One Hundred Victories (28 page)

Hayes’s “Do unto others” ethic was tested right away when he discovered that his conventional counterpart, the US Army colonel in charge of partnering with the Afghan army brigade based at Tarin Kowt, loathed special operations forces. The army colonel made the depth of his animosity clear on their first meeting. Hayes bit his lip and bided his time. As the Afghans instantly took to Hayes’s polite manner, the colonel found himself the least favorite player on the team.

Hayes established three clear objectives. One was to stop the “jet stream” of insurgents using Uruzgan and Zabul as their safe haven and transit route from Pakistan to Kandahar. He would concentrate his effort on securing the central corridor of Uruzgan. His second and related goal was to win over at least some of the Ghilzai Pashtuns from the Taliban side. The third goal was to transition a number of sites to Afghan control by the end of his tour and reduce the number of teams in Uruzgan. He knew that the US forces would be expected to draw down in the coming years, and he wanted to ensure that they were positioned to sustain their gains with fewer teams.

Though Hayes was driven, he was good humored, and his staff made sure there was time for hijinks to leaven the work. On his forty-​first birthday, they surprised him in his room—parading through in Ninja costumes and foam-rubber headdresses while someone videotaped his reaction. That day’s staff briefing featured outtakes spliced into the slide deck. As soon as the SEALs saw the decrepit base at Tarin Kowt, they petitioned for a new gym to replace the cramped, dark, one-room hovel that was jammed with equipment. A new gym as large as a warehouse, filled with CrossFit equipment and climbing and running machines, became a welcome retreat in which to escape for a few hours, day or night.

Stopping the insurgent jet stream was easy to say but hard to do. Special ops had been working at it for ten years already, but no one had taken a strategic approach to the problem. The critical central corridor was still not secure. The SEAL platoon assigned to the Chora District in Uruzgan was eager to find a solution that would stick, as the corridor was considered the Taliban’s main highway straight into Kandahar. Any SEALs who thought that the work of foreign internal defense in Afghanistan would not stimulate one’s adrenaline were in for a surprise. In their first weeks, the platoon in Chora was engaged in intense firefights on a regular basis. The Taliban did not shy away from close combat. These insurgents had been fighting over this ground for years, and they had every viable spot prepared for ambushes. One SEAL lost an eye due to shrapnel from a grenade. The deadly buried bombs also took their toll, blowing the legs off another SEAL. The platoon cast about for a change in tactics. Both Hayes and the special forces company commander were dubious when the platoon proposed building a wall to physically stem the flow of bad guys. Forging ahead despite the skepticism, the platoon built the wall, dubbing it “the wall of Chora.” It was a 500-meter-long barrier made of dirt-filled Hesco structures, with three checkpoints.

To their commander’s great surprise, the wall had a surprising calming effect once it went up. Feeling secure for the first time in years, the villagers came out to offer the SEALs fruit and give them tips as to where they might find buried bombs. The team began hearing less Taliban chatter on the shortwave radio. In perhaps the most telling sign that the tide was shifting, a Barakzai tribal elder who was known to be the elder in the village most sympathetic to the insurgents quietly moved away. The platoon believed it had reached a tipping point when another elder came forward one day to ask if he could be in charge of the wall. An offer of Afghan ownership, elusive for so long, had walked right up to their gate. The platoon leader readily agreed, and the team presented him with a plastic badge with a sheriff’s star. He was keeper of the wall.
{111}

Over the course of 2012, a year in which violence in Chora continued to subside, incidents still occurred that showed the Taliban had not given up—for example, a motorcycle rigged with explosives was found in the bazaar. But there was a notable change. Townspeople reported what they saw, and they supported the steps taken to disarm or blow up the bombs in place. Hayes believed this long troublesome district had finally been pacified, and that the partnership with the population seemed solid enough to endure. Progress in Chora was a good first step toward securing the central corridor of Uruzgan Province.

Zabul was another matter. Everything about that province was hard, beginning with the mountainous terrain. The logistics team at Bagram considered it hands down the hardest province to resupply, and the SEALs’ site in Daychopan the hardest base to resupply in the entire country. It had a tiny drop zone ringed by houses, a cemetery, and steep mountains. When winter set in and supplies ran short, the SEALs rolled out in their all-terrain dune buggies and their heavier armored trucks in thigh-deep snow to wait for their food and water to fall from the sky. As they retrieved the scattered bundles, they would quite often find themselves under fire and would have to fight their way back home. Eighty percent of the supplies in Hayes’s provinces—twenty-one sites in all—had to be dropped by air because of the rugged terrain and lack of landing strips. Helos, when available, would make milk runs. When it was not snowing, dirt became the pilots’ biggest concern. They risked brownouts as they attempted to land in the swirling dust, a significant hazard, as the pilots could easily become disoriented. The solution devised for landing zones was “Rhino Snot”: an acrylic copolymer mixed with water to produce a thick substance that was pumped through hoses to coat the landing zone. It took only a few hours for the Rhino Snot to harden into a kind of plastic lava field.

Zabul’s human terrain was no easier than its physical terrain. The people were Ghilzai Pashtuns, which supplied most of the Taliban fighters. Its economy was so linked with Pakistan that the rupee was the common currency. Zabul was such a forgotten backwater that there was not one bank for the estimated 300,000 Afghans who lived there. Most of the Afghan soldiers posted there were Tajiks from the north, since few southern Pashtuns would join the army. The same was true of the police: only 20 percent of them spoke Pashto. The army stayed close to Highway One, and the police were largely holed up in the provincial capital of Qalat. The Taliban had virtually free rein in the rest of the province. Hayes was not so naïve as to think he could transform the entire province, but he wanted the teams to create and connect a few bubbles that Afghans could sustain. What he hoped to leave behind were districts with police chiefs who saw the value in the “pockets of excellence” that had been created in the villages where the teams had invested their efforts, and who had both the incentive and the knowledge to sustain them. “Once we’ve shown them how to grow it and connect it,” he said, “Afghans can bring to scale the success we engender.”
{112}

The Afghan army brigade commander and the police chief in Zabul were considered professional officers, but the ethnic divide was a significant issue in an area where the population so deeply mistrusted the government and had relied on the insurgents for so long. Hayes hoped that the local police could be the wedge for a breakthough—but this was possible only if they could get some Zabul residents to come forward.

The SEALs had tried their best in the remote district of Daychopan in 2010–2011, but had been forced to admit defeat after braving a brutal winter. Instead of leaving it vacant, the Afghan army’s corps commander sent a large number of troops from Kandahar to occupy that rugged district with the intent of conducting operations there the following spring.

Hayes adjusted course and sent a SEAL platoon to a less remote district, to the village of Bagh. It lay astride a dirt road paralleling the Arghandab River, which constituted one of Zabul’s few easily navigable ratlines for insurgents traveling to and from Kandahar. When the SEALs first dug into their new site, it looked like it would be as hot as Daychopan had been. Every time they went on patrol they were attacked. The SEALs stood and fought, and the fierce gunfights eventually convinced both the people and the insurgents that they were there to stay. They slowly won over a few elders, who brought them a trickle of ALP recruits. The dirt road gradually became more secure, which produced their biggest dividend. The residents could travel unmolested to and from the bazaar, so business picked up and new stalls opened. The bazaar activity tripled over time, and the villagers attributed this visible, welcome change in their daily lives at least in part to the Afghan Local Police program—so more recruits began to volunteer.

As the local police program started to gain traction in Zabul, Hayes was pleased to see the provincial police chief take a great interest in it. He became very hands-on in his approach to overseeing the program, insisting on visiting the sites and approving them and any structures the special operators wanted to build, even roadside checkpoints. It was, Hayes thought, a promising sign.

While the teams in Zabul pushed out into bandit country, the teams in Uruzgan began to pull out of the villages and move to the district center. This was the necessary next step to connect the ALP with the district chiefs of police, and thus ensure that the latter would take ownership of the program in preparation for the day when the teams would no longer be there. Hayes envisioned that four teams would ultimately provide oversight from the province’s four district centers, but as an intermediate step he would keep three additional teams in Shahid-e Hasas, the biggest district in the west. A civil affairs team sergeant who worked in that district believed it had come a long way since the previous year. “This whole area was Taliban two to three years ago,” he said.
{113}

Over the course of 2012, Hayes closed four sites in Uruzgan as the teams repositioned to the district centers. The teams visited the vacated sites every three weeks to make sure the police were getting paid and supplied. Mentoring the entire police force would become increasingly the focus here and elsewhere, as it had been egregiously neglected throughout the war in Afghanistan, just as it had been in Iraq. The US government could not seem to get the police mentoring model right, even though policing is the single most vital task in counterinsurgency.

While the teams worked on security and village stability in the districts, Hayes dug deep into the tribal dynamics of Uruzgan and Zabul to understand the intra-Pashtun and Pashtun-Hazara conflicts. To help him, Dan Green, a naval reservist who had served on a provincial reconstruction team in Uruzgan, returned as his adviser. And he could rely on another storehouse of firsthand knowledge in Major Brian Strickland, an Air Force engineer who was an AFPAK Hand with over a year in Tarin Kowt in the Provincial Augmentation Team.
{114}

Both men were well versed in the history of Popalzai domination in Uruzgan—a history that fueled much of the present conflict. The period when Karzai’s friend, Jan Mohammad Khan, had served as governor had exacerbated the long-standing tensions. Even after Jan Mohammad Khan’s assassination in July 2011, it looked like this engine of conflict could churn on in the person of his nephew, Matiullah Khan. The special forces teams had relied on him and his highway security force to guard convoys to and from Kandahar and generally beef up their defenses. But Matiullah appeared headed down the same road of “all for the Popalzai,” nothing for the rest. He became acting provincial police chief, and his security force was grandfathered into the police force. At one juncture, Karzai sent a message from Kabul warning him to behave or he would have him fired.

Green was extremely skeptical that Matiullah Khan could be redeemed. The central Popalzai-Barakzai blood feud looked set to continue when a Barakzai who was suspected in old Jan Mohammad Khan’s assassination was killed. Some believed that Matiullah may have been responsible. Such blood feuds were all too common in Afghanistan. Strickland developed a different view from Green’s as he sat in endless meetings in Uruzgan over two years, listening and watching the governor, the police, and other Afghans. He believed that the death of Jan Mohammad Khan, Matiullah’s uncle and the main political boss and patriarch (who had fathered thirty-eight children from four wives), may have been one of those generational changes that made a different storyline possible.

Strickland told Hayes that he believed young Matiullah Khan wanted to go legitimate, just as the scions of America’s bootleggers had reinvented themselves after Prohibition ended, and just as America’s industrial “robber barons” had become philanthropists. Matiullah Khan had already amassed substantial wealth through his lucrative highway security company. After being named the provincial police chief, he told the Americans: “I have the job I want.” The Afghan intelligence service viewed him as a source of stability in the province, and Uruzgan’s literate and professional Afghan army commander was willing to collaborate with him on an operation to open up a road into Zabul, Route Whale, which had long been plagued by Taliban. Matiullah Khan, Strickland said, “had developed other tools and no longer needs to use the hammer.” Green suspected that the Afghan’s predatory instincts were only temporarily suppressed. Hayes opted for using his influence and resources to reinforce every constructive action Matiullah Khan took. He could not rearrange the players on Uruzgan’s chessboard, but he could encourage any moves they made in the right direction.

Hayes was especially keen to find a chance to make inroads into the Taliban’s base of support. The easternmost district of Khas Uruzgan was the unlikely scene of a major breakthrough. It was an impoverished, chronically violent area, riven by a Hazaran-Pashtun faultline and astride a pathway to Pakistan. The special operations team in the district got wind that a Taliban commander was ready to give up the fight. He turned out to be an important commander named Abdul Samad. He would be the most senior Taliban figure to have come into the reintegration program since it began. Hayes leaped at the opportunity and encouraged the team to explore whether he was in fact ready to make the break and to do so publicly. It turned out he was, and he would bring a number of his fighters over as well. His one condition was that the Americans guarantee his safety—a tall order. A Taliban commander who announced he was giving up in that area could be dead by dawn.