NO REGRETS ~ An American Adventure in Afghanistan (5 page)

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British SAS—Special Air Service—is the equivalent to U.S. Special Forces.

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U.S. Army Pathfinders are specialists in navigating foreign terrain and establishing safe landing zones for U.S. military personnel.

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ISAF—International Security Assistance Force—is led by NATO and provides security for the whole of Afghanistan.

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Department of the Army—formerly War Department—is a military department within the U.S. Defense Department. The U.S. Army falls under the Department of the Army.

Operation Enduring Freedom

November–December 2003

On September 11, 2001, a group of Muslim extremists hiding out in the mountains of Central Asia reportedly launched an attack on the United States by hijacking four commercial airliners. These extremists were supposedly guests of the Taliban, the erstwhile leaders of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Following these attacks, President George W. Bush demanded the Taliban hand over al Qaeda and its leader, Osama bin Laden, who was considered the mastermind behind 9/11. The Taliban refused. In November 2001, the CIA and Special Forces (SF) teams linked up with Rashid Dostum and other commanders of the Northern Alliance who had been fighting against the Taliban since 1996.

The first American combatives into Afghanistan were Navy Seals, Army Special Forces, Air Force Combat Control (Air Force Special Ops), and CIA Special Operations commandos who carried in millions in cash. They also brought laser guidance systems that were used to guide smart bombs and missiles at Taliban targets. What most of the U.S. public doesn’t know is that many Taliban commanders were bribed into deserting. While the air campaign bombed Taliban units out of existence or into submission, U.S. and Afghan operatives enticed the enemy to switch sides with offers of cash and immunity. Many Taliban commanders decided that they’d rather take the money and live than continue to be bombed into oblivion. Afghan warlords have always been quick to abandon a losing cause. After being targeted by massive bombing runs by U.S. military, the Taliban fell back swiftly. They were not willing to fight against aircraft from which they had no defenses. The last stand of the Taliban occurred in a building on a U.S. base in Qandahar. That building is fittingly named “TLS” for the “Taliban’s last stand.”

The plan to invade and occupy Afghanistan was initially code-named “Operation Infinite Justice.” The “Muslim street,” already outraged by George Bush’s crusade remarks earlier in the year, protested. “Only Allah could provide infinite justice,” was the cry of the mullahs, imams, and people in the Arab world. Bush caved and, with little fanfare, the operation was renamed “Operation Enduring Freedom.”

Afghan, U.S., and Coalition forces rolled up the Taliban within a few months after taking Qandahar. Bush had tried to outsource the war to the Afghans but failed to provide covering forces to block the escape of al Qaeda. This allowed bin Laden, Mullah Omar, and other high-ranking al Qaeda and Taliban leaders to ride out of Afghanistan on horseback. These men were aided in no small part by Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI (the equivalent to our CIA or the Israeli Mossad). At the time, some intelligence sources had put bin Laden minutes ahead of U.S. forces at the border of Pakistan.

Back in the 1980s, Pakistan had worked with the Mujahideen against the Soviets. At the time, the United States and Saudi Arabia had brokered a deal with Pakistan’s ISI. The CIA and Saudi intelligence would provide funds to the Mujahideen, which would be funneled to them through the Paki ISI. That gave the Pakis the power of life and death over all Muj groups in Afghanistan.

The Paki ISI is run by Islamic fanatics who, back then, were diverting CIA and Saudi funds to the Kashmir insurgency to the north. Pakistan was also training irregulars in the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP) and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) to beef up the Kashmiri forces. Meanwhile, another dynamic was taking hold. Saudi Arabia had been funding Wahhabi mosques and madrassahs in the same regions—NWFP and FATA. These institutions of Islamic learning and worship taught students called “
talibs
” the more fundamentalist Saudi version of Islam.
Talib
is Arabic for “holy student” or “student of Islam.”

The war against the Soviets and the wars between Mujahideen leaders in the post-Soviet era had produced tens of thousands of Afghan orphans. These orphans were raised in the Wahhabi madrassahs. The Wahhabi strain of Islam had earlier produced the Muslim Brotherhood, al Jihad, Abu Nidal, and al Qaeda as well as dozens of other terrorist organizations bent on imposing the Islamic ideals of fundamentalist Wahhabism on the Muslim world.

Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban, and the Paki ISI recruited youthful
talibs
from the Saudi-funded Wahhabist madrassahs of the NWFP and FATA. These men became the core of the Taliban and would eventually conquer all of Afghanistan except the extreme northeast. Eventually, the Taliban provided a safe haven for Osama bin Laden and his group of terrorist thugs. Allegedly, the 9/11 terror attacks were plotted in southeastern Afghanistan.

By the time I arrived in November of 2003, the Taliban had been defeated and were fighting an insurgency against the Afghan government led by President Hamid Karzai and against U.S. and Coalition forces that would wax and wane over the next decade. The insurgency is mostly former Talib commanders and warlords who had not surrendered after the fall of the Taliban. They are a rearguard, of sorts, who are awaiting the return of Mullah Omar. To this day, Mullah Omar remains in hiding. Mixed in with the insurgency, at different periods of time, was a potpourri of characters, such as Hekmatullah Gulbuddin and his Islamic Party, various bandit kings, Arab al Qaeda fighters left behind by Osama bin Laden, as well as Jihadi fighters filtering in through the porous borders between Afghanistan and the neighboring countries of Pakistan, Uzbekistan, and Iran. Iran was betting against American resolve and has supported the insurgency to varying degrees since the beginning of OEF. The Iranians remember Vietnam wherein America won the tactical battles but lost the overall strategic war because of a lack of political will and decisiveness.

Once the insurgency kicked off, American leaders decided that the best way to fight it and to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a viper’s nest of Jihadi terrorists would be to put into place a viable Western-leaning “democratic” nation that could act in concert with America and Europe politically, economically, and militarily. The Jihadis and Taliban were betting that American, and world, resolve to see through the mission of nation-building would wane. Despite America’s best and worst efforts, democracy in Afghanistan would never truly get off the ground. Afghans voted but they voted for pre-approved candidates. The warlords still ran Afghanistan (and still do in 2013).

George W. Bush talked a good game concerning human rights. Barack Obama gave equal lip service to these ideals. In the end, though, the grand speeches were an orchestrated spectacle designed with the intent to hoodwink the American people into a long war in Afghanistan. Human rights were surrendered to cultural and political expediency from the day that the first warlord was bribed to switch sides and fight against their Qandahari masters. We traded the lofty goals of women and minority rights for support from the same warlords who had only months earlier fought with the Taliban. Enduring Freedom would become an epic fail but in November 2003 that was not yet apparent.

I arrived in Bagram about two years after the U.S. military’s “liberation” of Afghanistan. I hadn’t worked property accountability, or SPBS, in years and at first was a bit nervous. Would I remember anything? I didn’t want to come across as an idiot in front of Chief Lansing and his posse of tools. I needn’t have worried. As soon as I got on the “Box,” it was like coming home. Becoming accustomed to typing again was another story. I was woefully slow at first. I’d never been fast on a keyboard but soon enough I was back to my usual sixty words per minute.

Success! I’d bluffed my way back into the system. I was amazed at how much I remembered. Having left it in 2000, the Army was three years gone for me. I hadn’t worked Property Book since 1998. This job required that I know a veritable encyclopedia of Army regulations and assorted other local standard operating procedures (SOP). Again, it was like coming home. After a month, I could remember most of it. Reading the regulations and local SOPs brought me back to familiarity with everything else. Soon, I was telling the Army how to do their business and they were listening.

Within a couple of weeks, senior logistics sergeants major and warrant officers were coming to the office and asking me about the regulations. It was an eye-opening experience. When I left the Army, I was a staff sergeant. That’s a middling enlisted Army rank. At first, I didn’t feel qualified to tell these folks how to do their jobs. I held back. Soon enough, I was just throwing it at them.

“Dave, we had to leave a Hummer out on the battlefield and blow it in place. How do I get this piece of equipment dropped from the books?”

“Well, Sergeant Major, you have to submit a form 2765 attached to a Report of Survey and it has to be signed by an 0-6 or above.”

Simple procedures like that but it never ceased to surprise me when a senior non-com or warrant had no idea what the hell they were doing.

At first I railed against the seemingly pervasive ignorance and lack of attention to detail in my customers. Over time, though, I came to see my role as a mentor and I set about to show folks the zen of Army logistics. Unfortunately, I wasn’t always patient. I threw in biting sarcasm at times, causing at least one Army staff sergeant to cry. The NCO creed says, in part, “No one is more professional than I … competence is my watchword.”
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Despite having left the Army, I still thought that this was a fine tenet by which to guide oneself. Incompetence offended me.

The KBR contract with the Army called for a five-man team. Rob was the boss and he had room for four “data entry technicians.” Ortiz, my Army counterpart, was unreliable and got in the way. After two weeks of working with him, I wanted him out.

Rob sensed my worsening attitude towards the Army guys in our office. “Dave, do you think you can handle the customer flow by yourself?”

“Definitely. If it means getting Ortiz out of the way, I’ll work eighteen hour days.”

“Okay. I’ll talk to the bosses. Let’s go for the TOA next week.”

Technically, we should not have conducted the turnover of authority (TOA) until we had at least one more data technician on the ground. It would mean some long days and some trying times before we got the rest of the team on the ground, but I didn’t care. Long hours weren’t as bad as having Ortiz around. One hitch with the transition was that Fire Marshall Bill still had to be involved. By Army regulations, contractors couldn’t sign off on documents that involved funding or monies. Nearly every document that crossed my desk involved funding of some sort. Fire Marshall Bill had to sign all of these documents. We were stuck with him until he rotated back Stateside with his unit. With most of the pressure off of him and on Rob, he started to loosen up.

Early on, we had issues with some of our customer units. They’d come in to clear their accounts with us and they would be missing equipment. This was expected since we were in a war zone but the Army had started a quasi-war time accountability system. Not all losses could be written off. One Civil Affairs Unit lost fourteen up-armored HMMWVs.
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I don’t know how the hell you lose fourteen Hummers, but they did it. It took two months to find them. A Special Forces group had “borrowed” the vehicles and was using them for missions. Typical SF. Those guys stole from everyone. If they couldn’t get something legally, they’d not think twice about pilfering.

That Civil Affairs Unit was missing a whole slew of other equipment items as well. Everything from 52” flat-screen TVs to night vision goggles and a weapon or two had disappeared. Much of it was never recovered and the Army wrote off about two million dollars in losses. Some units didn’t bother to clear us at first. They’d simply disappear from Afghanistan. I’m sure that a lot of those TVs and DVD players made it into some homes back Stateside. We also found random containers in Bagram with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment inside. We’d inventory everything and issue the equipment to the unit that found it. That kind of thing, while not a regular occurrence, was not as rare as one might’ve thought. More waste went on in Afghanistan than I care to remember. Military commanders at Bagram used the war as carte blanche to spend.

Another problem we had was equipment finding its way into the local bazaar or to the bazaars in Kabul. There was one story that made its rounds in the media at this time. Some journalists had purchased memory sticks at the bazaar. When they got to their offices and plugged them in, they found classified data on them. Everything was on those sticks—battle plans, manning numbers, troop dispositions, social security numbers. All levels of classified data were discovered.

That wasn’t the worst of it. The Army discovered at least one Hummer at a bazaar in Kabul. All manner of weapons were found at bazaars all across Afghanistan. They even found a Ma Deuce (M2 .50 caliber machine gun) out there. One problem was that soldiers lose equipment constantly. If they didn’t report the incident, it could be months before the loss is discovered. The property accounting system was loose when we first went into Afghanistan. Equipment accountability and supply discipline were severely lacking. When soldiers or commanders lost equipment, they more often than not wrote it off as a battle loss. Even when it clearly was not.

It was at this same time that I became aware of the effort to create a National Afghan Security Force consisting of a national army and police force as well as a limited air force. The effort started with the Army. This newly-born Afghan National Army (ANA) needed vehicles for its soldiers. Several hundred heavy duty, souped up, tan Ford Rangers complete with roll bars were purchased at the expense of Joe Taxpayer of the good ol’ U.S. of A. Almost immediately, these trucks started to disappear. Many of these brand new Ford Rangers made their way onto the black market. About thirty of these vehicles were eventually found on car lots in California.