One Hundred Victories (37 page)

After they left, Brandon, the ODA 3131 team sergeant, remarked, “Wazir is a heroin addict, but he’s a functional one. He has guys posted at all the culverts, and every time we show up he comes to meet us in five minutes.” The vetting rules established by the Afghan Ministry of the Interior permitted the Afghan Local Police recruits to test positive for hashish but not opium. However, the team was not inclined to derail an alliance with Wazir that seemed to be working well. Brandon assigned a sergeant to be the liaison to each district; the liaisons were to visit weekly with the ALP commanders and check in with them more frequently by phone. On a tour of the area, the team members stopped to talk with several policemen at their checkpoints. One man named Said Mohammed with a bushy white beard stood guard at the bridge across the river. “We are okay here; the Taliban is up in that valley,” he said. The next checkpoint was manned by two men who thanked the team for delivering them a used “man can” so they could sleep in shifts.
{162}

On the other side of the river, Nur Mohammed was adjusting to life without a special operations team in his district after Gant’s departure. He was concerned that his men would not have any air cover in the event of a major attack. COP Penich had been turned over to the Afghans, who immediately began carting away equipment and furniture. “Khas Kunar is 98 percent secure,” Nur said. “The government has been able to reopen schools in Walay and Shalay valleys.” But the insurgents were still using Maya on the border as a base to launch from, and he believed another commando operation was needed in that area. “We’ve been attacked three times,” he said, “but we have been able to repel them and kill four enemy.” He was constantly struggling to get supplies for his men: the provincial police headquarters was slow to provide trucks and fuel, but at least, he said, his district police chief was now passing their requests up the chain.

The new team, ODA 3131, multitasked in a frenzy of activity to assist the police in these four districts while also getting their conversion project started in the district of Marawara. For the previous two years, teams had usually been responsible for one district, but this team would end up covering the entire Kunar Province. It would be a test of just how much one team could do. They were to convert Marawara’s 120-member local defense force, which had been created by US conventional forces, into an ALP force. Previously, this would have been considered a full-time job. Marawara was a troubled district on the border with Pakistan that was also the refuge of Qari Zia Rahman, or QZR, as they called him. Rahman was the top Taliban commander in Kunar Province. His refuge, like Maya village, was conveniently located in the four-kilometer buffer zone in a village called Barawolo. The US forces were still banned from conducting combat operations there, but some Afghan development workers had been in the village.

ODA 3131 had its hands full in the southern half of Kunar, but another conversion was under way in the far northeastern corner of Kunar, deep in the Hindu Kush and smack up against the Pakistani border. Here a CIA-trained force was being converted into an ALP force because the Agency was closing down its base. No one would be left to conduct overwatch of that force except for ODA 3131, yet the team members could not possibly travel there and still complete their duties in the other five locations. Were they supposed to conduct overwatch by telephone?

Marawara was the team’s priority for two reasons: first, it was the home of the top Taliban commander in Kunar, and second, it was a straight shot, thirteen kilometers, from the Pakistani border—and his lair—into Asadabad, the provincial capital. Qari Zia Rahman commanded insurgents throughout Kunar and Nuristan and across the border in Pakistan. He was Afghan, but the US military considered him an Al Qaeda affiliate, rather than just a Taliban leader, because his forces included a mélange of Central Asian and Arab fighters. “He is the nastiest guy around,” said Holahan, the intelligence officer.
{163}

Students of the Soviet war in Afghanistan were familiar with the fierce battle of Marawara in 1985. In the fall of Asadabad, the mujahideen had come through Ghaki Pass. Yet no special operations team had been assigned to Marawara for four years. Some villages in Marawara had asked for help in early 2012, after nine insurgents were captured, but there was no plan at that time to build an Afghan Local Police force there. Nor was there a local
tashkil
, or allotment of positions, for doing so. Holahan had fretted: “I worry that if we do not take it up we will miss the opportunity. The villagers stick up their head and ask [for help] and will not likely wait that long.”

For their part, US conventional forces had launched repeated operations without finding a formula to hold the district. The solution to the puzzle, in a broad sense, was simple: unless an Afghan force remained behind, all their efforts would be for naught. Yet Americans continued to focus on combat operations rather than constructing this hold solution. In April 2010, the 2nd Battalion of the 503rd Infantry Regiment had fought at Daridam, the first insurgent stronghold in Marawara’s Ghaki Valley, killing 100 of the enemy. Two months later, in June, the conventional battalion that replaced the 2/503, the 2nd Battalion of the 327th Infantry Regiment, returned to Daridam and again killed over one hundred insurgents. The sixty Afghan soldiers who accompanied the 2/327 retreated in the face of the withering battle. Even the US troops were fainting from lack of fluid and running out of ammunition. On the second day of battle, Afghan commandos were dropped in to assist. But no one remained behind to secure the village, and the police failed to show up. The next month, the battalion launched a one-day operation with 425 troops in search of Qari Zia Rahman in the village of Chenar, the next insurgent stronghold down the valley, but QZR was gone, along with most of the villagers. The following spring, the 2/327 launched another foray into the valley, this time as far as Barawolo, in a ten-day operation aimed at capturing QZR in his new hideout. It resulted in eighty enemy killed, but no QZR. Since then the village had been ruled off–limits, as it lay within the four-kilometer buffer zone.
{164}

This final mission, operation Strong Eagle III, represented an advance in that the coalition had taken more Afghan army units out into battle for longer missions than ever before—and they had gone to multiple villages—but the Afghan army was not yet an expeditionary force. The Afghan army had many decent officers, but it was challenged by shortfalls in logistics and equipment; even the Americans had difficulty hauling ammunition to high-altitude combat locations. The Afghan Border Police post at Ghaki Pass, once resupplied by coalition air support, made occasional overland trips for supplies.

The team hoped, in the little time it had left, to fashion an enduring solution for the valley’s, and therefore Kunar’s, security. The operators believed that Asadabad’s security required securing Ghaki Valley. They intended to do it primarily with residents of the valley, so they lobbied to double the Marawara local police allotment to 250 slots. That way, they could station 50 local police in the district center and recruit the rest from the villages leading down the Ghaki Valley to the border. They would work their way down the valley, building local police forces one village at a time. The plan was ambitious, but if successful, it would do more for Kunar Province and beyond than the endless game of Whac-A-Mole that had been the status quo. If they could at least build local police halfway down the Ghaki Valley, they could buy Asadabad four more kilometers of defensive perimeter.

ODA 3131 was an experienced, cohesive team. The men had deployed together to Kandahar the previous year, with the exception of the captain, who was on his first tour in the Special Forces. The team sergeant, Brandon, thirty-five, had eighteen years of military service, and the chief warrant officer was a fifteen-year army veteran. Brandon was a giant redheaded bear of man with a steady manner and six deployments under his belt. He was a stickler for sound tactics and scrutinized everything the sergeants did to ensure there were no lapses. Their battalion had taken heavy losses since they arrived—they had been among the teams sent to Wardak and Logar—and Brandon was determined not to add to that count.

The team’s chief warrant officer had deployed six times to Afghanistan and twice to Iraq. On two of the tours in Afghanistan he had been detailed to the CIA, and he had adopted the Afghan name Jawad for his undercover work. “Jawad” had been to “the Farm” for Agency training and taken the special forces Level 3 source development training (as had the team medic, Dave). Jawad led the team’s planning and intelligence. He had an easy way with people and a talent for improvisation. From the moment he and Dave hit the ground they began to build a network of Afghans and colleagues in the province who would exchange information about people and events. Jawad’s Agency time earned him immediate credibility with the CIA personnel in Kunar, and he met with them daily.

The team also was fortunate to have a civil affairs team working alongside it, led by Captain Tim Ambrose. Late in the war, special operations commanders had begun to revive this once-standard practice of using special forces, civil affairs, and psyops soldiers as a combined team. Ambrose dug into the Marawara human map and discovered some interesting connections. It appeared that one of the dominant elders of Marawara, Haji Hazrat Rahman, might be the uncle of QZR, and in any event carried great weight with the tribes in the Ghaki Valley. Rahman had been extremely standoffish, declining to attend any meeting or shura convened by the team. The Kunar provincial reconstruction team had built a model farm on land he owned, however, and Ambrose was eager to find a way to benefit from the knowledge of the US development workers and their relationships with the locals. He made overtures to the head of USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives, who had spent two years in Kunar and was now running the program from Kabul for the entire country. Ambrose hoped to tap into her network, although civilian officials were often reluctant to work with the military. In some cases, the reluctance was grounded in a concern for Afghan personnel working in remote conflict zones. Any sharing of names might expose them, and the insurgent retaliation would be swift and deadly.
{165}

Just revetting and training the Afghan Local Police force at Marawara’s district center was a fairly dicey proposition, to say nothing of recruiting police all the way to the border. ODA 3131 began training the first forty recruits in the abandoned police station at the district center, which sat at the mouth of the Ghaki Valley. The district governor had come back to work since the team had arrived, but it was still considered enemy territory. About an hour after arriving, the operators would usually come under fire from either a DShK machine-gun nest implanted in the ridge over the next village down the valley or 82 mm mortars launched from the mountain ridge.

As if on schedule, an artillery round exploded on the hillside next to the class about an hour into the session one day in early November 2012. Brandon snapped his head around to look at the puff of smoke made by the impact. “Did anyone shoot?” he said. He and other sergeants took cover and looked through their rifle scopes at the surrounding ridges. The gunners in the trucks swiveled their cameras over the horizon and down the valley. The captain called the conventional unit at the main remaining conventional base, FOB Joyce, which had an artillery section and attack helicopters, and asked for an air weapons team to launch and locate the insurgents. He requested a 155 mm artillery round to be fired in response. “Have you done a CIVCAS assessment?” the ops watch officer replied. The rules of engagement required an analysis of the potential for civilian casualties. After further discussion, Joyce decided that it could not fire in the populated area down the valley where the mortar had likely been launched. However, it could shoot a deterrence round into a nearby unpopulated hill. In twenty minutes, a distant thud marked the return of fire. Shortly afterward, two Kiowa helicopters flew into sight from the south and circled around the mountains. Whoever had been there was surely long gone. It was not exactly the kind of quick response that would strike fear into the insurgents’ hearts.
{166}

The team was also trolling for information about an Afghan soldier who had reportedly been captured by QZR’s men the day before, on November 6, 2012. An Afghan arrived to report that the soldier had been taken down the Ghaki Valley, and that QZR had threatened to behead him the following day. Brandon sprang into action. He thought it sounded like a perfect mission for the Kunar Provincial Response Company, which was advised by Hungarian special operations forces and was based at FOB Joyce. But when he called, the US adviser there told him that the unit had not yet been validated for combat operations. He then called US advisers to the Afghan army battalion, which also declined to act. Next he called the district chief of police, who said he could not take action without orders from the provincial chief.

Brandon and the captain discussed their very limited options. The local police whom they were training were untested and were not supposed to go on offensive operations. The special ops team’s Air Force combat controller was back at base recovering from surgery to remove wisdom teeth. Brandon’s men wanted to load up and charge down the valley with their Afghan special forces partners, but it would not be wise to go into this heavily controlled insurgent area without a combat controller. They would very likely wind up in a fight and probably a big enough one to require air support. Brandon was frustrated that he could not goad Afghan forces into acting. “I made eight calls to eight different units and not one responded,” he said. “I pulled the trigger and nothing happened.”

The discouraging day ended on a bit of an up note. When the team arrived back at their base for the evening, Jawad, who had stayed behind, told them that the Afghan countermine group trained by special operators had found a mine and called the police. The countermine group also alerted the team base. It was a massive bomb, made of old antitank mines from the Soviet era, and buried in a hole in the road. A bomb of that size could take out the heaviest of the American armored vehicles. The Afghans planned to blow it up at dusk.