One Hundred Victories (8 page)

The catch was that all of this awesome firepower had to be applied in very precise conditions to avoid civilian casualties. Living among the villagers would severely constrain the team members. The special operators were no longer supposed to be conducting set-piece battles such as those Pat Mahaney had led, but rather, teaching the fishermen how to fish.

CHAPTER THREE

__________________________________________

THE TALIBAN’S HOME

Kandahar 2010–2011

“WHO WILL GO WITH ME?”

The framers of the local defense initiative recognized that Kandahar was the single most important province, so it received the greatest number of special operations teams. It was also the hardest place in which to find willing volunteers, because it was the cradle of the Taliban—its spiritual home, where it had regrouped while the coalition was sleeping. Taliban leader Mullah Omar had ruled from Kandahar, and before the Taliban came to power he had taught at a madrassa west of the city. Once ousted, he took up residence in Quetta, Pakistan, just a few hours’ drive away.

Kandahar Province’s landowning khans had largely fled to the city of Kandahar, and tenant farmers, left to fend for themselves, were easily cowed. In 2010, Taliban influence in the province overshadowed the government almost everywhere outside of Kandahar City. The insurgency asserted itself as a ubiquitous presence through the use of threatening night letters, summary justice dispensed by shadow courts, and thugs on motorcycles carrying AK-47s or PKM machine guns. Even if most Kandaharis rejected this extremist version of Islamic rule, survival instincts dictated compliance. The Taliban was, for young men, a source of seasonal employment, especially after the cash crops of opium and hashish were harvested.

The natural landscape of Kandahar was far less intimidating than the rugged mountains that characterized most of the insurgent belt in the south and east. The province is mostly flat, with small humps of mountains springing up here and there on dun-colored plains. The irrigated land between the Arghandab and Helmand rivers serves as the breadbasket of the south and the opium capital of the world. South of the Arghandab, the blood-red Registan Desert runs in undulating ripples to Pakistan, crisscrossed by smuggling trails and nomadic Kuchi herders who camp in black cloth tents. The province’s manmade landscape provides many guerrilla-friendly structures, such as arched grape-​drying sheds dotted with tiny windows, which are perfect portholes for guns. Grape arbors made of chest-high walls of mud are impassable to Humvees and favor fighters on foot. Homemade bombs festoon their walls or the sides of the underground irrigation channels, called
karezes
, which from above look like holes bored by giant moles in a snaky line across the plains. Columns of insurgents can run underground and pop up miles away. Arched kilns, surrounded by high piles of freshly baked bricks, await customers and offer one more spot to hide.

In the summer of 2009, all of Kandahar Province was under siege, but there were few forces available to pull it back from the brink. In hindsight it seemed incredible that the United States had neglected the south, leaving it to small numbers of British and Canadian troops while Americans obsessed on the eastern border where bin Laden had last been seen. Realizing belatedly that the war was about to be lost, the Americans hastily threw the 5-2 Stryker Brigade into the fight. It was led by a man named Harry Tunnel who thought counterinsurgency was bunk. His troops proceeded to get chewed up in Arghandab District and then got even in Maiwand District, where a rogue “kill team” was subsequently prosecuted for extrajudicial killings. (Tunnel was investigated and absolved, but lower-level soldiers were eventually tried, and some were convicted.)

In November 2010, Major General James Terry arrived in Kandahar to lead Regional Command–South, the coalition headquarters, and attempt to turn the tide in his yearlong tour. His first order of business was to beat back the Taliban in an arc west of Kandahar City stretching from western Arghandab through Zhari and Panjwayi districts. Terry, who had fought here briefly with the Canadians in 2006, knew this was the epicenter of the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan. The 2nd Brigade of the 101st Airborne endured heavy casualties in Zhari, suffering ninety killed and wounded, many of them multiple amputees. The perimeter around their base was so heavily mined that they used rocket-launched explosive mine-clearing line charges called “miclics” to blast open paths for vehicles or foot patrols.
{37}

Unlike some conventional commanders, Terry was a big fan of special operations forces. He counted on them to provide a rural security blanket through the Afghan Local Police, because he did not have enough troops to do it himself. He practiced counterinsurgency with a blend of enemy- and population-centric tactics: after using clearing operations to dislodge the Taliban, he quickly brought district governors back to their districts to begin the “hearts and minds” work by providing essential services.

Terry met frequently with the special operations battalion commander, Chris Riga, who was the current occupant of the special ops’ small patch of Kandahar Airfield. Special forces had claimed the cluster of blue and white buildings in 2001 and had been there ever since. Once part of the commercial airport, the long, low main building, with arched rooms and arcades, looked like a Hobbit motel. A few steps and a chain-link fence with a coded lock separated Riga’s Camp Brown from Terry’s headquarters, a building with a badly leaking roof surrounded by a stockade of two-story “man cans.”

Riga had made quite a name for himself. Two months before Terry’s arrival, at a provincial council meeting on September 14, the council chair and half-brother of the president, Ahmad Wali Karzai, announced that Afghan security forces would mount an all-out assault on western Arghandab. It would be led by a cocky and corrupt border policeman named Abdul Raziq. “Who will come with me?” Raziq asked. There was silence, and then Riga leaned forward. “I’ll come with you,” Riga said. Raziq got up from the table and started to leave. “When do we go?” Riga asked. “Are you ready? Let’s go tomorrow,” the itchy Afghan replied.
{38}

Riga was primed for this scene. He had been called in by the British commander, Major General Nick Carter, a few days earlier. Carter explained to him that the Afghans were readying another offensive that was similar to the operation they had just launched in Malajat. Raziq had outpaced the conventional forces partnered with him in Malajat. This time, Carter said, the Afghans were prepared to go on their own, on orders of their president. “Can you partner with him?” Carter asked Riga. “Yes, we can partner with anyone,” Riga told him. He had been coming to southern Afghanistan since the beginning of the war; this was his sixth tour. Carter was a bit surprised when he saw Wali Karzai and many other Afghan officials and council members greet Riga with hugs and kisses at the council meeting. Riga had met Raziq on a previous tour in Zabul as a company commander, but he had not worked with him before. He knew that Raziq had been accused of a tribally motivated killing of thirteen Afghans in 2006 and was alleged to have made a lot of money from the bustling commerce at his base in the border town of Spin Boldak.
{39}

Riga and Raziq left the council meeting and repaired to another room in the municipal building to plan the first of what became a dozen operations throughout western Kandahar. The Americans would provide the helicopters, air support, and medevac, and conventional forces would form an outer perimeter as Riga and Raziq’s men entered the villages. Riga and about a dozen of his men saddled up the next day to accompany Raziq and four hundred of his border police into one village after another. Helped by tips from local residents, on the first day they found over one hundred improvised explosive devices (IEDs). They captured about thirty Taliban in the first day. Riga found them to be younger and more poorly armed than the fighters he had seen in earlier years. “They had one or two magazines and little ammo, and no heavy machine guns,” he said. The IED was now the weapon of choice.

In one day, Raziq had cleared a notorious insurgent stronghold and identified a spot for the conventional forces to set up a patrol base. He walked the conventional officers to the spot and then he and Riga moved on. Riga and his operations officer, Mike Sullivan, found that Raziq was a savvy tactician. His men were adept at spotting the lethal buried mines. They also had contacts in the districts, and the intelligence gathered allowed them to operate quickly. Both American officers said they saw no evidence of any human rights abuses in their operations with Raziq; nor did Sullivan hear of any when he debriefed the other operators who had been in the field with him. Riga pushed back against the allegations of Raziq as a bloodthirsty Afghan. “He is an incredibly brave, phenomenal combat leader,” Riga said. “I found him to be shockingly empathetic toward the enemy.” He recalled Raziq telling a captured fighter, “You are my brother. You need to come back to our side. I will give you the opportunity to come over so the NDS [Afghan intelligence] does not have to take you away.”

The fight in the Arghandab was not over. The next month, in October, the conventional battalion commander ordered the bombing of two nearby villages, Tarok Kolache and Khosrow Sofla, after seeing insurgents in what he said were deserted towns. The two villages had become factories for making homemade explosive powder, which was manufactured from fertilizer ingredients and then spread out to dry inside abandoned qalats. The villages were razed to the ground. Most of the civilians had left the villages beforehand. Some may have been under pressure to leave from the Taliban, which wanted to use the villages for their own purposes; others may have left in anticipation of a US offensive. In any case, it remained unclear whether any villagers had been killed; those who returned were furious to find their homes and pomegranate orchards gone. When Terry arrived, he inherited the public relations disaster. He ordered the local mosque to be quickly rebuilt along with a massive tree-planting campaign to replace destroyed orchards.
{40}

Riga’s readiness to ride out alongside the Afghans earned him the respect of many of them. As his tour drew to a close, Afghans mounted a campaign for him to stay. Elders and officials from every district in Kandahar wrote letters or attached their thumbprints to the letters of others, and Ahmed Wali Karzai sent the appeal to President Karzai. They wanted Riga and his men to stay. “We had some incredible momentum going at that point,” Sullivan commented. “It gets personal.” Petraeus explained to the Afghans that the next battalion would be just as good, but Riga reported that this rebuff felt like a “kick in the gut to the leadership of the south.” He added, “Such trust can’t be built overnight.” Before Riga left, Kandahar’s mujahideen council, veterans of the anti-Soviet war, feted him with a banquet, and a popular Kabul singer performed a farewell concert in his honor.

By the time Riga left in April 2011, Arghandab was largely pacified, but Zhari, Panjwayi, and Maiwand were not. They straddled Highway One, the sole paved “ring road” linking Afghanistan, in this case Helmand Province, into Kandahar City. These districts would be Terry’s focus. The conventional brigade based in Zhari would also work in Panjwayi; Terry requested special operations teams in both of those districts, and he especially looked to them to turn around Maiwand, where he had few troops.

MAIWAND

Captain Dan Hayes and his team, Operational Detachment Alpha (ODA) 3314, were ordered to Maiwand to look for a suitable site to embed. Maiwand was a desolate place marked in history by the 1880 Battle of Maiwand, an ignominious blow to the British during the Second Anglo-Afghan War. The economic rhythm revolved around the poppy crop, grown in fields irrigated by American-supplied pumps, followed by hashish. Once the opium tar is harvested, usually in May, the young men pick up their guns and the fighting begins.

The team moved into the Maiwand district center (akin to a county seat), a place called Hutal, and began daily patrols into every corner of the district in a ceaseless search for a village that wanted help defending itself. The conventional battalion assigned to Maiwand tended to hug the Highway One corridor, attempting to keep it open and free of bombs and ambushes. As the special operators left the gate of their Hutal base each day, they passed by the old British fort, a reminder of previous failures and their possible fate.

Unsurprisingly, Hayes found the going slow in this Taliban stronghold. He found no welcome south of Highway One, a rich agricultural belt along the Helmand River known to be a Taliban safe haven and transit zone. Its Ishaqzai tribe was cut out of the opium trade and did not have a role in the district’s Noorzai-dominated government, which was linked to the Karzais by marriage. To the west of Hutal was the area where Tunnel’s rogue band had done its killing; it was unclear whether anyone there would give the Americans another chance. So ODA 3314 began to scout villages north of Highway One.