One Hundred Victories (16 page)

Kunar 2010–2011

ODA 3316

If Paktika held the dubious honor of being the most ignored province in Afghanistan’s insurgent belt, Kunar probably ranked as the province that received the most attention throughout the war. The war’s most heroic and horrific fighting occurred in this mountainous region, where six of seven Medal of Honor recipients fought with extraordinary bravery. Korengal, Wanat, and Ganjgal top the blood-drenched roll call of fearsome battles in Afghanistan, much as Khe Sanh, Hue, and Tet do for the Vietnam War. Unfortunately, however, the blood, sweat, and tears expended in Kunar had not translated into anything approximating victory by 2009.

A look at a map explains why Kunar was such a battleground: the narrow, mountainous province borders Pakistan, most of its population a scant fifteen kilometers away. In northern Kunar, the Hindu Kush rises up in a dense, formidable massif that forms a perfect, natural sanctuary for insurgents and terrorists. For years the military threw both conventional and special operations forces into ill-designed raids, each time expecting a different result from the bloody nose they received before. Steve Townsend, an incisive and sharp-tongued officer who fought several tours in the east, was scathing in his criticism. On a piece of paper he sketched the location of the US bases built at the bottom of the Korengal and Pech valleys, where they were sitting ducks for enemy fire from the surrounding mountains. “If you had proposed that at Benning [in Officer Candidate School], you would get an F,” he said flatly.
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By 2010 the military had begun to pull out of these remote, beleaguered bases and was ready to try something new. A population-​focused strategy needed to be applied. Special operations leaders believed that civil defense just might work to secure the populated southern half of Kunar, where Afghan farmers and merchants presumably had a concrete stake in the prospect of peace. From Asadabad south, the mountains are gentler. The Kunar River forms a broad, fertile floodplain where 80 percent of the province’s population lives. The special ops commander for the east, Lieutenant Colonel Bob Wilson, thought that Afghans there might be willing to defend their lush agricultural valley, which stretched from Asadabad south to Jalalabad, the capital of Nangahar Province. By creating this bulwark in the valley, the insurgents would be bottled up in the sparsely inhabited mountains of the Hindu Kush, unable to attack Asadabad or Jalalabad, the two major cities of the east. Securing these two cities would help ensure Kabul and the Afghan government’s survival.

Kunar was the cornerstone of the region the military referred to as N2K, for Nangahar, Nuristan, and Kunar. It had historically been the route through which guerrillas had threatened the government. The first mujahideen to fight the 1979–1989 Soviet occupation rose up in Kunar, and when the Soviets decided to withdraw, it was among the first to fall. Kunar was both buffer and bellwether for Nangahar to the south. Nangahar was heavily populated and well traveled, with its Khyber Pass crossing from Jalalabad into Pakistan serving as the main east-west link to Kabul and the principal commercial artery. Smuggling abounded, but by and large there was enough business to go around. Nuristan, to the north of Kunar, was sparsely populated by the ethnically and linguistically distinct Nuristanis. Al Qaeda and foreign terrorists regularly trickled in and out of its billy-goat terrain, but Wilson believed their southern Kunar strategy could effectively wall off the badness in Nuristan.

Some outreach to the people of Kunar had already been started by a special forces major named Jim Gant, who had befriended a tribal chief whom he nicknamed Sitting Bull and regarded him as something of a father figure. He wrote about his experiences in a paper entitled “One Tribe at a Time,” which Admiral Olson and General Petraeus both read.
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Gant was known throughout the district as “Major Jim,” and his relationships provided a springboard for the formal Afghan Local Police program in the province.

Operational Detachment Alpha 3316 arrived for a ten-month tour in 2011 with orders to expand the local defense initiative along the Kunar River Valley. The team was led by Matt, an angelic-looking, blond-haired, blue-eyed captain from the base at Combat Outpost (COP) Penich on the east side of the Kunar River. The highway was frequently mined, so one of the first steps the CJSOTF-A command took was to bulldoze a landing strip next to the base for its recently acquired M-28 Polish-made planes to land. Team members quickly learned that they were in the crosshairs of the Taliban: their base was mortared four or five times a week from the surrounding mountains. When the M-28 came with visitors or supplies, the loader scanned the horizon from a bubble window in the back as they descended, ready to alert the pilot if he saw movement in the mountains or the flash or smoke of an RPG. The loadmaster would drop the back hatch for quick unloading while the Air Force special ops pilot stayed in the cockpit, ready to take off.

Whenever a flight was inbound, the team would roll out of Penich and barrel down the road to meet it, two dune buggies taking up positions toward the mountains, guns at the ready and gunsights trained on the ridgelines. One day the handoff at Penich’s gravel airstrip was especially hurried given the number of passengers coming and going: about a dozen French commandos had come to learn about the local police program so they could apply it in their area near Kabul. A sergeant hoisted gear and shooed new arrivals into his idling Toyota Hilux pickup. For a decade the Hilux had been the runabout vehicle of choice. Although the trucks were unarmored, special operators frequently used them to drive in towns because they blended in and caused much less disruption than the wide, tall, heavy military vehicles. Being unobtrusive was often the safest way to travel. Miller’s command had interceded when Toyota decided to shut down the Hilux production line, and the company decided to keep it open. The operators purchased the double-cab model in white for the Afghan Local Police to use as patrol cars, with a green, red, and black logo painted on the doors.
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From the lookout tower on the eastern wall of COP Penich, the broad plain that stretched east to the mountainous border with Pakistan looked unbroken, but in fact it was laced with wadis that led right up to the perimeter of the small base. The insurgents could and did sneak up the wadis to fire on Penich, so the first thing Matt did was post a rotating guard of the 1-16 infantry squad that had been assigned to him. A conventional infantry company was based on the west half of the tiny Penich outpost, but it would depart later in the year as the coalition began to consolidate and draw down its forces. While 1-16 pulled guard duty, Matt also integrated them into all of his team’s operations. The unit had been sent to help special operations forces with very little notice and even less training, but the platoon leader, Lieutenant Jake Peterson, turned out to be a natural with Afghans; he made friends easily while keeping a weathered eye open to security threats. The young infantrymen were delighted to have a chance to hang out with the special operations forces. They were all permitted—nay, encouraged—to grow beards, which Afghan men regarded as a symbol of male adulthood. Any American who appeared youthful and did not have a beard could be open to ridicule or sexual advances. The teams that made the infantrymen feel part of their mission were repaid with all-out effort and potential future recruits.

Upon his arrival, Matt faced an immediate problem. The leading elder from the nearest village to the south had agreed to form a contingent of Afghan Local Police, and for his boldness the Taliban had crept down the valley and beheaded him. They laid his severed head on a doorstep in another village to dampen any enthusiasm there for joining the movement. Trying to counteract the intimidation, the team made the rounds to visit surrounding villages and ask new leaders to come forward.
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Although the Afghan Local Police were intended to be purely defensive forces, the special operators could not afford to gain a reputation for passivity. Matt’s team, like other teams who were very nearly alone in the Afghan countryside, made regular forays into the insurgent-​infested areas to the east in an exercise they called “creating white space.” Sometimes they waited until the Afghan commandos were available to conduct a combat operation with the special operations team with whom they were partnered. But the commandos were in high demand, so the teams often conducted their own patrols to flush out guerrillas and ensure that both the tentative villagers, sitting on the fence, and the insurgents knew the team had more than enough firepower to win any battle. One such battle took place shortly after the beheading incident. The team had determined that the insurgents had come from a camp near a village called Maya, which was right on the Pakistani border. It turned out to be a major guerrilla camp, training, and rest area. Less than ten kilometers away from Penich, Maya sat at the apex of a V where a valley adjoined another valley that ran to the Kunar River just to the north. Insurgents in Maya could easily attack either their district or the one to the north, Sarkani, and retreat back to their lair on the same day. Studying the geography, the team knew that something would have to be done about the camp in Maya if the main Kunar River Valley was to be secured.

The men decided to push eastward to the edge of the mountains. Two Humvees descended into the mazelike wadi and Matt’s Humvee, packing a minigun mounted on the roof turret, traveled on the valley floor. As they drove east, Matt found himself too far from the Humvees down in the wadi. He turned to drive back to a spot where he could provide overwatch for the other two vehicles, and suddenly a wave of Taliban popped up out of a crevice and began firing AK-47s and RPGs. Matt wheeled again and his gunner let loose with the lethal blast of an M134 minigun, an incongruous name for a weapon that fired 4,000 7.62 mm rounds a minute. The Taliban retreated, although not before several fell dead or wounded. Matt raced back to the rest of the team, which also came under attack just as he arrived. An RPG hit the rear of the trailing Humvee, and then one of the weapons sergeants was wounded. The wadi had narrowed, so the men were unable to turn around. They stood and fought off the attackers. One of the medics attended to the injured weapons sergeant, who was evacuated home. Matt was furious with himself for getting tangled up in the terrain, but the fact was that few had traveled where they had gone. They would come to know that terrain well. The firefight put the Taliban on notice that the newcomers would come out to fight and stay to fight. The team picked up radio chatter in which the insurgents called the minigun “the breath of Allah,” a phrase that delighted Matt and which he and his teammates often repeated.
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Matt was blessed with a solid team sergeant, Jay Schrader, who was on his last combat assignment after twenty-five years of service. At age forty-six, he was the same age as the father of his youngest sergeant. Schrader had the even temper of a soldier who had seen it all. He had been coming to Afghanistan since 2003, and the team had been through a trying rotation the year before in Kakhrez, Kandahar, where they had to untangle a very complex tribal, familial, and insurgent human battlefield. Working with indigenous tribes was difficult, dangerous, and maddening, but ultimately rewarding—when it worked. Schrader appreciated the extra help from the 1-16 infantry, but it also represented an additional oversight task, as he had to make sure the discipline among the younger soldiers did not break down. The team was being pressured to split into two as soon as possible so they could expand the local police force. Schrader would move north a few kilometers to head the new site. The idea was to establish a new site with new recruits at least three months before their planned departure in January 2012, so that the incoming team would inherit a relatively mature operation. Split-team operations created a significant additional managerial and logistical burden, not to mention an increased security risk. Most importantly, no one on the team wanted to risk the unraveling of a local police force that was going well but still learning to look after itself. Their Afghan charges were not yet being supported with fuel, ammo, and pay from the local chief of police. The team wanted to make sure they were building something that could last and would not go off the rails.
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The team applied the textbook methods of the Afghan Local Police methodology and enjoyed rapid success in recruiting, training, and fielding the force. Because of the district’s strategic location, the police allotment was 400 rather than 300, and the force was almost full with 393 trainees. The team profited from two key advantages. First, there were relatively few tribal frictions, because most of the population in this area came from the Mohmand tribe. The other leg up, in addition to a homogeneous population, was the commander, a thirty-five-year-old man named Nur Mohammed, who had stepped forward to become the Afghan Local Police leader with the blessing of the Khas Kunar district elders. Nur was an industrious Afghan with a steady temperament and good management skills. He was low-key rather than a swashbuckler like Commander Aziz, but he was respected by his men and the townspeople, and he quickly proved to be an adept administrator and an effective recruiter.

The Afghan Local Police adopted a way of operating in Khas Kunar that was different from their counterparts in Paktika: instead of building many observation posts, the police lived at home and conducted roving patrols and snap checkpoints in the valley. They built one main outpost east of the main populated area under the shadow of a huge but nearly vacant Border Police post, high atop a hill, and a few more small ones as they expanded up and down the valley. There was virtually no activity or assistance from the Border Police; even the location of the post, ten kilometers from the border, suggested that they were not serious about their assigned duty.

Matt tried to balance assisting the nascent police force with guarding against dependency. He also tried to prod the reluctant district police chief to support Nur and his men. Nur, for his part, understood that they were all supposed to work together. When a suicide bomber blew himself up by a national police truck at the far side of the bridge across the Kunar River, Nur and his men raced to pick up the wounded and secure the site. The Afghan Local Police also received some backup from the Afghan commandos, who came to Kunar on several occasions to spend a week with them on their training or “yellow” cycle. During Ramadan, the commandos joined Nur and his men at their main outpost for an
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dinner to break their daily fast. As they waited for the sun to set, the commandos and policemen played with a baby monkey the commandos had brought home from one of their mountain operations. The monkey scrambled up the posts and jumped on the laughing men, biting at their clothes and hats. Other men set up cots in the open-air interior of the fort and spread large tablecloths on the ground to serve as both seats and table. They distributed the nan bread and bowls of food. The 1-16 platoon sergeant had been a chef at one time, and he helped the Afghans man the drum-barrel barbecue while Nur and Matt and others chatted. Another team member stood watch on the ramparts of the outpost, scanning the horizon with binoculars as the rose-colored sun set over purple velvet mountains. All the Americans refrained from eating or drinking anything, even water, out of respect for the Muslims’ fast. As the sun disappeared in a flaming finale, the Afghans gathered at one edge of the compound to kneel and pray. When they were finished they urged all their guests to be seated on the cloth. In keeping with Afghan custom, Nur and his men refused to eat until their guests had their fill.