The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor (63 page)

Colonel George sent a number of his noncommissioned officers to the outposts so they could see for themselves why they needed to push their soldiers to be fit and able to shoot, move, and communicate in difficult mountainous terrain. This fight would be quite different from what the brigade had gone through during its fifteen-month deployment to Baghdad during the surge. George and Brown, for their part, paid their first visit to Combat Outpost Keating on Saturday, December 6, 2008—the same day the brigade held a memorial service for Yllescas. The leadership of Blackfoot Troop objected to the memorial’s being held on the day of the week when the enemy was likeliest to attack, but headquarters insisted.

Once on the ground, George and Brown got out of the bird and looked up and around at the steep mountains—just as Kyle Marcum and virtually everyone else who had been at the outpost over the past two and a half years had done on first arriving.

“What the
hell
are they doing here?” George asked.

“I don’t know,” Brown replied.

CHAPTER 24

The Puppies

P
echa returned from leave in mid-January. He, Meshkin, and Mazzocchi were sitting on the small enclosed deck right off the aid station, smoking cigars, when a sniper’s bullet passed right between them and knocked out a light above Mazzocchi’s head. That they had been targeted there suggested to them that locals were telling insurgents that the deck was a good place at which to randomly fire, that American soldiers often hung out there. Or maybe the enemy had just seen the cigar smoke.

Either way, for Pecha, the bullet was yet another reminder that he had to try to improve relations with the locals—a challenge, since the elders from the Kamdesh shura had begun offering excuse after excuse for not visiting Camp Keating: “So-and-so is too old to make the walk,” they would say, or “That one doesn’t have any shoes,” or “The weather is bad.” Meanwhile, the outpost continued to provide a significant amount of humanitarian assistance to local villages—blankets, jackets, shoes, and food—and the “Radio Kamdesh” idea was finally starting to come together. Taliban propagandists had been airing clandestine radio broadcasts warning locals that the Americans were planning to kill innocent people, steal their land, and kidnap their children. The enemy radio hosts would stay up all night singing the poetry of jihad; Safulko called these recitations Taliban death jams. Victorino suspected that the broadcasts originated in Kamdesh Village itself, from hand-held radios, the transmissions carrying throughout the area because the village was at such a high elevation. The Americans wanted to mount a counterinformation campaign in Kamdesh District, and to that end, Master Sergeant Ryan Bodmer, a U.S. Army Reserves civil-affairs NCO, was posted to Combat Outpost Keating from the PRT in Kala Gush to oversee the project.

With Markert’s support, Bodmer had $130,000 worth of equipment, including a thirty-foot radio tower, shipped to Camp Keating. The goal was to broadcast news and miscellaneous music. Just as Dennis Sugrue of 3-71 Cav had done to promote Radio Naray, Bodmer made sure to distribute hundreds of small, Chinese-made hand-cranked transistor radios to the local populace. The locals, as they did with the humanitarian aid, bickered over the gifts.

At the White House, on January 23, a newly inaugurated President Barack Obama made his way to the Situation Room to talk about Afghanistan.

The commander of international forces in Afghanistan, General McKiernan, had an outstanding request for thirty thousand additional U.S. troops. While the new president had campaigned on the promise to withdraw American soldiers from Iraq, he had pledged to send
more
men—at least ten thousand, or two brigades’ worth—to Afghanistan. But Obama was reluctant to send more troops there without taking a harder look at the overall plan for that war, which he regarded as a mess lacking a clear strategy. During his presidential transition, one of President Bush’s top advisers on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Army Lieutenant General Douglas Lute, had briefed the president-elect with a PowerPoint presentation that frankly spelled out for him that there was no strategy in Afghanistan that anyone could either articulate or achieve.
⁶¹
There were some thirty-six thousand U.S. troops in Afghanistan already, and the president wasn’t about to grant McKiernan’s request and nearly double that number without undertaking a more comprehensive review of what the United States was doing there—and why this war was in its eighth year, with no end in sight.

Having impressively advanced through the ranks, General David Petraeus, leader of the group that had rewritten the Army’s counterinsurgency manual, published in 2006, now headed U.S. Central Command, covering the twenty countries that comprised the European, Pacific, and African commands, including Afghanistan. Petraeus wanted the president to send in more troops and put even more emphasis on counterinsurgency in the Afghanistan war. He was backed in this call by Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
⁶²

Almost a month later, President Obama announced that he would commit an additional seventeen thousand U.S. troops to Afghanistan. “The Taliban is resurgent in Afghanistan, and Al Qaeda supports the insurgency and threatens America from its safe haven along the Pakistani border,” he explained. The president said he would be sending a brigade of Marines and a brigade of Army troops “to meet urgent security needs.” He meanwhile asked a former CIA official and National Security Council staffer named Bruce Riedel to conduct a sixty-day review of the war and its strategy. The previous year, Riedel had published a book entitled
The Search for Al Qaeda,
in which he suggested that the real threat lay in Pakistan.

Another issue was percolating beyond McKiernan’s troop request, and that was McKiernan himself. Mullen and Robert Gates, Obama’s (and Bush’s) secretary of defense, both had doubts about his leadership and wondered if he was really the right man for the job. To them he seemed too cautious and conventional.

Radio Kamdesh, once it was up and running, featured clerics who preached messages of peace and decried the other voices on the airwaves that were rallying locals to attack Americans. Similar monologues were delivered by the local Afghan National Police chief and ANA commander. After President Obama announced the surge of troops to Afghanistan, the Americans co-opted the information and began broadcasting the falsehood that all of the nearly twenty thousand new troops were headed straight for Kamdesh District. (The other broadcasts reaching the valley, from BBC and Voice of America, never specified where, precisely, the U.S. soldiers were to be posted.) The insurgents pulled back from the area around Combat Outpost Keating for a few weeks, until it became obvious that two new brigades weren’t being squeezed in to the modest camp.

Forty-four elders came to Camp Keating on February 15 to learn more about Radio Kamdesh and to discuss other topics. They represented all four settlements in Kamdesh Village, plus Mirdesh, Urmul, and Agro. The elders from Paprok couldn’t make it due to poor road conditions. The Mandigal elders weren’t there, either; the consensus seemed to be that they were protesting the shura because Afghan security forces had killed two insurgents from their village, one of whom had been detained the previous summer for distributing pamphlets near Urmul on how to make bombs. (Yllescas had released him after the Mandigal elders promised to monitor him and keep him out of trouble. They hadn’t done either of those things, apparently: according to several Nuristanis, the man had constantly peppered the main entrance to Combat Outpost Keating with small-arms fire.)

During the shura itself, ANA Commander Jawed compared the elders from Mandigal to the thugs from Tora Bora. Anayatullah, the district administrator for Kamdesh, talked up the Americans’ new radio station and its benefits for the area. Anyone who wanted to be a journalist, he said, would be welcome to travel around and collect information for broadcasts, with the shura assuming responsibility for correspondents’ safety. No matter what issue was brought up during this meeting, the discussion always got snagged in the thicket of security and its insufficiency—as, for example, when Gul Mohammed Khan asked why the Afghan government had promised to bring wheat to their district but then stopped in Barikot.

“The driver would not drive all the way into Kamdesh District due to the security issues,” Anayatullah replied.

“There were supposed to be forty-five hundred blankets for Kamdesh District,” another elder noted. “Where have they gone?”

“You have to trust us,” Anayatullah said. “There were three hundred and thirty blankets, but they were unable to bring them because there were illegal checkpoints past Barikot. The shura needs to do more to provide security.”

“Security is the government’s responsibility,” Abdul Rahman protested. “Providing it is the job of the Afghan National Police and the Afghan National Army.”

Anayatullah insisted that he had brought up the matter of security within Kamdesh District several times with the new governor of Nuristan,
⁶³
Jamaluddin Badr, and promised that he would send Governor Badr yet another letter requesting assistance.

“All the other districts have electricity, hospitals, and roads,” noted Afghan National Police commander Jalil. “We need to come together for construction in Kamdesh District.”

The next day, at a meeting that Camp Keating hosted for all the contractors, Anayatullah spoke bluntly. “Security has been bad in Kamdesh for many years now,” he said. “As contractors, you were aware of that when you took on these projects, so you need to stop using it as an excuse for why the projects are not getting done. From now on, you should factor in the cost of hiring security guards before you submit bids. And stop lying about how close the projects are to completion.” Kyle Tucker, in charge of development funds for Combat Outpost Keating, informed the seventeen contractors present that they would need to finish the projects they were currently working on before they could be awarded any new contracts.

“You are the most important part of the development of Afghanistan,” Pecha told them. “You need to take pride in what you’re doing. Even the smallest projects are very important.”

Important, maybe, but also endangered. Tucker had looked into the nearly three million dollars that had been committed to projects in Kamdesh District, and the report that he and Pecha wrote up worked its way up the chain of command. Spiszer and Markert decided the money had to stop flying out the door. As Spiszer saw it, 1-91 Cav had initiated these projects without having any means of performing proper oversight or inspections—or any power at all, really, to hold a contractor accountable after the first payment was made. (Then, too, the undermanned 6-4 Cav was at a disadvantage in having less combat strength than 1-91 Cav, hence less ability to get out to the villages to check up on projects.) In any case, the new civilian-affairs team at Forward Operating Base Bostick believed that Tucker should cancel every project outright until the violence stopped.

Tucker pushed back against that notion; he remained convinced that the projects could be used as important bargaining chips. He and Pecha did, however, cancel some projects, and for good reason. The contractors on the Bar Mandigal secondary-road project, for example, were reportedly working for the Taliban; they also rubbed Tucker the wrong way, and besides that, they hadn’t done any work. Their total fee would have been $407,197, of which $50,000 had already been paid out. Project canceled. Another contractor had been hired to build a pipe system in Chapo—north of Urmul and up the road toward Barg-e-Matal—to help irrigate the fields there. He had collected $17,000 out of $27,552, but Tucker never saw or heard from him. Canceled. Same problem with the contractor in charge of the pipe project in Sudgul: $11,000 already paid out of $27,552, but no contact with Tucker. Canceled. A micro-hydroelectric plant in Sudgul: $35,000 paid out on a $67,560 contract. Canceled.

Many projects were far enough away, and in areas where security was sufficiently sketchy, that Tucker simply had no direct knowledge of whether or not they were real. He hired a local man with a video camera to drive out to the Marwai secondary road—$118,692.24 paid, in full, for its construction—and document its existence. The man did that and was paid for his time, though Tucker never felt 100 percent sure that the video wasn’t of some other, already existing road.

The Americans had spent $19,000 on refurbishing the Kamdesh boys’ school, that money having been used to build chairs and desks for the students and to repair the building itself. But then one day Tucker heard that the Taliban had taken over the school and raised their signature white flag over it. So he canceled payment on the remaining $6,000 owed to Mohammed, the contractor.

“We’re paying for this school, and you’re letting the bad guys live there,” he scolded Mohammed.

“We can’t control them,” the contractor protested. “They have guns! What can we do?”

“Okay,” Tucker said. “We’ll come in with
our
guns.”

“Oh, no,” a shocked Mohammed replied, “we don’t want you coming into our village with all your guns.”

The next time Tucker checked, the flag had been removed. The shura tried to make a big deal out of this, but Tucker wasn’t buying it; it wasn’t as if the Taliban had abandoned Kamdesh, after all. He imagined the head of the shura telling the Taliban, “The Americans are mad that your flag is up, and they want to cancel the project. Take it down so we can continue to get paid, and we’ll give you a slice of the pie.”