One Hundred Victories (20 page)

The effect on morale was noticeable. Allen’s reinvestigation soured many of Haas’s staff on Allen; they saw him as a “political” officer who had groveled before the Pakistanis and was ready to throw his own troops under the bus. Dinter was furious. He felt that Allen preferred to conduct diplomacy rather than war and was launching investigations to cover his own rear end. “Thirty-one investigations!” Dinter bellowed in the privacy of his own office. “The endless investigations are wearing the force out.”

For his part, Allen felt that from the day he had assumed command from Petraeus in July, his tenure had been marked by a series of what he called “meteors” that struck without warning and threatened to derail the war effort. A sustained attack on his own headquarters; a massive car bombing on a large US base; assassinations of key Afghan leaders; the burning of Korans at a US base, which sparked days of violent riots; Marines urinating on corpses; and the Sayaqa incident—he seemed to lurch from one crisis to the next. The precious two years of the “surge” were passing and with them the chance to show the world that the momentum of the Taliban had been blunted.

Decisions taken by Allen after Sayaqa did not just have psychological impact but concrete consequences as well. Allen might not be able to mend ties with Pakistan, but he was determined to prevent any more incidents along the long, fraught border. He declared a five-​kilometer buffer zone along the border, which made any proposed operation there a “Level Two CONOP” that required notifying him and gaining approval by Scaparrotti. Given the supercharged climate of this international crisis, every subordinate commander got the implied message: no such missions would be approved. Therefore, no such proposals were submitted. The net effect was to move the border five kilometers west. No public announcement was made, but it did not take long for the insurgents to realize that the coalition was ceding ground, and they took full advantage. Pakistan, for its part, would pocket any concessions made.

The effects were most dramatic in the narrow province of Kunar. Kunar’s capital and the populated Kunar River Valley lay fewer than fifteen kilometers from the Pakistani border. The new edict brought the insurgents that much closer and made the job of the Afghan security forces, including the local police, that much harder. It meant that Maya was untouchable. And, since many of the operations that the special ops commanders wanted to conduct were in the buffer zone, it meant that the Afghan commandos and Eddie Jimenez’s company were essentially on ice for the rest of their tour. The buffer zone was reduced to four kilometers—the Pakistanis had wanted ten—but a number of special operations outposts located close to the border, including the ones at Dand Patan, Chamkani, and Shkin in Paktika, were shut down. CIA operatives remained because they were unaffected by US military decisions.

The stand-down came at a critical moment, when the maximum gains of the surge ideally would be felt and the momentum could shift in the Afghan government’s favor. Had the United States and its allies made any appreciable difference since the adoption in 2009 of a counterinsurgency approach? Judging the progress of wars, especially insurgencies, is difficult; they are like ocean tides that rise and fall, obscuring the underlying movement. The most obvious fact was that American political support for the war was ebbing, and the US president was resolutely committed to handing off combat operations by 2014. The US military believed it had made progress in rousting the Taliban and quelling the violence in the south. But it was difficult to know what would happen when US troops went home. Would Afghan security forces be ready to carry the ball, and did their people believe they would? The psychological state of the Afghans was perhaps the most important question of all, since a lack of confidence would sap the country’s will to fight.

Continued US assistance would be critical to both Afghans’ confidence and their ability to keep fighting, but the US-Afghan relationship had become a loveless marriage. Both sides were to blame. Even veteran Ambassador Ryan Crocker, who came out of retirement in the summer of 2011 to replace Eikenberry as ambassador in Kabul, quickly grew frustrated with Karzai, whom he had known since he had arrived in Kabul in 2001 to reopen the US embassy. Crocker was also annoyed by White House micromanagement, and even more at the administration’s decision to order troops out more quickly than the military thought wise. Crocker’s primary task was to negotiate a strategic partnership agreement that would pave the way for long-term security and economic assistance to help Afghanistan keep the Taliban and Al Qaeda from regaining their former sway.
{82}

Karzai had become increasingly adamant in asserting Afghan sovereignty and exasperated at continued civilian casualties. He was determined to halt unilateral night operations, which were primarily conducted by special mission units in search of high-value targets. Haas’s troops were always partnered with Afghan special operators, and ISAF coalition special operators were partnered with Afghan special police or intelligence forces. Foreseeing the end of unilateral operations, the special mission units had followed suit, creating their own Afghan partner unit, which initially was primarily a “face” they put through the door once they reached their target. Karzai made clear that he would settle for nothing less than Afghan approval of every mission launched.

In addition to night operations, the other neuralgic issue was the control of detainees. Karzai wanted Afghanistan to assume full control of Parwan, the main detention facility, and all detainees. There were two problems. One was the US concern that detainees would be released for lack of evidence or as a result of the weak justice system. The other issue was that international conventions forbade the handing over of detainees if there was reason to believe they would be tortured. United Nations, Red Cross, and coalition reporting all indicated that prisoners, especially those in the custody of the Afghan intelligence service, were being abused.

The United States dragged its feet in acceding to Karzai’s demands regarding night raids. Under the congressional authorization for the use of military force that was approved in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the US administration had asserted the right to capture or kill any Al Qaeda operatives or affiliates anywhere in the world. There were in fact very few sightings of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan—fewer than one hundred had been the standing testimony of US commanders for years—but the US command believed that its special mission units were keeping the Taliban off balance by rolling up thousands of field commanders and key nodes of its network. These were not high-value targets, but they did constitute the majority of those being captured in Afghanistan. Any time these raids caused civilian casualties, General Allen would be summoned to the presidential palace in Kabul for a tongue-lashing from Karzai. On one such occasion, Crocker protested the harsh language and reminded the president that Allen was a four-star general. American officials intimated that Pakistani intelligence and Iran were influencing two particularly antagonistic Karzai aides, his chief of staff and his spokesman. Crocker was able to keep a number of crises from escalating (such as the assassination of former Afghan president Burhanuddin Rabbani in September 2011, which threatened to sunder the Tajik-Pashtun governing coalition), and he finally did ink the partnership agreement in May 2012.

GROWING PAINS

This was the troubled bilateral context in which special operations forces were trying to make their part of the campaign work. A lot rested on their success or failure: they were being asked to change the dynamic of the war with the Afghan Local Police and to train and mentor the most proficient arm of the Afghan military and police—its special operations forces and special police units. Moreover, there was talk of turning over the entire post-2014 endgame to special operations forces.

Haas felt his teams were making progress on the two lines of the special operations effort: the Afghan Local Police initiative had expanded steadily since its inception in August 2010, and the Afghan special operations forces were growing and getting better. As of November 2011, there were 8,405 Afghan Local Police guardians in 70 sites spread out over 51 districts that had been vetted, trained, and validated by the Ministry of the Interior. It was easy enough to track the numbers, but understanding each little microcosm took enormous effort.
{83}

To gauge how individual sites were doing, Haas visited different provinces weekly. So did his trusted longtime comrade Colonel Mark Schwartz, who had replaced Don Bolduc as the CJSOTF-A commander. Schwartz had been with Haas in 2002 in Operation Anaconda, and his colleagues still remembered his heroic effort to stop the friendly fire from killing their Afghan militia force. Heinz Dinter, Haas’s blunt and sarcastic operations officer, described Schwartz climbing on top of a tank and banging on it with his helmet to get it to stop firing. Between the three of them they had shared many experiences, and, importantly for this job, they had the full screen version of the Afghan movie playing in their heads. It kept them from overestimating any single event as a Technicolor breakthrough or the crisis to end all crises. Schooled to take the long view, they would do what they could to nudge the country along.
{84}

Schwartz was cautiously optimistic about the local police program. “I’ve seen it struggling and flourishing,” he said. “Generally, it is following the mandate.” The best areas tended to be the homogeneous ones; the problems tended to occur in very mixed tribal or ethnic locations. Occasionally, the Afghan government had imposed its will, as occurred in Baghlan when the NDS intelligence service insisted that former insurgents be included in the police. Schwartz ticked off some gains in surprising places. Three Marine special ops teams had moved into perennially troubled northern Helmand in May, and by fall elders had come forward to ask for an Afghan Local Police force to be formed. Marine special operators had also won converts in the once-dicey Margab River Valley in the west, where unimpeded travel was now possible, and raised seventy police recruits in Dare Bum. The foothold in northern Kandahar was expanding. But teams had been pulled from a few areas that proved inhospitable. In one case, the Taliban had beheaded three elders for collaboration. In another, the local police had struck a deal with the Taliban to allow them safe passage. Before reaching decisions to withdraw, the teams were generally allowed time to try to work through problems.
{85}

Rather than rely on anecdotal impressions, the command tasked a team of RAND analysts to produce a rigorous, quarterly assessment of whether the program was producing the desired effects. The analysts drew on three main sources of data: polls they commissioned; the “significant activity” database of hostile acts, as reported by coalition forces in the vicinity of the sites; and the voluminous situation reports that the special operations teams filed. The hostile-activity reporting showed that between six and twelve months after an Afghan Local Police force had been formed, the violence in an area, after an initial spike, tended to decline compared to similar areas in which no local police existed. Over 70 percent of those polled expressed support for the Afghan Local Police in their area. The most recent poll in the fall of 2011, however, showed a worrying increase in the number of Afghans who said they had been asked for a bribe at ALP checkpoints; still, at 27 percent, the incidence was lower than that reported for other security forces and officials.
{86}

Haas was concerned about the need to mentor district chiefs of police more intensively, since the teams reported mixed support from district chiefs. They were the vital link for the police to receive pay, supplies, and support, if this was to become a genuinely Afghan program that would be sustainable when the special operations teams were no longer available to hold their hands. Haas began thinking about whether teams should move from villages to the district centers in a “hub and spoke” approach to encourage district chiefs to support their local police. The vast majority of his sixty-five teams were devoted to this initiative, so he wanted to be sure he was getting the best possible return on that investment.

Any changes made the early proponents of the initiative nervous. They feared that pulling out of the villages could cause the teams to lose touch and allow bad influences to take over. Some change was inevitable, if only because each commander had his own style and made course adjustments as he saw fit. Haas was not one to sit in hours-long video teleconferences, for example, so he did not carry over that practice from Miller. Some felt Haas was less committed to the Village Stability Operations half of the VSO/ALP program. A certain pressure to focus on numbers was created by the weekly spreadsheet that tracked how many Afghan police were on the ALP payroll in each site, but Haas repeatedly told teams not to act hastily. “You do not want to be looking over your shoulder when you leave,” he counseled.
{87}

The anxiety of those on the sidelines was also due to the fact that Haas did not advertise his changes of course. His style in general was more insular than Miller’s. He did not create a big tent or rely on outside advisers, as had become common at military commands over the past decade. He preferred to trust his closest colleagues and his own gut. In addition to Schwartz and Dinter, Haas’s inner circle consisted of his deputy commander, John Evans, a rising star aviator from the 160th “Nightstalkers” Special Operations Aviation Regiment, and his frank chief of staff, Navy SEAL Captain Wes Spence. Haas’s door, schedule, and flank were closely guarded by his aide-de-camp and by his command sergeant major, Jeff Stigall, whose brother had occupied the very same position as Miller’s senior enlisted adviser. Haas had an extraordinary grasp of Afghanistan’s Machiavellian politics. One of his staff officers commented, with some amazement, “Haas will rub his bald head for a while and then predict exactly what [a senior Afghan official] is going to do.” He added, “He’s like Tony Soprano—if Soprano were a good guy.”
{88}