One Hundred Victories (36 page)

Brigadier General Chris Haas wanted to throw the book at Gant, but Gant had many supporters in the higher ranks, which may have helped him stave off a court-martial. He spent months at Fort Bragg awaiting the outcome of the Article 15-6 investigation. No charges were brought in the end, but he was relieved for cause and ejected from the US Army Special Forces. One general said, “Breaking the arrows [the crossed-arrow symbol of the Special Forces] is a very serious step.” He was taken off the promotion list for lieutenant colonel but allowed to retire with his pension—and to face whatever personal fallout would come with his wife and family.
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In his final months of command in Afghanistan, Haas had grown extremely concerned about discipline in general. The shootings allegedly perpetrated by Staff Sergeant Robert Bales on March 11 were an egregious example, but the Gant case hit home, too, given Gant’s relative prominence within the military. He was an experienced officer who had been awarded a Silver Star for valor in Iraq, a seasoned combat adviser accustomed to working in all kinds of conditions, and had thus been given wide latitude. His behavior gave ammunition to critics of special operations forces and reinforced a stereotype of them as defiant of authority and scornful of procedure. The cowboy attitude of immature operators was not just unprofessional but, more importantly, could cost lives—and had cost lives on Haas’s watch. He related one account of a team sergeant who, shortly after arriving in Afghanistan, had led his team into an ambush without doing the necessary pre-mission analysis. It cost him his life and the team its leader.

So Gant’s fall was a blot on the reputation of special operators. But it had a concrete impact as well. It deprived Kunar’s fledgling local defense forces of experienced guidance at a critical juncture. The special operators were seeking to triple the police ranks and their reach in the coming year. Because Gant was out of the picture instead of being moved to Penich, Nur Mohammed lacked the backup that he needed for the coming fighting season. This became especially evident one day in March, just as Gant was being ejected from Kunar, when Nur Mohammed’s forces were attacked at one of their checkpoints. The boom of an RPG hitting the checkpoint could be heard across the river at COP Fortress, and a puff of smoke went up, followed by gunshots. The soldiers watched from the ramparts of Fortress to see if anyone would come to their aid, but no one did. Later that night, on the phone, Nur Mohammed said his men had had to fight off the attack alone. They had called Penich, where a rump staff told them to call another base. “We asked for air support” from Penich, Nur said, adding that his men had hit an IED in the course of going for help. As usual, Nur was calm and analytical as he pointed out the larger significance of the day’s events. “If there is no backup, that only will encourage more attacks from the Taliban. We need a team at Penich if one is available,” he said. Nur himself was also in the crosshairs: the NDS intelligence officer in Khas Kunar had twice warned Nur that suicide bombers had been sent to find him. The insurgents knew he was the lynchpin of the local police, and they were set on taking him out.
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It was a lot to expect of Nur Mohammed’s lightly armed Afghan Local Police to hang out in their checkpoints, exposed to frontal attacks, IEDs, and ambushes, if they could not count on anyone to come to their aid. They were supposed to be one layer of a multilayered defense. So where were the other layers? The Afghans did need to start backing each other up, but Afghan army units were notoriously reluctant to come out of their barracks. When they did, they chose the safer western side of the Kunar River rather than the IED-laden route on the eastern side, much like the US conventional forces. The work of mentoring and stitching together the various Afghan police and army forces had been secondary for years as US forces focused instead on their own combat operations. Furthermore, the restrictions on border-zone operations had made it easier than ever for the insurgents to creep down the lateral valleys to the populated Kunar River Valley and then scoot back to their safe haven on the border.

To relieve the pressure on Nur and the populated valley, the special operations command won permission for their first near-border mission with Afghan commandos since the previous November, when Operation Sayaqa had precipitated the international crisis with Pakistan. The location was the Ganjgal Valley just north of Nur Mohammed’s district, where the Battle of Ganjgal had taken place on September 8, 2009. For his heroism in that battle, Marine Corporal Dakota Meyer had become the first living Marine since the Vietnam War to receive a Medal of Honor. The 4-kilometer buffer zone established after the cross-border attack in November 2011 was still in effect; Ganjgal village, population 500, lay 4.7 kilometers from the border.

The 1st Commando Kandak and its partner special ops team, led by Captain Alex Newsom, lifted off in helicopters from Camp Dyer in Jalalabad at 1 a.m. on March 6. Their approved landing zone was 6.5 kilometers from the border, so the 140 men put on their NODs and stole toward Ganjgal in the darkness to preselected houses where they would await first light. Setting a watch, they hunkered down at these strongpoints at about 4 a.m. for a two-hour wait. The new rules for night operations would soon force them to infiltrate just before dawn, at “nautical twilight,” which meant they and their aircraft would be visible to insurgents. At 6 a.m., the troops moved out toward the village, knowing that it was just a matter of time before they took fire. They took fire from the northern ridge at 9 a.m., and seconds later the ridge to the south opened up as well. Within eight minutes, they were taking fire from four or five locations. The ground commander declared troops in contact over the radio, which gave them priority for air support. Conventional forces and Afghan army troops blocked the route behind them along the highway. At Camp Dyer’s op center, intelligence officer Captain Rick Holahan tracked the battle and updated his Google Maps laydown of the operation as it progressed. It provided an excellent 3D model for after-action reviews. He put a digital “push pin” at every location where gunfire was reported.
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Fog created a low ceiling, so the attack helicopters were forced to wait for it to burn off before they could take off, which occurred at 11:36 a.m. But a blimp was up, with a camera and thermal sights, and it had spotted the hot barrel of a PKM medium machine gun on the north ridge at 9:51 a.m. The team called in the fast movers, and they dropped a bomb on the site, killing one insurgent. Shortly thereafter, another location on the south ridge was pinpointed and a second bomb was dropped, killing two insurgents.

The team’s company commander, Major Kent Solheim, had come along on the mission and was up in the mountains on the north ridge, where he and his men spotted Taliban ducking in and out of a network of caves. They called in an A-10 Warthog, a slow-moving beast of a plane beloved by ground troops for its accuracy. It strafed the positions repeatedly. Solheim watched in amazement through his rifle scope as Taliban fighters popped out of the caves to fire off their AK-47s at the plane, hoping to bring it down. Solheim’s own mettle awed his subordinates. An amputee from a previous combat deployment in Iraq, he was a dedicated runner and fierce competitor. He clambered through the steep mountains with the best of them.

The insurgent fire was suppressed for the time being, though the air weapons team overhead spotted reinforcements moving from the north. While the commandos entered the village below to begin meeting with elders, the troops on the ridges climbed up to the machine-gun nests to take photos of those killed in action. Solheim had learned the value of photographs on his very first commando op of this tour, in northern Kunar. Villagers alleged that commandos had killed women and children, and the provincial governor had repeated them, leading General Allen to ask the team for evidence of the operation. Luckily they had photos. The special operators with multiple tours in Afghanistan had grown used to all kinds of accusations anytime they conducted an operation. The troops in Ganjgal that day could not reach the highest point, about 6,100 feet up, which they believed was the Taliban commander’s location. It lay 1.56 kilometers inside the forbidden buffer zone. But they did get photos of the others, as well as samples for DNA testing, which later led one fighter to be identified definitively as a Taliban IED maker.

As it turned out, Gant’s departure did not stop the forward momentum of the Afghan Local Police in Kunar. Nur Mohammed soldiered on, and across the river, two special operations teams worked to build the program in two districts, Narang and Chowkay, over the spring and summer of 2012. One of those teams, ODA 3436, had been deployed to Uruzgan the previous year. The team members had hoped to return there, as they had mastered Uruzgan Province’s intra-Pashtun and Hazara politics and knew the physical terrain like the back of their hands. But they took up the job in Kunar, grumbling aside, and found a ready ally in the acting district governor, a pharmacist who had lobbied for the Afghan Local Police program to be started there. An educated man, he volunteered to teach the class on the Afghan Constitution and Afghan law that was part of the ALP curriculum. The governor was impressed by the team’s energy. “In a few months, they brought in solar-powered streetlights, built sidewalks and taught basic hygiene,” he said. The team medic—who held a master’s degree and spoke Pashto—conducted a health assessment, prepared packages of tailored supplies to be given out in the villages, and oversaw a $25,000-upgrade of the clinic, which saw some four hundred patients a day. “I think we’re making a difference,” the medic said. “Just by getting them to boil water, we are saving babies’ lives every day. But they can’t figure out the piss tubes,” he added with a laugh, referring to the pipes that the team inserted in the ground as urinals. This was a simple method the special operators used in the field for urination to avoid contaminating the ground water, but Afghans were used to squatting and not inclined to use the tubes.
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ODA 3436 expanded the ALP force, running forty recruits at a time through the three-week class. The team reserved half of its two hundred approved positions for a second recruitment up Badel and Waygal valleys on the western side of the Kunar River. These bisecting valleys led to the Pech and Korengal no-man’s-land farther north, and Taliban regularly traveled down them to stage attacks, lay mines, or cross over to Pakistan. As the operators trolled for recruits, they looked for Afghans with family ties in the valleys to help them move into those areas, and the district governor volunteered to go with them to recruit. The team sergeant, who planned to retire after twenty-three years in the army and six tours in Afghanistan—and many more in Africa, Haiti, and elsewhere—felt they had found a plucky ALP commander, Wazir. “He’s a pipe-hitter,” he said approvingly of Wazir’s willingness to foray out into risky places. The team operating in the adjacent district also found ready recruits. The plan mirrored that on the other side of the river: to build a force that was strong and thick enough to hold the main populated area and seal off insurgents farther north among the tribes who wanted to be left alone to ply their timber-smuggling business.

THE LAST TEAM

By October 2012, the ALP program in southern Kunar was on a solid course. A new team, ODA 3131, arrived to pick up the baton for most of the province. This team was given the task of overseeing local police in four districts while also, in a fifth district, revetting and converting a force that had been formed by US conventional forces into Afghan Local Police.

Fortunately, the four ALP commanders of the districts of Narang, Chowkay, Khas Kunar, and Sarkani were sufficiently competent already. They were a band of brothers who could rely on each other even if the regular police or army did not come to their aid. Their relationship was evident one cold but sunny morning at the Chowkay district commander’s headquarters located between the highway and the meandering riverbank. The commander, Asim Gul, pulled webbed cots outside into the sunshine to provide seating for the special forces team. And no sooner had the team members taken their seats than the Narang commander, Wazir, pulled up in his truck to see what was going on. His local policemen, who were posted along the highway, had alerted him to the gathering. Wazir and Asim Gul sat next to each other animatedly sharing the latest news. They had been friends since childhood and were on their way later that day to a funeral for Nur Mohammed’s aunt across the river.
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The commanders had a functioning network that reacted when any one of them came under attack. Nur had responded with his men several times when Wazir and Asim Gul had called for help. The commanders stayed in touch with each other by cell phone, and their policemen stood watch day and night at the bridges, in the culverts, and in other areas that had been targeted. They enjoyed varying degrees of support from the district chiefs of police, although the pay did arrive regularly. The police chief in his district, Wazir said, was corrupt. Wazir’s men had detained an insurgent leader at the bridge a month earlier, and the police chief, Wazir said, had released him. “He had 250,000 Pakistani rupees and a Pakistani ID,” Wazir fumed, referring to the insurgent leader. The man, Wazir added, was a Taliban judge who had ordered the beheading of two policemen; he had also routinely sent out night letters to intimidate people in the valley. Just that morning, Wazir’s men had seen a truck driver carrying a load of illegal timber pay a bribe to pass through a police checkpoint. Wazir had called the provincial police chief to report this, he said, since he did not trust the district chief.

The men had more regard for the Afghan army, but they wanted the army to help clear insurgents from the troublesome bisecting valleys. “The commandos came last summer, for the first time in a year,” Asim Gul said. “Now the fighting up north is pushing the Taliban back down into our valleys.” He and Wazir then excused themselves, saying they were late for the funeral.