One Hundred Victories (6 page)

McChrystal did not carry the ball very far down the field, however. His military career came to an abrupt end following the publication of a
Rolling Stone
article on June 22, 2010, in which he and his aides were described and quoted as criticizing the White House and Vice President Joe Biden in scathing terms. McChrystal flew to Washington with a resignation letter in hand, which Obama accepted on the spot. The next day, Obama asked General David Petraeus, then the head of Central Command in Tampa, to take the post, which he did on July 4.
{25}

Petraeus did not need to be sold on local defense; he believed it was a potential game changer in a war that was going badly. Given that most Afghans lived in villages, Petraeus felt that “bottom-up” efforts would temper the highly centralized government system in which all provincial governors, mayors, district subgovernors, and generals were appointed by the president. Petraeus had done something similar in Iraq with his Sons of Iraq initiative, which started in Anbar as the “Sunni Awakening” and which he extended throughout greater Baghdad in 2007 and 2008. But the Sons of Iraq movement had been undertaken rapidly, with few guidelines and—most important—​without the endorsement of the Iraqi government. Iraq’s
Shia government later largely reneged on its commitment to incorporate Sons of Iraq into the regular police or army—a commitment extracted under duress and late in the game. By making the Afghan local police an Afghan government program from the start, Petraeus hoped to avoid those pitfalls.
{26}

Before deciding whether to endorse the program, President Karzai presided over several contentious meetings at the presidential palace, which was nestled in a wooded park a few blocks from the yellow and burgundy mansion that housed ISAF headquarters. It took the single-minded Petraeus only ten days to secure Karzai’s agreement to the local defense initiative, which was renamed Afghan Local Police (ALP). On August 16, Karzai signed a formal decree spelling out the specific terms of the program.

Karzai insisted on a key feature: that the Afghan Ministry of the Interior would administer the program. The ministry would validate Afghan Local Police guardians, who would be recruited and vetted by local Afghan shuras, and they would report to Afghan police chiefs. Americans would train the recruits and pay their part-time salaries of $120 monthly plus a $65 food voucher until they were put on the ministry payroll. The ministry would provide pay, weapons, ammunition, uniforms, and radios. The program would sunset in three (later extended to five) years. The total force was to be capped at 30,000, and no more than 300 defenders would be recruited from any one district. These provisions were intended to ensure that the force would be carefully formed and closely overseen.
{27}

MILLER’S NEW IDEA

Miller’s mission was to ensure that the program worked as intended and that the many pitfalls were avoided so that the local defense effort would contribute to a turnabout in the war. Ironically, Miller pushed the local defense concept even further than its original framers had envisioned. “It took a black ops guy from [the special mission units] to understand the limits of kill and capture,” his command sergeant major, J. R.
{28}
Miller’s new idea was village stability operations: that Afghan local policemen by themselves were not sufficient to bring peace to rural Afghanistan, and the country had to be stabilized from the village level up. He got the idea while reading about pacification in Vietnam in a 1999 book by Lewis Sorley,
A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and the Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam
. Miller renamed the program “Village Stability Operations/Afghan Local Police,” or VSO/ALP. The name was cumbersome, but he wanted to stress that the goal was community mobilization, to help villages identify and address the problems that were creating conflict and instability in their area. Special operations teams were ordered to focus on village stability operations as a first step, and only if and when the villagers decided they needed and wanted to form a local police group would they proceed to do so. Under the Community Defense Initiative, development assistance had been provided to villages, but this new approach made governance and development coequal legs of the triad. The closest parallel in recent special operations history had been the deployment of special forces teams to villages all over Haiti after Haiti’s military junta was ousted and the elected government restored in 1994.
{29}
Miller’s plan was to rebuild Afghan stability one village at a time. It was nothing if not ambitious.

Miller wanted to find an enduring solution, not quick fixes that would later unravel because teams were relying on dubious characters or had failed to understand village dynamics. He tapped development experts from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and RAND social scientists whom he invited to join his staff. It was his trademark move, to create a big tent of diverse talent. He had done this in Baghdad when he had convened a weekly video conference of all the conventional brigade commanders in order to share what his Task Force 16 operators were up to and to exchange information. For years special operators had not shared information with each other, let alone with their conventional brethren, who were, after all, the “battlespace owners” working there every day. This practice quickly reduced the tension and grudges that had built up in four years of night raids by the door kickers. In a similar move, when Miller
set up the Pakistan-Afghanistan Coordination Cell in the Pentagon, the walls were literally taken down in the national military command center in the bowels of the building to create an open bay of cubicles where the intelligence, plans, and operations staffs were relocated to work side by side. Every Friday, he presided over what was probably the largest regular video teleconference in the US government. At these “Federation Forum” meetings, a think-tank researcher or another expert would present new analysis, and McChrystal or his deputy and a dozen or more outposts in Afghanistan would tune in to give updates and join the discussion. The Pentagon conference room was crammed with an assortment of academics, analysts, and officials, with the White House, State Department, USAID, and multiple other agencies on the video link.

Miller used his network of experts and operators to figure out exactly what needed to be done, how to do it, and where to do it, and—perhaps most important—to design measures to ensure continuity of effort as units and commanders came and went. It was vital to stop the churn and ad hockery that had characterized special operations and prevented them from achieving lasting impact. First, a four-step process was fashioned that teams were directed to follow: shape, build, hold, transition. An SOF team was first to tour an area to gauge whether there was potential support for such a program. The “shaping” phase would usually entail some combat operations to reduce the insurgent presence and to create breathing room for villagers to begin to take charge of their affairs, but the combat was to be carried out by other forces—commandos or Afghan soldiers, or, if none of these were available, another coalition force. Only a few operations or detentions might suffice: Taliban domination was due in many cases to the absence of any government security force, officials, or services in much of rural Afghanistan. After the shaping operations, the SOF team, if invited, would move into the village or in the vicinity to begin phase two, building the program. As the villagers began taking ownership of their own security and resolving their issues, ideally with the help of the local district government, the effort would move into the third, or “hold,” phase. Finally, the SOF team would transition the
area to local control, while returning for regular visits to provide some fallback support.

Four basic criteria were developed for selecting the villages in which to embed the special ops teams. First, since the program’s premise was helping Afghans who wanted special operations assistance, the teams would have to be invited in. Second, the villages should be ones that had already demonstrated the desire to resist the Taliban. Third, the location had to be logistically sustainable so that the teams could receive food, water, fuel, and ammunition. Fourth, the location should be consequential to the overall fight. This criterion was difficult to define and was interpreted in various ways. The basic idea was to look for and support resistance to the Taliban in the corridors and sanctuaries that led directly to population centers—in the words of one operator, “where the ratlines met the population.”
{30}

To avoid duplication of effort, the staff planners intended for the teams to avoid areas where conventional forces were already operating. But in some areas conventional forces might seek help, because they rarely reached below the level of the district center—which was equivalent to the county seat—to the villages where most Afghans lived. The same was true of the civilian coalition presence, where the lowest-level entity was the district support teams (DSTs) manned by personnel from the State Department, USAID, and sometimes the US Department of Agriculture. Fewer than fifty districts had DSTs. At the height of the surge, 1,040 civilian officials were sent to Afghanistan, but most of them remained in Kabul, or, at best, provincial capitals. Even where DSTs did exist, their ability to reach villages was limited by safety rules imposed by the US embassy. The essential difficulty in combating a rural insurgency resides in its dispersed nature, which requires commanders to make accurate decisions about where to place scarce manpower. It was easy enough to ascertain which of Afghanistan’s thirty-four provinces mattered most in terms of insurgent threat, population, and political-economic value. The Taliban dominated a broad swath of rural Helmand, northern Kandahar, Uruzgan and Zabul, and the eastern border provinces, which were laced with ratlines that intersected population centers of varying size. Highway One, the major
artery running from Kandahar through Zabul, Ghazni, and Wardak to Kabul, was bisected by many valleys where the Taliban rested and resupplied themselves and through which they moved. The difficulty lay in deciding where to focus within the key provinces: Which of Afghanistan’s 398 districts and 30,000 villages ought to be the focus of the teams’ efforts?
{31}

The list of districts that special ops teams would scout for willing villages was determined in conjunction with the newly appointed minister of interior, Bismullah Khan Mohammedi (BK). One hundred districts were initially agreed upon. The majority of the districts on the list were in the south and east, where the vast majority of the insurgents were located, but approximately one-third of the districts BK endorsed were in the north and west. Local defense was justifiable in some strategic and vulnerable spots—for example, the districts around the Salang Tunnel, the principal transportation artery to the northern border, or critical passes in the west. And in the largely Tajik and Uzbek north, some pockets of Pashtuns had become insurgent havens. But BK and Vice President Mohammed Qasim Fahim Khan saw the program not so much as a tool to combat insurgents as an opportunity for a jobs program for their Tajik constituents, and perhaps a way to rebuild militias that had been demobilized in 2002 and 2003. Even if the insurgency was largely in the Pashtun south and east, they were not keen to create a force of 30,000 armed Pashtuns.

Implementing the program would take all the special forces, SEALs, and Marine special operations teams the United States could muster. A few teams remained partnered with the Afghan commandos, and the Task Force 535 units remained focused on counterterrorist raids. Admiral Eric Olson, the four-star admiral in charge of US Special Operations Command, pushed through requests for more army special forces teams as well as special operations civil affairs and military information support (psyops) teams. Between April 2010 and March 2011, the number of special operations forces assigned to the mission doubled, increasing from 2,900 to 5,900.
{32}

Even with the extra special operators, Petraeus saw that they would not have enough manpower for the widely dispersed rural sites. In
November 2010, he asked the army for a conventional army infantry battalion that he would place under Miller’s operational control. The army was not enamored of this idea, but Petraeus insisted that it was critical to the success of his campaign. The army was loath to chop conventional units away from their chain of command to work under special operators. Even more unpalatable was that the battalion’s squads were to be parceled out to help secure the teams’ remote sites and thicken their patrols. It was a huge responsibility to levy on young platoon and squad leaders, and discipline would be at risk. Moreover, the battalion commander’s career path could be compromised, because he would not be leading an intact unit in the traditional way.

On short notice, 1-16 Infantry Battalion of the 1st Infantry Division at Fort Riley was sent to Afghanistan in January 2011. Petraeus requested a second battalion, and the 1-505th of the 82nd Airborne Division arrived in June 2011. The latter battalion had the advantage of a longer lead time to prepare for the unusual mission, and since it was based at Fort Bragg, it linked up immediately with the US Army Special Operations Command and the 3rd Special Forces Group for training. The 82nd Airborne tapped one of its best young officers, Lieutenant Colonel Curtis Buzzard. He selected those of his battalion he believed were best suited for the task. Many soldiers who had served in Iraq during the surge had rotated through small outposts, but this time they would be serving an extended tour out in a very primitive, rural environment. It was to be a round-the-clock, months-long experience of going native. Young soldiers used to Wi-Fi, Facebook, video games, chow halls, and regimented formations would have to adapt.

Buzzard was named the commander of Special Operations Task Force–North (SOTF-N) based in Mazar-e Sharif. Special forces battalions retained command of the teams in the south and east. Navy SEALs took command of a newly formed Special Operations Task Force–Southeast, covering Uruzgan, Day Kundi, and Zabul. The Marines and the 1st Special Forces Group traded command of teams in the west and southwest. Marine Special Operations teams made up the majority of teams assigned to the west and to Helmand, where Marines had assumed control of the battlespace from the British in 2009.