One Hundred Victories (5 page)

On May 11, 2009, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates asked for McKiernan’s resignation. McKiernan was a thoughtful general, but not decisive enough, or so the Obama White House concluded as it completed its yearlong review of Afghan policy. Stan McChrystal, the hard-charging special ops counterterrorism chieftain, was picked as the next commander and promoted to four-star general. He had
gained fame in the inner circle of national security leaders from his days in Iraq, where he had turned his unit into a ferociously effective, relentless machine to hunt down Al Qaeda and Sunni insurgents.

Shortly after McChrystal arrived in June, Reeder and Jones went to talk to him about local defense. Reeder asked him what he wanted to do about AP3. McChrystal was noncommittal. “I don’t want to kill it, but let’s reassess in six months,” he said. They described the fledgling Community Defense Initiative and the development projects. “We have to get Karzai to ask for it, to ask the US to do it,” Reeder said. “It has to be an Afghan program or it won’t work. It will just be seen as another Western program.”
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The next day, McChrystal raised the idea with Karzai over breakfast at the presidential palace. When he returned he sent the message through his staff: “Tell Reeder thumbs up.” Reeder proceeded to launch the Community Defense Initiative in July, but he noted that there was no overt sign of support from Karzai.

Reeder directed his special operators in the field to be on the lookout for spontaneous anti-Taliban activity. They would find it in Gizab in 2010, a village overrun by the Taliban a few years earlier. It was pure serendipity that the team was in the area, however. Reeder planted the seeds by sending a team to Day Kundi Province, 25 miles from Gizab, after its governor came to see him. The governor complained that his province did not reap any benefits in aid or attention because it was not a hotbed of insurgency. “I want a PRT,” he said, referring to the provincial reconstruction teams that brought development projects and government training to provinces. A building had been built, but no development workers had ever arrived. Day Kundi was not a priority because it was peaceful. Its population was ethnic Hazara, Shia Muslims who had been brutally persecuted by the Taliban. Reeder sympathized with the governor, but he had no authority over PRTs. He offered instead to send a twelve-man special forces team, ten naval construction workers (called Seabees), and a “radio in a box” manned by psyop soldiers. They would hire local Afghans as deejays to produce programs and play music. The grateful governor burst into tears.

The team settled into the PRT building and began getting to
know the neighborhood. Several months later, the residents of Gizab decided they had had enough of the Taliban. When the uprising in Gizab occurred, the team moved in to help. Reeder also made sure the Shia religious leaders knew what they were doing to help the Hazaran Shia, who were the majority population in this area. Iran was heavily courting Afghan Shia to build its own avenues of influence. Reeder went to see the senior Shia cleric in Kabul, Ayatollah Shaikh Mohammed Mohseni, who was surprised by the overture. Reeder insisted on taking his boots off at the mosque door, and the cleric later invited him to come on Sundays to pray after his own Christian tradition. Like most other Afghans, the ayatollah thought that all special operators did were night raids, so Reeder kept him apprised of their projects such as renovations of mosques and provision of medical care. He sent him a CNN report on the team providing first aid for a Shia child who had been medivacked to Kandahar for surgery, and the cleric rebroadcast the information on his own television show.

Reeder’s burgeoning Afghan Rolodex led other commanders to his door. They used his Pashtun network to help tone down Karzai’s periodic anti-American tirades. At McChrystal’s request, Reeder asked the powerful Karzai ally Jan Mohammad Khan to meet with outraged elders following a devastating special ops raid in Uruzgan in February 2010 that mistakenly killed twenty-seven civilians. When Private Bowe Bergdahl went missing in Paktika Province, Ed Reeder called the former governor of Uruzgan, a former Taliban deputy minister who had joined the government. The latter’s contacts said that the soldier had been taken across the border to Miran Shah in Pakistan. A week later, in response to Reeder’s appeals for information, Qayum Karzai, the president’s brother, visited Reeder in Kabul and gave him a note from the kidnappers demanding $19 million and the release of twenty-five prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in exchange for Bergdahl’s release. He also gave him a video, the first proof that Bergdahl was still alive. Karzai had obtained both via a Pashtun who had traveled to Miran Shah. Reeder later received a second message, which lowered the ransom demand to $5 million and
dropped the demand to release detainees, but to his surprise, none of his superiors followed up on it.
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Did Reeder’s close relationships wind up empowering Afghan leaders and powerbrokers? Probably, at least in some cases. Reeder’s perspective was that he had to deal with the Afghans who wielded significant influence. His ties no doubt helped the United States understand the machinations going on at any given moment within Afghanistan, but a lot of Afghan skullduggery was overlooked in the name of friendship, leaving open the question of whether more tough love would have reined in some of the corruption. As the massive flow of US funds ratcheted up the corruption to new heights, the coalition formed a task force aimed at peeling apart the web of money and influence in order to stop malfeasance and worse. Contract procedures were tightened, but very few insiders went to jail.

By the time Reeder left in March 2010, special operations teams had formed local defense groups in seven sites around the country. Some of the sites did not work out—in Achin in Nangahar Province, for example, an anti-Taliban uprising devolved into tribal and land conflicts. In Arghandab, just north of Kandahar City, however, Karimullah Naqib eagerly sought a special forces team to come to his valley to push out the Taliban. This would become one of the most successful and enduring sites. That bond had been forged in 2007, when Naqib had credited Mahaney’s men with saving his life after he had come under attack as the newly anointed head of the Alikozai subtribe. Local defense was still nascent, but it was now more than an idea.

The year 2010 marked a pivot for special operations forces as they turned away from pure combat operations to embrace local defense as a viable way to bring security to a largely rural society. Before this new direction could get off the ground, however, there would be more turmoil at the top.

CHAPTER TWO

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INTO THE VILLAGES

Kabul 2010–Kunduz 2011

THE BATTLE FOR BUY-IN

Scott Miller, the special ops general who took over in March 2010 after Reeder’s departure, would take up the torch of civil defense and add his own, significant twist during his year and a half at the helm. But first he needed to bring the rest of the military, the US embassy, and the Afghan government on board. Civil defense may have been an old idea that special operators had just rediscovered, but it was controversial in Afghanistan. The biggest objection was the fear that any such effort would empower the warring militias that had viciously torn apart the country in the 1990s. Proponents of the idea emphasized that what they had in mind were small, village-based defensive groups. Historically, Pashtun tribal elders had raised
lashkars
or
chalwesti,
armed defense groups from the community, to respond to threats and then disbanded them when they were dealt with. This was quite different from the large militias, some numbering 30,000 or more, that
were formed in the 1980s by Afghan mujahideen and warlords to fight the Soviet occupation.
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This Afghan history was complicated by the succession of programs the United States had backed or started since arriving in 2001, none of which had calmed concerns, and which led many to assume that the same ad hoc, offensive-minded, and manipulation-prone results would ensue this time. Opposition extended from Afghans—although Karzai had periodically favored the idea of self-defense for Pashtuns, and his brother Qayum certainly did—to nongovernmental organizations, such as human rights groups, to retired general Karl Eikenberry, whom the Obama administration had appointed as ambassador to Kabul. Reeder thought Eikenberry would support the Community Defense Initiative because these groups were to be strictly defensive, but a ninety-minute meeting failed to persuade him.
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Eikenberry’s skepticism extended to the entire US venture. He doubted that Hamid Karzai was “an adequate strategic partner,” as one of his leaked cables put it. The debate over local defense was only one element of a remarkable and crippling struggle over US policy that continued even after the Obama administration completed its extended policy review in 2009. The administration defined the US objective narrowly—preventing the restoration of an Al Qaeda safe haven in Afghanistan—and gave the US military 33,000 troops and two years to achieve it. The bureaucratic warfare raged on, pitting those who felt the policy goal could be achieved by hitting Al Qaeda targets as they popped up against those who believed it required an Afghan government and security force capable of defending its territory from terrorists and other threats. McChrystal (in a somewhat paradoxical evolution, given his background as the master black ops terrorist hunter) became a vocal proponent of the latter counterinsurgency approach. An additional cohort believed that the Karzai government’s corruption and parochialism were a principal cause of the reborn insurgency and that reform should be the central focus.
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McChrystal devoted a lot of time to building a relationship with Karzai and devising ways to promote better governance and economic development. He remained somewhat lukewarm about local defense—
perhaps because he and Reeder never got along well—until the arrival of Reeder’s successor, Brigadier General Austin Scott Miller, in March 2010.

Miller had been serving as director of the Pakistan-Afghanistan Coordination Cell (PACC) at the Pentagon, which made him McChrystal’s primary link to Washington. A rising star in the special operations community, Miller had earned McChrystal’s trust as the commander of the Delta task force under McChrystal’s Task Force 714. Miller’s quiet manner contrasted with the brasher egos of his club, but his pedigree spoke for itself: he was a Delta Force veteran of the 1993 “Black Hawk Down” battle in Somalia, and he had commanded Delta Force in Iraq during the raging years of the Iraq War. He had helped to hunt down the number-one target in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was killed in June 2006. Miller’s sincerity exerted a charismatic force that drew people into his orbit.

After 9/11, McChrystal and Miller had revolutionized special mission units. These units were already known as the most proficient shooters and rescue forces in the US military before 9/11. But the most difficult part of hunting terrorist leaders is finding them, not killing them, so McChrystal and Miller introduced three changes. First, they brought technical intelligence and intelligence analysts into their fold; second, they replaced a hierarchical command-and-control structure with a flatter organizational model that fostered constant communication and encouraged subordinates to take the initiative. Then they set a relentless pace powered by the first two changes.
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Miller took the same meticulous approach as he prepared to take over for Reeder: assembling the expertise, building a network, and preparing it to work overtime. The secret to special operators’ tactical prowess was constant training and careful preparation of their kit, and Miller believed in the same zealous attention to detail as a commander. He was keen to prove himself on a new mission in a new theater. Although he was known to Delta, as well as to Rangers and SEAL Team Six, for the first time he would be leading a force that included other SEAL, special forces, civil affairs, and psyop units. He was acutely aware that some in the special forces hierarchy viewed him
as an interloper from the “black side” of special ops and were discouraging those who wanted to join his team. Miller recognized that special forces were trained to work with indigenous populations and had spent the past decade in Afghanistan, and he augmented their expertise with social scientists and created a program called Afghanistan-Pakistan (AFPAK) Hands to produce a deeper bench of knowledge.

When he arrived in Kabul in March 2010, Miller had ideas for the local defense program aimed at increasing its chance of success and decreasing the risk that it would spawn out-of-control militias. First, he needed to bring McChrystal fully on board. Shortly after arriving, Miller gave him a briefing that one aide described as “transformative.” McChrystal, now fully convinced of the need to address Afghanistan’s conflict at the village level, agreed to seek Karzai’s formal and public concurrence so the machinery could be created for a full-fledged government program.
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