One Hundred Victories (39 page)

Jawad, Brandon, and many of their teammates were suited for these challenges, but many younger members of the special operations forces were not. Jawad recognized that the “commando” image that had drawn many young American men into special operations had left some of the newer operators feeling disillusioned. At least two members of ODA 3131 had decided to leave the service after completing their tours, a pattern repeated in other teams. One senior sergeant on a team in Paktika put it bluntly: “All of the guys on this team are leaving. They do not like this mission. They feel the recruiting video sold them a bill of goods.” The recruiting video created at Fort Bragg emphasized a
Call of Duty
vision of special operations—direct action gun-slinging, popping targets in raids, jumping out of planes and helicopters. The future of special operations forces would depend on attracting and keeping people who were drawn to working with indigenous cultures—and good at it.
{175}

CHAPTER TWELVE

__________________________________________

THE ENDGAME

Kabul 2012–2013

UNITY OF COMMAND AT LAST

No one could say how the Afghan war would end, but by 2013 the Afghans were finally being given control of their war and their country. Special operations forces were substantial contributors to that effort, and they could lay claim to a certain amount of progress in the missions assigned to them. They had taken nearly 10,000 insurgents off the battlefield in the previous year. They had expanded Afghan Local Police to over 22,000, and they were building an 8,500-man Afghan special operations force that would eventually have its own intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capacities and be able to conduct both air and ground assault on their own.

One of special ops’ most important achievements was an internal change that was seemingly arcane but profound in its implications for the special operations community in the future. In July 2012, a single special operations command was formed in Afghanistan to orchestrate and lead all the different US and coalition special ops units running around the country. This had never been done in eleven years of war. An attempt had been made to create unity of command among special operations units late in the Iraq War, but by most accounts it was a formal gesture because no one forced the “SOF tribes” to play well together.

The man picked to lead this new command in Afghanistan was Major General Tony Thomas, a hard-charging Ranger who talked so fast that his aides had a difficult time writing down everything he ordered done. A lean man with a brush cut, Thomas was brutally honest, funny, and impatient—and, because of his background, the right person to lead the new command, which replaced Haas’s one-star command in Kabul in July 2012. On his first day on the job, Thomas banned the “SOF tribes” metaphor and insisted on adopting a new term, “SOF nation,” to represent the new ethos he wanted to instill. The diversity of special operations capabilities was its strength, but in its relatively brief history the community had not figured out how to orchestrate its different parts to achieve the greatest possible impact. The jealousies, rivalries, and superiority complexes fed by the Tier One, Two, and Three terminology and class structure ran deep, so deep that many special operators were either wedded to their parochialism or resigned to its permanence.

Thomas was charged with uniting three tribes: the US special mission units charged with hunting high-value targets, where he had spent twenty-one years of his career; ISAF SOF, which had grown to comprise special operators from twenty-five countries; and the US special operators of Combined Forces Special Operations Component Command–Afghanistan, or CFSOCC-A, until July commanded by Chris Haas. CFSOCC-A included the Green Berets, SEALs, and Special Tactics Airmen who were raising local police and combat-advising the Afghan commandos and special forces as well as the great majority of civil affairs and psyops units.

Thomas had lived through the anarchic situation, having been in Afghanistan for some portion of ten of the past eleven years, so he knew the problems were real. “We had people who were not talking to each other from ISAF SOF and task force. They would actually bump into each other on targets, and they thought that was okay. Really?” Thomas remarked, his voice heavy with sarcasm. In his first month on the job, Thomas traveled throughout the country to meet all the commanders. In Regional Command–East alone there were two SOTFs, three task-force elements, and nine ISAF SOF elements, which were partnered with special police units in nine provinces. “They all said, ‘We’re doing fine, marching to our own drummer,’” Thomas said archly. “Okay, first things first,” he told them. “Let’s build a common intelligence picture of what we’re all seeing here, and then decide who should be going after what.”
{176}

Thomas had to wrestle with two basic fissures, one between the coalition and US SOF, and the other internal to SOF. The coalition SOF answered only to the coalition chain of command, and many of its member countries restricted the types of missions they could perform. To bring together coalition and US special operations forces, Thomas was dual-hatted, as commander of NATO Special Operations Component Command–Afghanistan and as commander of the US Special Operations Joint Task Force–Afghanistan. But that formality, which was accomplished by September 2012, was only the first step in creating an actual community of special ops forces, which did not yet even reside at the same physical headquarters.

The coalition special operators were the elite units of their countries, and they did not readily cede to a US boss, so the politics of the marriage were tricky. The British, Norwegian, and other top-notch allied special ops units had worked intensively with national special police units and the Afghan intelligence service, the National Directorate of Security, for years, and their Afghan partners were performing admirably. The nineteen Provincial Response Companies were SWAT-style police units in varying stages of maturation. Some of the ISAF SOF members felt that the other “SOF tribes” did not sufficiently appreciate the value of their contributions, which were considerable. Their operations were “warrant-based,” reliant on gathering and preserving evidence—and on arresting suspects to be tried in Afghan courts. Under Afghan law, the NDS performed internal security duties akin to the FBI in the United States. This was not a sideshow to combat, but rather an important stepping stone to Afghanistan’s postwar future and the rule of law. Furthermore, it was an important model for US special operators to learn from for use in countries where there was no declared war and no authorization for the use of military force.
{177}

The special police units varied in quality, but as time passed they became more proficient with this intensive mentoring. By 2013, 86 percent of the police operations were Afghan-led and had a majority of Afghans on each operation. There was another important benefit to this endeavor: more and more countries that were allies of the United States began to send their special operations forces to Afghanistan as they realized their men could gain valuable experience working in a hot war zone. British, French, Australian, and Canadian special operators had long partnered with US special operations forces, but the more recently formed Eastern European and Baltic special forces from places such as Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Estonia, and Lithuania, and from other countries such as New Zealand, the United Arab Emirates, and elsewhere, were eager to gain experience and to work alongside Americans and other coalition partners. These forces were primarily trained for unilateral counterterrorism raids or hostage rescue, and many were acting as advisers to a foreign force for the first time. In order to mentor them in this particular art, the 10th Special Forces Group assigned a battalion to work alongside them and provide on-the-job training. This long-term investment, it was hoped, would expand a global network of willing allies for future advisory missions in other trouble spots.
{178}

The second fissure that Thomas had to contend with, the one inside the US special ops community, was even more fraught. The US special mission units had traditionally operated with a direct line to the secretary of defense or the White House for missions of the highest level of importance and urgency. That remained true for many of their missions. But the use of special mission units had evolved over the past eleven years. Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal had moved his TF 714 command group to Iraq in 2004, and when McRaven moved it to Afghanistan in late 2009, the special mission units had become a permanent fixture on the battlefield rather than the quick-in, quick-out force they had been in the past.
{179}
McRaven had pushed them to work with the other units in the field, but the separate chains of command remained.

The rationale for that separate chain of command became hazier, however, as special mission units in Afghanistan began servicing target lists that had less to do with the worldwide fight against Al Qaeda (of whom there were, at most, one hundred fighters of any rank inside Afghanistan at any given time) than with the effort to stabilize the country before US troops departed. This was not necessarily a bad evolution—Why keep your best hunters on a leash, waiting for that one shot at Osama bin Laden?—but it created a new imperative for collaboration that was not fully realized, despite McRaven’s efforts. Special mission units were playing a role in the Afghan campaign but not fully integrated into it. A decade of operations had shown that failure to coordinate all the military and civilian pieces on the chessboard usually created problems and impeded progress, whether in a war zone, such as Iraq or Afghanistan, or in gray zones such as Yemen or Somalia, where there were many players but no common game plan.

If Tony Thomas could not bring the special mission units into the fold, no one could. Thomas had spent the previous two years (2010–2012) as the deputy commanding general of Task Force 535, first under McRaven and then under Lieutenant General Joseph Votel. Previously, he had been the task force’s operations director and chief of staff, positions he held under McChrystal from 2003 until 2007. McChrystal, a fellow Ranger, acknowledged that his and Thomas’s driven personalities were so similar that initially they often clashed. Both men epitomized the ascendancy of Rangers within the organization, and indeed, they had left indelible marks on its culture.
{180}

When Thomas moved from the terrorist-hunting machine based at Bagram to take charge of the newly created unified SOF command at Camp Integrity in Kabul, the first thing he had to change was his body’s clock. Special mission units operate at night and sleep in the day, and the Afghanistan that Thomas knew was the Afghanistan of the night. In his new job he sat in meetings with senior Afghan officials, taking their measure. He quickly realized how eager the Afghans

were to assert control over their own affairs. He had already been subject to the new rules that put Afghans in charge of night raids—and limited their frequency—but his new position brought him face to face with how fed up Afghans were with unilateral US behavior.

In the meantime, Thomas conducted his daily briefings in a Quonset-style building at Camp Integrity, a little-known base on the far side of Kabul’s airport in a neighborhood of furniture makers, vegetable stalls, and rutted dirt roads. Inside, a few steps away from the building that housed his cramped office, the men slept in concrete barracks known as “villas.” Thomas’s two American deputy commanders were Scott Howell, an aviator from the task force, and Don Bolduc, who had helped design and oversee the Afghan Local Police initiative. The ISAF SOF commander, which rotated between an Australian and a Brit, was Thomas’s third deputy. Thomas had a staff of only 300 people to lead 13,700 special operators, and it was ad hoc staff formed of individuals, rather than assigned as a unit that had trained together for months before deploying. Thomas did request and receive two dozen hand-picked staff members so he would have a core of known, trusted subordinates in the group. His predecessors—Reeder, Miller, and Haas—had labored under these same constraints, because there was no standing command for these types of long-term special operations missions. Task Force 535, in contrast, had a standing three-star command that was in a continual cycle of training and deployment. It was the difference between varsity and a neighborhood pickup game.

When Thomas was appointed, some special operators under Haas’s command had feared that their advisory missions to Afghans would be subordinated to the priorities of the special mission units, but they soon found out otherwise. The price for progress would be paid by the latter, since they had the most assets to be shared. There was grumbling, but the steely-eyed Thomas cut it short, telling them in no uncertain terms that their personal performance would now be judged on how well they supported their special ops brethren. “Get on board,” Thomas told the special mission units, “and you will be rewarded for it.”