One Hundred Victories (21 page)

Stylistic differences aside, Haas supported the continued expansion of the local police initiative, but he believed that training, advising, and mentoring the Afghan special operations forces was an equally important part of the campaign. The latter were regarded as the most proficient Afghan fighting forces, an achievement that was directly attributable to the intensive mentoring approach that US special operators typically used. Building competent indigenous forces was part of their tried and true formula. Most of the US special operations work in seventy-plus countries in Asia, Latin America, and Africa in any given year involved advising and assisting those governments’ forces.

The Afghan special operations forces consisted of 5,500 troops as of late 2011, including nine commando
kandaks
, or battalions, and a brigade-level headquarters. In the past year they had begun to select and field special forces teams as well. The chief of the Afghan army staff, General Sher Mohammed Karimi, was an enthusiastic champion of Afghan special forces; as a military exchange student, he had graduated from the Special Forces Qualification Course at Fort Bragg and the Ranger School at Fort Benning forty years before. He posted the chart of the expanding organization on his office wall for visitors to see. The plan at that time envisioned a force of 8,500, with two brigades of commandos and special operators; a Kabul-based mobile strike force equipped with light armored personnel carriers; and an air wing of Mi-17 Russian-made helicopters. The Afghan Partner Unit, called Kteh Khas in Dari, was a nascent counterterrorism unit. Rangers were traditionally direct action specialists, but they took up the task of training their partner unit and built a first-class shoot house in which they practiced close-quarter battle drills and marksmanship.

This plan for “Afghanization” was the special operations forces’ way home. In fact, it should have been the operators’ number-one priority from the beginning had they followed their own playbook. Decade-long efforts in Colombia and the Philippines had produced proficient forces that greatly diminished threats in those countries. In Colombia, an entire special operations command had been built, with special forces, Delta, SEAL, and Air Force special operations forces all taking part. The Colombians had since graduated to training other countries’ forces in Latin America and West Africa. Haas’s previous post before coming back to Afghanistan was at Africa Command, where he had focused on training and advising government forces—until the Libya uprising shifted his focus to unconventional warfare to aid the overthrow of Muammar el-Qaddafi.

As commanders and policymakers began debating the future course in Afghanistan in late 2011, the question arose of whether the special operations forces should prepare to assume overall lead for the Afghanistan effort in 2013 or 2014, since the United States was heading toward a small-footprint mission largely devoted to training, advisory, and counterterrorism roles. These were all special ops missions, but the question was whether the special ops command could manage all of the moving parts—the logistics, the base functions, and the legal and administrative tasks that were currently being handled by multiple four-, three-, and two-star commands. Haas’s staff did some initial planning, but he concluded that it was a bridge too far. The fact was that the special operations forces had no deployable three-star command other than the one developed to do high-value counterterrorism operations. The conventional army argued that ten years of on-the-job training had given its corps as much claim to the job, so its III Corps and XVIII Airborne Corps were lined up to do the job through 2014. Having lost that battle, US Special Operations Command chief Admiral William H. McRaven then turned his attention to what was a logical intermediate step—combining all special operations forces in Afghanistan under one operational command. He had forced SEALs, Delta Force operators, and Rangers to work together when he led the counterterrorism Task Force 535, and he was known to favor more unity and less parochialism among the “tribes.” He set his sights on making Haas’s successor a two-star who would lead a unified special operations command in Afghanistan.

The fact was that special operators had their hands full overseeing the expansion of the largest local defense program since Vietnam, building Afghan special operators, and tracking terrorists. Special operations forces had not operated so many dispersed firebases and outposts since the Vietnam War. The CJSOTF’s recently formed 120-man Group Support Battalion (GSB) handled logistics for a 6,000-man force in 103 locations all over the country—whereas the normal ratio in conventional units was three support personnel for every fighting man. Riggers worked up to twenty hours a day assembling and loading made-to-order packages to be delivered by plane, helo, or truck. They dropped a staggering 1 million pounds a month—almost half of all the airdropped supplies in Afghanistan. The battalion cobbled together air support from three sources: the conventional force’s aviation brigades, the CJSOTF-A’s own contract fleet, and the Air Force Special Operations Command’s Combined Joint Special Operations Air Detachment–A (CJSOAD-A). The CJSOAD-A had a centralized command in Qatar that apportioned two MC-130Ws (as well as AC-130H gunships, which provided close air support in combat missions) and three Polish-made M-28 “Truckers,” which could land on a 1,500-foot runway or kick loads from its back hatch. The contract planes included three Beechcraft 1900s, two Casa 212s, and a B-200. Most conventional air was obtained on a “mother, may I” basis, so the special operators were astounded when Major General James Terry, the regional south commander, dedicated three Blackhawks, three Apaches, and four Chinooks to support them.
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Although both the Afghan Local Police and the Afghan special operations forces were growing, Haas, like General Allen, was bombarded by his own set of meteors that fell into his path. Some were less damaging than others, and some represented a mortal threat to the enterprise. The first one was a scathing report published by Human Rights Watch in the fall of 2011. It was sharply critical, but short on facts. The human rights investigators were only able to visit a handful of sites, and the problems they found focused on the north, Herat, and the Khas Uruzgan District, which was known for its internal strife. The report dwelled on Afghanistan’s history of militias and earlier programs and predicted that this latest program would degenerate into lawlessness. It recommended several safeguards that were already in place, including US and Afghan intelligence vetting of recruits, a designated coordinator in the district police office, and rule of law and ethics training.

To some degree the report was a self-inflicted wound; the command had given out very little information about the local police program and permitted even less access, in part because ISAF wanted it to be seen as an Afghan program rather than something special operators were doing. But this prevented any outsiders from evaluating what was happening in the remote countryside. When the report came out, ISAF ordered a brigadier general to investigate. He took a thorough approach, assembling a team for each region to visit sites and conduct interviews. The month-long inquiry confirmed seven allegations and partially confirmed several others; many could not be verified. “I take it seriously when there is misconduct,” Schwartz said, noting that a former local policeman had been convicted of rape and an Afghan special operator had been relieved of duty.
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A much graver threat to the reputation and potential success of the Afghan Local Police program—one that consumed months of staff time and caused great angst at the special operations command—was the proliferation of ad hoc forces formed by US conventional units. These programs had none of the safeguards and intensive mentoring that were the hallmarks of the Afghan Local Police initiative. Most important, they were not Afghan programs. Only the Afghan Local Police program was an official Afghan government program—it was backed by a presidential decree and run through its Interior Ministry. The special operators knew—from their own hard experience—that the Afghan government opposed the coalition taking matters into its own hands. The Marines in Helmand had created a force of thousands called the Interim Security Critical Infrastructure program. In the north, the Critical Infrastructure Protection program hired Afghans as guards for fixed installations. Then ISAF authorized a new program, called Community Based Security Solutions (CBSS), that allowed conventional forces to use Commander’s Emergency Response Program (CERP) money to hire local security forces. These programs were all quick, easy ways to employ young Afghan males and address the lack of Afghans to provide security. But none of them involved any local or national Afghan oversight. This was perhaps a legacy of the Iraq War, in which US units had been encouraged to throw together local forces and let them grow like Topsy with no intensive training or mentoring. They were intended to be quick fixes.

This drove the special operators crazy, since they had carefully crafted procedures to gain the approval of a shura of local elders, vet the candidates, and ensure that the Interior Ministry validated every single district where they worked. The conventional forces’ programs posed two clear dangers: their loosely overseen armed guards could run amok, and their misdeeds would be a blemish on everyone, as few Afghans or foreigners had any idea which program was which. The operators were also betting that, at some point, the conventional forces would attempt to turn the whole motley lot over to them. An unvetted, untrained force of wayward Afghans from who knew where would then become their problem.

Haas’s staff spent a lot of time arguing with the ISAF Joint Command, and eventually two solutions were devised. First, a FRAGO would be issued making the special operations command the “executive agent” for local defense in Afghanistan; the conventional units would be instructed to follow their procedures and best practices for raising any local defense forces. Second, the conventional force programs would end in 2012, and if and when those forces were turned over to special operators, there would be no presumption that they would be automatically hired. They would have to go through the vetting like everyone else. The task of crafting the specific details fell to Commander Alec McKenzie, a Navy SEAL who oversaw all aspects of the local police program for Haas. McKenzie was from a tribe that was famous for shooting and taking down terrorists, and the SEAL took the same “no prisoners” approach to his bureaucratic battle. He was deeply passionate about the program and its prospects for success if the forces hewed to the carefully crafted methods.
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The second FRAGO was finally issued in January 2012, and the actual demobilization and transition of the non-ALP groups would take more than a year. It occurred most rapidly in Helmand, where three-fourths of the Marines would be leaving in the coming months, and more slowly and painfully elsewhere.

By far the biggest problem that Haas had to wrestle with—the one that posed a strategic threat to the local police program—was the Tajiks’ ongoing effort to hijack the program for their own political purposes for patronage jobs and the rearming of their militias. Nothing would damage or end the program more quickly than this. Like Miller before him, Haas had spotted problems brewing in the north: the shuras were not doing real vetting, nonlocal outsiders had been permitted to join, and at least one provincial police chief was a noxious influence. The Americans finally secured his removal only to see him sent to another job.

The problem came to a head in dramatic fashion as 2011 drew to a close. Interior Minister Bismullah Khan Mohammedi (BK), a powerful Tajik figure, issued an ultimatum: he would not authorize any more Afghan Local Police in the south or east until his bidding was done in the north. The special operators had finessed this issue for the past year and half, throwing their teams and energy into the insurgent-​plagued areas while putting just a few teams up in the north. Now BK insisted they immediately create Afghan Local Police forces in all the designated districts in the north, as well as some new ones. His refusal to validate any more districts in the south came at a critical time in the south, where elders in the insurgent-infested province of Zabul had come forward. If this opportunity were lost, those individuals might suffer a dire fate.

Haas met with Generals Allen and Scaparrotti and then went with the latter to confront BK, hoping he could dissuade him. The Americans showed him the joint campaign plan that he had signed on to and pointed out that those areas in the north were not under threat. BK airily dismissed the plan, saying, “That was just a snapshot in time. We see a threat outside that area now.” Haas then outlined the criteria for establishing ALP forces, which BK had signed off on and now was ignoring. The Afghan was unmoved.
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Haas knew that BK was under tremendous pressure from his Jamiat-e Islami Party colleagues, who had watched the Afghan Local Police growing in Pashtun areas. Jamiat’s many factions, including six governors of northern provinces, all wanted a piece of the action. But sending special operations teams north and taking more of the approved slots, pay, and guns for an area with no insurgent threat would siphon off much-needed resources from the south as well as fuel the ethnic divide. Haas offered a compromise: he would send a team to Parwan Province. It was near Kabul, so shoring up its defenses had a clear security rationale.

Haas faced the showdown armed with knowledge of BK’s tactics, which he had grappled with at the latter’s Jabal Saraj headquarters in 2001 as they prepared the assault on Kabul. US interests and those of Jamiat, the Northern Alliance party, overlapped but did not entirely coincide. The Tajik leaders ultimately wanted what was best for their faction, not the entire country. Haas tried to appeal to BK’s duty as interior minister to protect the entire country.

Haas thought his concession on Parwan had broken the logjam, but weeks went by and BK refused to authorize any supplies or pay for the south. Haas tried another gambit: he asked Asadullah Khalid, the president’s confidant, to see if he could sway BK directly or through Karzai. That did not work either. He then floated an alternative proposal to BK. “You have police training centers in the north and a budget: why don’t you train more police there?” Still the minister would not budge.