One Hundred Victories (40 page)

Thomas forced the various special ops battalion-level commanders in the same region to begin meeting regularly—some of them had never even met each other. He also required them to present a regular “deep dive” briefing update that they produced as a team—another mechanism to force them to collaborate. The disparate units were expected to look at Afghanistan as a common mission to which each was expected to contribute. This common planning entailed a common targeting and asset-allocation process as well as combined operations.

The change was epitomized by the nightly “JAAM” sessions—the Joint Asset Allocation Meetings led by Thomas’s headquarters. Priority targets and operations were selected in a newly centralized process; decisions about which helicopters, gunships, and drones to use where, and which troops to insert or extract where, were subject to this same new centralized decision-making process. A portion of the two hundred aircraft and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance platforms were apportioned for the entire spec ops force’s use in this manner. Thomas made his priorities clear. “We are here to support the ISAF campaign plan, and Afghan Local Police is the priority SOF effort in that campaign,” Thomas said in an interview.

Colonel Tony Fletcher, the CJSOTF-A commander, saw the immediate payoff for his sixty-two special operations teams, who were spread out in villages raising local police and fighting alongside Afghan special operations units. “I benefit the most,” Fletcher said of the new command. “I get more airlift, gunships, ISR than ever before, and I have the benefit of his two-star influence.” Air support for Fletcher’s operations increased by more than 40 percent, and by 300 percent for ISAF SOF. One of Fletcher’s subordinates, Special Operations Task Force–South (SOTF-S) commander Richard Navarro, also found the change was dramatic. Previously, he said, “for our priorities to make it onto their target list was a big event. And if we needed airlift, it was always ‘space available’—if they had nothing better to do. After Thomas took over, the message was, ‘We’re here to help. Let us know who the heavy hitters are and we’ll go after them.’”
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Thomas turned his efforts to planning a series of combined operations that brought all the special operations resources to bear on given problem spots, including the Triple Action, a series of operations in the gnarly province of Wardak. Winter was closing in, but the command was also eager to finish the tough Guardian series in Kandahar and apply the same formula of combined operations in Ghazni. Thomas aimed to bolster the anti-Taliban uprising in Ghazni’s Andar District and increase recruits for Afghan Local Police all over the province along Highway One.

The special mission units also continued to target high-value insurgent leaders, facilitators, and the occasional Al Qaeda member or affiliate. Operation Haymaker in upper Kunar launched thirty-eight strikes over four months—a slower pace than earlier in the war—but Thomas considered it sufficient to keep the threat at bay. With only two orbits of drones, it was a test of what this type of small-footprint approach might look like in the future, when the conventional forces were largely withdrawn. The bigger endgame question for special mission units was whether a “judicial finish” could be arranged for the many combatants they had taken off the battlefield. The US government lobbied heavily to ensure that Afghanistan would not release a few dozen detainees that the United States considered highly dangerous, at least so long as coalition forces remained in Afghanistan. The task force had killed some 3,000 combatants and scooped up roughly twice that many in Afghanistan. All but a handful were turned over to Afghan control in 2013, and without trials this effort would turn out to be an ultimately fruitless game of catch-and-release.

Thomas’s stepped-up pace of operations came at a steep price: 132 special operators and attached forces under his command were killed in action and 130 wounded in his first five months. Thomas did not always get the cooperation he sought from the special mission units: in the first Wardak operation, they decided not to join in. They could still opt out because they were only under the tactical control, not the operational control, of Thomas’s command. Admiral McRaven wrote in an email, “I strongly believe the internal elements need to be OPCON to [i.e., under the operational control of] Tony. He must have the ability to reorganize and employ as he sees fit. While technically this isn’t the case, practically, Tony feels he has that latitude
and
if any of the components were to push back, I would step in and get the issues resolved—to include with my NATO brothers over which I have a strong influence.”
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All in all, Thomas believed that the combined command had proven its value. “If the baseline is creating ALP, something lasting and sustainable, then the question was how to align our forces to do that instead of random affiliations. Now the task force and [the British task force] are focused on that as opposed to targeting the subcommander of a subcommander of a Haqqani,” he said. “The proof is in the pudding,” he added, noting that the Afghan Local Police forces had continued to grow steadily, even with the two-month pause that he had ordered for revetting the force, as a measure to guard against infiltration and insider attacks. Four hundred local police were let go, but the net growth continued.

WHITHER LOCAL POLICE?

No one earned more sweat equity in the Afghan Local Police and Village Stability Operations than Don Bolduc. He signed on for another tour in Thomas’s command as one of his deputy commanders to see the program through the crucial growth phase as he awaited promotion to brigadier general. He cared intensely about the program, which he had helped Scott Miller launch in 2010 on the back of the Community Defense Initiative. It was Bolduc who had pored over the weekly tracker, negotiated the district-by-district allotment of police slots with the Afghan Ministry of the Interior, and laboriously mentored the MOI police general who headed the program, General Ali Shah Ahmadzai, or ASA, as the special operators called him. It was one thing to say that the Afghan Local Police were under the command and control of Afghan’s Interior Ministry, though, and another thing to actually make it so. That would be the acid test of whether the Afghan Local Police would endure, for whatever time the Afghan government decided, because the Afghans had to be able to raise, train, supply, and oversee the local police as the force grew and as the US special operations presence shrank in both relative and absolute terms. Even if some special operators remained in Afghanistan for years to come, they would number far fewer than the sixty-two special operations teams that Bolduc had to work with in 2012 and 2013.

Bolduc was focused on “beans and bullets” logistics tasks, because the Ministry of the Interior was still an immature bureaucracy that had a hard enough time keeping its regular police force supplied with ammo, fuel, and functioning vehicles and recruiting, training, and retaining a force that still suffered from high desertion, attrition, and casualty rates. Compounding this were persistent concerns that the MOI, and the Afghan government as a whole, was less committed to the ALP program than it was to its regular police and military. But Bolduc pushed ahead, dogged as ever. In December 2012, the deputy minister of the interior, Abdul Rahman, presided over a conference that issued updated procedures and guidelines for the local police, raised the ceiling on its eventual size to 45,000, and extended the lifetime of the program until 2025. A few weeks later, ASA and his staff moved from their cramped quarters into two floors of a new building.
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Bolduc had no doubt that the Afghan Local Police and Village Stability Operations initiative had delivered results, and his conviction was backed up by the quarterly assessments produced by the RAND team. Over 70 percent of Afghans with local police based in their area consistently told pollsters that they supported the police. The RAND analysis of violent attacks indicated a “significant reduction in kinetic activity” in a five-kilometer radius of a local police force within five to twelve months. Economic activity also tended to improve, with an average of one new market or bazaar opening within fifteen months. The special operations teams assessed that 70 and 80 percent of the district police chiefs and governors supported the local police, respectively, but only about half of the chiefs were deemed to provide sufficient logistical support.
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Even more important, Bolduc said, the Afghan Local Police had taken the brunt of the Taliban attacks, and they had successfully defended their posts 88 percent of the time. Their attrition rate, due to death or desertion, was only 2 percent. The local police had their share of problems: the teams reported bribe-taking, drug use, and other infractions, for example. But only 10 percent of the incidents were serious crimes such as rape or drug trafficking. Afghans who were polled reported greater bribe-taking by Afghan local officials and the regular police. All of these findings were a testament to the careful and close mentorship that special operators had exercised over their charges during the past two years. What was not known, however, was how well the police would do as the teams moved into “tactical overwatch” mode and then transitioned the program entirely to Afghan control. Where good local police commanders and Afghan mentors existed—such as Nur Mohammed in Kunar and Aziz in Paktika—the police might well survive and continue to provide security, so long as the pay, ammo, and supplies kept coming.

The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) provided an independent barometer in its annual report on the protection of civilians issued in February 2013. Without detailing the exact polling methods used, it said that in its survey conducted over the year, “the majority of communities reported improvement in the security environment in those areas with ALP presence.” It also praised the Afghan Interior Ministry for setting up a monitoring and evaluation unit to investigate allegations of misconduct. In an interview, General Ahmadzai vowed to keep a personal watch on trouble spots, such as Baghlan and Kunduz, and to sack ALP commanders for infractions, if necessary. But he and his team were dependent on US airlift to get to the districts, and his small staff of fifty was already overtaxed, as their duties had expanded from overseeing the biometric registry and validation process to investigating alleged crimes or misdeeds. The UN report concluded that further local oversight was needed: “While UNAMA observed considerable progress and commitment in 2012 to promoting accountability for violations by the ALP, UNAMA reiterates its concerns with insufficient implementation of existing policies resulting in cases of weak vetting, impunity and lack of local level ALP oversight and accountability mechanisms.” UNAMA recorded fifty-five reports of human rights violations committed by Afghan Local Police forces, singling out three districts of Kunduz Province in the north and Khas Uruzgan in Uruzgan Province.
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As of April 2013, the Afghan Local Police had grown to encompass 21,886 officers in 104 districts, with another 1,180 vetted volunteers awaiting training. Over 8,000 of the local police were under “tactical overwatch”—meaning that special operations teams were making regular visits but not embedded at the ALP locations—and 4,700 had already transitioned entirely to Afghan control. Bolduc projected that at the current pace of growth, the force could reach 25,000 by year’s end and 30,000 by July 2015. In Vietnam, by comparison, the Civilian Irregular Defense Group had reached a peak of 42,000 defenders, with 84 special forces “A camps.”
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  Bolduc’s plan was to shift the training location to the Regional Training Centers, where the regular Afghan Uniformed Police were trained. Both Thomas and Bolduc foresaw teams moving to districts and provinces as they positioned to take on a broader advisory mission to foster coordination among the various Afghan police and military units.

This rapid-production model was 180 degrees out from the original Village Stability Operations model, in which teams worked with village elders for months before any Afghan police were even recruited. The success of such quick handoffs relied heavily on the competence of the district chief of police, which was in many cases lacking. It also presumed that the force itself would solidify quickly. Many special operators were concerned that once teams left the field they would lose the intelligence and understanding of what was going on and how the forces were actually performing. “We have to stay tied to those guys going to the field or we’ll be blind,” one senior officer said. If not, the operators would be “unable to positively affect or assess what is going on where the insurgency thrives.”
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But Thomas made no bones about wanting the teams to produce Afghan Local Police as rapidly as possible. “What I want is—hey fellows, the clock is ticking—you can expand this great tool you have given them that’s viral now. I need them to say ‘good enough, and I’m on to the next one,’” he said, noting that teams were reluctant to raise a local police contingent in one location and then move to a new district and repeat the process all in one six-month rotation. “That is the mark I am looking for, guys. It’s really good production,” Thomas
said, describing his dialogue with teams in the field. In his rapid-fire delivery, he mimicked how he wanted teams to proceed: “When you train [your police], you get your DCOP [district chief of police] and say, hey bud, here are your boys.…You own them now. Let’s go through some battle drills on how you are going to sustain them.” He continued, explaining how he wanted the teams to mentor the district police chiefs: “Now I’m going to start stepping back. You’ve got my phone and if you need me I’m right here. And by the way, your real chain of command is your PCOP [provincial police chief] or your MOI because I’m artificially here anyway.”

Thomas was not wrong that Afghans had to assume ownership. The teams and others who were deeply invested in the program saw the worst-case scenario as tossing the ball only to see it fumbled—with wayward, criminal, out-of-control militias the end result. The “purists” believed that slower growth was better because it simply took time for villages to step up to defend themselves, resolve their internal disputes, and adopt sound governance practices. Others believed that the number of local police produced was a perfectly legitimate measure of effectiveness when investing scarce special operations teams. This tension created a certain churn as battalion commanders came and went, each one yanking teams here or there. Sometimes the demand of a conventional battlespace owner prevailed. Yet invariably, if local police were recruited in areas with heavy insurgent intimidation, progress would be slow and other problems could result.