One Hundred Victories (41 page)

Was the program a success? The Afghan Local Police forces generally appeared to enjoy the support of the people where they operated. They were receiving material support from the Ministry of the Interior, albeit fitfully in some cases. Swaths of the country, including important parts of the insurgent belt, had been pacified or largely secured. However, it would take time to see whether these positive trends would continue once the US training wheels came off. As Bolduc acknowledged, the looming question was how the transition to self-sufficiency would go. “Transitions have never historically gone well,” he said, citing RAND’s comparative historical research into civilian defense programs. Special ops forces, who were steeped in the doctrine of unconventional warfare, raising or supporting indigenous forces to overthrow regimes or occupiers, were taught that the most important phase of unconventional warfare was its seventh and final phase.
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Thus, the program would ultimately be judged by whether or not its endgame was successful. Whether 20,000 or 40,000, the force would need to be incorporated into the formal police in some fashion or formally disbanded. Either of those endgames, executed well, would constitute a success. The gravest threat to the program was that Afghans would divert funds and manpower into building a politicized militia and toss the ground-up vetting criteria out the window. This had already happened to some degree in the north, at the behest of Tajik leaders with clout in the security ministries and the cabinet. The danger was that this kind of deterioration would accelerate once the United States stepped back. The second threat was that the force would degrade wholesale into a highway shakedown operation at the service of corrupt district police chiefs or their own wayward leaders. If the force appeared to be going off the rails, the United States could always withdraw its promised funding for the initiative or tie further funding to adoption of a demobilization plan.

Would weak spots or trouble spots grow worse or be contained? Zabul, Khas Uruzgan, and Wardak could fall into these categories. The Afghan Local Police were like the proverbial canary in a coal mine. They might not survive a more organized enemy with superior firepower, and those areas riven by internal conflict would not improve overnight. Leaving men with guns to run amok there made little sense. In places like Baghlan, in the north, Pashtun enclaves defended by Afghan Local Police could be easily overwhelmed by the Tajik police and army, let alone the Taliban.
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What seemed more likely than wholesale success or failure was continued success in those areas where several conditions pertained—where Afghan Local Police supported each other, where they were well led, and where provincial police chiefs ensured the flow of logistical support, such as in Kunar, Paktika, and possibly Ghazni. In these places, the Afghan Local Police had achieved an impact beyond the village or district level. Where the scaling up occurred, economic activity increased and in turn generated more support for the ALP program.

Even in Kandahar’s tough western districts, a surprising breakthrough occurred in the spring of 2013. Taliban thugs roughed up a couple of elders in Panjwayi District, and the population, long actively or tacitly supportive of the insurgents, suddenly decided it had had enough. The people of the district threw out the Taliban and began volunteering their sons for the local police. All but a few villages participated, supported by the new district police chief, who had been appointed about six weeks earlier. But could they hold the line or would the Taliban stage a comeback? It was impossible to know, but the mounting evidence suggested that the bottom-up approach was indeed a valid way to confront a rural insurgency in Afghanistan.
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Four conditions appeared to correlate with successful civil defense:

• A charismatic, strong local leader
  
• A scheme that connects a village to a larger cluster or area, so that, if nothing else, the ALP commanders can provide quick-reaction forces to support each other
  
• A district or provincial police chief or other entity able to ensure ongoing material support
  
• Communities not riven by severe intratribal or ethnic strife
  

As of mid-2013, the special operators had another year to continue to mentor Afghan Local Police—albeit from an increasing distance as the US presence decreased and the operators were moved farther away from ALP forces they had mentored. General Allen’s successor, fellow Marine General Joseph Dunford, who assumed command in February 2013, was ordered to pull out 34,000 troops and a staggering number of vehicles and other equipment in one year’s time. The other 32,000 troops would ramp-down to somewhere between 8,000 and 15,000. At least that was the plan. But if the United States and coalition partners were to provide funds, training, and advice after 2014, the roles of the foreign troops would have to be codified in a status of forces agreement (SOFA). The Obama administration made clear that it would insist on retaining legal jurisdiction for US troops—it would not turn over any troops accused of violations to the Afghan judicial system. Such a condition, while a standard part of SOFAs, had been the proximate cause of the collapse of negotiations for a postwar training and advisory mission in Iraq.

The Obama administration’s top priority was retaining the ability to suppress any emerging threat from Al Qaeda, a job it felt could be performed by a small number of elite forces. Yet operating in Afghanistan’s rugged terrain would require well-defended fuel and ammunition resupply points, and very likely more bases than just the one at Bagram. Thomas could not imagine that the Afghan government would allow unilateral counterterrorism operations on its soil. Already, under the agreement negotiated to allow night operations, Afghan Colonel Omar Fareed at the Operational Coordination Group (OCG) in Bagram vetted each proposed mission, and Afghan forces were part of each combat action.

Operators’ views on the type of US advisory role that was needed varied. Thomas did not think it was necessary or politically viable for special operators to serve as advisers in the field after 2014. “If we SOF can’t work ourselves out of tactical advise and assist two years from now, I gotta wonder how good we are,” he said. Others viewed advising as a long-term endeavor that had less to do with the tactical skills imparted and more to do with influence and relationships. Proponents of long-term advisory missions argued that mentoring units over a decade or even a generation could encourage professionalism and allow ties to be forged that deepened as soldiers progressed in their careers. But Thomas, in his brisk and colorful way, pushed back against this view. “I’m challenging our guys, ‘If there is a need tell me if you’ve got to stay that close. But if you are that good at training the muj, in this case training the ANSF [Afghan National Security Forces], you can’t get them good enough two years from now, training their little butts off? How good is good enough?’” By 2015, he believed the only advisers needed would be at brigade or higher levels.

AFGHAN SPECIAL OPS TO THE FORE

Grappling with the exact size and scope of the US special ops follow-on missions—if there were any—would fall to Scott Miller, who returned to Afghanistan in June 2013 to replace Thomas. Miller had spent the previous year at Fort Bragg with a core staff preparing for his tour in Afghanistan. Although he arrived four months after Dunford, Miller hoped to help shape the best possible endgame. He would endeavor to ensure that control of the Afghan Local Police was successfully assumed by the Interior Ministry and the Afghan police hierarchy. His second task would be to rebalance the special operations effort to ensure that Afghan special ops forces were ready. That mission had taken something of a backseat to the ALP program, while most available teams were devoted to the villages. The Afghan government and military enthusiastically embraced the development of Afghan special ops forces, which would play a vital role in defending the country after 2014. The commandos were in high demand for combat operations. Afghan special forces teams, modeled on the Green Berets, were filling a critical gap as the ALP expanded and as sites transitioned to Afghan control. They were mentoring and monitoring Afghan Local Police as the US special operators transitioned to overwatch mode. The Afghan Ministry of Defense had agreed to provide this support to the Interior Ministry ALP program, at least for a while.
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The Afghan special operations forces were still relatively immature, however. In mid-2012, when Colonel Sean Swindell arrived to help oversee their development as the deputy commander for special operations at the training command, he was shocked to see how much there was to do. With a staff of two, he threw himself into the job. It was his first deployment to Afghanistan, but he had done this for years in Iraq and Colombia. In Iraq, he had been deeply involved in training and combat-advising the Iraqi special ops forces during a period in which they grew from one battalion to a brigade-sized force. In Colombia before that, he had been involved in building and mentoring Colombian special ops forces for years.
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Swindell naturally compared the Afghan special ops forces to the special ops forces in Iraq and Colombia. “In Afghanistan, the focus was on unilateral operations,” he said. In Iraq, by contrast, there had been an enormous effort to create fully functional indigenous special ops forces, with no lack of funds for that purpose. Colombia’s special operations capability had developed much faster than Afghanistan’s precisely because it was the top priority: the US special operations mission in Colombia had never been about combat. Even after three American contractors in Colombia had been taken hostage by guerrillas, the United States had supported Colombia’s search-and-rescue operation rather than attempt to take unilateral action.

Afghan commandos were progressing in their tactical skills, but the formation of the Afghan special forces in 2009 had set them back because the special forces had been recruited from the commandos’ ranks. The greatest deficits were an intelligence capacity that would allow units to plan their own missions and mobility to transport operators in order to execute those missions. Development of senior leaders and staff also lagged: brigade and division headquarters staff were on the drawing board as Swindell arrived.

An Afghan helicopter wing was being formed, but it was a daunting challenge, given the technical skills involved. Pilots and mechanics had to be trained for the Mi-17 choppers. Swindell put Afghan mechanics on the floor of the bays turning wrenches alongside American contractors. As of late 2012, the new Afghan National Army Special Operations Command (ANASOC) had seven Mi-17s—on its way to thirty. For intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, eighteen PC-12 aircraft outfitted with full-motion video were on order. As of mid-2013, five of a planned forty-seven pilots were being trained to fly with night-vision goggles.

Afghan military leaders were still not in the driver’s seat in planning their own campaigns and operations. Swindell spent a lot of time briefing the head of Afghan special operations, General Abdul Karim, in order to hasten this transition. He helped him craft a special operations plan that would become a component of the overall campaign plan, and he worked with Bolduc to ensure that the Interior Ministry and the ALP were incorporated into the plan. “It is the only tool for safe haven denial that they have,” he said of the ALP. Swindell helped Bolduc on the logistics supply process. No detail escaped him: astonished that no one had created “Mission Essential Task Lists” to drive the commandos’ training and equipment needs, he corrected this shortcoming and sent out contractors to train the units in these processes.

The growth plan for the Afghan National Army Special Operations Command was ambitious. The division headquarters had been activated on July 16, 2012. Under ANASOC’s authority, two brigade headquarters would each oversee 928 operators in four commando and special forces kandaks, with fire support and military intelligence units at their disposal. Another component of the Afghan special operations force was “Kteh Khas” (“Special Force,” in Dari), originally called the “Afghan Partner Unit.” At first it was merely an “Afghan face” for US operations, but the Rangers took up the task of training the Kteh Khas operators in earnest, and they became more and more capable. Kteh Khas would have 373 operators organized in four squadrons, each with its own military intelligence company. Another unit was also being formed, a mobile strike force of two companies equipped with light armored vehicles. All of this was possibly too ambitious and complex an organization, given the limited human capital available.

The Afghans would make these decisions—provided the United States, as the primary donor, found enough political will and spare cash to continue underwriting the development of Afghanistan’s security forces. There was certainly the possibility that the United States would pick up and leave—it had done so numerous times after interventions. All were braced in Washington for another steep cut in defense spending. Swindell was no expert in Afghanistan, but he had quickly picked up on the bruised sensibility of the proud Afghans. He had witnessed several slights suffered by the affable and courtly chief of the Afghan army, General Sher Mohammed Karimi, and did his best to repair that damage in his weekly briefings with the top general. Sitting in his office at the modern Defense Ministry building, nestled in the park surrounding the presidential palace, Karimi reviewed the course of the bilateral relationship. “It took Americans a long time to listen to Afghans,” he said, noting that the earliest US ties had been formed with the Tajiks, and this had tinged the Americans’ perceptions. “There is an unfortunate tendency to think the Pashtuns are the enemy,” he said. A Pashtun himself, he had been passed over for defense minister because, he believed, the Tajiks controlled the security ministries. But despite this, he rejected the idea that his country would devolve into civil war.