One Hundred Victories (32 page)

The sister team in eastern Paktika fared less well; in fact, it was a downright disaster. The team leadership of ODA 1112 was fired by the command early in their tour, but the team sergeant sent as a replacement was no better, and the captain was wounded. According to fellow special operators, the team sergeant was egregiously derelict in his job. That “retired in place” attitude is extraordinarily rare in the special operations community, but the toll of high operational tempo may have been partly to blame. In any event, leadership failure in small teams operating in austere environments is also risky in the extreme; special operators have to be alert to threats, and doing their jobs every day, or someone may well die. The team had been split in two halves and divided between Orgun and Sar Howza. A US soldier from a conventional unit was killed at Sar Howza one night in a friendly-fire incident. He approached one of the local police checkpoints and was mistakenly shot by an ALP policeman. The incident compounded concerns over poor leadership and lack of oversight, and the team leadership was relieved soon afterward. There were hard feelings, because the fate of this 1st Special Forces Group team was decided by the 3rd Special Forces Group leadership, but the potential consequences of
not
intervening were too important to ignore. Poor team performance could unravel several districts or an entire province, and incidents that caused a national or international outcry could jeopardize the entire program.
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AZIZ LEADS

Somewhat surprisingly, the progress that had been made over the previous two years by Hutch’s team and Commander Aziz and his men in eastern Paktika did not unravel despite the team turmoil. In the fall, another team from 1st Special Forces Group, ODA 1411, led by Captain Jae Kim, arrived to take up the reins. Part of the newly created 4th Battalion of 1st Group, the team had competed hard to be chosen for the Afghan assignment. One of their members, an artist and aspiring writer, had designed the team logo, a Japanese death mask with the special forces dagger, and emblazoned it on caps and T-shirts. Kim, at thirty-one, was a senior captain with two hard tours in Iraq under his belt. It was a mature team, with a forty-one-year-old team sergeant and a thirty-year-old chief warrant officer, and it was ready to take on the hairiest parts of Paktika.
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They felt the clock ticking and the pressure for results from the leadership above them, but Kim knew that “you make your own plan or one will be given to you.” It was a cardinal rule that strong teams leaned forward and mapped out a game plan; the tradition in the special ops was to let the teams’ ground knowledge guide the effort. If schemes imposed from above bore no resemblance to the realities at the grassroots, they were bound to fail. Kim made a 180-day plan: first the team would fill one remaining gap in the security corridor that Hutch’s team had created, and then it would attempt to expand the security bubble to the north. Finally, it would take on the Pirkowti pacification that had eluded Hutch in the east. If the team succeeded, he believed Paktika’s defenses would be solid enough to endure.

Kim learned within days of his arrival in Paktika just how vital an ally Aziz and his “Special Squad” of three hundred or so were. He already knew from reading situation reports of previous teams that they had been instrumental in persuading elders to form local police, in training the fledgling bands, and in coming to their aid when attacked. Kim had arrived early, so on September 28 when the rest of his team arrived, he headed back to the airfield to pick them up. On the road trip from the team base at Orgun in eastern Paktika to the provincial capital, he was accompanied by one of Aziz’s main lieutenants, Lalu, and a contingent of his fighters.

The narrow mountain pass in the mountain range that divided Orgun from the capital was still somewhat dicey; some soldiers referred to it as the Gates of Mordor. As the small convoy wound through the pass, they were ambushed by Taliban lying in wait. Aziz’s men, led by the long-haired twenty-something Lalu, opened fire with everything they had from the gunner’s turrets of their Humvees. The Americans also returned fire; they were enclosed in their MATVs with their automatic remotely operated systems, which allowed them to shoot their guns unexposed.
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But Lalu and his other two gunners were only shielded by a straight armored plate as they stood in their turrets manning the .50-caliber machine guns, and they were exposed on the sides and in back. Kim was awed by their fighting spirit. The Afghans fired a continuous hail of bullets as they pushed through the five-​hundred-​meter-long ambush. An RPG landed directly in front of one of the Afghan gunners, who did not flinch or stop firing for a second.

“They saved our lives that very first week,” Kim said. On many occasions thereafter, he witnessed the esprit de corps that Aziz had fostered, in both battles and in their noncombat performance. They went about their business in a quiet, efficient way, and in battle they were deadly. That was viewed by critics as a bad thing. But in a land of relentless foes, the men who will stand up and shoot back are a necessity. Kim had heard of the criticisms and the earlier investigations, which ISAF had closed, but he did not see any evidence of indiscipline or abuses. His impression was that Aziz exercised more command and control over his forces than any other Afghan forces he saw. Aziz rotated his squads every two months to give the men a two-week break to visit their families, and he kept a close watch on the scheduled leave and attendance.

Kim and his team felt better knowing that this tightknit, battle-​hardened group of Afghans would be with them in the field, augmenting their small band of twelve. But he also saw that the district police chiefs chafed at Aziz’s position, which created an intermediate layer between them and the provincial chief of police, Dawlat Khan, who relied heavily on Aziz. Dawlat Khan had made him his “trusted agent,” which meant that he was the official paymaster for the local police. His anomalous position was also recognized up the US chain of command, which was still nervous about the bad press Aziz had received.

With the clock ticking, Kim launched his plan. He was adamant that he would not split his team, so they moved together into a mud-walled qalat outside a village called Nawi Kalay. They had no running water, and lived cheek by jowl with a squad of Aziz’s men. They made do with portable toilets and baby wipes, and on weekly visits to Orgun base they took hot showers and ate like wolves in the dining hall. This was the last hole in the security corridor that Hutch had created that still needed to be plugged; Kim intended to do it and move on. Nawi Kalay lay astride an insurgent ratline and still enjoyed a great deal of passive and active Taliban support. It was the spot where it all began, in 2010, when Hutch’s team and Aziz’s men had killed the local Taliban leader known as Chamtu. Kim’s first step was to recruit more Afghan police from the surrounding villages and build a new checkpoint to fill in the gap between the checkpoints that already stretched from Shkin on the border to the capital.

To shore up this weak link in the chain, Kim sought to reward the surrounding villages that had been providing Afghan Local Police recruits for the past two years. His civil affairs officer surveyed the area and found that it had received far fewer benefits in terms of schools, clinics, and other development projects than other areas of Paktika. USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives had conducted 146 small-scale projects in the province, many in tandem with Hutch’s push into hostile areas, but Kim felt the friendliest areas needed a little more love. He wanted to make sure these villagers would continue to support the program as the US drawdown proceeded—but he was not about to be duped into a massive handout program. After a slippery Afghan contractor submitted an exorbitant bid to put a roof on a school, Kim made clear that he was talking about improvements that cost about $5,000.
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Kim’s men achieved something of a breakthrough in Nawi Kalay, but it took a small tragedy for the breakthrough to occur. A little girl who had been riding on a tractor with her father as he plowed his fields fell off, and the tractor wheels rolled over her before he could stop. The grief-stricken man gathered her up and drove pell-mell down the dirt track to the team’s mud-walled compound, pounding on the gate and asking for help. The medic ran out with his bag and immediately began performing first aid and CPR. The child was already dead, but her little body heaved with trapped air, momentarily giving the father hope. “Ratina, Ratina,” he called over and over, stroking her hair. The team could not save the little girl, but they took up a collection from their own personal funds to buy the family a sheep for the Muslim Eid holiday. The family and the entire village were touched by the gesture, and the relations became much friendlier thereafter. They were still not inclined to contribute volunteers for the checkpoint, however, so Kim would make do with other nearby villages.
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Kim also sought to encourage the district police chief to come outside the town more often to visit the villages in the populated valley. He especially wanted the police chief to embrace the local police as part of his larger force, as intended. He was a competent man, and not altogether without courage. He listened to Kim’s relentless pitches to recalcitrant tribes from the western side of the valley. At a meeting in the district chief’s office, Kim brought up the topic of local police to an elder from a village of known Taliban sympathies. “Oh, that again,” the old man said, physically recoiling into the sofa. He laughed nervously. “We just want our school.” Kim persisted, and the man became agitated. He felt that the Americans had reneged on the promise of a school, and he was angered by the implicit quid pro quo that Kim was offering. “I’m like one hand, waiting to clap,” Kim said with a broad smile, raising his hand with his palm open. The meeting broke up and the old man stormed out.
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The district police chief frankly expressed his doubts about the Afghan Local Police. He believed they should all go through the academy and become regular policemen. Like many district chiefs, he saw his writ as largely confined to the district center, but he eagerly accepted Kim’s suggestion that he should take over the job of scheduling the patrols and checkpoint duty shifts of the local police. Even if Aziz remained paymaster, at least for the moment, the district chief could assume control of their assignment and leave schedule.

The US conventional battalion commander in Paktika agreed with Kim that a move into Pirkowti was desirable to shore up the province’s eastern districts, since the conventional forces were falling back from the border. He had his own ideas of how to do it. He wanted to use the Afghan army, not Aziz, even though the two Afghan battalions in Paktika had remained largely hunkered down in their bases for the past two years. The conventional battalion commander believed that Aziz had led US troops into an ambush, and tried to initiate yet another investigation of him. His primary assignment, however, was to withdraw conventional US forces and shut down their bases along the border. Combat Outpost Margah had already been shut, and he had begun to dismantle Forward Operating Base Tillman. As he did, the rate of shelling from the Pakistani side of the border escalated dramatically. The Taliban had posted videos of themselves moving into other vacated bases and celebrating, and the American command was determined to prevent a repeat of this scene.

The soldiers at Tillman were ordered to blow up everything that they did not carry away, to prevent it from being used by the insurgents or turned into a propaganda prop. The overtones of Vietnam echoed here, too, as the forces dwindled in Paktika. Tillman and Margah were bombarded over a hundred times each in November 2012, and Margah was already vacant. As the troops bulldozed Tillman and carted away every last container and piece of equipment, artillery and mortars rained down on the camp. A gory fascination gripped the highest levels of command as the daily reports came in. One commander in Kabul noted, “It was like, hey gringos, don’t let the door hit you on your way out.” Many Americans had been wounded and killed here, not just the famous pro-football player and Ranger Pat Tillman for whom the base was named. The Americans had never truly controlled Paktika’s border with Pakistan.

The border would be left henceforth to the CIA’s Counterterrorist Pursuit Teams, at least until the Afghan army was up to the task. The future of the not-so-secret CTPT force was up in the air as well. It would be up to the Afghan government to decide whether it should continue, come under effective control of the Afghan intelligence service, or be shut down. It was a sore topic with many in the US military. The existence of a separate armed force outside the military chain of command was a departure from US military doctrine. It created practical problems of coordination, since the CIA did not fall under military authority. Its chain of command ran from the Agency to the White House, with oversight from Congress. Congress, however, had been largely inert on this issue. Since 9/11, the Central Intelligence Agency had grown a shadow army—embraced by some Department of Defense civilians—that unbalanced the Agency, thrusting it into a tactical paramilitary role and diverting it from its core mission of collecting human intelligence and analyzing strategic-level threats to national security. Many in the US military, including special operations forces, saw that the CIA-led Afghan force created confusion among Afghans. That was the central problem, although spats flared up over personalities and prerogatives. The team at Shkin cooperated with the Agency on many operations, but the two also came to blows over an accidental fire and Agency evacuation plans that did not include them. Issues continued to fester and bubble up in the provinces where the Agency-created forces existed, in part because the forces were so large and operated not just on the border but well inside of it.
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