carry out the plan without much help from US conventional forces, who were in the process of pulling out their small element of less than three companies, which were scattered at various outposts in the province. Clarke launched an intelligence effort to help his teams. Little collection or analysis had been done in Ghazni, as few US troops had been sent there over the past decade. What information existed was focused on the enemy. Clarke made an aggressive effort to collect and fuse data on the population, the community’s economic needs, and the social and political leaders in the community using Palantir software, an expensive commercial system that created and organized open-source and classified data into searchable formats that could be manipulated, displayed graphically, and harnessed to the purposes of Village Stability Operations.
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The short timeline and the pressure to create Afghan Local Police limited just how much social science research could be conducted. Moreover, the questions that Clarke was trying to research were not easily answered, since they involved gaining a comprehensive understanding of province and district dynamics, not just who the bad guys were and where they were. Over the past decade, special mission units had perfected systems for rapidly fusing large and disparate sources of intelligence for the purpose of finding and capturing (or killing) enemy targets, but this was an altogether different type of intelligence problem. The task was not to find out “who and where,” but rather “who and why.” Dossiers of provincial-level figures did not exist, let alone dossiers of district-level leaders. The rural districts were where half of the population lived and where the Taliban had planted its roots.

The two competing local defense programs—one spontaneous but now controlled by HIG and/or Afghan intelligence, the other nurtured by the special ops team—made for a complicated vetting and recruitment process. Ultimately, the fate of the program would rest on whether the local government officials actively supported and sustained it. The provincial chief of police enthusiastically backed the program, attending the validation ceremonies and quickly supplying the arms and pay. In Andar, the governor was also effusively supportive, though his chief of police was less excited. The Andar district governor, Mohammed Kasim Diciwal, had embraced the anti-Taliban movement when it erupted in April. He had grabbed a gun and joined the anti-Taliban fighters at their first checkpoint south of town. Young men gathered around him, telling him they wanted to volunteer. “We are the first district to stand up against the Taliban. One hundred enemy have been killed,” the governor said in November. “We are going to finish the Taliban next year.”
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Diciwal’s motivation was partly personal: his brother, also a district governor, had been killed by the Taliban in 2008. Diciwal had served as governor in western Ghazni until he was moved to Andar in September 2012, as Kabul decided it needed an experienced hand on the rudder there. Over a meeting in his office with the special forces team, the civil affairs officer, and his police chief in November 2012, Diciwal was abuzz with plans, suggestions, and queries. He applauded when the captain told him that the police slots for Andar had been increased from two hundred to three hundred. Polishing off a persimmon after dinner, he prodded the police chief to ask whether they could get heavy weaponry for the local police. “I hear the local police in Qarabah have been given a PKM and an RPG launcher to defend their checkpoint,” he said.

The police chief, Ramazon, was a very cautious Hazara. He was an excellent police officer, but was mostly concerned with controlling corruption and preventing his men from getting killed. He came to the team to complain that ALP officers were eating at his dining hall. He did not have money in his budget to feed the extra mouths. The team leader, Jackson, assured Ramazon that the local police received a food stipend and did not need to eat his food. When brand new Hilux trucks arrived for the local police, Ramazon suggested that they be given driving lessons. His abiding concern was corruption; he was such a stickler that he re-counted the bullets and rifles after his staff took inventory. Since arriving in Andar seven months before, he proudly noted, he had fired seventy policemen. “Inshallah, it will soon be zero corruption,” he said.

While Ramazon was a rather timid soul, at least for a police chief, the fact that he was a stickler for procedure and probity would help guard against the force going off the rails. With Diciwal as the cheerleader, the duo might just make a local defense program work. But the nascent effort would need mentoring. When word of Taliban massing arrived one night, the police chief asked the team to shoot some mortar rounds in their direction. The team occasionally fired illumination rounds so the defenders would feel like they had some backup, but they were not allowed to fire lethal rounds in populated areas. The only attack that materialized that night was a small ambush in the bazaar, with no casualties, but the team knew it would not take much to dent the new force’s morale.

Nonetheless, the force continued to grow. The special operations command in Kabul characterized the program in Ghazni as “going viral”—growing rapidly—which was a somewhat exaggerated view of the situation. The defenders hung on, however, and did not collapse. By the end of January 2013, 139 US-supported ALP officers were on the payroll in Andar, and a total of 436 in the four Ghazni districts. Skeptics worried, however, that something built so quickly could just as rapidly unravel.

EXPULSION

If Ghazni might turn out to be a quick win, there was no such prospect in Wardak. The new US special operations commander in Kabul, Major General Tony Thomas, launched Triple Action, a series of major combat operations by combined special operations units in the fall of 2012. But in 2013 matters there went from bad to worse, just as the new four-star general, Joseph Dunford, replaced John Allen as ISAF commander, and special operators were at the
.Given Wardak’s strategic location as the southern gateway to Kabul, it was extraordinary that the province had not received the highest priority of the coalition’s attention and resources. It was a nest of insurgency right at Kabul’s doorstep. In 2010 the ISAF command had declared its intention to “expand the Kabul security bubble” outward. Despite those words, no surge of troops or resources was forthcoming in Wardak. Paradoxically, the province was treated like a backwater while troops and attention were lavished on remote provinces of secondary importance, such as Nuristan and Helmand.

Wardak featured the most rugged terrain in the country outside the Hindu Kush. Snowcapped peaks crept right up to Highway One, which was bisected by valleys so treacherous that conventional forces had shut down their few outposts after a tentative attempt to secure them. They built two bases along Highway One and a sprawling Afghan police training center, but insurgents moved freely through the Chak Valley, which paralleled the highway to the west.
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Wardak’s governor until late 2012, Mohammad Halim Fidai, frequently lamented to US generals and other visitors: “You have treated Wardak like a petri dish for your experiments.” One of those experiments was a pilot local defense program, the Afghan Public Protection Program (AP3), which General David McKiernan authorized in 2009. Initially the Afghans were trained and mentored by the special forces. According to Lieutenant Colonel Brad Moses, who had helped set up the original AP3, the force began going seriously off the rails after the conventional battalion sent to Wardak in 2010 took over the program in July. The battalion’s oversight was lax, he said. The battalion allowed recruits to join from other provinces, turned them into static highway guards, and, worst of all, permitted a former Taliban commander, Ghulam Mohammad Hotak, to lead the group.
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The AP3 grew to some 1,200 police before it was disbanded. Some of the former members were later vetted and admitted into the Afghan Local Police over the course of 2011. But some five hundred former AP3—and their guns—remained unaccounted for. Over the course of 2011, special operations forces struggled without success to build the Afghan Local Police program on the ashes of the earlier AP3. The
population was reluctant to volunteer for the local police no matter how hard the Americans tried. The special ops team finally made some headway in 2012, but it also suffered a number of casualties in the violent province. Team members managed to enlist several hundred volunteers, but it would later be confirmed that at least some of them were infiltrators.

The essential problem was that the province was divided between Taliban and HIG supporters. Most of those who supported neither of these insurgent factions had fled to Kabul. Some thought there might be a political solution to the province’s conflict, by which they meant essentially peeling the HIG faction, led by the grey-bearded Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, off from the other factions. This divide-and-conquer strategy would eventually weaken the insurgency, or at least isolate its most hardcore elements. “That is all HIG territory,” a senior Afghan security official commented, sweeping his hand across the map. Another faction of Hezb-e Islami had formed a party and elected representatives to parliament, and HIG had periodically put out feelers, accompanied by unrealistic demands. But despite several attempts at negotiation and reintegration, the United States and the Afghan government could not seem to find the formula to pacify Wardak.
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Thomas, the US special operations commander who arrived in July 2012 to replace Brigadier General Chris Haas, decided to launch a series of combined operations that fall. The history of combat in Wardak had not been encouraging, however. The worst loss of the war occurred in Wardak in August 2011, when thirty-eight SEALs and other Afghan and US servicemen were in a Chinook crash. This was followed a month later by a devastating suicide truck bombing at one of the two US bases there, Combat Outpost Syadabad. In the summer of 2012, in the Chak District, insurgents killed the governor and ten of the fledgling local police of fifty that special operators had recruited. They discovered that it was an inside job; elders allied with the Taliban had nominated Taliban fighters for the police. The toll suffered by special operations forces in Wardak continued: in September, Sergeant First Class Riley Gene Stephens was killed, and then Warrant Officer Joseph L. Schiro. Staff Sergeant Justin Marquez died of gunshot wounds after a battle on October 6.

Thomas decided to focus the first set of operations in Chak. But he soon found that he would be doing it largely on his own: Regional Command–East was pulling out of its southernmost base in Wardak, and it would leave only a few advisory teams with the Afghan security forces based in the northern part of the province. Thomas sought to pull together all the special operations units to throw everything he controlled at the problem. “That one little [team site in Wardak] is the customer and we are arraying everything around them,” Thomas said of his attempt to achieve a breakthrough for Afghan local policing and governance in the Chak Valley.
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He mounted the largest operation ever undertaken by the Afghan commandos, supported by a variety of US and coalition special ops units. The 6th Commando Kandak took to the shooting ranges for training and rappelled down walls at their base to brush up on their fast-rope techniques. On October 22, five hundred Afghan and coalition special operators flooded the Chak Valley for a three-day operation covering 150 square miles. It was the hardest the commandos had ever been pushed. They set up a perimeter and overwatch and moved through half a dozen villages and qalats in the valley, stirring up a hornet’s nest. The combined force fought multiple battles, killing a total of forty-seven enemy fighters, including Taliban leader Mullah Gulam Ali. Special forces Chief Warrant Officer 2 Michael Duskin was killed in battle on October 23. The joint operation uncovered two large arms caches and several buried bombs, which the commandos helped defuse. The Afghan police chief of Wardak presided over a meeting at the district center at which the elders were again invited to contribute to their own defense. A few days later the provincial officials also visited Chak. It was the first time in three years that they had been there.