One Hundred Victories (4 page)

In Afghanistan, Reeder bonded with various Afghan leaders with zeal, burrowing deep into the Pashtun world. They invited him to live in their homes, gave over their homes for safe houses, and asked him for advice. Few Americans had such an extensive network among the southern Pashtun leaders. The special forces had been the only American forces in southern Afghanistan from the earliest days of the war, when they met up with Hamid Karzai, who had come across the Pakistani border with a few guys on motorcycles. And they kept returning—not just the units, but the same individuals, first as captains, then as majors, then as lieutenant colonels or colonels. Sergeants kept coming back, on teams and in companies and battalions. Once cell phones came to Afghanistan, Afghans kept their numbers on speed dial and their photos as screensavers.
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During his back-to-back tours in 2002 and 2003 in southern Afghanistan, Reeder got to know Karzai’s close friend and mentor, Jan Mohammad Khan, whom Karzai appointed governor of Uruzgan. Reeder lived in his house for a time. He came to know Karzai’s half-brother Ahmed Wali Karzai and his brother Qayum well, too, while also befriending Gul Agha Shirzai from the rival Barakzai tribe. Shirzai had raced to Kandahar ahead of Hamid Karzai in 2001, moving into the governor’s palace and forcing Karzai’s hand. Karzai eventually eased Shirzai out by appointing him governor of Nangahar in the east. Shirzai’s brother remained as the apparently permanent commander of the Kandahar Airfield, a perch from which he and his son oversaw
the family’s burgeoning trucking and contracting business, fueled by the influx of troops and dollars. Reeder’s friendships with these men extended beyond his tours in Afghanistan. They paid him visits at Fort Bragg and stayed in touch by phone. Shirzai sought his advice as Karzai dangled offers of cabinet positions to dissuade him from running for president in 2004. In the end, the clever Karzai managed to keep the wheeler-dealer Shirzai out of the race and then left him in his post at Nangahar.

From his first tours in 2002 and 2003, Reeder and his men had been heavily engaged in targeting Taliban. Although the senior Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders had left for Pakistan, a lot of local Taliban remained. By his own admission, Reeder had not spent a lot of time thinking about how to stand up a good Afghan government or security force. Like Mahaney’s battalion later on, Reeder’s one battalion of special forces teams was spread out across the three provinces, with virtually no conventional forces in the south—and one reserve brigade was divided between Kandahar Airfield and Bagram. The training of the Afghan army had barely begun. In these circumstances, the special operators relied very heavily on the Afghan militia force they had recruited and hired. “They were a very effective force because they were local,” Reeder said. “They knew the people and the terrain.” After Reeder decided to cross-load Afghan and special forces personnel in each other’s vehicles, the ambushes stopped. “The locals did not want to kill a local guy,” he noted.

When Reeder returned as the commander of the CJSOTF-A in 2006, his troops still focused on targeting Taliban insurgents, but they also assumed more training and advisory missions. They were partnered with thirteen Afghan army battalions, called
kandaks
. Reeder’s boss back at US Central Command in Tampa, Brigadier General Frank Kearney, wanted him to build an Afghan special forces unit, but Reeder persuaded him that the Afghans’ skill level was still too immature. Instead he proposed they start a light-infantry commando unit. The first one hundred were selected and sent to Haas’s 5th Group forces in Jordan for training. These Afghans became the training cadre for the commandos, and in 2007, the first two commando kandaks were formed and fielded. Reeder viewed the commandos as one of the US special operations forces’ most successful contributions to the Afghan project. The commandos received an extra $50 a month in pay and double food rations, but he believed the secret to their 99 percent retention rate was a predictable deployment cycle and regular leave. After returning from leave, the commandos would live and train with the special operators at Camp Morehead outside Kabul before heading back into combat alongside a US special operations team.

By then, a training command had been created for the Afghan army and police, although the police, always an afterthought, still lagged behind badly. The overall US commander, Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry, ordered Reeder to demobilize the 11,000 members of the Afghan Militia Force. “Tell them to go into the army,” Eikenberry said. “And get them out of [battle dress uniforms].” Reeder was crushed, but this edict had been percolating for a while. As Afghanistan’s formal army stood up, both the tolerance and rationale for unofficial and competing armed formations not under the control of the Afghan government waned. The reach of the Afghan government was still limited, but the fear of wayward militias was a legitimate concern and a legacy of the tumultuous 1990s. There was no simple solution, however. This issue exemplified the ongoing tension between those who wanted expedient solutions and those who aspired to more idealistic results. The operators tended toward the practical. Reeder knew from conversations with the AMF members that they had no desire to serve in an Afghan army unit far from their homes. Few would volunteer. Instead, many militia members transitioned to a paid security force, which was confined to guarding the perimeter of the special operations forces’ firebases.
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Two weeks before the end of his tour in 2007, Reeder watched Mahaney’s troops crush the Taliban in Operation Adalat. “It was like shooting fish in a barrel,” Reeder said. The battalion had been hugely successful in blunting the Taliban’s drive to retake the south.

As he packed up to go home, the champion of the counterguerrilla fight had an epiphany. How many times had special forces done this? To what end? Reeder asked himself. They simply were not getting
anywhere with the constant raiding approach. They could conduct raids for the next one hundred years and not finish off the Taliban. “It seems like every time I come back here, the security situation is worse,” he thought. “Maybe we need to do something different.”

Before leaving the country, Reeder had several long talks with the CIA station chief in Kabul, who was also a friend of his. They discussed how the Taliban, a force of maybe 20,000, was managing to affect a country of 33 million. The Taliban had no trouble recruiting fighters, albeit largely inexperienced ones. The destabilizing cycle could go on forever. It was going to take a different approach to change this pattern. How had the Taliban taken control of Afghanistan in the first place? And now, how had they managed to make a comeback in 2005–2006, despite averaging only 10 percent support in public opinion polls conducted within Afghanistan? Admittedly, those polls primarily measured the views of urban Afghans and those in easy-to-reach, and therefore non-insurgent-dominated, areas. But what were the Taliban doing right—and could the special ops forces learn from it?
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Reeder spent the next year working as the executive officer for Admiral Eric Olson, the four-star admiral in charge of US Special Operations Command in Tampa, and continued to think about his experience in Afghanistan. He concluded that he could have done things differently. First, he realized, special forces needed to have a better understanding of the tribal dynamics of the country. The Taliban had used their knowledge of those dynamics to win over smaller tribes and subtribes by supporting their grievances against the bigger or more powerful tribes. Second, there was a need for a greater emphasis on defense, and especially on helping Afghans protect their own homes. To date, the special operations forces had focused on using Afghans as offensive tools to attack suspected Taliban enclaves, whether because they wanted to fight or because they were eager for the paycheck. Civilian self-defense was not a new idea for special operations forces; US special forces had conducted the largest such effort to date in Vietnam among the highland tribes, in what was called the Civilian Irregular Defense Group. The Marines had a similar village defense focus in their Combined Action Program.

Reeder was introduced to a political scientist named Seth Jones who had spent the past five years researching a book on Afghanistan. Jones had examined how the Taliban had taken power after the end of the Soviet occupation in 1989, and he had found that they had recruited one tribe and village after another through a series of deals, eventually taking over the entire countryside before closing in on Kabul in 1996. Looking further back in history, he found that the five decades of the Musahiban dynasty’s rule had been largely stable, in part because the monarchs struck agreements with rural Afghans to maintain security in their own areas. The Pashtuns, in particular, were far more inclined to police themselves than they were to allow others to run their affairs. Thomas Barfield, an American anthropologist who had studied the country for more than forty years, characterized its social history as relying on a decentralized model of security and governance in which the ruler in Kabul traditionally controlled the pursestrings, doling out money and patronage to regional power centers that in turn were expected to keep the peace in their areas.
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Meanwhile, Admiral Olson had been pushing for the creation of a special ops command in both Afghanistan and Iraq led by a general instead of a colonel. He realized that a command in the region led by a colonel was simply not adequate. Each colonel that had headed it had struggled with a short staff, haphazardly filled with a few additional personnel. The churn was also a problem: the staff turned over every seven months. Most of all, a colonel simply could not get into the room where the big decisions were made. The number of generals and admirals in Afghanistan had steadily increased, and it took a quantum leap in 2009 when a new three-star operational command was created. That command, the ISAF Joint Command (known as the IJC), eventually tripled in size, to 3,000 staff and 19 generals and admirals.
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The four-star general in charge of the Afghan war, General David D. McKiernan, agreed with the petition of Olson and others. Combined Forces Special Operations Component Command–Afghanistan (CFSOCC-A) was created in 2009, and Olson recommended Reeder as its first commander.

When Reeder arrived in Kabul, he found that McKiernan had already
approved and launched a local defense experiment called the Afghan Public Protection Program, or AP3. The pilot was implemented in Wardak, a critical province bordering Kabul, in January 2009 by Brad Moses, a special forces company commander. Afghans would recruit candidates who would be approved by the local
shura
, or consultative council. Recruits were vetted by the National Directorate of Security (NDS), the Afghan intelligence service performing internal security functions—the Afghan equivalent of the FBI. Given uniforms and paid half the salary of policemen, the recruits, following training, would be put to work as security guards at mosques, schools, bazaars, and other sites chosen by the locals. The AP3 volunteers were paid and armed with AK-47s through the Ministry of Interior, with the special forces providing the initial three-week training program.

The initial pilot was approved with a ceiling of 1,200 recruits, but this number was expected to increase to as many as 10,000 if the pilot was successful. According to Brad Moses, the effort got off to a good start. But then it went sideways, owing to two main factors. First, the recruiting, vetting, training, and oversight role was handed off from special operations forces to the conventional unit in the province in mid-2009, and they did not spend enough time with the newly minted defenders to properly mentor them. The force then morphed from a self-defense effort into a highway police force defending Highway One. Recruits from other provinces began filling the ranks, setting the stage for AP3 to morph again, this time into a bribe-taking shakedown operation. Second, a local Wardak figure, Ghulam Mohammad Hotak, a former Taliban commander, switched sides. Moses regarded Hotak as highly nefarious and refused to involve him with the program during his tenure. But in December 2009, the Afghan government permitted Hotak to form his own lightly supervised AP3 contingent.
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Reeder discussed expanding the AP3 program with McKiernan, but the latter doubted that NATO would agree. “They will think you are promoting warlords and militias,” McKiernan said. Reeder believed his idea would get off the ground only if influential Afghans embraced the effort. He went to see Sibghatullah Mojaddedi, the president of the Afghan Senate who had been president of the country in 1992. An
important Sunni religious figure, Mojaddedi embraced the idea. “The only way you are going to protect the population is to arm them,” he said. “But you must put the special forces in the villages to prevent ethnic or tribal cleansing.”
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Reeder also set his staff to work on a slightly different concept from AP3, which they dubbed the Community Defense Initiative. Mahaney, who had come back for a sixth tour as Reeder’s operations officer, enthusiastically embraced this pivot to putting local Afghans in charge of securing their villages. As if the scales had fallen from their eyes, he and his 7th Special Forces Group veterans saw that they had applied this self-help approach for years in Latin America, first in El Salvador and then in Peru and Colombia. Their emphasis had to shift to assisting rather than leading Afghans, and in a very deliberate and carefully structured way. Civil defense was not a replacement for the national army or a local police force, but an adjunct to them. Reeder’s staff began to do the rigorous evaluation of Afghanistan’s tribal mosaic that had been lacking. It was the beginning of a campaign approach guided by an overarching concept and plan.

Reeder thought the best model was a volunteer defense force with villagers taking shifts. He believed this approach would prevent any one faction from dominating other members of the community. He also wanted the defenders to bring their own guns, and he wanted to limit the US contribution to training and development projects. In his view, these limits would mitigate the risks. If the men were paid, and the pay ran out, a disgruntled armed local would be more likely to turn to nefarious activity than someone who was a volunteer to begin with. He wanted the solution to be something the Afghans could sustain. The interior minister, however, insisted that they be paid, and so they were.