One Hundred Victories (51 page)

{10}
The quotation is from an author interview with a special operations officer, June 10, 2011. Numerous special operations officers characterized the early approach taken in Afghanistan in this way in author interviews. Lieutenant General John Mulholland was interviewed on February 15, 2012. There is a large literature on Afghan militias and the demobilization, disarmament, and reintegration process in Afghanistan. See the work of Antonio Giustozzi, especially his
Koran, Kalashnikov, and Laptop: The Neo-Taliban Insurgency in Afghanistan, 2002–2007
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.

{11}
The two forces linked up in Tarin Kowt in Uruzgan to ready their drive to capture Kandahar from Taliban control. As Karzai’s men and the special forces gathered to stage their attack on Taliban-held Kandahar, they came under attack from Taliban forces. Karzai and the team were bombed after the GPS device reset; the aircraft was incorrectly given their coordinates instead of those of the enemy in trucks bearing down on them. Karzai survived unscathed, though others died, and shortly thereafter he received the call from Bonn informing him that he had been chosen by the Afghans gathered there as the interim president of the new Afghanistan. See Eric Blehm,
The Only Thing Worth Dying For
(New York: Harper, 2010). Reeder’s statements and his recollection of Eikenberry’s statement are from an author interview conducted on November 16, 2011.

{12}
Another short-lived initiative was the Afghan National Auxiliary Police, formed in 2006. Afghans were recruited in six provinces to supplement the Afghan National Police. They were given ten days of training and assigned to static security duty. The program received minimal support, with few safeguards to properly vet recruits, weed out opportunists, and prevent tribal imbalances, according to Mahaney. See also Seth G. Jones,
In the Graveyard of Empires: America’s War in Afghanistan
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 175–176; Mathieu Lefèvre,
Local Defence in Afghanistan: A Review of Government-Backed Initiatives
(Kabul: Afghanistan Analysts Network, 2010).

{13}
One of the polls showing Taliban support at about 10 percent of Afghans was conducted by the Program on International Policy Attitudes and posted on WorldPublicOpionion.org on January 30, 2006; possibly 8 percent of Afghans surveyed expressed favorable views of the Taliban. Some poll results—for example, one by the Asia Foundation in 2011—show higher levels of support (29 percent) for the “aims of the Taliban.” This result may reflect support for conservative Muslim values or for Pashtun representation, or opposition to a foreign presence in Afghanistan. In the 2012 Asia Foundation survey, only 10 percent of respondents expressed sympathy for armed opposition groups, and of those, 34 percent said they supported them because they were Afghans and 33 percent said they supported them because they were Muslim. Four out of five Afghans supported reintegrating the Taliban fighters, and 52 percent believed the country was headed in the right direction. See “Afghanistan in 2011: A Survey of the Afghan People,” Asia Foundation, available at http://asiafoundation.org/publications/pdf/989.

{14}
See Seth G. Jones,
Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan
, RAND Counter­insurgency Study vol. 4 (Santa Monica, CA: RAND National Defense Research Institute, 2008); Seth G. Jones and Arturo Munoz,
Afghanistan’s Local War: Building Local Defense Forces
(Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2010); Thomas J. Barfield,
Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012).

{15}
Author interviews with Eric Olson, January 27, 2012, and an IJC official, April 4, 2012.

{16}
Author interviews with Lieutenant Colonel Brad Moses, Bagram, October 7, 2011, and March 29, 2012.

{17}
Author interview with Reeder, November 16, 2011.

{18}
This account of the Community Defense Initiative is drawn largely from the author interviews with Reeder, November 16, 2011, and Scott Mann, November 21, 2011.

{19}
According to Reeder, at his request Karzai’s half-brother Ahmed Wali used his Popalzai network to secure the proof that Bergdahl was still alive. Rateb Popal, a member of the tribe and a cousin of the Karzais, agreed to go to Pakistan to find out whether he was being held by the Taliban. Popal had been an interpreter for the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan during the Taliban’s rule. In 2005, to cash in on the spigot of US funds entering Afghanistan, Popal and his brother formed Watan Risk, a private security company that received lucrative contracts from the military to provide convoy security for trucks resupplying US forces in the south; his brother pleaded guilty to heroin trafficking in a US court. Inquiries into contracting corruption began in 2009. An agreement was finally reached in 2011 that barred Watan from further contracts. However, the Popals remain active in many other businesses. See Associated Press, “Fraud Fighting Effort in Afghanistan Criticized,” updated September 14, 2011.

{20}
Scholars such as American anthropologist Tom Barfield have noted that the largest militias tended to be Tajik and Uzbek. A demobilization program after 2001 had seized most of the Uzbek and Tajik heavy weaponry, and most of the foot soldiers had been sent home or inducted into the army or intelligence service. Most of the senior leaders of the politico-​military groups were given high posts in the government, although Abdul Rashid Dostum was eased out of the country for a time. Northern Alliance leader Mohammed Qasim Fahim Khan became chief of the army and later vice president. On the Pashtun side, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar had joined forces with the Taliban. He continued to fight from his base in Pakistan, along with the Haqqani network that belonged to the Mohammad Yunus Khalis faction of the Hezb-e Islami Party. The Durrani of southern Afghanistan are the wealthier, landholding Pashtuns and have traditionally played political roles, while the Ghilzai Pashtuns that predominate in eastern Pakistan are more martial in nature and will fight to defend their valleys and small farms.

{21}
In an interview with the author in Kabul on October 30, 2011, Nader Nadery of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission expressed concerns that politicization, corruption, and lack of professionalism in the government would hamper the ability of the Ministry of the Interior to play its intended role. Furthermore, he noted, it would be difficult for the special operations personnel to understand all the political crosscurrents in a given area.

{22}
Eric Schmitt, “U.S. Envoy’s Cables Show Worries on Afghan Plans,”
New York Times
, January 25, 2010. This article quotes the cables, which were also published by the paper. For a fuller account of the policy review, see Bob Woodward,
Obama’s Wars
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011), and for the ensuing bureaucratic sniping, Rajiv Chandrasekaran,
Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan
(New York: Random House, 2012).

{23}
The description of Miller’s contributions and approach to command are drawn from interviews and email exchanges with the author, including on June 11, 2011, and November 21, 2011, and direct observation at the commander’s conference and in Afghanistan. See also Stanley McChrystal,
My Share of the Task: A Memoir
(New York: Portfolio, 2013)
.

{24}
Author interview with special operations officer, September 14, 2011.

{25}
Michael Hastings, “The Runaway General,”
Rolling Stone
, June 22, 2010, www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-runaway-general-20100622. See also Helene Cooper and David Sanger, “Obama Says Afghan Policy Won’t Change After Dismissal,”
New York Times,
June 23, 2010.

{26}
Author interview with General David Petraeus, August 22, 2011.

{27}
Details of the program are from a copy of Afghan Presidential Decree No. 3196, August 16, 2010; Afghan Interior Ministry guidelines; and author interviews with Afghan and US officials, including Afghan Ministry of the Interior Brigadier General Ali Shah Ahmadzai, October 29, 2011.

{28}
Author interview with J. R. Stigall, June 10, 2011, during weeklong visit to CFSOCC-A.

{29}
This short-lived experiment in village stability operations as part of Operation Restore / Uphold Democracy was chronicled in Bob Shacochis,
The Immaculate Invasion
(New York: Viking, 1999).

{30}
This account of the formulation of the Village Stability Operations and Afghan Local Police plan design is compiled from multiple author interviews with Brigadier General Austin Scott Miller and his staff; author interview with Lieutenant Colonel Scott Mann; attendance at SOF Academic Week in Eglin, Florida, September 13–14, 2011; and multiple videos and written products created by the command for training operators in the procedures to be used.

{31}
The civilian surge statistics come from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction’s September 8, 2011, report, SIGAR Audit-11-17 & State OIG AUD/SI-11-45 Civilian Uplift. The DST personnel were earnest and committed people—and in some cases extraordinarily experienced and effective—but by and large they were young or even temporary civilian government hires on their first deployment in a war zone. Moreover, they were severely restricted in their ability to move around the countryside. So the Village Stability Operations / Afghan Local Police (VSO/ALP) initiative was in many places the first sustained village-level outreach to rural Afghanistan—that is to say, most of the population of the country. One exception was USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives, which worked in some villages through local hires to conduct the Afghan Stabilization Initiative and its follow-on program, the Community Cohesion Initiative.

{32}
Don Bolduc cited this number in an article he wrote for
Special Warfare
magazine and in author interviews. See Donald C. Bolduc, “Forecasting the Future of Afghanistan,”
Special Warfare
, October–December 2011.

{33}
Mann became Mr. VSO/ALP for the rest of his active-duty career, setting up the predeployment academics training described later in this chapter. He was a patient and indefatigable promoter of the concept and champion of the equal role that governance and development efforts should play. He founded a networking website, www.stabilityinstitute.org, to build and maintain a community of interest among current, future, and former participants as well as a widening circle of academics, NGOs, and other interested parties.

{34}
Author interview with Geno Paluso, Kabul, June 11, 2011.

{35}
Author interviews with Miller and Petraeus.

{36}
Personal observations and interviews during trip to Balkh and Kunduz, June 9–10, 2011.

{37}
Author interview with Colonel Art Kandarian, commander, 101st Airborne, 2nd Brigade, November 5, 2012; DOD News Briefing with Colonel Art Kandarian, April 14, 2011; visit to Zhari district center and Forward Operating Base (FOB) Pasab, February 23, 2011.

{38}
This account is principally based on author interviews with Colonel Chris Riga, February 15, 2011, and May 8, 2013, and his operations officer for 1st Battalion, 3rd Special Forces Group, Lieutenant Colonel Michael Sullivan, May 14, 2013. See also Joshua Partlow and Karin Bruillard, “U.S. Operations in Kandahar Push Out Taliban,”
Washington Post
, October 25, 2010, and, on Tarok Kolache, Joshua Foust, “How Short-Term Thinking Is Causing Long-Term Failure in Afghanistan,”
The Atlantic
, January 24, 2011.

{39}
The allegations against Raziq are detailed exhaustively in Matthieu Aikins, “Our Man in Kandahar,”
The Atlantic
, November 2011. See also Yaroslav Trofimov and Matthew Rosenberg, “In Afghanistan, U.S. Turns ‘Malignant Actor’ into Ally,”
Wall Street Journal
, November 18, 2010; Matthieu Aikins, “The Master of Spin Boldak,”
The Atlantic,
December 2009.

{40}
Megan McCloskey, “Petraeus Promises Villagers U.S. Will Rebuild What It Has Knocked Down,”
Stars and Stripes
, December 21, 2010.

{41}
All the quotations for this section on ODA 3314 and Maiwand are from author interviews with the team members and local Afghans or my direct observation, October 2011 and February 2012. Brant is quoted from an author interview conducted on October 23, 2011.

{42}
Major Tyler Oliver, “The Economics of Opium Poppy and Substitution of Wheat in Maiwand, Kandahar,” District Augmentation Team Maiwand Information Paper, February 2012. Oliver’s paper is based on interviews he conducted with Maiwand farmers. He found that “the low price for wheat [19 cents per pound] is the result of massive wheat distribution programs in Afghanistan artificially affecting the market. The inefficient planting techniques used locally cannot produce wheat cheaply enough to compete with wheat grown by modern production methods.” He concluded, “The vastly higher profitability of opium poppy, combined with the high costs of wheat production, makes the large-scale adoption and substitution of wheat as a licit crop virtually impossible in Maiwand.”