One Hundred Victories (29 page)

Hayes’s first move was to get all the provincial officials on board and to activate the provincial reconciliation body that had been set up to provide a path back into civil society. A formal and fairly elaborate ceremony was held in which Samad exchanged his old turban for a new one and was given a Koran. The fighters brought an assortment of weapons and turned them over. A banquet was held and speeches were made; the provincial officials asked Hayes to sit at the head table with them. Hayes had held long talks with the now ex-Taliban, curious to learn more about his views and his fateful decision. He encouraged him to persuade other insurgents to follow his path.

Hayes settled on an unorthodox solution to the problem of Samad’s security. He lobbied for an exception to the guidelines to allow Samad to form a local police unit with about twenty of his former fighters. The special operations team would keep tabs on them to ensure there was no backsliding. There were simply too few official Afghan forces available to provide Samad security, and Hayes was not sure they would do it if asked. So he took a gamble, judging that the greater danger was that if Samad was killed, any chance of more fighters in the area coming in from the cold would die with him. Samad survived and more fighters came in—eighty-four in all. Samad told Hayes that others were ready to quit, saying: “More will come in, if they see that I am being treated well. They are waiting to see what happens.” Some glitches in pay and equipment caused the former insurgent leader to grumble about the provincial government’s lack of support. The governor approved roads, a dam, and a new canal for the area; such development projects were part of the official US-funded reintegration program. Hayes’s gamble had paid off so far, but the Afghan government would have to deliver on its side of the bargain. He hoped the seeds that had been planted would take root.
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Meanwhile, Hayes decided that the ALP in Zabul was ripe for expansion. He would send a team from Uruzgan to establish a new beachhead far enough from Bagh to incur some risk, but close enough that if the team succeeded, the two areas could connect into a much larger security bubble. Following the normal practice, Hayes first sent Afghan commandos with their combat advisers to clear the area of Taliban before the team embedded.

COMMANDOS RAISE THE BAR

A SEAL platoon served as the combat advisers for the Afghan commando kandak based in Uruzgan. Marshall, the platoon leader, had served on SEAL Team Six, but he harbored no prejudices about foreign internal defense. He did not see FID as a lesser mission. In many respects, conducting unilateral operations with fellow SEALs was easier than taking less capable partners through mission planning and going into combat with them. The SEALs’ unofficial motto, “The only easy day was yesterday,” applied in spades to this mission.
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Marshall had taken stock of the 8th Commando Kandak and its leader, Lieutenant Colonel Ahmadullah Popal, when he arrived in Tarin Kowt at the beginning of his tour. Popal was experienced: he had first served in a reconnaissance platoon and then in the first commando unit when it was formed. He was also politically well connected​—since he was from the Popalzai clan of the president, as his name suggested. Popal’s operations officer was especially competent; he carried his radio and notebook with him at all times and kept close track of his men. The unit’s soldiers, however, were not nearly as tactically proficient as the Iraqi special operations counterterrorism force that Marshall had trained, advised, and fought alongside on five tours in Iraq. The difference was partly due to basic educational levels, which were much lower in Afghanistan than in Iraq. The 8th Commandos, formed in February 2010, was also one of the newest commando units. The Iraqi force had benefited as well from much more intensive and longer mentoring by US special operations teams. A lot of money had been poured into Iraqi training facilities and equipment.

Marshall’s platoon devised a way to boost the commandos’ skills based on their own SEAL training. They held a competition within the commando kandak to select the best shooters, the strongest tacticians, and the fittest soldiers. These Afghans would be an internal elite cadre who would continue to train their fellow commandos when special operations teams where not there. They modeled the tryouts on the famous “Hell Week” at Coronado, a grueling week of endless running, swimming, obstacle courses, and punishing physical tasks designed to weed out the weak-hearted and leave the most determined and able SEAL candidates. The competition also spurred enthusiasm and developed esprit de corps. The Afghan Hell Week yielded fifty motivated commandos. The SEALs then worked with these men to refine their skills in close-quarter battle, the use of night vision goggles, and small arms marksmanship.

As the mission to Zabul approached, the SEALs took the commandos through every step of the preparation. They analyzed the mission order to search and clear the area, which was called Sayagaz, and then built a terrain model in a sand table to plot their scheme of maneuver. The Zabul mission into a Taliban stronghold would be difficult, as there were no forces nearby to come to their aid, and Popal wanted to be ready. He joked with Marshall, saying, “We don’t know where the SEALs have been for the last nine years but we are glad to have them now.” The thirty-year-old SEAL responded with a friendly quip, but he treated Popal with respect as his host and a senior officer in rank and age; he was very aware of the importance of dignity, honor, and position in Afghan culture. As the incidence of insider attacks mounted over the course of 2012, the US military command had pushed for tougher counterintelligence measures to weed out infiltrators, a necessary step, but also had conducted cultural sensitivity training for Afghans to help them understand the apparently rude American behavior. The ever-changing cast of conventional American units sent to Afghanistan did not help the US learning curve. Most special operators, by contrast, were on their fifth or sixth tours. Only a few attacks had occurred on special operations forces, despite the fact that the special ops soldiers lived in much closer proximity with their Afghan partners than conventional forces did—on the same compounds, and, in the case of embedded teams, often in the next room.

When dealing directly with the Afghans, Marshall emphasized his platoon’s desire to help improve their commando skills without personally denigrating the individual soldiers. In their internal discussions, Marshall, Hayes, and Haas all expressed the belief that the commandos had grown too dependent on quick missions—they were normally ferried in on US helicopters for a quick op and then back out the following day. It was time to raise the bar and begin taking them on missions of three or more days. They would not always have access to helicopters; ground movements would need to be part of the mix.

In early March, Marshall’s team and the commandos launched into Zabul, inserting by helicopter at night in the vicinity of Sayagaz on a three-day op. At midnight, the platoon and 107 commandos loaded their gear and crammed into two Chinooks and a Black Hawk at the Tarin Kowt flight line. They flew blacked out across eastern Uruzgan and into Zabul without incident, navigating mountain ridges and then dropping down into the valley. They were twenty-four kilometers away from the SEAL platoon at Bagh, so they were effectively on their own. Marshall put the commandos in the lead to see how they would do from start to finish. If things started to go south, he would step in, but he believed the Afghans were ready.

The commandos and SEALs offloaded in the planned sequence, with the lead element providing security at the landing zone until everybody was off and rucks were shouldered. So far, no incoming fire. They headed off, NODs on, to their predetermined strongpoint, a compound they would clear and move into until “BMT,” as first light was known in military jargon. Since Karzai had banned night operations, the special operators had adapted their procedures so that they would arrive at the target location under cover of darkness. But they would hold off until the earliest permissible moment before launching their operation.

The Afghans occupied the preselected qalat, set up their security perimeter, and hunkered down to wait for a few hours. Just before dawn, they stealthily moved into the edge of the village of Sayagaz, heading for the mullah’s house. Popal and Marshall had devised a new tactic that they considered a brilliant refinement of the usual practice. Normally, the Afghan commando leader would call on a bullhorn for the military-aged males to voluntarily come out of their homes, which was intended to sort the neutrals from those who would have to be fought. How much better would it be, they realized, if this call-out were done by the mullah of the village?

They stole silently to the mullahs’ house and requested that he call all the males to come out and meet at the mosque for a shura. The commandos would then clear the homes and suspected stash sites. “Mullah Sahib, we are here to do an operation. We want to meet the tribal leaders, and we will treat any sick people,” Popal told him. During the trainup, Popal had emphasized to his troops how essential it was to display deference to mullahs; they were the key to winning a welcome wherever the commandos were sent. “They teach our children, and we must show them we are the good Muslims, not the Taliban,” he said.

The commandos and the SEALs were of course poised to fight if they were attacked, but their first recourse was to avoid gunfights that would further alienate the population. The mullah in Sayagaz agreed to call out the villagers. So far, so good. Nerves were stretched taut as they moved through the streets to the mosque under the fading cover of dark. The commandos and the SEALs positioned themselves defensively around the mosque, waiting to see if they would need to shoot, as the fingers of the dawn came up over the horizon. The troops were especially on alert, as riots had rippled through the country just days before in reaction to the burning of Korans at the US base in Bagram.

The Afghan men of Sayagaz came out of their homes, slowly, at least some of them. The SEALs were certain that others were stealing away under the cover of dark, perhaps to ambush them later. No one’s guard dropped for an instant. The Afghans and the psychological operations soldiers moved to the fore to explain what was about to happen. “We want to meet and talk with you, and we are also here to look for the Taliban,” they announced. “We are here because we want peace for our country.” Popal explained that they planned to bring Afghan government, national police, and local police to the area. He described the Afghan Local Police program. The commandos completed the village search without incident that day, but the following day they came under constant harassing fire from across the river. They repelled those attacks without taking any casualties.

The commandos returned to base the following day, and Marshall and Hayes both considered the op a successful start to their Sayagaz campaign. A team from Uruzgan would move in shortly, and the commandos would go back to help if the Taliban decided to mount serious resistance to the arriving team. The team received some additional help in the form of a special forces team working with Jordanian special operators, who cleared IEDs from the road between Bagh and Sayagaz. The Jordanians were longtime US partners and had been coming to Afghanistan for years—105 were helping Hayes’s men. They were worth their weight in gold; as Muslims they were frequently asked to meet with the local mullahs.

The team in Sayagaz made headway, but slowly. The men started by distributing humanitarian assistance. The road to Bagh remained dangerous. The team was able to raise Afghan Local Police recruits, but the recruits were too afraid to secure the road by themselves. The first Afghan Local Police volunteers were reluctant to man the checkpoints the team had built or to go on patrol by themselves. So the SEALs kept the training wheels on and stood guard with them, driving the highway with the Afghans in tow. The commandos continued to run operations elsewhere in Zabul and, when required, in Uruzgan. By summer’s end, three hundred Afghans in Zabul had come forward to become local police. That was no small change in what had previously been a totally Taliban-dominated province outside of the city and Highway One.

Taking stock of the broader situation, Hayes realized that the coming drawdown would test the ability of US forces to continue to advise and mentor the entire Afghan security force—the military, a panoply of police forces, and the growing Afghan special operations forces. He was particularly concerned that the US conventional advisers embedded with the Afghan army were becoming vulnerable as the US combat formations departed, a prediction that came true when two newly arrived advisers were killed by a suicide bomber in Uruzgan. Hayes foresaw that the drawdown would put pressure on special operations to become more efficient at all levels. So why not combine the various special operations units and create a unified battalion-​level and brigade-level special ops command, as they were moving toward doing at the top of the special ops hierarchy? Such ideas were heresy within the stovepiped special operations culture, but Hayes was ready and willing to help break the mold by floating such ideas. When commanders realized how few special operators were likely to be left behind after 2014, they might swallow hard and try something new.

THE FALLEN

Hayes was approaching the end of his tour satisfied that he had increased security in Uruzgan, but things were still dicey just to the south, in northern Kandahar. A sister SEAL platoon in Kandahar was partnered with the Afghan commando kandak based there. While Marshall’s platoon and Popal’s commandos were hammering on their part of the “jet stream,” the part that ran across northern Kandahar had remained problematic. The Mullah Dadullah Front had laid siege to Route Bear five years before. The highway had been reopened in 2007 and a few footholds of Afghan Local Police had been created, but their lines were not yet thick enough and the Afghan army had not wrested control of the countryside from the Taliban.

Night operations were controversial in Afghanistan, but there is a reason why special operators love the nighttime. Infiltrating under the cover of darkness is always their preferred method of insertion because it gives them the edge and reduces their own risk of casualties. In response to Karzai’s demands and the desire to minimize civilian casualties, night operations had been progressively reined in. Daytime ops stripped the operators of their cloak of protection from the Taliban’s machine guns, mortars, and especially, the ubiquitous and deadly rocket-propelled grenade launchers. The only confirmed helo downing by a surface-to-air missile had been in Helmand in 2007, but many other near misses were reported on the battlefield. These missiles posed a much more lethal threat, but a skillfully aimed RPG could bring down a helicopter, as Somali militia fighters had proven in the deadly “Black Hawk Down” battle of 1993 against Rangers, Delta Force, and special ops aviators.