The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor (48 page)

Kolenda was delighted. He asked Rahman and Gul Mohammed Khan if the elders might persuade insurgent leaders such as Mohammed Jan—the HIG commander for Kamdesh District—to tell their fighters to lay down their arms. Rahman looked at Kolenda and smiled.

“No, that is not how things work here,” he said. “Right now the militant leaders are too powerful. They have control of the young men. Our plan is to go from village to village and talk with the people about the future. We will convince the elders and the parents of the fighters, and convince the fighters as well. Once we have enough of them on our side, then we will have the power to persuade the leaders to join us.”

From November through the following January, representatives from the Hundred-Man Shura toured Kamdesh District, going from village to village, discussing the way forward, explaining why the Americans were in the area, and talking about how they would all work together. “Jihad is over,” the elders said on their journeys. “Stop fighting.” To further combat the skepticism of a highly insular people who intensely distrusted outsiders, the Hundred-Man Shura asked the Americans and the Afghan government to draft written agreements regarding peace and cooperation. The shura wanted Karzai and the United States, first, to commit to coordinating with its members on all issues affecting their villages and the district at large, and second, to acknowledge the governance role of the shura itself. (Part of the elders’ motivation for both demands, it must be said, was the desire to get more directly involved in the development projects, in order to wield power and disburse money.) Called the Commitment of Mutual Support, the agreement with the United States stipulated that in exchange for the villagers’ assuming greater responsibility for the development contracts and taking the lead in expelling insurgents, U.S. troops would refrain from entering mosques or homes uninvited, unless there was an imminent threat. If a home had to be searched, Bulldog Troop was to confer with local elders and the ANA, and then ANA officers alone would conduct the actual search. If the Americans received intelligence on an insurgent weapons cache, they and the ANA would work with the elders to track it down and seize it. Only if the elders refused to help would the ANA and the Americans be free to take matters into their own hands.

The reaction among some officers and soldiers in the squadron was shock: We’re fighting a fucking war, these guys are killing us, and we’re supposed to politely ask permission before searching for bad guys? they wondered. But even before this, Chris Kolenda had been diligent about demanding that his officers and NCOs educate all of their troops on the many nuances of counterinsurgency, and after a while, most troops understood why it wasn’t always smart to just start kicking down doors, unless the goal was to piss off more people and create more insurgents. As a general rule, the men of Bulldog Troop already knew not to enter a village without first coordinating with its elders, because culturally, it was inappropriate just to show up. American and ANA troops were supposed to wait at the edge of the village while the women withdrew into their homes, and to go in only after the elders told them they could. But such cultural sensitivities hadn’t always been a priority. Now they would be, unless there was an “imminent threat.”

Roller didn’t think that was so much to give up. He was more than willing to trade his infrequent patrols through villages sans permission for the locals’ pledge to keep the bad guys out themselves. And most of those he served with understood that this war wasn’t like the one in
Saving Private Ryan
or
Band of Brothers:
there would be no surrender by a uniformed enemy army. Second- and third-order effects could metastasize.

Working with the elders, Kolenda and Hutto carved out another exception to the agreement: U.S. troops also had an open invitation to enter a village to inspect a project that the United States was paying for. If the village’s shura equivocated on this, or failed to welcome the Americans into the village, the United States would cut off the money or even cancel the project until the elders came into line. Moreover, if insurgents vandalized or destroyed a project, American funding would be stopped until the village elders identified those responsible and worked with Afghan security forces to hold them accountable. If the Nuristanis truly wanted to take ownership of their own affairs, their role couldn’t be confined to just managing the cash and handing out the contracts; they would have to do the hard work of self-policing as well.

The district shura also agreed to use its size to enforce a sort of nonviolent resistance against members who broke their word. If any village proved uncooperative and refused to abide by the agreement, the Hundred-Man Shura would drop in en masse and squat there. The village would then have to feed the picketing elders—a very expensive proposition—until the situation was resolved to their satisfaction.

Bulldog Troop signed off on the Commitment of Mutual Support, and Hutto began enforcing it—often with some choice language when he thought a village was slacking or violating the terms.

Hutto and Ingbretsen, the ANA trainer, felt they’d made some headway with elders throughout the district and were eager to expand their range. Hutto requested a shura in Mandigal, and the elders selected a date in November. This exchange was soon followed by radio chatter from insurgents in the area, suggesting that they wouldn’t allow the Americans to enter the village—and in any case certainly wouldn’t let them leave it alive. As the date neared, Hutto sent his men out on patrols to secure the road leading to Mandigal, and then he devised a plan to fend off an attack: he asked members of the Hundred-Man Shura to swing by Combat Outpost Keating, pick up Ingbretsen and him, and join them at the Mandigal shura. They agreed.

Accompanied by former district administrator Gul Mohammed Khan, Kamdesh Village shura head Abdul Rahman, Afghan National Police commander Jalil, and ANA commander Lieutenant Noorullah, the Americans walked breezily into the village. Seats had been set out in a big open space just south of the village mosque, and Hutto and Ingbretsen sat with the elders on a platform in front of a stone wall by the road. The meeting was led by Abdul Hanan, a respected Mandigal elder. Hanan served as a sort of master of ceremonies for the shura, calling upon each man in turn to give his presentation.

Hutto made his usual pitch about the benefits to be had from their all working together: peace, development, prosperity. “I’m not asking you to turn in insurgents,” he said. “But I want you to ask the bad guys what future they envision for Kamdesh District.”

Lieutenant Noorullah came next, informing the elders that a planned project to build a road north to Barg-e-Matal could be subcontracted so that each village along the way would be responsible for its own section, if it wanted. But, he explained, until the fighting ended, Nuristan would not be able to receive the economic-development funding it desired. And that meant that the elders of Mandigal would need to talk to local insurgents and get them to turn in their weapons and cease hostilities.

Noorullah had connections in the village—his wife was from there—and he had been working them before this meeting. (His own family sold gems in the Kabul area, and his wife’s was involved in the same trade, but on the mining side.) Drawing upon his sources, he had assembled a list of names of insurgents from Mandigal. And right then and there, he called those men out and told them to stand up—right in front of their fathers.

Ingbretsen’s interpreter was feeding translations into his earpiece. Ingbretsen and Hutto looked at each other. What was this?

And then the first insurgent stood. He was just a few feet in front of them.

Nervously, Hutto and Ingbretsen whispered to each other, “What are we going to do now?” Since they first entered the village, they’d been hearing enemy chatter on the radio, some of it coming from inside Mandigal. Apart from their interpreters and a couple of Army medics, including Rob Fortner, who were off to one side tending to ailing children, the two Americans were essentially alone, facing a crowd of hundreds of Nuristanis, many of whom were carrying AKs. Sure, there were Afghan police and ANA troops there, as well as the elders who had accompanied them to the shura, but who knew what would happen if bullets started flying?

Hutto looked out into the crowd: some two dozen men were now standing, identifying themselves as enemy fighters. Hutto and Ingbretsen, talking under their breath, quickly came up with a contingency plan. Straight ahead of them was a big wooden arch decorated with intricate patterns. That would be considered twelve o’clock, the two men decided. If the bad guys started shooting, Ingbretsen, on the left, would return fire and clear from ten to twelve o’clock, and Hutto would do the same from twelve to two o’clock. Then they’d turn, drop the fifteen feet down the wall to the gravel road, and run out of town.

The enemy fighters, however, didn’t make any moves. Noorullah told the insurgents that they must stop their attacks. “I know who you are,” he said. “You need to join the government of the Republic of Afghanistan. Next time I see you, if you are fighting the government or the Americans, I will kill you.”

The insurgents took their seats. It was as strong a message as Hutto and Ingbretsen could have hoped for.

Every officer in the 173rd Airborne was on record as supporting the new counterinsurgency strategy set forth by the Petraeus–Mattis group, but each one had his own take on it, and some thought Kolenda was taking the notion too far. Kolenda felt as if he were being constantly second-guessed by his boss, Colonel Chip Preysler, and by the brigade staff at Forward Operating Base Fenty at Jalalabad. The pushback never came in the form of a denial of development funds; it was more a matter of constant badgering and even condescension: What are you doing? Why aren’t you planning another kinetic
³⁹
operation? What’s with all of the backslapping and handholding? Despite the fact that 1-91 Cav had obliterated hundreds of insurgents throughout the summer and fall, one brigade staff officer still quipped that Kolenda’s men weren’t killing enough people.

This frustrated Kolenda no end. It was true that violence was down in his area of operations, but that wasn’t because his men had gone soft. As Kolenda saw it, none of what he was doing had anything to do with being warmhearted. In his opinion, counterinsurgency was a pretty damned cold-blooded strategy, all about being out there with specific goals—establishing stability and defeating the insurgency—and intelligently using the full range of available leverage, from cash, clean water, and education for local children to bullets, when appropriate, to get the desired results. There was an element of manipulation involved. Sure, he wanted the Afghans to have better lives—how could anyone not, after seeing that kind of impoverishment? But there was also something transactional about American promises of clean water, construction jobs, and a brighter future for Afghan kids. This wasn’t charity; the bottom line was, these offers were made to save American lives and help destroy anyone who hoped to hurt ISAF troops. Kolenda could never understand why some folks viewed the carrots as being somehow inferior to the sticks.

Preysler, for his part, didn’t see himself as pushing back against Kolenda’s efforts. As the man in charge of the four provinces in this area of operations, with eleven commands at the lieutenant colonel level under him, each with its own challenges and demands, he had a different perspective on matters. His men in the Korangal Valley were getting attacked up to five times a day, every day.
⁴⁰
Maybe the shuras and promises had helped, but how much? Even if violence was down in 1-91 Cav’s zone, all over the rest of its area of operations, the 173rd Airborne was still filling body bags.

This was Preysler’s fourth time in combat: he’d been in Afghanistan at the beginning of the war and then again during Operation Anaconda, as well as in Iraq at the beginning of that war. As a battalion commander, Preysler had been featured in Sean Naylor’s
Not a Good Day to Die,
the book that Ben Keating gave to his father before he headed overseas. By contrast, this was Kolenda’s first time deployed into battle.

Preysler believed that the deaths of Jacob Lowell, Tom Bostick, and Ryan Fritsche, combined with the challenges of the terrain, had—understandably—led Kolenda to conclude that conventional tactics wouldn’t work in Nuristan, and prompted him to put a great deal of energy into other, nonkinetic courses of action. And while he knew Kolenda might not think he was on board, Preysler felt that in fact, he was—it was just that he was constantly pushing for further analysis.

Kolenda didn’t talk with his subordinates about what he viewed as Preysler’s skeptical, sometimes even unsupportive attitude, but his troopers readily picked up on that attitude from the brigade leaders during their occasional visits to the area. As Kolenda saw it, many of his fellow officers did not understand the situation in Kamdesh, and many seemed to think of counterinsurgency as a simple matter of attrition warfare, with fig leaves of self-governance and development—as if counterinsurgency were just a big show being put on by Kolenda and others, a way of distracting the locals while the “real” Americans tackled the real job of killing bad guys.

At the end of December 2007, Second Lieutenant Hank Hughes, a former Army brat who’d gone to Boston University on an ROTC scholarship, met up with Hutto at Forward Operating Base Naray. The two hitched a ride on a chopper to Camp Keating. “You’d better be ready,” Hutto warned him in his odd, speedy Southern twang.

Hughes was flying in to replace Dave Roller as leader of 1st Platoon—Roller was being promoted to Bulldog Troop’s XO, Hutto’s second in command—and the green lieutenant had never before been deployed into a war zone. Hughes looked out the window of the Black Hawk and gulped. He’d been briefed on the terrain, but actually seeing it was another matter.