One Hundred Victories (15 page)

Kettman was convinced that training and education were the way to make a lasting difference, as the adage about teaching a man to fish implied. A literate local official armed with good management and accounting techniques could turn around unpopular perceptions of the Afghan government. But the American military and civilian incentive structure, internally, revolved around expenditure of authorized dollars. If program monies were not spent, that was considered a demerit. Eastern Paktika received $2.89 million in development funding in 2010, and West Paktika ten times that. Hutch argued that for $5 million he could amply fund development, security, and governance in eastern Paktika. This was a far smaller sum than the $1 billion it took to maintain an American brigade there annually. And, he noted, the United States paid $400 million to lease the base at Shkin each year.

TO PIRKOWTI AGAIN

The virtuous circle of security and commerce resulted in an increasingly peaceful Paktika as the team’s tour progressed. This set of circumstances left the sergeants crestfallen—try as they might, they could not get into a firefight. Then one day in October 2011 they picked up chatter that Abdul Aziz Abbasin—the Taliban shadow governor—was back in Pirkowti. He was on the United Nations blacklist and had recently been added to the asset forfeiture list of the US Treasury Department, but those sanctions had not touched him. The arm of the Haqqani network in Paktika, he was responsible for ambushing and killing many US soldiers and ran a training camp that still turned out Taliban fighters.

The team dropped everything and went into mission planning mode. Abbasin had eluded them before, but the team was determined to get him this time. Aziz and his lieutenant strode into the operations center to discuss the mission to Pirkowti that would kick off that night. Hutch and Greg engaged in extended negotiations throughout the night with their counterparts in Task Force 310—the special mission unit charged with hunting high-value targets in the region—and the CIA. The task force wanted to wait for more signals intelligence to confirm the target’s location and identity. The CIA’s Counterterrorist Pursuit Team, which was located in an adjacent camp, decided to send a small contingent along. The Afghans in the CTPT drove trucks and wore different uniforms from others in the alphabet soup of the Afghan security forces. Their chain of command ran through the intelligence hierarchy.
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At 3:30 a.m., the team rolled out of the Orgun gate, stopping to pick up Aziz and his men, whose base adjoined the American one. The US team was loaded into three Humvees, and the Afghans were in an assortment of Humvees and trucks. They drove under night observation devices (NODs) toward Pirkowti until day broke, the sun rising just as they climbed down the banks of the wadi and began the jostling, splashing drive up the riverbed. Their target was actually beyond Pirkowti, at Shaykhan, the town where they had been ambushed by Abbasin’s forces the year before. The line of vehicles, Cameron’s in the lead, pulled out of the wadi and quickened its pace as it entered Pirkowti, then sped through and made the sharp right turn down into Shaykhan.

The surveillance aircraft overhead was supposed to be jamming communications, but for some reason Hutch was picking up insurgent traffic. He did not need to wait for translation to be relayed. “Run, run,” the insurgents said. “They are coming.” Someone had tipped off Abbasin, and he and his men were fleeing Shaykhan. “Step on it,” Hutch relayed, urging his men forward into the town. They pulled into their predetermined spots, one Humvee parking on a high street to oversee the town’s rolling landscape, and then sprinted through the street, ducking into the target houses. Oddly, a helicopter had been spotted overhead as they arrived—a sure tipoff that Americans were on the way. The team never found out whose bird it was.

Commander Aziz led his men into homes they had targeted where Abbasin and his men were known to sleep. They searched them thoroughly. Then Aziz called for the elders to gather the young men in the village for an impromptu shura. They came out reluctantly, but without resistance, and sat on their haunches, Afghan style, in front of a building on the main street. Aziz reminded them of the agreement they had signed the year before, to defend their village against the Taliban. He said they had breached the agreement repeatedly and had lost their honor by behaving in this fashion. Hutch stood by but did not speak. This dialogue was more effectively conducted among Afghans. Aziz’s men spotted two young Afghans they said had ties to the insurgent leader and recommended they be taken for questioning by the NDS, the Afghan intelligence service. Two dwarves joined the gathering, and Aziz and Dustin began chatting with them playfully, attempting to lighten the mood. The sun was well up, and Hutch was ready to go. They had failed to bag their prey once again.

The convoy loaded up but was briefly delayed by a caravan of brightly clothed Kuchi herders who were making their way into town on several camels and horses, their children and belongings piled high on donkeys’ backs. Women and dogs on foot rounded out the slow-moving parade. They had stayed clear of the town until they were sure it would not become a battle zone. Hutch had planned a stealthy raid this day, but his standard practice, when issuing challenges to the Taliban, was to let villagers know beforehand. The team would challenge the insurgents to show themselves outside of town at such and such an hour to do battle. If the insurgents failed to show, they lost face before their kinsmen. And if they showed, they would be outgunned in short order. The villagers were glad to have the advance warning to stay off the roads, and it minimized the risk of civilian casualties.

Hutch was dead set on bringing Pirkowti around before the end of the team’s tour. Before he went on leave, he suggested that the team propose a combined operation to the conventional battalion commander at Orgun. The latter agreed, but his commander then retasked him to ferry their armored vehicles out of FOB Tillman on the border to refit them with heavier armor. The scheme exposed the truck drivers to attack along the narrow ambush-prone road. In the end the battalion expended an entire month in the final stretch of its tour pulling out ninety vehicles for refitting, suffering several wounded in the process. The team went ahead without the battalion to Pirkowti, again with Aziz. They hit an IED in the wadi, but no one was injured. They came up empty-handed again; they did not capture Abbasin, and the villagers were not inclined to help. The team was frustrated. It would take more time and more maneuvering to bring Pirkowti around.

While ODA 3325’s energy and acuity—and the decision to send the team back to eastern Paktika—were major factors contributing to the quantum leap in security, stability, and renewed economic activity that the region experienced between 2010 and the end of 2011, the team was quick to say that the improvements would not have been possible without the Afghan partner force led by Commander Aziz. He and his men played key roles in brokering deals and bringing the various district governors and elders into the fold. The province had been cowering under Taliban intimidation, and none of the appointed leaders or army or police commanders had demonstrated any leadership in the effort to change matters. But they did follow Aziz.

However, a different version of Aziz was circulating. Stories from Pirkowti and other Utmanzai Waziris were shared with United Nations officials, who wrote a report that was sent to the coalition. The ISAF headquarters investigated the allegations against Aziz, which included acts of murder, abuse, and pedophilia in 2009, but found no corroborating evidence. Then the UN report was given to a Kabul-based freelance reporter, Julius Cavendish. Hutch was with Aziz when the reporter called to ask him to respond to the allegations. Aziz hotly denied the charges. He was incensed by the first question he said Cavendish asked him: “Are you a Muslim?” Aziz felt the reporter was prying into matters that were none of his affair. The article was published in
Time
magazine in October 2011, and Aziz became the target of renewed questions and inquiries.
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When Hamid Karzai asked his aides about Aziz, he received favorable reports. The deputy NDS director, who was from Paktika, made positive comments. Mohibullah Samim, the governor of Paktika, and his chief of police, Dawlat Khan, also told the president of the helpful role Aziz had been playing. These high-level Pashtuns brushed aside the article’s implication that Aziz, a Tajik who had been born and raised in Orgun, had a vendetta against Pashtuns. The village elders had endorsed the commanders that Aziz had nominated. The force now included 625 Pashtuns and 66 Tajiks. The provincial council chief, a Pashtun, decided that more needed to be done to rebut the claims, and he urged village elders and district leaders to go to Kabul and seek an audience with Karzai to convey their view that without Aziz, eastern Paktika would not have moved forward. If he was removed, the relative peace and security might quickly unravel.
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The police chief told Aziz that Karzai wanted to meet him face to face. Aziz told Hutch he was going to Kabul in a taxi, unarmed. “Are you crazy?” Hutch said. But Aziz would not listen. The president wanted to meet him, and he wanted to clear his name. He drove to the presidential palace and met Karzai. The president heard him out, and, according to Aziz, began crying. Karzai also received a delegation from Paktika, which convinced him that this Afghan had been slandered. The Utmanzai Waziris, particularly those from Pirkowti, had an incentive to spread stories: Aziz was the most formidable enemy in Paktika of anyone linked to the Taliban, the Haqqanis, or the Commander Nazir Group.

The matter was put to rest, at least from an Afghan standpoint, when the Afghan officials and elders publicly rallied around Aziz. Jess Patterson, the US State Department head of the provincial reconstruction team based in Sharana, knew that the provincial governor and police chief both strongly supported Aziz. She believed he had been effective in bringing security to the province, but she did not know whether the specific allegations were true or false. “I’m sure he is no angel,” she said, but added that “the accusation that he was on some kind of anti-Pashtun crusade has no credibility.” Most of his force was Pashtun, as were the governor, the police chief, and the head of the provincial council, who were all from different subtribes (Andari, Zadran, and Kharoti, respectively). ODA 3325 had been in combat with Aziz countless times, but Hutch and Greg said they had never seen him execute anyone in cold blood. Any incidents that took place in 2009 would have occurred before the team arrived, but Hutch and Greg said that some of the alleged crimes were linked to combat operations in which Aziz had not even participated.

Aziz, who felt his honor was gravely injured, wondered why the reporter had not come to interview him in person. “I am ready to meet him at any time,” he said. “Why would he say these things?” Aziz said he had not pulled Chamtu from a mosque and killed him; he had never been in a heliborne operation; and he was in the hospital at Bagram recovering from injuries on one of the dates when the reporter alleged he had flown to a qalat, burned it down, and killed two women and children. The special forces had been with him on all of his operations. “If they don’t believe me, ask the teams,” Aziz said. What he viewed as a smear campaign seemed like it would never end: “The Taliban are now saying that this is what happens to those who are allies of the United States.”
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Hutch and his team had succeeded by unorthodox methods, and Aziz was undoubtedly a departure from the model. He had not come to the team through the village elders, but through his long association with special operators. He had been embraced by the local elders and officials, however. Nonetheless, Aziz’s situation was precarious from a practical standpoint because he held no formal position within the Afghan security forces apparatus. He was not a member of the Afghan Local Police or of the Afghan Uniformed Police. He was paid out of US Afghan Security Forces Funds in an arrangement that was due to expire as the security forces came under the Afghan government’s purview. He had been made the trusted agent or paymaster of the Afghan Local Police by the provincial chief of police, and he was clearly functioning as the primary trainer, quick reaction force, and intermediary between the provincial and district police. To regularize the role of Aziz and his Special Squad, the special operations company commander suggested in the spring of 2012 that his group be named the Village Response Unit and that the Afghan Ministry of the Interior pick up his salary. The provincial police chief, Dawlat Khan, did not want to lose Aziz as his ally and asked him to become his deputy. Aziz wanted to remain in Orgun, however, rather than move to Sharana, the provincial capital. He was willing to do whatever Khan asked, but he wanted to do it from his home city. He also did not want to lose his tie to the special forces. “I work for them,” he said. “I work with them.”
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CHAPTER FIVE

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ON THE BORDER