Intel Wars (15 page)

The experience in the Korengal raises a fundamental question for American commanders and intelligence officers. The problem was succinctly put by Matthew Hoh, a former State Department political adviser in Zabul Province: “How do you separate the insurgency from the population, when the population is the insurgency?” The short answer is: you can't. That fact, more than anything else, explains why the U.S. military failed to subjugate the Korengal over a span of six years. As it turns out, the people we were trying to save did not want to be saved. They just wanted us to go away.

With virtually all of the valley's inhabitants actively or passively assisting the Taliban, it should come as no surprise that the Taliban had a better intelligence network in the Korengal than the U.S. military did. The Taliban had spies everywhere, including many of the villagers who did manual labor on the four American bases in the valley, who routinely provided insurgent commanders with advance notice of all U.S. Army patrols and combat sweeps through the valley.

This became apparent in 2008, when the army low-level voice intercept team at the Korengal Combat Outpost at the head of the valley intercepted Taliban walkie-talkie transmissions warning a village farther down the valley that an American patrol was on its way. The Taliban commander ordered the immediate evacuation of all of the village's women and children, and the village's men were to “prepare for battle.” According to an army intelligence officer stationed in the Korengal at the time, “My battalion's intelligence officer said that if there were women and children in the village, the Taliban almost always would not attack. These were their wives and children. But if ICOM [walkie-talkie] chatter indicated that the women and children were running into the hills, then we knew that an attack was imminent.”

Not only did the Taliban's spy network make surprising the insurgents next to impossible, it also meant that the Taliban usually surprised the U.S. troops. According to an intelligence officer with the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team, “Finding the Taliban in the valley wasn't hard. Eight times out of ten, they found you before you found them.”

Within days of General McChrystal taking command in Afghanistan in June 2009, the Pentagon began putting pressure on the general to provide a clear-cut victory to show that President Obama's Afghan surge was working.

The problem was that the understrength and badly overextended U.S. forces in Afghanistan were having difficulty defending the territory they were responsible for, much less going on the offensive against the 27,000 Taliban guerrilla fighters they were now up against.

In fact, all over Afghanistan, the Taliban had the momentum.
On September 8, 2009, several hundred Taliban guerrillas
ambushed a hundred-man patrol of Afghan troops and U.S. Marine advisers outside the village of Gangjal in Kunar Province, killing five marines, eight Afghan troops, and an interpreter. Less than a month later, on October 3, 2009, three hundred Taliban fighters attacked an exposed army base in Nuristan Province called Combat Outpost Keating, killing eight U.S. troops and wounding twenty-two others.
On October 24, 2009, the
Wall Street Journal
reported
that Khost Province, located just to the south of Kunar Province, which the Pentagon only a few months earlier had heralded as “an American success story,” was now largely controlled by the Taliban despite the presence of 2,400 American troops in the province.

The attack on the Keating outpost was the last straw. In late October 2009, McChrystal decided to cut his losses and pull U.S. troops out of all the isolated outpost areas in Nuristan and Kunar provinces in eastern Afghanistan that, in his staff's opinion, were not worth fighting for. The hardest decision that General McChrystal had to make was whether to abandon the Korengal Valley or not. It took several months, but in the end McChrystal concluded that the valley was a lost cause. The Taliban were too deeply embedded among the valley's inhabitants, and the cost of rooting them out had proven far higher than what the bleak valley was worth in terms of blood and treasure.

On April 14, 2010, the U.S. Army pulled all of its troops out of the Korengal as part of what General McChrystal described as a “strategic redeployment of forces.” Many army commanders vehemently disagreed with McChrystal's decision to abandon the Korengal. An angry U.S. Army officer, who served two tours of duty in the Korengal with the 173rd Airborne Brigade, voiced an opinion shared by many of his fellow officers: “For years we were told that the Korengal was the anchor of our defense, and that it had to be held at all costs. Then one day, we get a directive telling us that we had to abandon it because some shithead in Kabul decided that holding the valley was no longer essential to the war effort. What a load of bullshit!”

For all the anger felt at abandoning the Korengal, there was also some relief. An army helicopter pilot from the 3rd Combat Aviation Brigade involved in the evacuation of the army's main firebase in the valley, known as the Korengal Outpost, recalled that as his Black Hawk helicopter took off from the base, the troops onboard his chopper took up the iconic 1965 rock anthem made famous by the English band the Animals, singing at the top of their voices, “We gotta get out of this place, if it's the last thing we ever do.”

Within hours of the U.S. Army pulling out of the Korengal, the Taliban emerged from the shadows. In an act designed to embarrass the U.S. military, the Taliban smuggled in an Al Jazeera film crew from Pakistan to document their victory. U.S. commanders in Kabul were crestfallen when the Al Jazeera videotape was posted a few days later on YouTube for all to see. It was a suitably bitter end to the U.S. Army's experience in the Korengal.

For the past decade, Helmand Province has been a cancer that the U.S. and NATO forces have never been able to cure. Located in southwestern Afghanistan, Helmand is the largest of Afghanistan's thirty-four provinces, roughly equal in size to Ireland, with a population estimated at 1.4 million people. Lawless and unruly even in the best of times, Helmand has a well-deserved reputation as one of the most dangerous places in all of Afghanistan. Even Afghan government officials in Kabul dread going there, with one senior official indelicately referring to the Helmandis as “brigands and outcasts” during a 2009 interview.

Today, more than twenty-five thousand U.S., British, and Afghan troops hold the area around provincial capital Lashkar Gah, all of the major towns, and a few large firebases scattered around the province. The Taliban control virtually everything else. The Taliban remain so omnipresent in the province's rural areas away from the populated areas that soldiers have taken to calling the hostile and desolate countryside outside the gates of their firebases “Talibanland” or “Hajiville”—“Haji” being one of the many derogatory terms that U.S. soldiers use to refer to the Taliban.

A common theme heard from American and British soldiers who have served tours of duty there is that Helmand was far rougher than anything they had previously experienced in Iraq. The statistics back them up.
Since 2006, more Taliban attacks have occurred in Helmand
than in all other Afghan provinces combined. More American and British soldiers have died or been wounded in Helmand Province since 2001 than in any other province in Afghanistan.

A morbid sense of humor has cropped up among soldiers who have served there. One sharp-witted Marine Corps infantryman who pulled a tour of duty in Helmand in 2008 had a T-shirt made up when he got back to the United States that read “I visited Helmand Province, and all I brought back was a case of PTSD,” a reference to post-traumatic stress disorder.

Just as in the Korengal Valley, the hostility to the presence of American and British troops in Helmand is palpable. Part of the reason for the hostility is that, like in the Korengal Valley, virtually every family in the province is connected in one way, shape, or form with the Taliban. When U.S. Marine Corps combat units first arrived in the Garmsir District in the southern part of the province in the spring of 2008, they discovered that all fifty Pashtun tribes in the district were connected to the Taliban to varying degrees,
with a declassified Marine Corps report admitting
that “everyone is somewhat associated [with the Taliban] if they live here.”

But perhaps more than anything else, what allowed the Taliban to thrive in Helmand was that corruption was more pervasive there than in Kabul, and opium poppy cultivation, heroin trafficking, smuggling, and organized crime dominated the province's political and economic landscape. The bazaars and teahouses of Lashkar Gah were filled with Taliban operatives, drug lords, crime bosses, smugglers, corrupt government and police officials, spies, gunmen for hire, arms merchants, thieves, and confidence artists of every sort and variety. In 2009, the province's governor, Gulabuddin Mangal, one of the very few Afghan governors with a reputation for honesty, told the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl W. Eikenberry, that there was a
“complete lack of security in the provincial capital,”
admitting that “narcotics traffickers operating with impunity lived within 100 meters of the police station in the capital.”

Outside the city limits of Lashkar Gah, the Taliban guerrillas operated openly, periodically attacking Afghan army or police checkpoints just to remind everyone that they were still there. To make the point, my guide took me to the bank of the Helmand River and told me matter-of-factly that if I wanted to find the Taliban, all I had to do was cross the bridge to the other side. “You will not have to look long. They will find you,” he said ominously. Afghan intelligence officers told me that they knew that dozens of Taliban agents kept close tabs on everything that went on in the city of Lashkar Gah. “There are no secrets from the Talibs,” one officer told me.

The opium poppy, the main ingredient in the manufacture of heroin, still dominates Helmand's political, economic, and social landscape. Virtually everybody who lives in the province is tied into the illegal narcotics business. According to British intelligence reports reviewed by the author, virtually every family in Helmand has its hand in the illegal narcotics trade, either growing opium poppies, processing them into heroin, or moving the finished product out of Afghanistan. And according to Elizabeth Lee Walker, the ISAF Rule of Law adviser in Kabul, “
Almost all officials [in Helmand Province] are assessed to be in some way involved in
, or dependent on, narcotics trafficking.”

Take any road out of Lashkar Gah and within minutes you are driving through thousands of acres of hauntingly beautiful fields of green, pink, and white opium poppies stretching as far as the eye can see. Local farmers freely admit that the local Afghan police will not touch the fields because the owners are variously Afghan government ministers in Kabul, some of the country's most powerful warlords, and a host of local government or police officials in Lashkar Gah, all of whom earn enormous sums of money from the illegal opium trade. Army Lt. Colonel Michael Slusher recalled that in 2006 during Operation River Dance, the first large-scale opium eradication effort in Helmand Province, the Afghan contractors hired for the project refused to plow under the opium poppy fields owned by the province's then governor, Mohammad “Engineer” Daud. According to Colonel Slusher, “
When they got into the area that Daud controlled
, they just went around his fields.”

In this incredibly hostile and chaotic environment, a number of senior American and British civilian and military intelligence officials admitted that they were continually frustrated trying to figure out just who was the enemy in Helmand. According to Major Stuart Farris, who commanded a Green Beret “A team” in Helmand, “
It was hard to determine if folks were actually no-joke Taliban or just criminals
… We had to figure out who the bad guys were, whether they were [Taliban] versus just being criminals and thugs. Sometimes, though, they're tied together. It was a very complex environment and was difficult at times to determine who the enemy was.”

Intelligence was only marginally useful in terms of separating the good guys from the bad because reliable sources in Helmand were few and far between. Unlike in Wardak Province, where the Hazara tribesmen were willing to cooperate and provide intelligence on the Taliban, the Helmandi villagers were reluctant to provide intelligence on the Taliban, going to extraordinary lengths in some cases to avoid even the perception that they were cooperating with U.S. and NATO forces. The village chiefs knew from long and bitter experience that the Taliban would exact terrible reprisals on anyone who collaborated with the U.S. military.

The U.S. military's problems with collecting intelligence from Afghan civilians date back nearly a decade to the early days of the Taliban insurgency, when U.S. Army intelligence personnel were restricted to their firebases in order to hold down casualties. Barred from leaving their bases, the army intelligence personnel typically set up a shack outside the main gate of their firebase to meet with local villagers who wanted to pass on information about the Taliban. The Taliban quickly figured out what was going on, put the “safe house” under surveillance, noted which villagers went in and out, and then killed them or blackmailed them into passing false information.

As a result, gathering intelligence about the Taliban has become progressively more difficult as the insurgents have expanded and tightened their control over the remote villages in the rural areas of Helmand. A marine platoon commander who served a tour of duty in the Garmsir District in southern Helmand Province in 2009 described a patrol to reconnoiter a village located not far from his battalion's firebase that was assessed by the battalion's intelligence staff as “sitting on the fence” in terms of where its loyalties lay. The purpose of the patrol was to “show the flag” by reminding the villagers of the presence of American forces in their neighborhood, demonstrate goodwill, and pick up any intelligence on Taliban activities in the sector.