by Jake Tapper
Kolenda was too focused on his work to pay attention to the very public signals being sent to the president by other McChrystal advisers, but they were unmistakable. On September 18, 2009, reporter Nancy Youssef of McClatchy Newspapers published a story under the headline “Military Growing Impatient with Obama on Afghanistan.” Wrote Youssef: “In Kabul, some members of McChrystal’s staff said they don’t understand why Obama called Afghanistan a ‘war of necessity’ but still hasn’t given them the resources they need to turn things around quickly. Three officers at the Pentagon and in Kabul told McClatchy that the McChrystal they know would resign before he’d stand behind a faltering policy that he thought would endanger his forces or the strategy. ‘Yes, he’ll be a good soldier, but he will only go so far,’ a senior official in Kabul said. ‘He’ll hold his ground. He’s not going to bend to political pressure.’ ” That official added, “Dithering is just as destructive as ten car bombs.”
Dithering: this one word summed up so much of the ill will between the president and his top general in Afghanistan. But beyond those two men, it also expressed what many other military leaders thought of this president and his decision-making process. Its utterance by a McChrystal aide to a reporter, however, was the kind of insubordination that made the president’s top advisers seethe.
In September, someone leaked the general’s report to Bob Woodward, and on September 20, 2009, the Washington Post published a redacted version of it. Woodward’s story was entitled “McChrystal: More Forces or ‘Mission Failure.’ ” The leak was seen at the White House as the ultimate attempt to force the president’s hand. How could this very green chief executive refuse his top general’s request for more troops to fight a war that Obama himself had pledged to win?
In Kabul, McChrystal expressed frustration to Kolenda and other aides about the leaks, as well as about public characterizations of him as being ready to resign if he didn’t get what he wanted. The general would subsequently dismiss the latter claim as a complete fabrication; resignation was something he had never even discussed with any of his top aides, he said. As to how Woodward had gotten his hands on a copy of the strategic assessment, McChrystal would maintain that he knew nothing about it: it hadn’t come from his team, he insisted, and it was only after the report had been transmitted to Washington, D.C., that the leak had occurred—and very quickly so.
McChrystal’s protests notwithstanding, senior White House officials had little doubt that the Pentagon was pushing the president. On one point, however, everyone could agree: all of this was significantly damaging to the United States’ strategic interests.
Now that the Afghan presidential elections were over and the White House could assess where to go next, President Obama began holding a series of meetings with his national security team—Gates, Jones, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and many others–to review, again, the entire Afghanistan strategy. His top aides were convinced that the president had to regain control of the decision-making process. This was just a mess.
By September, attacks had become so frequent at Camp Keating that many pilots refused to land their helicopters there at all—not at night, not during Red Illume, just… never. Some excuse was always found not to go. Moreover, though the mission at Barg-e-Matal was supposed to end just days after the July 12 air assault, U.S. troops were still there in September, and air assets continued to be diverted to assist them. The overall problem of resupplying missions got worse, with the result that the troops at Combat Outpost Keating and OP Fritsche started running even shorter on supplies. They refrained from using electricity during daylight hours and showered just once a week. They were not alone in their scarcity: the paucity of resupply missions throughout Brown’s area of operations had reached a crisis point.
Eric Harder didn’t like it, but he understood the pilots’ reluctance to land at Keating. Helicopters were loud—about ten minutes before the Chinooks arrived, you could hear them coming in. Even waiting until the moon was hiding didn’t make it safe enough to fly in the valley, thought Harder. The Taliban could down a bunch of choppers if they planned it right.
ISAF intended to withdraw from Barg-e-Matal at the end of September, so Brown started preparing, once again, for the opportunity to shut down Camps Keating and Lowell. General Scaparrotti had made it clear that when the U.S. troops departed from Nuristan, they couldn’t leave a vacuum in their wake; there would need to be some kind of security presence, an Afghan one, to prevent the area from becoming a Taliban safe haven.
Brown had tried to host a district-wide shura meeting upon his arrival that spring, but the key leader of the Kamdesh Village shura, Abdul Rahman, was away in Pakistan. When Rahman returned that summer, Brown tried again. In July, invitations were sent out to the elders, but the RSVP’s came back with regrets—the roads weren’t secured, the Nuristani elders said, so they didn’t feel they could risk the trip to Forward Operating Base Bostick. In August, immediately after the elections, at the start of Ramadan, Brown tried again. This time, the shura would be held at Combat Outpost Keating. The elders were receptive to the idea.
It was Brown’s first shura in the Kamdesh area. “We’re not going to stay here forever,” he told the elders. “So we’ve been talking about what will be here in terms of security for you and your people after we leave.” He described a plan to create a new Afghan Border Police battalion staffed by Kamdesh locals to protect the area. Brown also made a pitch for Abdul Rahman to become the district administrator for Kamdesh, but Rahman himself rejected the offer: he didn’t think the police-force idea would work, he said, and he didn’t want to be responsible for it. No one in Kamdesh had enough power to organize and maintain a standing force to keep them safe, he said, and the Afghan government wasn’t providing them with the security they needed.
Brown left the shura dejected. He had hoped something good could come out of what seemed to be a Sisyphean process; it might mean that his men would return home safely and not in caskets. He talked about the disappointing meeting with Colonel Shamsur Rahman of the Afghan Border Police, who had good sources of intelligence in the area. How could they fill the power vacuum in preparation for the Americans’ leaving? Colonel Rahman suggested that it might make sense to reach out to the long-exiled HIG leader Mullah Sadiq. Sadiq was living in Pakistan, where he’d fled after U.S. Special Forces began pursuing him, likely in 2006;76 he was considered at the time to be a high-value target to be captured or killed. But HIG’s leadership had since reconsidered the group’s participation in the insurgency, and Colonel Kolenda and 1-91 Cav had worked on Sadiq as a possible candidate for reconciliation.
Mullah Sadiq in Kamdesh in the fall of 2009, a photograph given to the members 3-61 Cav as a “confidence-building measure” to show that he was back from Pakistan. (Photo courtesy of Lieutenant Colonel Brad Brown)
Sadiq, Colonel Rahman insisted, was not a bad guy. Born into a poor family, he had nevertheless gone to school and was relatively well educated; more important, he was extremely well respected in Kamdesh. After doing some research, Brown learned that Sadiq had actually shared information with U.S. Special Forces when they first arrived in Naray, until they got caught up in a historical grudge dating back to the 1986 murder of mujahideen leader Mohammed Anvar Amin—a feud layered atop an age-old land dispute.77 Amin’s son, a well-connected contractor, blamed his father’s death on Sadiq, and he was the informant who told a U.S. Special Forces team that the HIG leader was working with the Taliban and Al Qaeda, thereby causing him to be placed on the “kill/capture” list.
After checking with his chain of command, on September 6, Brown sent a letter to Sadiq. “In previous years, the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan and International Security Forces have worked in close partnership with the shuras and elders throughout Kamdesh District,” he wrote. “We would like to rebuild this friendship and return peace to Nuristan, and ask your assistance and wisdom in this effort.”
He felt he needed to put the last few years
in context, and to apologize for anything that Sadiq might object to, particularly as it related to Afghan casualties. He continued:
Many civilians have been injured and killed during the fighting, and I offer apologies to the Nuristani people for the bombings that hurt the innocent. We would like to provide support to the people who have suffered in the fighting, and resume development projects to improve the lives of people throughout Kamdesh. But this can only begin when leaders from all the villages work together to provide security.
The Taliban, funded and resourced by criminals in Pakistan, has been able to influence and recruit the young men of Kamdesh to fight the Afghan National Army, Police, and Coalition Forces. We need assistance from leaders like you that are able to reach out and encourage the people of Kamdesh to cease the violence and oust the Taliban. We ask for your guidance in developing a plan that will improve security and development in Kamdesh. The sooner the people of Kamdesh are able to secure themselves from outside influences, the sooner Coalition Forces will be able to return to their homes and families.
In order to better resolve the security problem in Kamdesh, we invite you, or a trusted associate, to attend a shura to discuss security and cooperation. I offer you my personal protection during this meeting. We are willing to meet at the coalition base in Naray or Urmul, at the Afghan Border Police Headquarters in Barikot, the Naray District Center, or any place that is convenient for you.
He ended the letter by saying that he looked forward to working with Sadiq “to help bring peace and development to the people of Kamdesh.”
Brown gave copies of the letter to Colonel Rahman and the Afghan Border Patrol commander Brigadier General Zaman, who had been a member of HIG when the mujahideen were fighting the Soviets. They said they would get it to Sadiq.
Brown hoped he hadn’t just made a big mistake.
Colonel Shamsur Rahman reading Lieutenant Colonel Brad Brown’s letter to Sadiq. (Photo courtesy of Lieutenant Colonel Brad Brown)
CHAPTER 28
Send Me
Captain Stoney Portis could have been a character straight out of one of the books written by his dad’s cousin Charles Portis, author of True Grit. Lean and handsome, polite and determined, Stoney Portis was the quintessential soldier. He’d grown up in Niederwald, Texas—“Population: twenty-three,” he would later quip. He had to go to the next town, Lockhart, for high school—not that Lockhart was exactly a booming metropolis.
Portis had thought he was going to take command of Black Knight Troop, and relieve Porter at the outpost, immediately after arriving in Afghanistan. But instead he was sent to Jalalabad; Colonel George felt he was needed more immediately in charge of planning missions for the 4th Special Troops Battalion, which contained an intelligence company, a signal communications company, a reconnaissance troop, and two military police companies. That was Portis’s charge until August, when George drove from Forward Operating Base Fenty in Jalalabad to Forward Operating Base Finley-Shields,78 just down the road. It was only then that he told Portis it was time for him to replace Melvin Porter.
Portis’s father worked for Texas Parks and Wildlife and was a farmer, cattle rancher, and welder. His mother, an elementary school teacher, had died of leukemia when he was sixteen. She had taught Portis and his siblings about the importance of serving, whether through the military, teaching, or the church. Portis’s brother and sister both taught high school; his brother was also a youth minister, and his sister for a time had been a missionary in Mexico. Portis’s father, an Army veteran, pushed him to go to West Point first if he was going to join the Army; his experience was that officers by and large got to make the decisions, and if his son ever got put in a bad position as a soldier, he wanted him to be the one calling the shots.
Stoney graduated from West Point in 2004. Inside his West Point ring, which he wore on his ring finger next to his wedding band, was an inscription from the book of Isaiah, chapter 6, verse 8: Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Who will go for us, whom shall I send?” And I said, “Here I am. Send me!”
On August 27, 2009, Portis flew in to Forward Operating Base Bostick, where he met with various officers who briefed him on Camp Keating; Lieutenant Colonel Brown was not among them, since he was actually at Keating at the time. Air travel in and around Kamdesh was difficult, as Portis would soon learn. On the night of September 2, 2009, he flew to Observation Post Fritsche, where he met with Lieutenant Jordan Bellamy and White Platoon. The place felt to him like an old Western outpost on the edge of Indian country, like Fort Apache—a solitary compound in the middle of nowhere. Two days later, accompanied by a patrol from White Platoon, Portis walked down from the observation post, heading for Camp Keating.
In his more than ten years in the Army, this was the first time Portis ever got blisters. His whole walk down the Switchbacks, he kept thinking, If I were Taliban, I’d shoot at ’em from here and hide behind this tree and escape that way. Over and over, so many places from which to fire. It was only when they were coming down that last stretch of mountain that he first appreciated where Combat Outpost Keating was. Shocked, he could say only, “Holy shit.”
Portis didn’t know about Rob Yllescas, or Tom Bostick, or Ben Keating. He’d heard their names, but he didn’t know their stories. Soon he met Porter, who told him—inaccurately—that Captain Pecha, his predecessor, had stopped patrolling and never left the operations center because he believed he was going to die at Camp Keating. Awesome, Portis thought. I’m the enemy’s new number-one high-value target, and I didn’t even know it. Add to that the good news that the U.S. Army had placed the outpost in what he considered to be the most tactically disadvantageous terrain possible, and there weren’t many reasons for Portis to be happy about his new assignment.
He was, however, relatively impressed with the soldiers and his new subordinate leaders. When they needed to relieve themselves, the men of 3-61 Cav would put on full body armor just to head to the piss-tubes, even in 100-degree heat. It was a tremendous nuisance, but they did it anyway. That said something good about their willingness to follow orders, no matter the discomfort and inconvenience. That was a good sign, Portis thought, because Black Knight Troop was living under the most austere and harsh conditions he’d ever seen.
Portis walked around the camp and got his lay of the land. When he entered the shower trailer, Kirk and Rasmussen happened to be in there, on the cusp of disrobing. With his captain’s bars, in this remote locale, Porter could have been no one other than the new commander. Kirk turned to Rasmussen and said, “All right, let’s get naked.” He dropped his shorts and, as God made him, walked over to Portis and stuck out his hand to greet him. “You must be the new commander,” he said. “I’m Sergeant Kirk.”
Classic Kirk.
Melvin Porter briefed Stoney Portis for three days, and it became clear to the new commander that the men at Camp Keating desperately needed to figure out how to build up its defenses. He’d heard the whispers, of course, that the camp could be shut down at any moment, but until that happened, he would proceed as if he and his newly assigned troops were going to be there until July 2010, when they would hand the outpost over to the next company. From eye level, the camp looked generally fortified. The HESCOs were in place, and there was double- and triple-strand concertina wire enveloping the camp. There certainly were some defensive positions that Portis wanted to improve—first off, he thought, there was too much dead space near the camp’s entry control point of the camp. He understood, however, that there were limits to how much could be done to make the men safe. “COP Keating is practically worthless,” he wrote in his journal. “It’s in a bowl with high mountains all around us.” There were roughly fifty troops here just trying to exist; their only mission was survival.
Almost immediately, it was evident that Portis was going to be different from Porter. For example, he had a different reaction to the incoming AK-47 and RPG fire from the Putting Green. Hearing it come in, he stepped outside the operations
center and looked up with his binoculars at the northwestern mountain.
“Sir, you might want to get behind some cover,” suggested “Doc” Courville.
“Yeah,” Portis replied absentmindedly. He went back inside the operations center to get his radio. Lieutenant Carson Shrode was in there, on the radio with John Breeding in the mortar pit. “Hey,” Portis told Shrode, “you need to put five rounds of ‘Willie Pete’ ”—white phosphorous—“up there now.”
Portis walked down the hall, and Shrode ran after him. “Did you just say you want Willie Pete at this grid?” Shrode asked.
“Yeah,” Portis said. “And I want it fucking now.”
“You sure?” Shrode asked. Portis was. There were no civilians at the location from which the enemy was firing, so there was no reason to hesitate.
Shrode got back on his radio and told a still-skeptical Breeding, “No, he’s serious.” Portis glared at Shrode, pissed that his instructions been questioned, let alone debated, in front of other soldiers. “If Willie Pete works,” he said bluntly, “use it.”
There was a new sheriff in town.
Portis’s aunt and uncle had heard the troops lacked even basic equipment, so they sent him a care package that included some Leatherman Multi-Tools, a device containing a knife, pliers, wire cutters, a saw, a hammer, and on and on. Portis told his three platoon leaders each to select a soldier to receive one of the Multi-Tools—someone deserving of special, if informal, recognition.
Salentine picked Specialist Chris Griffin, a member of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, from Kincheloe, in the upper peninsula of Michigan. Griffin was a warrior, Salentine thought, who fought and lived with a passion that was second to none. That passion sometimes pushed boundaries—he and Jon Hill almost came to blows once, for instance—but if Salentine could have had ten Griffins, he’d have counted himself lucky.