One Hundred Victories (12 page)

Paktika 2010–2011

CHAMTU

ODA 3325, like most teams, desperately wanted the commando mission. Partnering with the Afghan commandos guaranteed a tour of planning and executing raids, plenty of target practice, and night operations. “Shoot, move, communicate,” were the basics of the soldiering life, and the bread and butter of special forces work because they were doing it with their indigenous partners. ODA 3325 was a dive team, and its operators tended to be aggressively physical because their scuba-diving specialty involved grueling training and periodic requalification tests. The team’s “personality” was also influenced heavily by its captain, Michael “Hutch” Hutchinson, and his intelligence sergeant, Greg, backed up by Dustin, the team’s communications sergeant. Hutch and Greg were smart and smart alecks, and it quickly had become clear that anyone who could not hang with their pace, their humor, or their taste in music (Journey, Led Zeppelin) need not apply.

There was no arguing with the team culture, whether in the special forces, the SEALs, or any other subset of special operations forces. The club or clique dynamic would take hold and reinforce the ethos, camaraderie, and esprit de corps that is vital for cohesion in military units. It is exclusionary, competitive, and mostly beneficial. Sometimes these small cliques would go astray, if they were led by the wrong leader, or if that leader lost his way. Hutch was a cheerful product of the Midwest, set upon following his uncle into the auto industry until his mother insisted he go to college. He chose West Point, despite her dismay at his decision to join the military in the wake of 9/11.

Hutch was smart and tended to poke fun at himself and everyone around him. He was frequently in trouble at West Point, and it seemed that the long gray line might reject him if it could not break him with endless punishments and threatened demerits. Clearly, the only place that was remotely suitable for his obstreperous temperament was the special forces. He instantly bonded with his whip-smart, tow-haired intelligence sergeant, an even more irascible and condescending wit than Hutch. Their battalion commander, Bob Wilson, took a somewhat benign parental approach to the team, but the company commander was less understanding and regularly tried to ride herd on them. On one occasion after they reached Afghanistan, the company commander overruled their proposed course of action, and Hutch, hearing the news over the secure line, kicked his desk to pieces.
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Failing to get the commando partnering assignment, the team sought the remotest possible corner to gain the freedom of maneuver to make things happen. They wound up in Shkin, the loneliest border outpost in Paktika, right on the border with Pakistan’s South Waziristan tribal area—in other words, one of the hottest Taliban and terrorist transit zones in the country. Over the years South Waziristan had played host to a collection of Al Qaeda and allied terrorist groups, such as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, as well as a shifting federation of tribal militants. The major insurgent leader in South Waziristan was Mullah Nazir, and the US military dubbed his group the Commander Nazir Group. He expelled the foreigners but struck alliances with other groups, including the powerful Haqqani network in North Waziristan. Nazir, born in Paktika with family on both sides of the border, had amassed a fighting force of some 10,000. He had been captured by the Pakistanis but released in a prisoner swap; he reportedly helped the Pakistani government by turning on the Pakistani Taliban, which was aiming to topple the Islamabad regime. In any event, Nazir’s focus was Afghanistan.

The special forces and the CIA had been bedded down at Shkin since early 2002, but Paktika was always what the military called an “economy of force” effort—meaning few conventional troops were sent there. Paktika was the southern lobe of a three-province area historically called Loya Paktia, and in fact it made more sense to think of Paktika, Khost, and Paktia as a region than as separate entities. The military used the shorthand P2K to refer to the area. In the map drawn up for the Afghan Local Police initiative, several districts in both Paktika and Paktia were selected for ALP development. Not a single district in Khost was designated, however, because the population was considered to be hostile and therefore unreceptive to the notion of local defense. But this logic was somewhat circular, as the approach employed in Khost had primarily been one of hunting and killing, and no effort had ever been made to recruit a local defense force. In addition to the conventional brigade, which was located at the capital of Khost near the border, a large CIA-hired Afghan force—one of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Pursuit Teams, or CTPTs—focused on the cross-border threat.
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Hutch and Greg had done their pre-mission study of Paktika, but they were eager to get out and augment their research with a firsthand tour to meet the players. They arrived on January 19, 2010, and the team spent the first two months doing reconnaissance patrols to every corner of eastern Paktika. “You can’t succeed by doing firebase diplomacy,” the captain said. “You have to establish your street cred.”

Their CIA colleagues at Shkin were generally aloof and arrogant, even though the father of one of the team members hailed from that organization. As the team sat in Shkin’s tactical operations center one day early in their tour, writing up a report about a border op they had just conducted, a scowling black-bearded Afghan strode in and passed by them without a word. It was Aziz. They had heard a lot about him from the previous team. Aziz had been a fixture in Paktika as long as the Americans had been coming there. He had participated in Operation Anaconda in Paktia in 2002 as part of Zia Lodin’s blocking force. Aziz had then joined the Afghan Militia Force until it was disbanded, and had later transitioned over, unhappily, to the Afghan Security Guard force. But Aziz was not inclined to sit around in a guard tower like some rent-a-cop. This was his country and he planned to help take it back from the Taliban.

Aziz did not greet the team that day. He knew they were the new team he’d be working with, but his experience had taught him to be wary. Each team was different, and the coalition’s war plans had taken many twists and turns. Sometimes the coalition commander simply wanted to hunker down and ensure his men got out of these badlands alive. But the new battalion commander from the 101st Airborne Division, Lieutenant Colonel Rob Harmon, had arrived with a new approach. He gathered conventional, special operations, and civilian PRT personnel together for weekly planning meetings; it was the first time anyone had tried to lash together the scarce resources being devoted to Paktika. Hutch’s team, which would go through four battalion battlespace owners on two Paktika tours, was impressed by the way Harmon orchestrated the various military and civilian entities so that each could do what it did best.

Aziz’s fierce motivation was partly a function of his personality, but he was particularly driven by the searing experience of being the lone survivor of a bloody Taliban suicide attack while eating at a restaurant in the bazaar of his hometown, Orgun, with his cousin Sardar in 2006. Sardar and many other fighters were killed, and the badly wounded Aziz was flown to Kabul for medical treatment. Special operations forces came to find him in the Afghan military hospital. “Where is Aziz?” they asked one of the doctors, not recognizing him through his bandages. Once they found him, they took him to Bagram, where he was attended to promptly and received better care than he would have received in Kabul. When Aziz returned to Paktika, he rejoined the fight. He added two new patches to his tiger-striped uniform. One patch commemorated Sardar’s death; the other read: “Taliban Hunting Club.”
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Aziz had acquired serious fighting skills over the past decade of war. When the team met him, he was babysitting the Shkin base and patrolling its perimeter. But the teams based there realized they needed Aziz for combat operations, as no one else had the detailed grasp of the terrain that he had or understood enemy tactics as well. Hutch and his sergeants recognized Aziz’s tactical proficiency in the way he conducted himself, handled guns, and assessed the terrain and situation. They also observed his leadership skills and his strict discipline of his subordinates. When a truck driver who hauled supplies arrived at their outpost, Firebase Lilley, and complained that one of Aziz’s guards had tried to shake him down by demanding protection money, Aziz confined the guard for six months without pay as a demonstration to all of his men. Aziz was extremely strict with his group, which then numbered about thirty-five men, who were called his “Special Squad,” and the team observed a certain pride and esprit de corps among them. They had adopted and enforced strict standards as part of modeling themselves as an elite unit.

Meanwhile, Hutch was pleased with the way his own team was jelling. The men had been to Afghanistan on a previous deployment, but they had since gained new members—and now, a new mission. Following pre-mission training in Wyoming to prepare for high-​altitude operations in mountainous terrain, they were slated to serve two tours with only a short break, and Hutch wanted to make sure they did not suffer burnout. One of his points of friction with his company commander was the high-spirited hijinks of ODA 3325: just because they liked to have fun did not mean they were not serious professionals. Before every mission, they gathered in their team room to play their favorite songs on the computer as they were kitting up. En route to the target, they cranked more tunes over the loudspeakers in the Humvees. And as they crested the hilltop leading back to the firebase, they played the team’s theme song, “Don’t Stop Believin’.”

Special operations teams are given a certain latitude to accomplish their commander’s intent, and Hutch would not hesitate to take the initiative and innovate as he saw fit. After two months of driving around and sitting with Afghans in dozens of towns and qalats, he concluded that the basic dynamic there was strength and honor. A tribe would seek and use guns and money to protect its honor, and shame or loss of honor was the worst fate it could suffer. He would play on the tribes’ desire to be strong and to protect their honor. To be effective, the team also had to establish its identity, and a reputation of strength as well as fairness. The large Waziri tribe straddled the border between Paktika and Pakistan’s South Waziristan. As the name suggested, the Waziris were the dominant tribe in Waziristan, and the Waziris in Paktika had many family and business ties across the border where most of their kin lived. The team’s academic studies had suggested that the Waziris were unalterably opposed to the Afghan government because of ideological differences and their geographical tie to Pakistan. But the team reached a different conclusion after spending time among the Waziri. They found the tribes to be overwhelmingly motivated by their own local status and concerns and largely indifferent to a government that provided them nothing and compelled nothing from them.
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The team ranged all over eastern Paktika—a region the size of Rhode Island—frequently encountering bands of Taliban. Speed and aggression were their friends; they learned that standing and fighting would usually cause the insurgents to disengage. They became known as the little band that would fight, not break contact. They relied on their Humvees and the Kawasaki dune buggies, since the narrow dirt mountain roads and winding trails were too tight and steep for the hulking RGs and even the smaller Military All-Terrain Vehicles, which, despite their name, were still not agile enough for this terrain. Adding weight through armor to protect the soldiers ultimately made them less safe, unless their job was to drive up and down paved roads. One of the team members called the Kawasakis their $12,000 “IED defeat machines,” because they allowed the soldiers to travel off-road and avoid the buried bombs entirely. They enabled them to escape—and therefore defeat—what had become an endless cycle of US manufacturers building bigger and bigger vehicles while the insurgents simply rigged ever bigger bombs. Physics favored the insurgents, who could pack ever greater amounts of homemade explosive powder into jugs or culverts. The dune buggies allowed the team to fight like the Taliban, but faster: they could handle almost any terrain, take unexpected routes, and pursue and overtake their attackers. The team regularly ridiculed the top-heavy, grotesquely expensive American way of war. They had been trained to think and act like guerrillas, and that meant improvising on shoestring budgets. Hutch was radical about overspending in general—he came to believe that the typical behavior of Americans actually lessened their stature in Afghan eyes. Americans constantly offered handouts with no strings attached and allowed themselves to be ripped off—and every Afghan knew it.

From their base in Shkin, the team decided to focus on the most populated valley corridor, which ran up to Orgun, where the battalion was based, through the towns of Rabat and Surobi. They chose Rabat as the place to begin their version of village stability operations. Rabat sat beside the Spedar Pass, which was a critical chokepoint for vehicle traffic traveling from Pakistan through Shkin on the border to the populated central valley and main city of Orgun and on to the provincial capital of Sharana and the intersection with Highway One. The Spedar Pass was dominated by a group of Taliban insurgents who extracted money at checkpoints through the pass and exercised control of the water resources in the area, which was a constant source of friction among Rabat’s five subtribes. The group was led by an Afghan named Chamtu who had a fearsome reputation; the team heard tales of murder, torture, and rape from Afghans who lived in the valley.

The team carefully laid the groundwork for a showdown in Rabat. Hutch, who had grown up in Chicago, proved to be instinctively streetwise in Afghan-style politics. The younger men of Rabat were tired of Chamtu’s predations and frustrated that their elders were so thoroughly intimidated. But they could not overrule their elders alone. After an April 28 firefight in Spedar Pass, when Hutch and his team killed eight of the twenty insurgents who attacked them, he decided it was time to call for a shura. He requested that the Rabat elders come to Shkin for a powwow. He had already enlisted the attendance of the Bermel district governor and had discussed the script with him and the Shkin shura leader. These two began the meeting by berating the Rabat elders for not keeping the pass open and secure. Their truck drivers were regularly shaken down and sometimes attacked. As the Rabat elders began to make excuses, the Shkin shura members interrupted them with more complaints. The pressure began to build. Then Commander Aziz asked each elder to declare which side he was on, the government’s or the insurgents’, and began to separate the elders into two groups based on their response. The ultimatum forced the elders to side with the government.
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