All In (13 page)

A rugby player with a Ph.D. in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, McMaster was a charismatic, freethinking officer who had demonstrated the potential of classical counterinsurgency doctrine in Tal Afar, in northern Iraq in 2005, long before COIN became the Army's dominant approach during the surge in 2007. McMaster instinctively preached respect for the Iraqi people and dispersed his troops in small outposts throughout the city. McMaster was the kind of officer who would embrace one particular Petraeus mantra, the final imperative in the recently issued counterinsurgency guidance:

 

EXERCISE INITIATIVE
.
In the absence of guidance or orders, figure out what the orders should have been and execute them aggressively.

 

McMaster would lead what would become the Combined Joint Inter-Agency Task Force–Shafafiyat.
Shafafiyat
means “transparency” in Pashto and Dari. In keeping with the desire to be respectful and not publicly confront the Afghan government and the penchant of some to steal large quantities of American aid, McMaster would, by design, do most of his work behind closed doors.

His first task was the drafting of his counterinsurgency contracting guidance, which Petraeus refined and issued on September 8. This was their attempt to bring discipline and principle to the awarding of contracts. The clearly stated one-sentence imperatives were reminiscent of the counterinsurgency guidance Petraeus had issued earlier:

 

Hire Afghans first, buy Afghan products, and build Afghan capacity. Know those with whom we are contracting. Consult and involve local leaders. Act. Get the story out.

The corruption problem was one of enormous magnitude. A report released that October found that between 2002 and 2010, the United States alone had provided nearly $55.7 billion in reconstruction funding without having established a comprehensive U.S. strategy for fighting corruption in Afghanistan. By that point, the amount spent on the reconstruction of Afghanistan exceeded the amount spent on reconstruction in Iraq. While Congress had required the Pentagon, the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development to create a common database to keep track of contractors' compensation, they didn't really know how to use it. Nor could they tell auditors which contracts, cooperative agreements and grants were spent on reconstruction and which ones were spent on support for U.S. troops and other activities. In fiscal years 2007, 2008 and 2009 alone, more than $17.7 billion had been designated for 6,900 contractors. Many of the contractors had not kept their ends of the bargain. For instance, when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers awarded a $5.9 million contract for building six Afghan National Police (ANP) headquarters in Helmand and Kandahar provinces, payments were made to Afghan contractors despite project delays and shoddy construction. Oversight of the project was so lax that U.S. taxpayers would probably have to foot another $1 million—17 percent of the contract value—to complete the headquarters.

These shortcomings by U.S. officials paled in comparison with the deficiencies of their Afghan partners. In Nangarhar Province, the United States invested $100 million in 2009. The report concluded that “the province does not have the capacity to independently manage development funds, lacks a functioning development planning process, and is unable to sustain completed projects.” It also voiced “growing concern that some companies hired to provide security, supplies, and reconstruction work have been siphoning off money to fund the Taliban and criminal groups.”
One of the groups identified and subsequently suspended and debarred was Watan Risk Management, an Afghan private security contractor that the special inspector general found “had been funneling large sums of money to insurgents.” The firm was headed by two of Karzai's cousins, Ahmed Rateb Popal and Rashid Popal. In all, auditors reported eighty-one ongoing investigations, including problems at the Kabul Bank, as well as the export of large amounts of cash through the Kabul airport. American bureaucrats had done business the only way they knew how, with almost no understanding of Afghan culture or appreciation of what Afghan businessmen were capable of accomplishing.

Petraeus expected all civilian and military personnel involved with contracting, especially commanders, to support qualified Afghan partners, to dedicate additional personnel to contract oversight, and to take action against corrupt businesses that were impeding the mission. Contracting was a weapon every bit as potent as direct fire. “Commanders must know what contracting activity is occurring in their battle space and who benefits from those contracts,” Petraeus's contracting guidance stated. “Integrate contracting into intelligence, plans and operations to exert positive influence and to better accomplish our campaign objectives.”

Petraeus wanted McMaster's anticorruption team to design a plan that would help Afghan partners define, penetrate, prosecute and ultimately undo the culture of corruption that defined the Afghan political system. It was a tall order for McMaster, one much more difficult than pacifying Tal Afar, in northern Iraq, the signal achievement of his regiment there. Corruption was so endemic in Afghanistan that it was taken for granted, like the noisy, dusty streets in Kabul and the cold, hard winter that sets in over much of the country. McMaster's team attacked its mission with a planning timeline that began in early September, a cache of PowerPoint briefings and, ultimately, a plan that pinpointed political patronage networks dominated by the Afghan elite, including some officials at the highest levels of Karzai's government.

McMaster's nickname in his new job was the Henchman, but at five feet eight inches, with a shiny bald head and a forehead that creased with intensity when he briefed, he came across as a Southern Baptist preacher, bubbling with energy and enthusiasm. His team, an assemblage of anticorruption experts from the military, the State Department and contractors, was determined to come up with fresh new approaches.

One afternoon in late September, McMaster went to Tolo TV, in Kabul. Tolo had helped to force Karzai's transparency during the Afghan presidential election and in other issues through its newscasts and public broadcast messages. McMaster had come with a couple of lieutenant colonels to meet with the producers of an anticorruption campaign the U.S. military was funding on radio, TV, posters and billboards.

McMaster met Saad Mohseni, founder of Tolo TV and CEO of its parent organization, Moby Group. Mohseni, who felt equally comfortable in Washington, Sydney, Kabul or Dubai, was no great friend of Karzai. He had partnered for years with USAID to pursue various transparency initiatives. Mohseni was the son of an Afghan diplomat who had been raised abroad. He cared about his country, and he had also found a way to make money there. It wasn't entirely clear how pristine his own record was; however, McMaster recognized the leverage Mohseni's partnership could provide for Shafafiyat. And he knew Mohseni was savvy in the ways of Afghan politics. Mohseni played devil's advocate for McMaster's plan.

“If there's no political will in Afghanistan to indict and prosecute, what do you do about that?” Mohseni asked.

“Well, it's an issue of influence, you know, exhorting the government to do more,” McMaster said.

“Is that your only option?” Mohseni asked.

“No, there are a lot of options,” McMaster said. “A lot of the problem is related directly to our money, how our money flows into the system. So that's something over which we have a great deal of control: who gets the international community's money, and our money in particular.”

“But that doesn't really work, you know that,” Mohseni said.

“You mean because somebody will capture that contract from someone—”

“Or they can get the money from the Iranians, or someone else, or they could utilize drug money; they operate in that gray zone.”

Mohseni was too smart to accept McMaster's simplistic formulation and was taking him to a deeper understanding of the situation in Afghanistan, where issues were rarely as they seemed on the surface. McMaster's education had begun to enter the graduate level.

In early October, McMaster presided over a review of Task Force Shafafiyat's work in a briefing room at ISAF headquarters that was packed with four dozen interagency representatives from NATO, the State Department, the Drug Enforcement Administration and other agencies with a stake in the anticorruption effort. McMaster was blunt in his opening remarks, noting that “there has not been one historical record of a case of corruption being solved by an outside party exclusively.”

“We've been engaging with Afghan leaders, and civil society, and framing the problem from an Afghan perspective as best we can,” he said, adding that “many of the leaders with whom we're engaging . . . are kind of complicit in the problem set we're dealing with.” McMaster's goal was to find the “islands of integrity” among Afghan officials and publicly reward them. There was a general perception that the ministries of Defense and Interior were fairly clean. But the truth, one of McMaster's deputies said, was that the Ministry of Defense “steals money mainly from us,” whereas the Ministry of the Interior “steals mainly from the Afghan people.” McMaster knew his effort would entail dealing with at least minimally corrupt Afghans to meet his objectives. It was the best he could hope for to achieve Petraeus's goals.

McMaster turned the briefing over to Lieutenant Colonel Joel Rayburn, a Ph.D. whom Petraeus called his “designated thinker” while they were in Iraq and at Central Command together. Rayburn began with the group's conclusion that corruption in Afghanistan stemmed primarily from “criminal patronage networks,” but he added that a great many “reform-minded” Afghans had also been identified in senior government positions. The U.S. military and the broader international community had to begin by cleaning up their own houses so they weren't, in Rayburn's words, “doing harm” with all the money they were dumping in the country. Then they needed to make sure their Afghan counterparts understood “the severity of the problem so that, to the extent that it's possible, they internalize the threat to themselves and to the future of their state.”

One problem, McMaster interjected, had been a tendency to respond reactively to corrupt practices instead of attacking them preemptively by presenting Afghan officials with hard evidence. “Do we understand what the vision for anticorruption efforts is for key Afghan leaders?” he asked. “Have we asked them that question? Have we determined what common ground we have, what we can work on together?”

One of those seated around the long rectangular table was David Kilcullen, an Australian-American defense intellectual and counterinsurgency expert who had become a key adviser to Petraeus during the surge in Iraq. Like McMaster, he was not shy about saying what he thought.
He had come to Petraeus's attention in 2006 after writing an essay, “Twenty-Eight Articles: Fundamentals of Company-Level Counterinsurgency,” that went one better than T. E. Lawrence's “Twenty-Seven Articles” about fighting in the Middle East in 1917.

“It's a little too complicated,” Kilcullen said after listening to the briefing for about half an hour. “You're making it seem too linear.” To succeed, he said, they would have to deal with all the layers of corruption, beginning with the Afghans. But this would include the United States, coalition country governments and the international community, all of which contributed to the problem. All were accomplices in one way or another.

“Yeah, that's right,” McMaster agreed. “There's no way this is conducive to any centralized form of action. It just has to allow the various organizations that are engaging on this issue to take initiative and deal with a common understanding of the problem.” That included a very large cast of players, and no one had attempted to orchestrate the initiative in a comprehensive manner before McMaster and his Shafafiyat effort.

McMaster's prescription followed Petraeus's management fundamentals. Getting those fundamentals right in Afghanistan, though, would be the challenge of a lifetime.

CHAPTER 4

SCREAMING EAGLES

P
etraeus had a special affection for the 101st Airborne Division, the Screaming Eagles. The storied unit had been severely tested in Europe in World War II, and in Vietnam and Iraq. Afghanistan would do the same.

After the division's creation, in August 1942, its paratroopers were among the first to land in occupied France in the early hours of D-Day, June 6, 1944. Months later, it would participate in the airborne landings in Holland that began the liberation of that country. In December, the division refused to surrender when surrounded by Germans at Bastogne, Belgium, during the Battle of the Bulge. The acting commander famously responded to a German ultimatum with a single word: “Nuts!” During the Division's seven-year deployment in Vietnam, in 1969, the 3rd Battalion, 187th Infantry Regiment—the Rakkasans—fought their way up Hamburger Hill in one of the toughest battles of the Vietnam War, suffering heavy losses: 329 men killed and wounded. The battalion's nickname, however, went all the way back to the World War II occupation of Japan, where the local people called the unit's paratroopers “Rakkasans,” Japanese for “falling-down umbrella.”

In 1991, as part of Operation Desert Storm in Iraq, the Rakkasans conducted an air assault and cut off Iraqi Republican Guard units fleeing Kuwait and heading back into Iraq. Several months later, Lieutenant Colonel David Petraeus took command of the 3rd Battalion, 187th Infantry Regiment, the first essential step up the ladder in the career of any future four-star general. Twelve years later, he commanded the 101st Airborne during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. It was Petraeus's first combat command. He led the division through battles in Najaf, Karbala and Hillah on the way to Baghdad. But it was in Mosul after the invasion that Petraeus and the division's members distinguished themselves most, achieving early progress through their ability to conduct nation-building and counterinsurgency operations, pacifying their area in northern Iraq during their charge of it while other sectors spiraled into violence.

Once the division's 4th Brigade Combat Team arrived in Afghanistan in August as the final unit in Obama's surge, nearly the entire 101st Division was deployed together for the first time since Petraeus led the Screaming Eagles to Baghdad. The 4th Brigade, known as the “Currahees”—the word means “stands alone” in Cherokee—would join the 1st Brigade Combat Team, nicknamed Bastogne, and the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, the “Rakkasans,” in the war's eastern sector. The division's 2nd Brigade Combat Team, nicknamed “Strike,” had been sent to southern Afghanistan to clear the area west of Kandahar city as part of Operation Dragon Strike. Thousands of soldiers from the Strike Brigade, teamed with units from the Afghan National Army, pushed into the Zhari District west of Kandadar city in mid-September, searching booby-trapped villages for Taliban insurgents.
Beyond its tactical significance, the area was of considerable symbolic importance: The Taliban movement was established in a village in the district called Sangsar in 1994 when a cleric named Mullah Mohammed Omar ordered the hanging of a local warlord who had raped two young girls. Dragon Strike was the first major military operation the Americans had mounted since the Marines cleared Marjah, to the west in Helmand Province, in February.

Petraeus and his team knew that the PR blitz that heralded that Marine operation had backfired after the fight in Marjah became far harder and longer than the U.S. command had imagined. Operation Dragon Strike wouldn't be formally announced for a week, even though hard fighting had been under way in the area for months. Dragon Strike was the largest operation mounted in the nine-year-old war and the third and final phase of a broader push to clear Kandahar Province, called Operation Hamkari, from the Dari word for “cooperation.” Phase one had begun in the early summer to increase security in Kandahar, the most important city in southern Afghanistan, with a population of more than 500,000. Phase two began in late July with the clearing of the Arghandab River Valley, north of the city. The lush terrain of the Arghandab, with its vineyards, pomegranate groves and marijuana fields, provided the perfect cover for Taliban fighters to ambush U.S. forces with AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades and then melt back into the villages.

Phase three was Operation Dragon Strike, which included attacks on Taliban positions along Highway 1 and in the Zhari District, west of the city. And phase four, in October and November, would involve clearing the Taliban out of Zangabad, Mushan and Talukan, in the Panjwai District southwest of the city. Control Zhari, Arghandab and Panjwai and the flow of insurgents into Kandahar would be considerably reduced.

By American historical standards, the fighting in Afghanistan seemed an order of magnitude smaller. U.S. battle deaths in the summer, while the highest by far since the war began in 2001, had peaked at 58 in July and then declined to 54 in August, then to 30 in September, before rising to 47 in October with the initiation of the new offensives. But those numbers were deceptive and did not capture the vicious nature of the fight in Afghanistan, particularly in the south, where the terrain was riddled with thousands of IEDs. The homemade weapons came in all shapes and sizes—some detonated by pressure plates, others by command wires, still others by remote control. The crude bombs maimed soldiers horribly, blowing off arms and legs, filling torsos with shrapnel and scrambling brains with such concussive force that large numbers of troops were left suffering from the misunderstood and difficult-to-diagnose war wound called traumatic brain injury. Others suffered silently from post-traumatic stress disorder. In some ways, the better measure of the savage nature of the combat in Afghanistan, particularly in the south, was battlefield injuries, which were running about ten times the number killed. In June, 539 U.S. troops were wounded, the highest monthly total since the war began. The number increased to 606 in July and 608 in August and hardly tapered off as summer gave way to fall and Operation Dragon Strike, with 590 U.S. troops injured in September and 578 in October.

On Petraeus's first visit to Kandahar in July, where coalition loss of life and limb were highest, he asked the 101st's Strike Brigade Combat Team commander, Colonel Art Kandarian, “What do you need to succeed?” Kandarian asked for M58 Mine Clearing Line Charge for breaching capability, Military Working Dogs to sniff out IEDs, and interpreters. Petraeus immediately relayed these requirements directly to Secretary of Defense Gates. “I know that Petraeus personally took these on and without his personal efforts I am certain the requests would not have been filled,” Kandarian recalled. On Petraeus's second visit, in August, Kandarian gathered his battalion commanders for a discussion with Petraeus. At the end of the meeting, Petraeus asked everyone to leave the room so that he could spend a few minutes alone with Kandarian, who had suffered the largest combat losses of any brigade commander in the division. “How are
you
doing, Art?” Petraeus asked point-blank, sensing the colonel's emotional struggles and looking him in the eye. No one carried the weight of losing soldiers in battle, the “heavy rucksack” feeling, like a commander. “It was clear to me that he was a ‘commander's commander,' ” Kandarian observed, noting that Petraeus had made five visits to his unit alone over the year and also called routinely to check on the commander and Strike's progress.

Even before Dragon Strike officially commenced, targeted Special Operations raids and initial clearing operations in Kandahar had started to show early gains. The situation was improving, but Petraeus didn't want to declare success prematurely. He was keenly aware of how the United States had overpromised in Marjah. He addressed this phenomenon in his counterinsurgency guidance: “
MANAGE EXPECTATIONS
. Avoid premature declarations of success. Note what has been accomplished and what still needs to be done. Strive to under-promise and over-deliver.”

“We need to be careful announcing dates of upcoming operations and what we expect to achieve by a certain date,” Petraeus said during his stand-up a week before the soft launch of Dragon Strike. “One of the lessons learned from operations in central Helmand was to be careful on what we announce.” He struck the same theme in his stand-up three days later. “We will not tell the enemy in advance of our intentions,” he said. “In my dealings with the press I have restricted myself to stating that operations have started and resisted the temptation to state when we will have achieved success. Do not amp up expectations about Kandahar: no specifics, no dates. A deliberate campaign has begun, and events will unfold.”

There were numerous fierce firefights, but the Taliban were more difficult to find when troopers from the Strike Brigade showed up before dawn in villages in Zhari, many of which were largely abandoned. Many of the insurgents had melted back into society. The massed force, backed by A-10 attack jets and Kiowa and Apache helicopters, tipped off the Taliban better than any press conference ever could, but this was fine with Petraeus. The objective was clearing the area of enemy and forcing them to displace from long-held command-and-control nodes and IED-manufacturing sites, not killing every last one of them.

WHILE MUCH OF THE
101st's 2nd Strike Brigade was moving across the Zhari District, west of Kandahar city, in September, Lieutenant Colonel Dave Flynn's unit, the 1st Battalion of the 320th Field Artillery Regiment, remained in the Arghandab River Valley, northwest of Kandahar city, clearing villages of Taliban fighters and the hundreds of IEDs they had left behind.

The Arghandab River Valley had historically been a very tough area. Previous units there had suffered tragic losses, and Flynn's soldiers had been in an intense fight since the moment they had arrived in late June. Nine years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Flynn was a typical Army commander, experienced and skilled in conducting counterinsurgency operations after multiple tours in combat. Intense and athletic, with piercing blue eyes, Flynn was an artilleryman by training. He grew up outside Boston in suburban Norwood, a Red Sox fan, but attended Clemson University, in South Carolina. His father, a Korean War veteran and retired Army sergeant major, convinced him to join the ROTC in college. Flynn had served in Kandahar from 2004 to 2005, when his artillery unit from the 25th Infantry Division performed what he called a “provisional” infantry role. He remembered that tour as “the good years,” the period before the Taliban had regrouped. He deployed to Iraq with the 25th Infantry Division in 2006 and 2007, serving in Kirkuk with an artillery unit again repurposed to perform infantry tasks. They called themselves “infantillary.”

When he took command of the battalion at Fort Campbell in 2009, Flynn was initially told that his unit would deploy to Iraq. Flynn spent six months with his soldiers reacquiring artillery skills, only to shift gears and focus for the next nine months on training in infantry tactics before deploying to Afghanistan in late spring 2010. “I'm not downplaying the concern the Army has about the erosion of artillery skills, but I believe you do what you must do now to win,” Flynn said.
“There will be time to re-train.” Artillery battalions made sense as an integral component of an Army brigade designed to fight the Cold War, when U.S. war planners contemplated epic battles between large, mechanized forces that included massive artillery duels. Converting artillerymen to infantrymen able to fight small-arms engagements and interact with people at the village level made the 1st Battalion, 320th Artillery Regiment, the “Top Guns,” relevant to the kind of war the nation had been fighting since 9/11. This transformation was difficult, but Flynn believed it was possible.

The readiness of his troops became an issue in one of the first battles they fought as they patrolled jointly in the Arghandab River Valley with combat-savvy soldiers they would soon be replacing from the 2nd Battalion of the 508th Parachute Infantry, 82nd Airborne Division. With temperatures over 100 degrees and extremely high humidity, the paratroopers from the 82nd led an assault on Taliban positions through an orchard on July 11, only to stop when some of Flynn's soldiers passed out with extreme heat fatigue. The problem became so acute that helicopters had to be called in to evacuate the troops. When the Black Hawks arrived with reinforcements, they took withering fire as soldiers loaded their incapacitated comrades aboard.

After the remaining soldiers in the orchard, under heavy fire, were finally able to return to the compound where the patrol had begun hours earlier, tensions ran high. Squad leaders from the 82nd clashed with officers from the 101st. “You're not putting my guys at risk anymore,” Staff Sergeant Christopher Gerhart, of the 82nd Airborne, told 2nd Lieutenant Zak Pantaleo, from the 101st.
“You dudes need to think about my guys, who have been out here for eleven fucking months.” Meanwhile, Flynn directed a complex helicopter assault to fly reinforcements to the scene, and he arrived at the compound with a dismounted patrol a short while later. He was struck by the acrimony of the sergeants from the 82nd Airborne toward his soldiers of the 101st. He made it clear that their attitude was unacceptable among American soldiers. He then organized the movement of both units from the battlefield and personally led his reinforcements back to their base on foot.

Given his previous tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, Flynn was an experienced counterinsurgent. He arrived in Afghanistan as part of the 2010 surge with a nuanced understanding of Petraeus's tactical approach. He bought in to the mission, and he was prepared to adjust tactics as the mission dictated.

Staff Sergeant Gerhart was later quoted in the press as saying that the soldiers from Flynn's artillery unit “weren't prepared physically, mentally, and tactically.” But in February, when Flynn had learned that his unit would be deployed in the Arghandab River Valley, he had intensified its training on dismounted infantry operations. He could have argued that they should have deployed as an artillery unit, but, having served previously in Kandahar, he knew they would contribute much more as infantrymen—and they'd likely end up performing infantry missions regardless. “As artillerymen, I fully recognize that we could not attain the expertise and experience of our Army's premier infantry units,” Flynn noted.
“But at the same time I knew we could prepare our men to be better than the Taliban, and we are. . . . We studied the area for six months and had access to the 82nd's classified reports. We knew the terrain, the people and the enemy. We studied the 82nd's tactics and rehearsed them at Fort Campbell before we deployed. The curve is certainly steep. The weather, the vegetation, terrain and a wily enemy all made this a tough fight but not one we didn't expect.” Flynn noted that his unit had mounted a “no-notice air assault” to evacuate the soldiers with heatstroke, something very few could pull off without training.
“We all have three, four or five deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan and would not put a unit in a position for which it was unprepared,” he said.