One Hundred Victories (38 page)

A few team members hopped onto their Kawasaki ATVs and zoomed up the rocky mountain trail behind their base, Camp Wright, to a picturesque red-brick turreted outpost overlooking the camp and the river. The mountains of Pakistan were clearly visible from the outpost, which was called OP Shiloh. To the north the breathtaking expanse of the Hindu Kush rose above the curving Kunar River. The outpost had been built by the Russians, as was the camp below, which the Americans now called Wright after Sergeant Jeremy Wright, a special operator (and all-American cross-country runner) who was killed in Kunar in 2005. After a frustrating day in which he felt his hands were tied, Brandon was pleased to see the far-off flash of the detonation in the valley below as the sun’s last rays fell on the glistening river. “This is what we call success at our level,” he reflected.

The team was eager to forge ahead with its push down the Ghaki Valley. Over the fall the team conducted several patrols to the first three villages. “If you poke the hornet’s nest, you can find out who’s who,” Jawad said. Working in tandem with the CIA, the operators identified six or seven QZR subcommanders. Their visits into the first two villages had encouraged the residents to reopen their school. When they reached the third town, Daridam, however, they got into a heavy firefight. It was the site of the Soviets’ Battle of Marawara in 1985, in which a Spetsnaz special forces company had been ambushed and pinned down on a reconnaissance mission that turned into a two-day battle, with thirty-one Russians killed. From the same mountaintop
firing positions the Taliban let loose with DShK machine-gun and mortar fire raining down on the American special ops team. The team was in a bad tactical position, and the Taliban obviously did not care if they caused casualties among the villagers. The combat controller called in air support, which eventually chased the Taliban away. At the same time, Afghan commandos and their special ops partner team flew in from Jalalabad to hit Chinar, the next village, in a simultaneous helicopter assault designed to show QZR that they intended to bring the fight to him in a sustained way. In subsequent weeks, the team made two additional patrols into the valley, bringing the district governor and police chief, who had not visited the villages for several years, with them. In shuras they described the Afghan Local Police program and made a pitch for volunteers.
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But it was not to be. The higher command nixed the team’s plan to recruit ALP in the Ghaki Valley. The team was told to focus the Afghan Local Police initiative on the Marawara district center and thicken the defenses there. They were not to build something that the Afghans would be hard pressed to sustain by themselves.

The company commander, Major Ben Hauser, did not have the heart to tell the team all the bad news. He had led ODA 3131 as a captain, and Brandon and others were his former teammates and friends. Hauser was under enormous pressure to move all the teams out of Kunar right away to begin building Afghan Local Police along Highway Seven down in Nangahar, as part of the pullback to reinforce the country’s two main highways. The move to Nangahar was also a response to a political demand from its governor, Gul Agha Shirzai, a major Pashtun figure who was planning to run for president in 2014. At the special operators’ blue-and-white tropical-muraled base in Jalalabad, Hauser relayed the order in a deadpan fashion. “This is a strategic withdrawal plan,” he commented drily, pointing out the troop movements on the wall map in his office at Camp Dyer. A red marker showed the repositioning that was already under way and the scheme to move all teams in Kunar to create new ALP sites in Nangahar.
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The officers who had occupied this office at Camp Dyer before Hauser had all been in the business of expansion—more ops, more troops, more territory. Hauser instead faced giving up the gains for which they had bled. He did not like it; no commander would. He believed in the special operators’ mantra of working themselves out of a job, but he was close enough to the ground truth to know that a total withdrawal from Kunar at that time was premature. His superior, Lieutenant Colonel Chris Fox, was so annoyed he would not even discuss it during a visit to his small base in Bagram’s sprawl. “Kunar is not in the IJC plan,” Fox said tersely, referring to the three-star ISAF Joint Command.
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When Fox’s superior, Colonel Tony Fletcher, who was in charge of CJSOTF-A at Bagram, was asked to identify the threat that warranted the increase in special operations teams in Nangahar, he said, “It’s an insurance policy. The idea is to thicken the defenses.” And what was the plan to support Afghans in Kunar? Fletcher was equally terse: special mission units would run periodic disruption operations.
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It looked as though the province’s future defense plan rested on pinprick strikes. Many operators knew that this was a weak reed, and even such sporadic operations would depend on intelligence gathered on the ground. They received a reprieve when the next conventional division arrived to lead Regional Command–East in the spring of 2013. The new command put the brakes on the total pullout of special ops from Kunar, allowing ODA 3131 to stay for the remainder of its tour.

That also gave the team and the special operations command the opportunity to compose a well-thought-out plan for maintaining a small footprint in Kunar for the immediate future. Such a plan would need to help the Afghans to pull their security forces together, and it would need to encourage district and provincial police chiefs to fully embrace the local police, leveraging them as a critical asset for village and valley security. It would also require reliable human intelligence for any counterterrorism operations and, more generally, the kind of situational awareness that can only be gained by having eyes and ears on the ground.

Camp Wright, in theory, could be maintained as a model of the small footprint presence that US special ops leaders discussed and which the US national defense strategy envisioned. Maintaining a team with the right enablers made a lot more sense than consolidating special operators at Bagram, where they would have no idea if insurgents were massing in Asadabad, much less be in a position to help orchestrate an effective Afghan response. Camp Wright was becoming the final frontier as US bases farther north, including Bostick, Monti, Falcon, and Honaker-Miracle, closed down one by one.

Camp Wright had everything needed to sustain operations; it was a small but sturdy base with solid mortar-and-stone walls built by the Russians, and was well positioned on a mountainside close to Asadabad. The two turreted observation posts above Wright provided early warning lookouts, coupled with two more posts on the other side of the river. They were manned by a CIA-trained Afghan force that was nominally led by the Afghan intelligence service. The camp was outfitted with a forward surgical team capable of treating the most severe wounds and stabilizing trauma cases for evacuation; it was also a forward ammunition and refueling point, with ammo and fuel for soldiers, helos, and drones. Giant bladders of fuel ringed the landing zone. It had generators and water purification equipment, and, at least for the time being, a route clearance unit of vehicles equipped with mine-detecting equipment. It could serve as a remaining outpost from which air and ground operations could be conducted if both the US and the Afghan governments decided that some stay-behind American presence was needed to bolster the Afghan forces for a time.

Camp Wright was an ideal small-footprint stay-behind base, but it would take the right people to pull it off. Namely, it would require a mature special operations team like 3131, led by someone like Jawad, with the understanding and credibility to interface with a CIA team, which the Afghan government might also choose to keep in place for the cross-border operations needed to gather intelligence. The basic situation resembled the one in Paktika, where special ops teams and the Agency occupied the same space. But in Kunar, the frictions between special ops forces and CIA teams were less prevalent than elsewhere because of Jawad’s tours with the Agency and the relationships that he had forged. He spent a lot of time with the Agency team trading information. “Can you see how much better we’d all be if we shared everything we had?” he pleaded with them. Security classification and an institutional reluctance prevented his vision from becoming reality, but Jawad’s friendly ways won over most of the CIA team in Kunar, one member of which was a woman codenamed “Rosebud.” Since they would soon be the two remaining teams left in the province, both knew they would be more effective if they were on the same page. A clear division of labor was needed, however, and a clear chain of command under Afghan authority. Cross-border intelligence operations might be warranted, with Afghan concurrence, in a few critical spots, but they had to be contained and kept from contaminating the primary mission of enabling Afghans to secure their own territory.

The lack of US-Afghan agreement on these issues burst into the headlines in April 2013, following a battle in western Kunar’s Shigal District. In this battle, a CIA officer was reportedly killed, and three other Americans employed by the CIA were wounded. Seventeen Afghan civilians, including twelve children, died when an airstrike was called in; according to an Afghan delegation later sent to investigate, a house had collapsed on them. President Karzai’s chief spokesman, Aimal Faizi, made extensive comments to Western news media in which he criticized the CIA-run force. “It was a joint op at most in name, but really in fact a CIA-run parallel security structure, and such structures have been a factor of insecurity themselves,” Faizi told the
New York Times
. “We are informed five minutes before they are conducting an operation, and our security agencies do not have authority over them.” The Afghan intelligence chief for Kunar was fired, and Karzai ordered a review of all the counterterrorist pursuit teams.
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The division of labor became muddled as well in the selection of the ALP commander for Marawara, and the mingling of defensive and offensive missions and security and intelligence functions created confusion and potentially counterproductive effects. When it began the Marawara ALP program, the ODA 3131 team had spotted a candidate with good standing among his peers and the majority tribe there. The elders engaged in a long debate, but failed in three meetings to agree on a leader. They ultimately opted for a different fellow named Gudjer, who had worked for the CIA. He had a checkered past, one that had
been extremely valuable for the Agency’s purposes. He had fought in the war against the Soviets as part of a force led by the prominent mujahedeen commander Haji Qadir, and he subsequently had lived on the Pakistan side of the border in Bajaur as part of another militant group. He eventually broke with the group and its Pakistani intelligence handlers because they had wanted him to attack a target, which he would not name, that he refused to attack. In 2008 he returned to Kunar, where he was hired into the CIA force. He had conducted many cross-border missions to track and tag targets for the CIA. Gudjer’s background made him less than ideal to lead the local police, however, which was defensive in nature and required close interface with the Kunar provincial police hierarchy. He was chosen anyway, perhaps because the elders expected his established American ties to deliver benefits, or because he reflected their own divided loyalties, as had occurred in Wardak’s Chak Valley. At any rate, Gudjer seemed to think his main job was to go get QZR, the Al Qaeda–linked Taliban leader holed up in Barawolo, rather than help the population defend itself. “They expect me to stop QZR, and stop him from kidnapping people and taking livestock,” he said.
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While side-switching was a deeply rooted part of Afghan culture, the selection of Gudjer made ODA 3131 uneasy. “If we don’t make sure these are good guys,” Jawad, the chief warrant officer said, “we’ll be back here in twenty years having to fix the mess.” Since the team could not overturn the elders’ decision, the operators planned to watch Gudjer closely and work with him to influence his development. Their favored candidate was elected deputy commander, so he would provide a second channel to guide and monitor the evolution of the force.

If special operations forces were designing a dream team for a small-footprint stay-behind mission in Kunar, another desirable component would be civilian development experts. In El Salvador and Vietnam, aid missions had formed a useful triad along with the special operations and intelligence teams. The provincial reconstruction team at Camp Wright, housed in a funky wood-front building with a verandah that looked like a movie set for the OK Corral, was slated to
shut down along with the rest of the PRTs in the country as the 2014 transition approached. But if a few civilian experts were to stay to assist with development and governance, that would provide a natural and productive link to the civilians while the military advisers focused on security.
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The idea of a small footprint with a combined military and civilian advisory team had precedents in both the CORDS model of Vietnam and in Central America in the 1980s, but the civilian agencies had become much more risk-averse since then and were often less inclined to work alongside the military. As of 2013, most US embassy personnel were being pulled back to Kabul. The US embassy’s regional security officer had mandated that no Kabul-based personnel could spend the night at outlying bases. The USAID Office of Transition Initiatives reached the most remote locations of any civilian entity, and it still had a robust program in Kunar, but its director could not get out to oversee it. The intrepid personnel of OTI had conducted 112 different activities in Kunar as part of its Afghan Stabilization Initiative, ranging from water-management projects to civics education and training of local officials.
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In the waning afternoon sunlight as he sat on an Adirondack chair on the verandah, Jawad reflected on the type of people drawn to this type of work. The advisory mission was often dismissed as less important than the direct-action special ops assignments. Little glamor or career-enhancing incentives were attached to it, though it demanded a very high degree of skill and probably some inborn talent. Because it was not valued, often the US troops who were assigned to advisory missions were not cut out for the work. Jawad also lamented that Americans tended to look down on their Afghan comrades, and in many cases treated them poorly. They may be poor or have less formal education, he noted, “but they have a PhD in Afghanistan.” The desired attributes for advisers were not hard to identify. “What we really are is teachers,” he said. It was not possible to be happy in this line of work unless one enjoyed teaching, learning about foreign cultures, and dealing with people in general. The other dynamic he saw at work was the struggle over sovereignty. Most US commanders were trained to be in charge and to dictate the terms of a relationship. “But this is the Afghans’ country,” he said.