One Hundred Victories (10 page)

The nature of the threat was subtle, constant, and wearing. The shots could come at any time, forcing the team members to be on alert while simultaneously greeting villagers, kicking a soccer ball with the village kids, and trying to persuade local officials to do their jobs. It required practicing sound tactics every day, every time they swung open the wide iron gate of their qalat. One day half the team and a few infantrymen patrolled on foot to Nasu Kalay. Following procedure, they fanned out in a diamond shape, with Parker riding along in one of the Kawasaki dune buggies. On their return, a shot cracked overhead as they crossed a barren field that would soon burst forth with poppies. The farmers were annoyed that the soldiers tromped across their fields, which were latticed with hand-mounded irrigation channels, but it was the best way to avoid IEDs. The soldiers knelt on the ground to lower their profiles and scanned the horizon. There was no cover between them and the gate of their mud-walled compound. Parker sped off in the direction of the shot, radioing the intelligence intercept team to see what they heard. The soldiers then moved out double-time and reached the gate without incident. No further shots were fired, and the team surmised that the insurgent’s PKM machine gun had jammed. Afghans hiding in the distant treeline sped off on their motorcycles.

These random potshots were a typical low-grade threat. What the soldiers feared most were the IEDs, the buried bombs that were hard to detect and responsible for the vast majority of deaths and serious injuries. To search for explosives, working dogs and their handlers were attached to teams in the highest threat areas: in Ezabad, Mocha and her sandy-haired handler were welcome additions on every foot patrol. Mocha walked point along with her handler, a tall, quiet young man who was aware that he remained an outsider in the team’s close-knit social dynamic. The well-behaved brown female Labrador sniffed out more than her share of bombs.

Perhaps the most valued and versatile aid came from the Afghan special forces team that came to live alongside them in the adjoining compound. One of its members had an uncanny ability to spot the tiniest telltale signs of an implanted bomb—and was equally skilled at disarming the crude devices—usually a wooden clapper built to evade metal detectors. The Afghan special forces teams had recently been formed with recruits from the commandos, so they were the best soldiers Afghanistan had and the beneficiaries of six years of joint training and operations with the US special forces. Their team organization mirrored the American special forces: each team had an officer and noncom leader, two intelligence specialists, two medics, two engineers, two weapons specialists, two communicators, plus two additional members to handle psyops and cultural/religious engagement.

The Afghan special forces team that came to Ezabad next door to Hayes and his men was led by Captain Azizullah, a grave black-haired young man from Nangahar. He was articulate and projected a calm assurance when speaking with both the villagers and the local officials. He would urge them to stand up and take responsibility for protecting their families and improving their lives—the kind of speech that might have alienated Afghans if delivered by an American, but was effective coming from this sincere, confident young man. Azizullah addressed the elders in a respectful but firm tone, and both they and local officials came to trust him. His team became a familiar presence as it alternated with another team on three-month tours in Maiwand.

Hayes’s patient courting of the district governor, Barwari, persuaded him to come to Ezabad for his first-ever visit. Soon he began to visit unprompted. Unlike many other district governors appointed by Kabul, Barwari was from Maiwand—and he was educated. But he had not passed the formal exam required for a permanent appointment, so he could be replaced at any time. Barwari seemed to be well-liked, and he was less corrupt than many local officials, but there was a fundamental impediment to bringing the government closer to the people of Maiwand: most of the population relied on the illegal opium business for their livelihoods. The provincial government had mounted an aggressive campaign to eradicate the poppy trade, but viable alternatives were scarce. Growing and harvesting opium poppies yielded a farmer $8,400 in profit per acre, while growing wheat would result in a net loss of $130, thanks in large part to the effect of USAID’s distribution of wheat seeds, which had depressed the price of wheat.
{42}
The opium traffickers made it easy: they would front farmers money to plant poppies each spring and then buy the balls of opium tar they harvested.

Weeks and then months passed. Ezabad and the surrounding villages remained reluctant to court the Taliban’s wrath by forming their own local defense groups. Still, the team poured its energies into village stability operations. After many shuras with the male residents, the team decided to build a road, start a school, and open a clinic. If life in the village improved and travel to Hutal became easier, better security might follow. Engineer Fazil Ahmad Barak hired a crew to grade and then gravel the moondust road to the town, and Jimmy began an outpatient clinic with the help of the Afghan special forces medics. A temporary school was started, and Hayes managed to finagle a teacher on loan from Kandahar while beginning the laborious process of petitioning the Ministry of Education for a permanent school.

The extended family at the Ezabad outpost also included a new innovation called Cultural Support Teams, composed of two servicewomen who had volunteered and trained to join the special operators in the field. The original rationale for this program was to provide women to search Afghan females during raids, but the program evolved into an effort to build bridges to the female population and better understand the needs of the villages. The American women tried their best to connect with the women of Ezabad and offer them something of value. Just entering the conservative Pashtuns’ humble homes, however, was a delicate cultural crossing. For example, during a visit to one home on the outskirts of Ezabad, a woman dubbed “the egg lady” (because she sold eggs from her house) reluctantly chatted with the uniformed women as she sat on the dirt floor turning a metal churn, which was wrapped in a frayed green sweater to keep it cool. She had a smile on her face, but her eyes, lined with heavy kohl, were wondering and wary. One of the American women inquired after her health and her children and offered some first aid advice based on their last chat, but the woman’s reserve did not thaw. The gap was an enormous one to bridge: the Afghan mother could not comprehend why these foreign women had no children of their own and had ventured so far from their own homes. As the American women collected their rifles and got up to leave, the woman, still polite, asked them not to return. The Afghan American interpreter, also a female, explained as they left that the Afghan woman was terrified that the Taliban would think she was collaborating with the Americans and would come to kill her and her family.

About six months into its second tour, the team’s dogged persistence finally paid off. After many hundreds of meetings, Hayes had gathered five older Afghans who would become his Afghan Local Police commanders. They looked like characters out of J. R. R. Tolkien’s
Lord of the Rings
trilogy, with craggy faces and long, wispy beards. Soda Khan was a dour, white-haired elder who decided to return from Kandahar to help rally the villagers. Out of Hero Jabbar’s former Gomai militia came Jan Mohammed (no relation to Karzai’s mentor, Jan Mohammad Khan of Uruzgan), a one-eyed former commander with a twinkly smile and teeth stained from constant smoking. He immediately enlisted his sons and volunteered to man the first outpost on the north side of Ezabad. Soda Khan was not such a hands-on leader, but he appeared at every meeting, gliding into the seat next to the district governor or appearing at his side when he made his rounds. He was no doubt seeking some type of windfall, but in the meantime, Hayes was happy to use his tribal stature as a legitimizing force to galvanize the timid villagers.

Ezabad residents endorsed the idea of local police in a shura, but they would not volunteer their own sons, so the five commanders’ recruits came mostly from the Hutal hub villages around Highway One and the district center. Some came from farther afield, including neighboring Helmand, where Jan Mohammed had a house. Some recruits were elderly and some very young. Rob, the weapons sergeant, oversaw the recruits, their training, and their pay. He snapped their photos and ran them through the biometric database to try to ascertain where they had come from and to ensure they had no record as a criminal or insurgent. One of the first recruits to go through the course held up a car to shake down the occupants. A few days later he was shot dead on orders from the Taliban shadow court. The incident had a salutary effect on the next class of recruits.

Some of the Afghan recruits knew how to handle an AK-47; others were totally raw. The special forces weapons sergeants and other team members patiently corrected the neophytes’ hunched-over posture as they tried to brace their thin bodies against the weapons’ recoil. The only way to get better, as with most skills, was to practice. One technique the sergeants used to teach the green recruits how to shoot was to seat them cross-legged at a slight angle to the target, so the body formed a natural cradle to brace the gun against the shoulder. The recruits sat in rows, watching as those in front took turns firing at paper targets stapled to boards. When they finished, the instructors beckoned them to the paper targets to examine their shot groups. The three-week program of instruction was a modified version of the standard bread-and-butter infantry training that special forces gave all over the world. They taught basic squad movements (overwatch, bounding overwatch, breaking contact, and the like) and basic marksmanship. Other instructional blocks covered human rights, the rule of law, and police and checkpoint procedures.

Much of the target practice was at close range, twenty-five meters. The role of the villagers was to defend, not to go on offensive raids. Any suspects they detained were to be immediately turned over to the Afghan district chief of police or his officers. Those blue-gray uniformed police were never deployed outside of district centers, and as of 2010, about half of that force still lacked training. In the rush to provide a police force, they had been recruited and sent to work without even the three weeks of training that Hayes’s recruits were receiving. This created immediate tension as the district police chief watched the new force receive instruction from America’s elite forces.

The skills of the police recruits gradually improved, and new recruits slowly materialized. Hayes spent a lot of time sitting in meetings but saying little. His entire method was to let the Afghans take the lead, so he only provided input before or after meetings. He sat on the sidelines and let Captain Azizullah sit at the meeting table with Barwari, the elders, and the other local officials. Hayes knew his most important role was behind the scenes; it was vital that Afghans interact directly in the formal meetings. Many conventional forces, and even civilian diplomats, did not heed that basic rule of advising, choosing instead to sit at the main table and often dominate the discussion. Hayes had developed an excellent relationship with the conventional battalion in Maiwand as well as with the brigade commander in Zhari. He used his easy and irreverent humor to build rapport, and he offered suggestions frequently without being pushy. He played a role well above his rank—and no one bristled.

One day after a shura at the district center, Jan Mohammed and the other local police commanders gathered around Hayes to share the latest news: they had just received the first pay for their recruits from the district police chief. Hayes was astounded. He had expected that it would take months and endless bureaucratic hassles for the Afghan government to take charge of the payroll, but the money spigot had turned on shortly after the office of the Ministry of the Interior (MOI) in Kabul processed their biometrics, ID cards, and MOI contracts. The first payday was not perfect—some commanders had received too much or too little based on their number of recruits—but it was a welcome first step, a sign that the Afghan government was embracing the local police concept and might just be able to make it work.

Hayes felt that the district government was also coming along. Barwari, the governor, was known to make money on the side, but he was relatively popular because he never tried to solicit bribes from the poor. Hayes had read intelligence assessments from the hydra-headed coalition forces recommending his removal on corruption grounds, but Hayes thought removing him would be a mistake. Barwari was reaching out to more and more communities, and he had begun to stay in Maiwand, only returning to his family in Kandahar City on weekends.
{43}

One incident in Ezabad led to a breakthrough as the team’s long tour drew to a close. Jan Mohammed’s checkpoint was attacked one night and some of his police were wounded in exchange of fire. He was livid. Believing the shooter had come from Ezabad, he rampaged through the village seeking the perpetrators, firing at those he believed responsible. The next day, the elders appeared at the team’s gate, demanding the departure of Jan Mohammed and his men. An elder named Daoud offered to generate a police force from Ezabad residents. They would rather have their own sons out at the checkpoints, he said.
{44}

Thus the American and Afghan special forces teams trained the first class of eleven Ezabad defenders. Hayes did not intend to let Jan Mohammed go, however, since he was a very reliable anti-Taliban leader who was respected in the district. Hayes also suspected that the new Ezabad leader might partly be motivated by the prospect of skimming off some of the money or other benefits that he could access by being an ALP commander. Daoud, a short man with deeply sunburned skin and white hair, said his family had lived there for two hundred years. When asked in an interview how many men he thought he would need to secure the village when the special operators moved on, Daoud answered, “None.” Asked to explain, he said, “Ten days after the Americans leave, they [the Taliban] will take over Maiwand. We got along with those people before, and we will again.”