The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies (7 page)

By that time, our interrogators had gotten much better, and I had developed considerable confidence in their findings and recommendations. I was delighted to hear from them, and after a few interrogations I was informed that George was coming around. I was asked by our HUMINT team (human spies, as opposed to SIGINT, or intercepted communications), for permission to put him back out on the battlefield as an intelligence source. The team felt strongly that he would work for us.

We took the risk. Later on, we would have gone much slower, but at that point we had very little good HUMINT targeting Zarqawi’s inner circle and practically no overhead ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance) or even good SIGINT.

It started well. George provided us with some good intel for a few weeks, stretching into approximately three months. It was basic information, precisely what we needed to target the al Qaeda network: safe houses, IED locations, names and identities of other AQI operatives. Then suddenly we received word from another detainee that George had been involved in a meeting with Zarqawi himself and he had not reported this to us. Nothing more devastating could be imagined, and it checked out. Worse yet, he somehow realized that we were on to him, because when we reached back out, he did not show up. We did that multiple times over about a week. He’d fooled us.

Once we established he was back on the side of Zarqawi, we knew we had to hunt him down to either capture or kill him. He was inside our detention system, so he knew how we were working to turn detainees and we could not afford to have him out there talking too much. If the terrorists knew our methods, they could outwit us just as George had.

We made it a priority to find him, partly to try to convince him to come back—an unlikely long shot to be sure—but mostly because it was terribly dangerous to have such a man on the loose. He knew too many things about our methods, after all, and we didn’t want him educating Zarqawi’s men. They were tough enough without giving them an additional helping hand.

We found him one night in Fallujah in early winter 2005. He and a couple of others were hiding in a house in the city. It was too dangerous for our operators to go in after them. The intelligence was excellent that evening. We were certain he was in the house, and we decided to destroy the building and kill all inside. We did.

We had no regrets about killing George and his cronies. Having him off the street was a good thing and it sent a message to our enemies that we would hunt down anyone that turned his back on us.

Our whole team had every reason to be proud of our accomplishments in Iraq, but some credit has to be given to the terrorists. They had the upper hand on several occasions and in several different areas, which according to the rules of guerrilla war should have produced victory. It didn’t, for several good reasons:

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They unleashed unprecedented violence on the local populations (keep in mind that Saddam was plenty violent but the terrorists were even more so);

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They proved unable to cope with our strategy, and starting in places like Anbar Province in Iraq in 2007 and Helmand Province, Afghanistan, in 2010, the local tribal leaders and their people could clearly see that;

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They were exposed as liars regarding us. When we invaded Iraq in 2003, al Qaeda and their supporters told the Iraqi people that we had come as the latest wave of foreign imperialists, and that we intended to add them to the masses of people around the world subject to the American imperium. We weren’t doing so, of course, we just wanted to win and go home. As they got to know us better, the Iraqis recognized they had been deceived.

General McChrystal tells an important story in his memoir. It’s about a conversation between one of the very finest British special operators, Lieutenant General Sir Graeme Lamb, and his favorite detainee, Abu Wail, the religious emir of Ansar al-Sunnah (aligned with AQI, mostly made up of Iraqis too), which was a significant element in the uprising against us. There were very bad vibes between the two; as McChrystal says, “given half a chance, the emir would saw Graeme’s Scottish head off.” But they talked every couple of weeks, and Wail was treated with respect: he was taken out of his orange prisoner garb, dressed in traditional clothes, his handcuffs and chains were removed, and there was a full teapot. The epiphany came very quietly:

“You know,” he said matter-of-factly, “you’re a force of occupation, and don’t try to tell me differently. That’s how we see it—and you are not welcome.” He explained to Graeme … that guidance from the Koran was that he must resist the force of occupation for years—for generations even—if it threatened the faith and his way of life. He paused … “We’ve watched you for 3½ years. We’ve discussed this in Syria, in Saudi, in Jordan, and in Iraq. And we have come to the conclusion that you do not threaten our way of life. Al Qaeda does.”
(Gen. Stanley McChrystal, My Share of the Task, p. 248)

Similar turning points were reached all over the battlefield. There was a fairly reliable template: Anbar started turning around in September 2007 (the start of the Awakening plus additional Marines and Army troops and expanded operations) but the violence didn’t subside until the following spring. The Awakening then expanded, but it wasn’t easy to see. Indeed, the overall level of violence didn’t noticeably decline until the fall of 2008 as Baghdad, Diyala, Salahaddin, and other cities were subjected to large-scale Multi-National Force-Iraq Coalition operations and supported by tribal forces.

The Iraqi Awakening—and similar successes in Afghanistan—might have gone even faster, and proven more durable, if we had more aggressively challenged the doctrines of al Qaeda and the Taliban. There were numerous Iraqi imams who rejected the revolutionary doctrines of the insurgents. Chief among them was the most important Shi’ite religious figure, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. Sistani exemplified the “moderate” Muslim. From the earliest days following the invasion, he ceaselessly counseled cooperation between Shi’ites and Sunnis, even calling for calm and understanding after the bloodiest sectarian attacks. His was the strongest and most revered voice in the Iraqi Shi’ite community, and we should have echoed it. In like manner, we should have denounced the Islamists’ embrace of suicide terrorism and their constant efforts to provoke a sectarian civil war.

This did not happen in either Iraq or Afghanistan, nor is it happening today anywhere in the Middle East. It should. There are plenty of Islamic religious leaders who, like Sistani, detest the radical jihadis. Yet senior American policymakers, ever since 9/11, have shied away from any criticism of Islam, repeating, despite all manner of evidence to the contrary, that “Islam is a religion of peace.” This insistence on denying the existence of jihad led President Obama to the absurd claim that the Islamic State has nothing to do with Islam.

We’re not going to win this war by denying what’s in front of our collective nose. It’s long past time for us to denounce the many evils of Radical Islam. The people in the region know it well, as anybody could see by looking at the millions of Iraqis and Afghans who risked their lives to vote in their respective elections despite the jihadis’ promise to kill them.

Despite our failure to attack our enemies’ ideology, we still defeated them every time we went after them on the battlefield. Their successes invariably came hard on the heels of our decisions to withdraw, first in Iraq and then in Afghanistan. It’s difficult to find anyone who thinks that the Surge in Afghanistan achieved anything remotely approaching that in Iraq, but I disagree.

It wasn’t easy, and Afghanistan was tougher than Iraq.

When we arrived in Afghanistan in June 2009 we found an HQ in complete disarray, while the enemy was on the march. The threats were increasing and expanding around the country and we felt the International HQ was under siege. Few of the international officers had even left the HQ to travel outside the compound. And the military systems and processes you would expect to find in order to understand what was going on around the battlefield, especially after eight years, weren’t in place. Frankly, it was disappointing, and after so many years, we suddenly found ourselves starting from scratch—again.

Upon assuming command, General McChrystal immediately started to tighten everything up. He instilled a sense of discipline into the staff and into the leadership around the country as quickly as he could. Many of the first steps he took were neither welcomed by the international team nor by some on the American side. One of the seemingly minor things was shutting down the alcohol-serving bar inside of the ISAF compound. Here we were in a Muslim country in the middle of a war and the International HQ was holding drinking parties practically every night. Officers, enlisted, civilians, you name it, were carrying on and making all sorts of noise. You could hear all of this in the relatively quiet city of Kabul and everyone knew. The Afghans didn’t like it at all. We weren’t seen as serious, about them or ourselves. This type of behavior certainly didn’t carry that message. The same lack of serious commitment existed all over the battlefield at every major HQ as well as at some of the camps down to at least brigade level. There was too much of an attitude that we’re here to simply participate, get a combat patch, and return home. Instead of merely participating in this war, we needed to instill an attitude that we needed to win.

This had to stop. We had to get the U.S. forces and the international team back on track and fast. At least that is what we thought we needed.

However, like all wars, you can never discount your enemy and one of the welcoming messages from the Taliban was a massive vehicle-borne improvised explosive bomb (VBIED) delivered to the front entrance of ISAF HQ early one morning. This came only a few days after General McChrystal had assumed command. It was the Taliban’s way of saying, Welcome to Afghanistan.

The attack happened in the middle of our early-morning battlefield update. It was so large, so explosive, that it shook the entire compound. The explosion seemed to lift the building we were occupying. Everyone started to run outside when General McChrystal very calmly directed everyone to stop and get back into their seats and focus on what we had to do—fight and win this war. He was right. And at that moment, at least those in the HQ knew that McChrystal was deadly serious and that a laser focus on winning was now going to be the norm. There would be little time to worry about all the nonsense we found upon first arrival to Kabul. Things had to change and change fast—we were losing.

All of this took place in the first couple of weeks.

After these initial days, some discipline returned to the HQ, and Stan and I and other staff conducted a “listening tour” around the entire country. The results were ugly: we knew very little about the population we were here to supposedly protect, and we were alarmingly ignorant about the strength of al Qaeda and the Taliban. This tour was a descent into some of the most notorious places in Afghanistan, but it was indispensable. We met with our commanders and their staffs at their various operational HQs (down to platoon and squad level), but more important, we met with Afghans. We went into remote and rural villages and cities, we met with local tribal leaders and provincial governors. We met with police officers and many in the Afghan military. There were battlefield updates from our forces about how well we were doing (most all of it subsequently demonstrated to have been BS) and numerous but mostly whispered complaints about the extraordinary level of corruption rampant inside the entire ecosystem—including our own people.

As is often the case, the most accurate information came from the lower levels of our fighters. They did not bullshit us. They didn’t have time to waste our time for any nonsense, nor did they have the resources from the policymakers they badly needed. They also didn’t know many of the basic things they needed to know if we were going to prevail; they lacked any real intelligence other than what they discovered on the terrain they were operating on. I felt bad. I had come from the world of special operations where we brought intelligence to the forefront of our operations. We had changed the mentality from fighting a plan to fighting our enemy—we had operationalized intelligence and we did so for our most elite military forces. I was proud of that, but I saw in our conventional forces a complete lack of real intelligence support.

All the baloney you hear about “national to tactical” is crap. Here we were in the first decade of the twenty-first century and despite advances in technology, our conventional military forces fighting at the edge of the battlefield were very limited in their vision and understanding of the battlefield. There was simply no good technology down to the local level enabling them to “see” the enemy the way higher headquarters were able to see them. There was a need to change what we were providing our troops at the edge and we proceeded to do that. In the meantime, thank God they were so brave, ingenious in how they executed their mission, extremely well trained, and innovative. There is something about the American soldier—despite our best efforts to shit on them, they rise to the occasion and perform miraculously.

Before going back to Afghanistan in June 2009, I had most recently served at Central Command and for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs in the Pentagon, pristine areas where you get all the intelligence you want and on a constant basis. The problem is, that intelligence doesn’t do you a bit of good if you aren’t able to get it to those who can actually do something about it. And in those assignments, I found that “intelligence,” the really sensitive stuff, was routinely outdated and therefore irrelevant. I was quickly starting to see that the world of open source information from media on the battlefield was becoming more and more useful—this would pay off later on with the rapid rise of social media.

During this listening tour, many soldiers and civilians we spoke to complained about the disconnect between the government of Hamid Karzai, the international community, our military forces, and the rest of the country. Nearly everywhere we traveled, whether by helicopter, foot, or vehicle, there was this incredible loss of confidence stated by everyone. They lacked confidence in us, and they especially had zero confidence in their own government.