The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice (50 page)

Convinced that the project’s failures stemmed:
There is evidence that Fondacaro and McFate were correct about the BAE contract, and that ultimate responsibility for many of the program’s shortcomings lay with the Army’s Training and Doctrine
Command. In 2009, citing “anecdotal evidence indicating problems with management and resourcing” in the Human Terrain System, the House Armed Services Committee asked the Defense Department to conduct an independent assessment of the program. The assessment, undertaken by the Center for Naval Analyses and published in the fall of 2010, paints a picture of TRADOC as understaffed and uncooperative, and suggests that “some of these unresolved issues may require a reassessment of where the HTS program resides. . . . [T]here may be a lack of TRADOC institutional commitment to making HTS a success.” The report notes that TRADOC’s contract with BAE, worth $380 million, included few protections for the government, and that it was renewed in 2009, despite Fondacaro’s complaints. Human Terrain Team members were hired on the basis of a phone or online interview, and BAE’s rejection rate was remarkably low. In fiscal year 2009, more than half of those who applied for a job on a Human Terrain Team got one; the following year, some 40 percent did. While some were removed during training, many stayed on, for there were no tests or other measures of competency during the program’s four-and-a-half-month training period. BAE, for its part, complained that the program didn’t give its contractors enough lead time to find qualified recruits. An in-person interview with potential recruits would have tested “the candidate’s ability to interact with people—likely an important attribute for someone going to a foreign country and attempting to ‘map’ the human terrain,” the authors of the study noted dryly. But BAE estimated that such an interview would cost about one thousand dollars more per candidate and the contractor “had no incentive to spend the additional money.” The authors of the study were not able to look at the contract, but they noted that it apparently contained no “penalties for providing substandard recruits or incentives for providing good recruits. The government seems to have to take whatever BAE provides. . . . In our judgment, the contract needs to be modified to provide more protection for the government.” Moreover, the study finds significant grounds that TRADOC did not properly review or oversee its contract with BAE. Unsurprisingly, the study found that the Human Terrain System suffered from crippling attrition rates and that “many of the currently deployed HTS personnel are underqualified for their jobs.” Clinton et al., “Congressionally Directed Assessment of the Human Terrain System,” 3, 6, 86–93, 106–9, 135–37.

“Steve has the attitude that”:
McFate, interview by author, June 30, 2010.

Overselling is pretty much required:
Despite the findings of the Center for Naval Analyses, the Human Terrain System successfully graduated from its experimental “Proof of Concept” phase to program status, gaining its own line item in the fiscal 2011 defense budget, where it is listed as a “Military Intelligence Program.” See Department of the Army, “Fiscal Year 2011 Budget Estimates: Volume 1, Operation and Maintenance, Army,” February 2010, 31, 108. And this from the HTS website: “In OCT 2010, the Army funded the HTS enduring (force generation) capability starting in the FY 11-15 POM (base budget),”
http://humanterrainsystem.army.mil/htsFAQ.aspx
.

“The problem with the Human Terrain System”:
Fondacaro, interview by author, June 19, 2010.

“American lives have become intertwined”:
Horowitz,
The Rise and Fall of Project Camelot,
3.

By 2012, the Human Terrain System had cost:
Steve Lacy, “Propping Open the Door: The Argument for Permanent Integration of Population-Centric Intelligence to Understand the Human Terrain,” Master’s Thesis, National Intelligence University, 2012, 58. This figure does not include start-up funding. The actual amount spent on the program is likely considerably higher.

Fondacaro was no longer in charge by then:
The Human Terrain System was “a foreign policy implementation tool,” Fondacaro told me. Fondacaro, interview by author, June 19, 2010.

Chapter 9: The Devil You Don’t Know

It seemed obvious to everyone back home that the Taliban had killed Paula Loyd:
Clint Cooper, Loyd’s teammate, took this view, and his was one of the earliest and most persuasive accounts of the motivations behind the attack. “I know Paula was targeted because she was a woman, because she was obviously a well educated woman and a person of some importance,” he told Army investigators. “Other women in the Bazaar always wore the full head to toe coverings usually associated with more radical forms of Islam. Although Paula always kept herself covered she stood out and represented to the Taliban everything they were trying to suppress. They could easily have taken anyone of us, but in a cowardly act they targeted a person who was very obviously engaged in humanitarian work. She wore no uniform. I have worked with many people down range, but never have I met someone more purely motivated than her. She wanted to make a difference. In a way she did. She will never be forgotten.” Cooper statement, U.S. Army Report of Investigation 08-CID369-43873-5H1.

“Paula Loyd, in our estimation based on the facts that we have”:
Steve Fondacaro, interview by author, January 28, 2009.

What he knew was that Loyd’s killer was not from Maiwand:
“We haven’t been able to trace him identitywise,” Fondacaro told me, “only we know that he’s not from the area, and that’s a specific choice by these people, because if he doesn’t survive, if he’s known by people, people will come and say, ‘Oh, I know him, he’s Akhmar and he’s associated with  . . . et cetera, et cetera.’ ” Fondacaro was mistaken. The eventuality he described—that Salam would be identified by local people—was exactly what had happened.

“You know there are a lot of kids in Afghanistan”:
McFate and Fondacaro, interview by author, January 28, 2009.

When it was over, the boy told the soldiers he had seen the man around:
“A child in the house my [platoon] cleared knew the man as a frequent stranger in the village, and gave
his name the same name tattooed on the man’s forearm.” Statement of Lieutenant Matthew Pathak to Army investigators.

a
New York Times
reporter had been kidnapped:
David Rohde was kidnapped on November 10, 2008, after heading off to interview a Taliban commander in Logar Province south of Kabul. “Times Reporter Escapes Taliban After 7 Months,”
New York Times,
June 20, 2009.

the Kandahar office of the Afghan government reconciliation commission:
The program, one of many largely unsuccessful attempts by the Afghan government and the international community to reintegrate Taliban fighters, was Proceay Takhim-e Solh, known as PTS or Peace Through Strength. Candace Rondeaux, correspondence, September 15, 2012, and “Talking About Talks: Toward a Political Settlement in Afghanistan,” International Crisis Group, Asia Report N°221, March 26, 2012, 17.

The government had promised to help support former fighters and protect them:
“Now in the suburbs and villages, on every side of the city center, there is the influence of Taliban, and because of that, people are scared, and they cannot come for reconciliation,” Lalai told us. “We promised the people that if they had problems with the Taliban afterward, we will come and help you—I even promised this. We could not keep the promise. These people, especially high-profile people, sometimes had problems, and they should have government security, but we have not been able to provide it.” Hajji Agha Lalai Dastagiri, interview by author, January 19, 2009.

a new, more extreme brand of Taliban were targeting aid workers:
See Marc Kaufman, “Rising Violence Hurts Afghanistan Aid Work,”
Washington Post,
February 9, 2003, and Gezari, “Hostilities Threaten U.S. Effort to Rebuild Kandahar,”
Chicago
Tribune,
February 20, 2003.

Then came the assassinations:
Among the most prominent victims of these attacks was veteran police chief Mohammad Akram Khakrezwal, who was killed in a suicide attack in 2005, but this trend began much earlier. Gezari, “Afghans Now Focus of Taliban Violence,”
Chicago Tribune,
October 10, 2003, and Carlotta Gall, “Afghan Mosque Attack Seen as Effort to Hinder Political Process,”
New York Times,
June 8, 2005.

He said he had heard about Salam’s attack on the American woman:
Speech attributed to Hajji Sadoo Khan here and below is from Sadoo Khan, interview by author, January 19, 2009.

For as long as most people could remember, he had lived with his father, Mohammad Umar, near the highway in Chehel Gazi:
When I asked Mike Warren, Loyd’s team leader, where Salam was from, he concurred with the elders: “He’s from the village right there.” Warren, interview by author, March 20, 2009.

Salam’s family owned a tractor:
The family had bought it the previous year with borrowed money, the elders told me. The account of the stolen tractor is from Sadoo Khan and Qala Khan, interviews by author, January 19, 2009.

‘What bad work you have done!’:
Qala Khan, interview by author, January 19, 2009.

‘I was arrested by the Taliban and I was beaten’:
“He disappeared,” Qala Khan said. “And we thought that people were talking that, ‘Oh, this poor man was kidnapped by robbers and he was disappeared for two days. Two nights.’ After two nights, he showed up, and said, ‘I was arrested by Taliban and I was beaten and they have tied my hands.’ ” Ibid.

‘Who did this?’ they asked each other:
Qala Khan gave this account of what had happened in the bazaar that day, which was remarkably accurate given that he hadn’t actually witnessed the attack himself: “Everyone knows in that area about the incident. We are going to that mosque and we are praying. In that street where the mosque is, [Abdul Salam] was coming and he had this petrol and a lighter with him. And he was stopped by the translator of the American woman and asked if he can talk. And he was laughing with them, he said, ‘Okay, I’m talking with you.’ At that moment, he poured the petrol on her and ignite with the lighter and he ran away. And  . . . when he ran away, at the end of the street, there were other foreigners, and they killed him. . . . They arrested him alive and later they killed him. . . . The local people come and start asking and talking about this incident, ‘Who done this? This was done by the son of Mohammad Umar, Salam. He was arrested a few days ago by Taliban.’ And some people say, ‘Okay, the Taliban had told him that if you don’t do work for us, we will kill you.’ ”

In Afghanistan, hard facts are exceedingly difficult to come by:
For more on the fluidity of information in Afghanistan, see Gezari, “Can Afghanistan Really Develop a Free Press?”
Slate,
March 26, 2004; Gezari, “Journalism in an Oral Culture: From Homer’s
Odyssey
to Tolo TV,” Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, November 11, 2010; and Gezari, “Crossfire in Kandahar,”
Columbia Journalism Review,
January/February 2011.

Bride burning persists in India:
See, for instance, Rahul Bedi, “Indian Dowry Deaths on the Rise,”
Telegraph,
February 27, 2012.

immolation is a known form of domestic abuse in Pakistan:
Parveen Azam Ali and Maria Irma Bustamante Gavino, “Violence against Women in Pakistan: A Framework for Analysis,”
Journal of Pakistan Medical Association
58, no. 4 (April 2008): “According to a survey conducted on 1,000 women in Punjab, 35% of the women admitted in the hospitals reported being beaten by their husbands. The survey reported that on an average, at least two women were burned every day in domestic violence incidents and approximately 70 to 90% of women experience spousal abuse. In 1998, 282 burn cases of women were reported in only one province of the country. Out of the reported cases, 65% died of their injuries.”

Instead, Afghan women mostly set fire to themselves:
Fire as a mode of attack against women in Afghanistan is rare, but not unheard of. Self-immolation, however, is a significant public health problem. See Rheana Murray, “Self-Immolation Among Afghan Women Rises as UN Pushes Country to Take Action Against Violent
Crimes,”
Daily News,
December 13, 2012, and Alissa J. Rubin, “For Afghan Wives, a Desperate, Fiery Way Out,”
New York Times,
November 7, 2010.

Lighters bearing English lettering:
Salam’s lighter was recovered and photographed by Army investigators.

an Afghan man swung an axe into the head:
“Axe Attack Was an Ambush, Canadian Military Says,” CBC News, March 5, 2006,
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2006/03/04/canada-afghanistan060304.html
, accessed March 6, 2013.

The medic remembered this detail because the boy wore a skullcap:
Statement of a platoon medic to Army investigators.

another Afghan had been trying to hurry the kids along:
“There was a headmaster that came out and was signing [to the kids], ‘Leave the soldiers alone, get in school.’ But we were handing out pencils and pens and that was a big distraction. That’s why there are so many kids around.” Cooper, interview by author, April 22, 2010.

Even an American staff sergeant had tried to disperse the kids:
Statement of a staff sergeant to Army investigators.

Abdul Salam was known as an oddball and an annoyance in the village:
Hajji Mohammad Ehsan, Maiwand district representative to the Kandahar Provincial Council, interview by author, October 12, 2010.