One Hundred Victories (7 page)

All these battalion-level SOTFs reported to CJSOTF-A, now led by Colonel Don Bolduc, who in turn reported to Miller. Bolduc was every bit as driven and meticulous as his boss, although the personalities of the two men could not have been more different. Bolduc was outspoken—known to challenge men to pushup contests—and toyed with the idea of running for political office when he retired. He wrote articles and enjoyed attention, whereas Miller did not relish the limelight. The CJSOTF oversaw the tactical day-to-day operations and the resupply of the far-flung teams. Bolduc pushed authority down to the teams to conduct patrols as they saw fit within their designated “ops boxes,” only requiring approval of about 8 percent of the missions where contact with other forces or combat was deemed likely.

FROM BLACK OPS TO VILLAGE OPS

For the emphasis on village stability to be more than rhetorical, Miller set up an apparatus to ensure an equal focus on the governance and development elements of the program. He knew that special ops teams would have their hands full focusing on the security leg of the triad. So he created Village Stability Coordination Centers (VSCCs), which were located alongside the battalion SOTF commands, and sent his trusted lieutenant, Lieutenant Colonel Scott Mann, who had been part of Reeder’s original design team, to Kandahar as the first VSCC-South coordinator.
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The VSCCs were not intended to do governance and development work themselves, but rather to help teams find governance and development resources in the Afghan government and the coalition. The VSCCs were to tie the “top down” to the “bottom up.” They were expected to reach out to the regional commands and their civilian counterparts and find those with expertise, programs, or funds. In addition, they would engage with nongovernmental organizations and cull or produce analysis to better understand the specific districts. The VSCCs embodied  the network ideas that Miller had employed as a terrorist-hunter.

Miller also formed a national-level node of the VSCC at ISAF in Kabul to reach out directly to the Afghan ministries responsible for local governance, rural development, and agriculture and help bring their programs to the districts once the teams had achieved sufficient security. The national coordinator, Colonel Randy Zeegers, the 20th Special Forces Group commander, formed an especially close relationship with the Ministry of Rural Reconstruction and Development, arranging visits for its officials to newly secure districts so they could assess the situation for themselves and authorize the formation of community development councils and the initiation of projects the villagers chose.

A third layer of  the network consisted of the Provincial Augmentation Teams and District Augmentation Teams, dubbed PATs and DATs. These positions were manned by the AFPAK Hands program that Miller had launched while on the Joint Staff with backing from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mike Mullen. Military personnel who volunteered to become AFPAK Hands were asked to commit to serving at least two tours in Afghanistan, and in return they were provided with language and academic training and stateside positions that would allow them to remain engaged in between their tours. The objective was to develop a cadre of expertise that had been lacking since the beginning of the war. Miller was the first AFPAK Hand, and many special forces officers signed up as well, in addition to Air Force and Navy personnel.

Miller stayed in Afghanistan longer than most commanders, from March 2010 until July 2011. His headquarters was located at the New Kabul Compound at the bustling traffic circle a block from the US embassy and the ISAF headquarters. Many Afghans thought the base was a prison because of its prominent guard towers and high walls, which were topped by green netting that obscured views into the camp. High-wattage lights mounted on poles glared out to the street all night long. But inside the compound, three drab beige and brown buildings were surrounded by a warren of Quonset tents and a two-story stack of “man cans,” trailers that contained beds, flimsy wardrobes, and, occasionally, desks. The ground was covered with fist-sized gravel, which crunched under the booted feet of the troops. The grim, utilitarian military architecture of concrete walls and concertina wire did evoke a prison, an aesthetically numbing environment in which military personnel and contractors measured their days in chow hours and physical training (PT) breaks from their deskbound labors. In a bit of gallows humor, the gym in the basement of the main building was named the Dungeon.

Miller’s diverse staff hailed from every tribe of the special operations community. His chief of staff, Geno Paluso, a SEAL captain, and his army command sergeant major, J. R. Stigall, ran a tight ship. His deputy commander was Pat Mahaney initially, and then Alex Krongaard, another SEAL captain who would soon be promoted to rear admiral. Describing Miller as “a shorter version of McChrystal,” Paluso said, “There are a lot of general and flag officers here. Very few of them could’ve done what he has done.” Paluso had arrived in December 2009 and would stay for two and a half long years. Miller inspired intense loyalty among his staff by working even harder than he drove them. Unlike his former boss, McChrystal, Miller did not post a sign, but the staff understood that the same rules applied: they were expected to work seventeen hours a day and use the other five for sleep, exercise, and meals.
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Miller brought two practices with him from his black ops experience, in addition to the punishing work pace: flat networks and communications. He convened VSCC and other video teleconferences that consumed hours each day: these kept Miller in touch with every echelon and allowed the lowest levels to raise concerns or express opinions he might not otherwise hear. “Over-communicate” was one of his mottoes. It was Miller’s preferred method of command, whether he was hunting terrorists or stabilizing villages. He always checked in with Petraeus and other senior commanders before reaching out to their subordinates, and Petraeus increasingly trusted him to deal with senior Afghans.
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Miller was also determined to fix the problems of continuity that had plagued the special operations effort in Afghanistan until now. In addition to holding commanders conferences that cast a wide net, he and Scott Mann institutionalized a week-long predeployment course in the United States called SOF Academic Week. It offered up an extensive curriculum on the methodology they developed for local police and village stability as well as a rich menu of Afghan, Pashtun, and Islamic expertise, with native speakers, experts, retired intelligence officers, and returning operators. It was open to conventional units as well, and soon over a thousand soldiers and general officers were signing up to attend whenever these were held. Miller’s staff and the RAND experts in his initiatives group produced videos, research papers, and manuals. One of the special forces officers who attended the SOF Week training voiced amazement at the degree to which Miller had embraced and elevated the standards of what building and advising indigenous forces should mean. “He gets it more than many of our own,” he said.

Miller spent four or five days each week visiting his troops around the country. He wangled funds from Central Command for a fleet of a half-dozen Beechcraft 1900 contract planes to ferry special operations personnel around their bases. One of the most important functions of Miller’s circulation was to try to ensure that his teams were receiving the support they needed from the two-star regional commands and their subordinate brigades, which were called the “battlespace owners.” The special operations teams had their own chain of command straight up to the four-star ISAF headquarters, which did not include the conventional forces’ regional commanders and their brigades, but the latter could exercise the “choke-con” of special operations forces by withholding airlift, attack helicopters, or convoys to resupply food, fuel, and ammunition. As a one-star general, Miller was a junior in a sea of generals, but his prior relationships with other commanders, many of them forged in Iraq, enabled him to have more influence than he otherwise would have had.

Miller traveled constantly—not only to stay in touch with the situation, but also to provide direct moral support. “What do you need?” was his constant refrain. Although many officers asked this question, the general had a way of making people feel like he genuinely cared. On one occasion, he flew to Mazar-e Sharif for a promotion ceremony and to award Purple Hearts and met with his battalion commanders from the north, south, east, and west who had flown in for the event. Later, Miller spoke frankly to his subordinates about the casualties that operators had incurred and demanded better attention to their needs. He then sat down for a briefing from the captain whose team was the partner for the Afghan commandos assigned to the north. Miller arranged for him to try out for Delta Force. Then he boarded a Chinook to fly east to neighboring Kunduz Province, where he attended a graduation ceremony for newly trained members of the Afghan Local Police, along with the German general who was the Regional Command–North (RC-North) commander. The Afghans sat uncomfortably under the blazing sun in red plastic chairs lined up before a stage as they were called up one by one to receive their diplomas. Miller, the introvert, was equally unhappy to be on stage, his smile more of a grimace. He had also wrenched his back lifting weights. He stood at attention as the team members—decked out in new, sharply pressed
shalwar kameezes
, or man jammies, as soldiers called them, and the wool muffin-shaped
pakol
hats commonly worn by the Tajiks of the north—shook hands with every new graduate.

Miller gained an education in the complex national political dynamics of Afghanistan as he spent an increasing amount of time on Tajik demands and reactions to any instability in the north. Hamid Karzai was a Pashtun, but he had struck key Tajik alliances. For most of Miller’s tenure, BK ran the Ministry of Defense and Fahim Khan was one of the vice presidents. Both were Tajiks. Another Tajik, a rival Northern Alliance commander, the powerful Atta Mohammad Noor, was governor of Balkh Province, where Mazar-e Sharif was located. In addition, the top ranks of the Afghan army and police force, as well as the NDS, the Afghan intelligence service, were largely occupied by Tajiks from the Northern Alliance. For all intents and purposes, Tajiks ran Kabul, and thus the country, from a security perspective. Karzai had reinforced this power-sharing arrangement in his reelection bid by making Fahim one of his vice presidents, thus ensuring the support of this powerful, organized minority. Karzai maintained and controlled a shifting cast of ministers, commanders, and provincial and district governors through a heavily centralized constitution, which granted him authority to appoint all of these positions. Late in Miller’s tour, after the police commander in the north was assassinated by a Taliban suicide bomber, he watched with concern as the Tajik leaders rallied former militia members to gird for the possible return of the vicious civil war of the 1990s. “They are getting the band back together,” he muttered with foreboding.
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Miller did not sugarcoat the difficulty of what they were attempting. After a visit to Zabul Province, he said grimly, “There is not one district that isn’t controlled by the Taliban,” dismissing official reports that glossed over this inconvenient fact. But that did not mean he was pessimistic about the prospects for village stability and the local defense effort. He kept after the teams to be rigorous in implementing the procedures they had so painstakingly crafted. “The population will see if they do not pick the right leader or recruits,” he said. So the ultimate failsafe would be for the teams to keep their ears and eyes open and to correct course if they got it wrong.

Miller had imposed a new standard for detailed planning and execution of special operations, but he understood that success or failure would ultimately be determined at the ground level. He could try to set the conditions for success, but the art of the endeavor was practiced by the teams. Although he had formed an analytical assessment cell to develop ways to measure progress or the lack of it, it would take time to know whether the teams were able to midwife stability in the villages, much less whether their efforts would have any impact beyond the immediate environment. Would the Afghan district and provincial police chiefs prove capable of overseeing the new force? Would the initiative in fact help turn the tide of the war, as Petraeus and others hoped? They might not know until long after they departed whether they had left Afghanistan better able to fend off the Taliban. All Miller could do was give the teams and their Afghan partners a fighting chance.

First, they would have to survive. Since the beginning of the war, army special forces teams had been living out in the hinterlands in about a dozen small firebases along the border and in parts of the rural south, but they were now going even farther off the grid. Not since Vietnam would so many special operators be scattered in small teams living in such remote, hostile places. Dozens of teams were moving into remote villages where they were much more exposed to ambush and attack. Their first line of defense was to get to know the Afghan villagers among whom they were now living, and quickly build a human intelligence network while practicing good security tactics. If that failed to deter attacks, the teams were equipped with an arsenal of ground-based power, including individual and crew-served weapons such as M-16s, M240 squad automatic weapons (SAWs), .50-​caliber machine guns, and miniguns. If they were overrun, the teams’ vital link to external defensive and offensive power was the Air Force combat controller from the special tactics squadrons who was assigned to each army, SEAL, and Marine team. He would talk to the overhead surveillance assets and call for air support. On high-risk patrols, he would request an air weapons team to be on call, and in emergencies he would place the 911 call to any birds in the area. The air weapons team might be attack helicopters from a conventional unit controlled by the regional command, fast movers such as F-16s or F-15s controlled by the theater command, and/or one of the special operations command’s own AC-130 gunships, a lumbering plane that packed a fearsome array of firepower.