NO REGRETS ~ An American Adventure in Afghanistan (12 page)

Arab men would get into the act at times. These guys wore white flowing robes and red and black checkered
keffiyahs
(the scarf with the camel whip wrapped around it). They jumped up, clapped, and flailed their arms, sometimes spinning wildly at the base of the stage. White robes swished and swirled in orgasmic bliss. The
keffiyah
snapped in the air. I was reminded of the legendary whirling dervishes of Sufi Islam. I sat in my chair and laughed until I could hardly breathe. At one point, I thought the vein in my forehead would burst.

After watching the women whirl at “Club Bollywood,” Ian and I hit a few other clubs. One drink became several drinks. Somehow I managed to stagger back to the hotel after Ian went off with a girl. When I got my room key from the front desk, there was a note for me. Passports and visas were ready. We were flying to Kabul in the morning. I was excited to start this new job. It would be different than all of my previous jobs in Afghanistan and my first real experience with Afghans.

¹³
An S4 NCOIC—non-commissioned officer in charge—is a battalion-level supply officer that oversees and facilitates logistical operations.

Arriving in the Mile High City

Mid-June 2007

Kabul is politically a dusty backwater. Real power resides in the provinces with the warlords who have the pull of patronage. Karzai understands this, which is why he cannot solve the corruption that riddles the country. The only real power in Kabul resides in the hands of the U.S. military, as exercised on behalf of the Karzai regime. Without the Coalition, Karzai would be toothless. The people of Afghanistan have never looked to Kabul for guidance. Afghan culture is simply not centralized in the manner sought by the U.S.-led coalition or collectivized in the manner in which the Soviets attempted to force on the Pathan, Hazara, and Tajik tribal and cultural associations. Centralized government didn’t work when Afghan leaders such as Durrani, the Taliban, and King Zahir Shah tried it. It won’t work with an outside force attempting to ram it down the Afghans’ throats.

Kabul sits at roughly the same altitude as Denver, Colorado. Situated in a high valley in the Hindu Kush with the ancient Cophes river trickling through it, the city sprawls from mountain wall to mountain wall. Antenna Hill—the telecommunications hub of central Afghanistan—rises roughly in the center of the dust-ridden “urban” sprawl. Kabul is about the size of Louisville, Kentucky. The roads are pockmarked with potholes or dirt covered and muddy in the rain. The central area of the city is crammed with markets, restaurants, and government offices. Hesco barriers line the walls of ministry compounds, giving Kabul a siege-like appearance. The signs of the Muj wars and the American invasion are evident everywhere. Signs of collapsed, bullet-ridden buildings dot the cityscape. Afghan homes are sometimes built directly on top of the rubble of these collapsed structures.

Kabul is subdivided into districts. The most famous of these districts are Shahr-e Naw (New City), which is the business district at the center of the city, and Wazir Akbar Khan, which is a set of affluent neighborhoods now populated heavily by foreigners, NGO (non-governmental organization) workers, prominent company owners who do business with the Coalition, and other well-connected and well-heeled persons. Wazir Akbar Khan is brimming with new money and shifty characters looking to profit from the war in Afghanistan.

The rest of the city is a maze of streets and alleyways thronged with merchants, goats, and beggars. There are more vehicles than space on the road. Traffic jams in the city center are a regular occurrence. While pensively waiting for logjams to unlock, beggars and hawkers knock on your window pleading for money or selling tissue paper, phone cards, and candies. Many storefronts and homes are still bombed out wrecks across the city. There are streets dedicated to certain kinds of wares. Chicken Street, once a lane wherein Kabulis purchased poultry, is now a magnet where Coalition officials and embassy “tourists” shop for overpriced carpets and Afghan souvenirs.

In the northeast sector are the old Soviet bloc buildings where government and military officials resided during the occupation of the 1980s. Further east towards the outskirts of the city is the Kabul International Airport. Ian and I landed there around noon in mid-June 2007.

We were picked up by Anton who had been promoted within MPRI to take over the Eastern Regional Property Assistance Team. At 6’ 4” and about 290lbs, Anton was an imposing fellow. I don’t know if MPRI truly knew Anton’s history. I was later told that he had left the Army after ten years as a sergeant first class. One guy swore that Anton was a retired colonel. He never gave a straight answer when asked.

“I’m Anton. Which one of you guys is Ian?”

“That’s me,” Ian answered.

“You’ll be on my team. We’ll be heading out to Gardez. Dave, you’re going to Herat with Zach Amuro.”

“I’m going to take you to your hotel first. Then we’ll stop by the office.”

“Hotel? We’re not staying on Eggers?” I asked.

“Nope. Not enough room. You guys are staying at the Safi Landmark Hotel.”

“Cool.”

We checked into the hotel. Ian and I were given a suite together. We dropped our bags and Anton took us to the office to meet the rest of the team. I was introduced to my team lead, Zach Amuro, who was an Asian dude of Okinawan descent. He was a National Guard warrant officer and had done a tour of duty in Iraq. As the team lead, he was supposed to have the leadership and people skills to inspire exceptional performance. He had already been in Kabul for two weeks when I arrived, and he hadn’t made a great impression on anyone in that time. I found the guy to be one of those non-confrontational types and a tad hypersensitive.

I walked into this situation and was told immediately, “Dave, we need you to keep an eye on Zach out in Herat. Keep him in line. We know you have the experience and leadership.” I thought, well, why aren’t you making me the team chief then. What the hell? I’m in this situation again. My boss is another idiot who doesn’t know jack and I’m expected to take charge of him. To Zach’s credit, he knew he was out of his depth. He sidestepped with great aplomb and handed me the reins almost immediately. Again, I was expected to do the work and someone else was getting the dough.

We spent two months in Kabul developing our curricula. We were using the Afghan National Army decree (regulation) and the U.S. Army’s program of instruction (POI). We thought it was done for us but when we started going over the material, it was frightening. Someone had cut and pasted relevant chapters of U.S. Army logistics and accountability regulations into a “decree” and had it translated into Dari. The guy who did it must have been in a hurry. Some of the sections were completely irrelevant. Some ended mid-sentence. There seemed to be no order to it. I was told that Larry Parker had “created” the decree.

The POI wasn’t much better. The thing looked like it was written by a group of six year olds. Typos and poor grammar were the rule rather than the exception. Someone had fallen in love with the word “matériel.” Military folks with limited vocabulary loved to grab onto a word and use it to death. It had to be some kind of self-esteem issue. Seems “matériel” was the word of the day for the half-literate moron who had created the POI. To add insult to injury, we were using the Army training format which is “Tell ‘em what yer gonna tell ‘em. Tell ‘em. Then tell ‘em what you told ‘em.”

We were supposed to open the POI document, do a find/replace to change Afghan National Army (ANA) to Afghan National Police (ANP), Ministry of Defense (MOD) to Ministry of Interior (MOI), soldier to police, and army to police, and then call it a day. After looking at the mess that the Defense Ministry mentors handed us, we realized that we had our work cut out for us. Initially, the POI consisted of sixteen classes. I teamed up with Alan to re-write four of them. Alan was hired by MPRI to be the junior mentor on the northern region team based out of Mazar-e Sharif. In addition to the four classes I prepared with Alan, I also created an inventory management class. It took a day and a half to create that class complete with PowerPoint slides, a practical exercise, and a quiz. I learned PowerPoint on the fly while I was editing and writing the classes. After everyone had completed re-tooling the classes that they’d been assigned, we went over them again as a group.

POI editing was really the only thing that we did in Kabul. Zach and I wouldn’t start getting into the actual mentoring and training until we got out to Herat. Zach had to fly out first to coordinate our living arrangements. We were supposed to live on the regional training center (RTC) behind the Herat Airport. Politics blew that plan out of the water. The RTC was controlled by the State Department and INL or International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs. We were supposed to be on the same team. Fighting the same fight, as it were. The INL, nevertheless, denied our request to stay at the RTC. I tried to find out why but never got a satisfactory answer. Several ranking Army and Air Force officers told me that they repeatedly denied our requests as a way of telling DoD that they had the power to do so. There was a mini-war between Defense and State over the police training mission in Afghanistan. The State Department thought it was their mission. Department of Defense begged to differ.

The ANP and ANA were wont to fight each other at times. Outside of Kabul an ANA Kandak (
kandak
is the Dari word for “battalion”) had run into a District Police unit and had an all out firefight. One of our challenges as mentors was to foster a spirit of cooperation between these two hostile brother forces. The U.S. Defense and State departments’ animosity set a poor example for the Afghans and often hindered the mission with their infighting over funding and geography.

As a result of Defense/State animosity, Zach and I were planted on Camp Stone when we moved up to Herat. This put us at a severe disadvantage. Had we lived on the RTC, we would have been able to integrate with the DynCorp police mentors. We would have been able to better coordinate our training. We would have been able to move around western Afghanistan much more frequently. We’d have been much more effective. Instead, we were stuck on a FOB
¹⁴
connected to an Afghan army base that was fifteen miles away from the nearest police headquarters. The folks at Camp Stone were focused on the Afghan National Army. The Afghan National Police mission was a secondary consideration at best. My team’s mission with the ANP was relegated to an afterthought.

For now, though, we were stuck in Kabul. We spent two months in the capital city with virtually nothing to do once we finished preparing our program of instruction. Even though the Army had requested our services and MPRI brought us on contract, no one had a plan. We were actually supposed to stay for a third month but the bill for our hotel was eating into contract profits, so they hurried us out to the regions. The regions didn’t know we were coming. They had no plan for our arrival or implementation. Most of them had no idea what to do with us. Basically, we were responsible for creating our niche and convincing the regional U.S. commands that we could be useful to them.

While in Kabul, we were often marooned in our hotel due to threat level considerations. The Army had a four-tiered road safety status based on perceived levels of threat.

green – unrestricted travel

amber – movement has to be signed off by a colonel or above

red – mission essential movement only

black – all movement prohibited

Nearly anytime that Karzai was known to be traveling around Kabul, it seemed the roads went “black.” The day of an attack and the day after, roads were usually “black” or “red.” I always thought that the safest day to travel was the day AFTER an attack. The insurgents, Taliban, bandits, and half of the population go into hiding. It was rare that an attack was mounted the day after a successful bombing or IED run by the insurgents.

With nothing else to do and plenty of time to do it, I got antsy. I was curious about all of the underground establishments rumored to be in the city. I kept hearing about Wazir Akbar Khan, Line 15.
¹⁵
There were restaurants, bars, whorehouses, and foreign-owned businesses throughout the district. Once I found my way down there, I met quite a few folks who lived and partied hard in that area. There were several Chinese brothels, a Thai restaurant, and one bar called Crazy 8s. Crazy 8s was owned and operated by an American named Rick who worked for a company that was a big player in State Department contracts. State Department employees did not fall under the Army’s General Order #1. Many of them lived on the embassy compound or in a place called “Area 10” that was behind the embassy. Area 10 was similar to the Green Zone in Iraq. It was heavily guarded and surrounded by Hescos and concrete barriers. A maze of secure housing. The DoD side of Area 10 was a bit crowded but much better than living in a B-Hut or tent, whereas State Department housing was somewhat more luxurious. Many State Department contract employees lived in “safe houses” interspersed in various districts.

Kabul is a dangerous city. You can be kidnapped for ransom, murdered, beheaded, mugged, shot, or blown up at anytime on nearly any corner. Though there are some areas that are more targeted than others. Massoud Circle outside of the U.S. Embassy is one such place. Nearly every time the insurgents mounted a major attack in Kabul, Massoud Circle saw violence. The Serena, where diplomats and journalists stayed while in Kabul, was constantly attacked.

Military convoys rumbled down the roads in and around the city at all hours of the day and night. Black armored cars and trucks sped around carrying Afghan ministry and international embassy staff officials. Following too closely to these convoys was a sure way to see some violence. I witnessed this firsthand when my driver was following a small convoy carrying Rashid Dostum. The vehicles each had a sticker on the rear window stating “Rashid Dostum, the next King of Afghanistan.” Not sure how Karzai felt about that. The Dostum convoy came to a halt at a red light. My driver was slowly rolling up to the back of the convoy when the rear doors to the trailing SUV swung open. An Afghan wearing body armor over his Armani suit brandished an AK-47, aimed, and burst fired at the ground to the front of our vehicle. My driver started yelling and pointing at the U.S. vehicle identification on his dashboard. Dostum’s security guys weren’t impressed by our credentials. They yelled at my driver, “Back off or we’ll shoot again.” That was a close run for me. If the guy had aimed inside the vehicle, he’d have shot me full on in the face. Not only did we have to worry about the bad guys, we were sometimes endangered by the “good” guys.