One Hundred Victories (35 page)

Thomas did not stop there. Over the coming months he launched additional operations in the districts to the north. He was still sore about the failure to persuade his RC-East counterpart to participate. Thomas said he was “literally flummoxed” at the general’s resistance to join in. “Why didn’t you tell us in September?” Thomas said. “We just lost a couple of guys. If [the conventional forces] don’t come there, we are on a fool’s errand.” But he plowed ahead, launching special operators into Wardak’s northern districts, where they detained numerous Taliban insurgents and Afghans suspected of facilitating attacks. At the same time, Afghan Local Police ranks expanded to 756 in Wardak.
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Two weeks after General Joseph Dunford took over the four-star ISAF command, Wardak blew up in his face. President Karzai’s office issued a statement containing explosive allegations. “It became clear that armed individuals named as U.S. special force stationed in Wardak province engage in harassing, annoying, torturing and even murdering innocent people,” the statement read. It didn’t indicate who had identified the attackers as “U.S. special force.” A Kabul delegation visiting Wardak had been besieged by complaints from elders and villagers, who accused the special operations forces and their Afghan partners of abuse, torture, and killing. A local provincial council member and family members of the missing Afghans also made denunciations to the press. Some of the family members traveled to Kabul, and the protests escalated. Nine Afghans were alleged to have disappeared; the ISAF command confirmed that it had detained four of the nine, but said that it found no evidence of misconduct by US special operations forces.
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According to one news report, a villager in Nerkh named Asadullah Aslamuddin said his son was detained on January 19, 2013, in a night raid by US special forces and Afghans, and found dead a short while later, shot three times in the head and chest.
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Other villagers said they had received rough treatment by Afghans associated with the special operators based in Nerkh. A cell-phone video surfaced showing an Afghan, later identified as Zakeria Kandahari, kicking an Afghan repeatedly.
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Kandahari, who was wearing a US military uniform in the video, had been an interpreter for the special operations team on its previous rotations in Kandahar, and the team had called him to come join the effort in Wardak. He was not yet on contract, however, when the incident occurred. According to the special ops battalion, he had been called to the Afghan intelligence service’s office in Nerkh to identify someone when the videotaped incident occurred. Since the incident had allegedly occurred there in the presence of Afghan intelligence officers, one special operations officer wondered, “Why didn’t they stop him if he was abusing a detainee?”
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In any event, Kandahari left the NDS office, went to the special operations team’s outpost, and then disappeared. The government in Kabul then asked for the Afghan to be detained. When Karzai found out that Kandahari was gone, he snapped. He ordered all special operations forces to be out of Wardak in two weeks, by March 10.

After prolonged meetings with Afghan officials, ISAF announced that it would open a joint investigation with the Afghan government. It stood by its previous statement that no coalition forces had been involved in abuses. An Article 15 investigation was conducted and no evidence of coalition complicity was found, but the report itself was not released. Allegations had been filtering up to Kabul since the intensive operations began, including through the NDS intelligence service. US special operations officers alluded to an extensive propaganda campaign being mounted through insurgent sympathizers to accomplish by slander what they could not achieve militarily: the removal of US forces from the battlefield. They did not name individuals, but a Wardak provincial council member, Haji Hazrat Janan, had denounced coalition combat actions on this occasion and previously.
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The reports of abuses fell on believing ears in the presidential palace. It was symptomatic of the state of US-Afghan relations. The deterioration in relations was underscored by another assertion by Karzai in a March 10 speech that left incredulous US officials sputtering with anger. “Those bombs that went off in Kabul and Khost were not a show of force to America. They were in service of America. It was in the service of the 2014 slogan to warn us if they [Americans] are not here then Taliban will come,” Karzai said, referring to two suicide bombs that had gone off in Kabul the day before.
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General Dunford and various other high-ranking US officials immediately rejected Karzai’s outrageous claim. A joint news conference with Chuck Hagel, in Kabul on his first visit as secretary of defense, was canceled. Karzai, who had been engaged in a prolonged standoff with the US government over detainees and control of the Parwan Detention Facility, was more determined than ever to assert Afghan sovereignty, playing to an increasingly nationalistic audience.

The team in Nerkh, the Wardak district where the alleged abuses occurred, believed it had been falsely accused by Afghan officials allied with the Taliban and Hezb-e Islami factions. The Taliban had successfully used elders’ complaints before to take down army checkpoints that were interfering with insurgent movement. The team adopted a new policy: it would only go on patrol with a local official in tow, such as the district police chief, the Afghan intelligence representative, or the district governor. But these measures were too late to resolve the situation. The battalion operations officer, Major John Bishop, said, “We found ourselves in a power struggle between the government, HIG, and the Taliban.” It was difficult to untaint the waters once allegations of abuse were made, he said.
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The March 10 deadline came and went. Dunford and the special operations command continued intensive closed-door talks with the Afghan officials and military command. US military commanders as well as many Afghan army officers, including the brigade commander for Wardak, warned that the Afghan security forces were not even close to being able to handle the province on their own. All the efforts of the previous months would likely be reversed if the coalition forces abruptly left Wardak, which was precisely what the Taliban wanted. The coalition had made a last big push to win back Wardak for the government, but the government did not appear to appreciate the effort. The special operations command spokesman acknowledged that it had failed to cultivate sufficient support from local officials to counter the wave of denunciations from Wardak. They had lost the battle of perception, at a minimum.
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On March 11, an Afghan national policeman in Jalrez, the district next to Nerkh, jumped into the back of a green Afghan police pickup truck and grabbed the machine gun mounted on the truck bed. He swiveled it into position, aimed at a crowd that included US special operators, and mowed them down. The Afghan 6th Commandos came to their aid, but Captain Andrew Pederson-Keel, twenty-eight, and Staff Sergeant Rex Schad, twenty-six, were killed. Nearly eight hundred people turned out for the officer’s memorial service in his native Connecticut.

On March 20, ISAF announced that it had reached an agreement with the Afghan government regarding Wardak. The special forces team in Nerkh, ODA 3124, would depart from the district on March 30 and turn over its contingent of forty local police to an Afghan special forces team. That expelled team would move to Sayadabad, the district straddling a sixty-kilometer stretch of Highway One south of Nerkh. The command decided to bring the team in Chak in to work along the same corridor. The team in Chak had continued to fight an uphill battle there despite the huge operation in the fall, and the district still had no governor. The special operations battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Chris Fox, summed up the new approach to Wardak: “We are only going to work where we have a direct tie-in to the district police chief, the district governor and the Afghan army. If those entities do not deem it important, it will not work.” Afghan Local Police only flourished in certain conditions, which did not exist in this province. Special operators had paid a high price in Wardak, yet the tide there still ran in the insurgents’ favor.
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CHAPTER ELEVEN

__________________________________________

WILL THE VALLEY HOLD?

Kunar 2012–2013

A BAND OF BROTHERS

The successes in both Paktika and Kunar contrasted with the failures in Wardak. Indeed, like Paktika, Kunar emerged in 2012 as one of the clear successes of the Afghan Local Police program. The southern Kunar population was receptive to the local defense initiative, in part because it was anchored in the reliable and sober local police commander Nur Mohammed, whose good reputation extended beyond his district. He encouraged Afghans in the surrounding districts to join the program, and once their leaders were selected, he formed a close working relationship with them.

But the promising trajectory in Kunar was threatened by three factors: the safe haven available to the Taliban in Pakistan, haste, and ego. The Pakistan safe haven posed a particular threat because Kunar’s populated areas were a few hours’ march from the border. From Kunar’s capital, Asadabad, it was less than a two-hour drive south through a broad valley to Jalalabad, the principal city of eastern Afghanistan—
and if those two cities fell it would be difficult to hold Kabul. Yet the safe haven in Pakistan was a fact, like the weather; for all the teeth-gnashing, intelligence operations, and pinprick drone strikes, there was little that could be done to alter it. Pakistan’s internal dysfunctions had bred the insurgent stronghold, and only fundamental change would alter the country’s self-defeating approach to security. Unlike Paktika, whose populated areas were farther from the border, Kunar’s populated areas were right on Pakistan’s doorstep, and the province would have to be more proactive in its defense if it was to keep the badness at bay.

That meant the local police force had to be solid, and it had to be backed up by the other Afghan security forces. Unfortunately, the coalition was in a hurry to leave Kunar. The culmination of two years of effort in Kunar was jeopardized by ISAF’s plan to pull back to Highway One and Highway Seven and effectively abandon critical areas such as Kunar. No official would admit it, but the US military had adopted the same strategy the Soviets had twenty-five years earlier. US commanders rationalized their decision as necessary, however: they would focus on what the Afghans could hold, even though the Afghan military protested some of the moves. Afghans knew their history. The Soviet Army had withdrawn from Kunar in mid-1988, and by the end of the year its capital, Asadabad, had been in the hands of the mujahideen.
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The Taliban was certainly aware of the significance of this territory. Qari Zia Rahman, the Taliban commander for Kunar and Nuristan, told a Pakistani journalist in 2008 that “from the Soviet days in Afghanistan, Kunar’s importance has been clear.” He added: “This is a border province [with Pakistan] and trouble here can break the central government [in Kabul]. Whoever has been defeated in Afghanistan, his defeat began from Kunar. Hence, everybody is terrified of this region. The Soviets were defeated in this province and NATO knows that if it is defeated here it will be defeated all over Afghanistan.”
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The second factor, haste, could lead US forces to depart too rapidly from Kunar, short-circuiting the emerging victory in the southern part of the province. The commanders had to carefully consider how much and what type of support the Afghans would need to hold it.

A third factor, ego, also threatened to derail Kunar’s progress in the spring of 2012. After Matt’s team left, Major Jim Gant was to move down from his mountain lair to Combat Outpost Penich in the valley to oversee the continued expansion of the Afghan Local Police. Gant had been one of the first special operators in Kunar. A paper written under his name, “One Tribe at a Time,” recounting his experience of tribal engagement, had gained him a wide following and a degree of fame within the military community. He had been permitted to return to Kunar for a two-year tour in a somewhat unorthodox arrangement. Normally, a special forces major would be a company commander overseeing teams that were doing tactical missions. But Gant had grown deep roots in Kunar. His relationship with the “Sitting Bull,” as he dubbed the tribal chief in Mangwal, was, by his own account, like that of father and son.

Gant styled himself as Afghanistan’s Lawrence of Arabia, but turned out to be closer to Colonel Kurtz of
Apocalypse Now
. While he did lay some of the groundwork for the expansion of ALP in Kunar, he spent most of his time in Mangwal with his favorite tribe. There were rumors of unauthorized cross-border operations, questionable tactics, and unaccounted expenditures. His superiors grew uneasy, telling one visitor he had become “uncontrollable.” Gant was seen zooming around in a Kawasaki dune buggy with antlers tied to the front. Finally, a young conventional infantry lieutenant attached to Gant’s ad hoc team decided to blow the whistle after being asked to falsify a situation report. “This is just not right,” he told Gant’s superiors, adding that things were out of control in the camp. The command ordered an official “health and welfare” inspection of Gant’s camp in early March 2012. It appeared that Gant had been living out some kind of a sex-, drug-, and alcohol-fueled fantasy, becoming, as one officer put it, “a legend in his own mind.” Alcohol and steroids were found in his hooch, along with large quantities of Schedule II, III, and IV controlled substances and other drugs. Classified material was also found unsecured in his quarters, a violation compounded by the fact that Gant had been keeping a reporter-turned-lover at the camp, moving her around to prevent his superiors from learning of her presence. Gant had suffered multiple head injuries, including from IEDs and other explosions, but it was unclear whether he was technically unfit for duty. He had suffered a concussion after a fall in January 2012. In any case, it was clear that Gant had gone off the reservation. He was so lost in his own misplaced sense of entitlement, his superior officers said, that he refused to acknowledge any misdeeds and had to be forcibly removed. The woman, a former
Washington Post
reporter named Ann Scott Tyson, also reportedly refused to leave. The US embassy in Kabul had to send personnel to remove her.
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