* * *
Such presidential reflection was evident three weeks after Moshtarak began, when on, March 7, I sat quietly, legs crossed, on the floor of Marjah’s main mosque. Though the troops I commanded had become the dominant feature of Marjah’s landscape for the past three weeks, here I was a guest, a listener. The humble mosque just outside the bazaar was a low box of clay, with rough timber ceiling supports and cracked beige plaster walls inside. Mark Sedwill was next to me. Amrullah Saleh and Minister Wardak sat a few feet away, quietly watching as well. From our position at the front of the room, we saw the crowd that now filled the rug-covered floor. Some two hundred local elders sat cross-legged and still. Quarters were tight, and everyone sat touching. The men a few feet in front of me had significant beards, and sun-darkened faces. Past them I could see the tops of swirled fabric, a sea of thick turbans. As the initial commotion quieted, all gazes were directed to our left. There, President Karzai stood at a small wood podium, topped with a clump of microphones angled toward him.
“I’m here to listen to you, to hear your problems,” the president said. This was his first visit to Marjah.
The words came to me, delayed a few seconds, through my translator’s voice in an earpiece. The elders sat remarkably still. No uncomfortable shifting or side conversations. On occasion, their work-worn fingers rubbed weathered chins, or silently fingered white beards. With flat faces, they listened with attentive respect. This was the first time in memory such a senior figure from the distant Kabul government had visited their district. Karzai was welcome here, as was I. But this was not scripted theater, and the small space soon got loud when it was the crowd’s turn to address him.
The questions were blunt. A man, clearly a father, complained that military units had turned the schools into bases. Another said that the Americans had detained innocent farmers. At one point, an old man, in thick layers of robes, rose, but then turned away from Karzai and squared himself with a man who was off to the side. The old man quivered and shouted, cracking his arm like a whip in front of him as he pointed and denounced the man as a drug trafficker. The seated men nodded and cheered their approval, clapping vigorously, while Karzai raised his hands out to bring quiet again.
Only then did I see them. I hadn’t originally. But to the side was Sher Mohammad Akhundzada, along with his hated former police chief Abdul Rahman Jan. These were dangerous men to accuse openly.
And yet the elders did so, sometimes obliquely, sometimes directly, as in the case of the pharmacist appointed by the town to speak for them.
“Their hands have been stained with the blood of innocents and they have killed hundreds of people,” he said, pleading with Karzai. “Even now they are being imposed on the people.” The message in Marjah was clear: We do not like the Taliban, but Adbul Rahman Jan and his police gangs are intolerable. They steal from us and rape our children.
Almost five years earlier, at the request of the British, Karzai had sacked Sher Mohammed Akhundzada as governor of Helmand. Karzai did so reluctantly, and sometimes seemed to regret the firing. Every year since, the province had seen greater Taliban presence, more violence, and more western troops. It wasn’t hard to imagine how from his seat in Kabul, the president could conclude that removing Akhundzada had lost him Helmand, and set off a cycle of violence. But from our perspective, with Akhundzada and his men, Karzai could have order, but it would be corrupt and criminal—and thus impermanent. If Helmand landed back under the Akhundzada empire and Marjah came under the thumb of Abdul Rahman Jan, the Taliban hardly had to work to regain the people’s favor. As in 2006, and 1994 before that, the pendulum of power would swing back to the Taliban just as soon as the predations became too much for the people to bear. But if the government could unmoor itself from warlords and drug lords, and install something better, it would shift initiative to itself and the Coalition.
The people of Marjah had good reason to be afraid. Abdul Rahman Jan had already organized a thirty-five-man local Marjah shura to gain a toehold. He was actively campaigning against the newly installed governor of the district, Haji Abdul Zahir, defaming the Coalition effort, and politicking in Helmand and Kabul to get Marjah back in his hands.
Inside the mosque, President Karzai reacted carefully, his political instincts guiding him. He listened attentively to everyone. He answered complaints he thought unjustified, and he accepted legitimate criticism. The crowd continued to express their grievances to Karzai, but they were not against him. He was quick and conversational with his responses. He got them laughing at one point, and when he asked if they supported Abdul Zahir, the new district chief, the whole crowd erupted in cheers. After one litany that blamed Karzai for letting Akhundzada’s men run roughshod over the area in the first place, the president turned to one of the men whom an elder had singled out.
“Shame on you,” Karzai said simply and loudly to much applause. From the floor, it appeared to be a first step away from Rahman.
After more than two hours of tense back-and-forth, and some deft politicking, Karzai appeared to win much of the crowd.
“Are you with me?” he asked. “Do I have your support?” The president raised his own hand toward the crowd.
“We are with you,” came from the crowd. “We will support you,” some said, as many of them raised their hands back at their president.
When the meeting concluded, everyone filed out of the small mosque into the grassless courtyard outside. I sat and slid on my boots, the soles heavy with mud, as Karzai addressed the press outside, this time in English. “We exchanged views. I heard them, they heard me. They had some very legitimate complaints. Very legitimate. They feel as if they were abandoned, which in many cases is true.”
He walked off, the crowd pressed close around him. He clasped the hand and shoulders of greeters. As I lost site of Karzai into the huddle of people that glided away, out of the corner of my eye I saw a man approach. The first thing I noticed when I turned were the shoes, stepping gingerly through the mud. Beneath the skirt of his salwar kameez were black patent leather shoes with long, slender toes that to me seemed absurdly out of place. I looked up at his face. His wide smile parted his ruddy, almost maroon cheeks and black, wooly beard. With outstretched hand, Sher Mohammad Akhundzada introduced himself to me.
I was surprised that he had approached me, although I probably shouldn’t have been. Even the appearance of a genial relationship between he and the ISAF commander could send a powerful, potentially frightening message to the throng of locals streaming out of the mosque—the kind of message that could undermine the change we were promising.
“It is good to see you,” I told him with a smile, and quickly turned to catch up with Karzai.
I walked with the president through the nearby bazaar. While we were in a small shop, with curious residents surrounding us, Taliban rocket fire impacted some distance away. It was far enough off to have been little immediate danger. But it signaled the Taliban’s awareness of Karzai’s visit and their intent to target him. With the crump of the rocket, President Karzai looked at me inquisitively. When I shrugged, he smiled back and continued his conversation as if oblivious to any hazard.
I caught up with Kosh, and asked him what he thought. He’s good, Kosh said, impressed. Karzai was thickening his Kandahari accent, giving his folksy greetings a twang I couldn’t hear.
Meetings like these put tremendous pressure on Helmand’s Taliban, who since the town’s anticlimactic clearing had regrouped and were intimidating the liberated people. Their threats were making it difficult to convince the scared citizens to use the local government being slowly erected. Much of the menacing came from local insurgents, whom Marjah’s people knew were playing the long game. But other more grisly attempts to terrify came from the Mullah Dadullah Front. This large, roving mahaz still bore the imprint—fanaticism and cruel tactics—of Dadullah, a man we’d killed two years earlier. Around this time, unsettling new
s of beheadings arose in the district. It appeared Quetta’s newly appointed military chief Qayyum Zakir—who had stolen across the border from Pakistan for a midnight pep talk to Marjah’s Taliban before Moshtarak—had dispatched the Dadullah Front to contest our front-page effort to reclaim and rebuild Marjah.
That evening, we marshaled the president and the polyglot collection of travelers in a muddy field to board helicopters back to Kandahar. But the desert skies turned dark, and a steady rainstorm moved in. Worried about getting the entire party stuck in Marjah, I stood outside with our team coordinating aircraft as President Karzai waited inside the small Marine base, rain plunking on the roofing. After a time, the first MH-53 descended into the tight landing zone and we boarded. President Karzai and I sat near the front of the aircraft, next to open windows through which machine guns protruded for protection. As we flew through the now-black night sky, the downpour and wind battered President Karzai and me mercilessly and I shivered from the chill. Directly across from me, Karzai sat motionless. His only move was to reach into his pocket and produce a dry handkerchief that he didn’t use to wipe his face—but instead reached across the aisle and handed to me.
* * *
As I’d anticipated, because of its timing after President Obama’s December speech, the fight for Marjah, never in doubt militarily, became a litmus test for the validity of our strategy in Afghanistan. On display was our ability to conduct effective counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. It also tested the performance of Afghan soldiers, and the Afghan government’s commitment and ability to bring legitimate governance to a skeptical population. Finally, the action offered the chance to examine whether it was possibile and appropriate to sharply limit the use of our overwhelming advantage in lethal fires. That judgment would have accompanied the operation regardless of where we’d conducted it.
The natural eagerness in Washington and Brussels to see tangible results following the announcement of more troops created expectations difficult to satisfy with the often glacial speed of counterinsurgency. The drumbeat ahead of the operation, and the dramatic kickoff on February 13, made matters worse. I should have worked harder to tamp down unrealistic expectations of how quickly and dramatically we’d see progress.
That spring there was talk of my returning to Washington, D.C., later that year, as Dave Petraeus had in September 2007 to show progress in Iraq. I remembered his convincing presentation to Congress wherein he showed graphs with steep downward lines and dramatic metrics. Afghanistan, I thought, would never yield anything that clean, or clear. Only over time—a span of months, then years—would we cumulatively be able to produce convincing change.
Indeed, as the first operations of 2010 began, we asked what psychic effect among Afghans we could produce through material gains. Would Afghanistan feel the addition of troops and the benefits of security they brought? Would such turns in feeling be large enough, and happen fast enough?
Inevitably, some came to label the decision to increase forces in Afghanistan a surge, and drew comparisons with events in Iraq during 2007 and 2008. The situation we faced in Afghanistan, however, was much different. In Iraq, violence reverberated and was animated along sectarian lines. The 2006 bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra set off sectarian purges hundreds of miles away. Our strategy in Iraq reflected that reality, and that of the insurgents: The U.S. campaign began by focusing on sixteen key cities, then narrowed to twelve, then to nine, until we eventually came to realize that the war’s center of gravity was one city, Baghdad. Whoever controlled the capital controlled the country, and American planners designed the surge to lock down Baghdad.
More rural and significantly less developed than Iraq, Afghanistan could absorb the effects of violence, and the swings of power between the diffuse insurgency and the NATO-backed government, more than could a country of highly connected urban centers. Unlike infusing the majority of surge troops into Baghdad, in Afghanistan we would spread our troops across the eighty districts whose control we judged could be decisive. We hoped gains made in the coming year would bring about the critical mass of confidence that we thought necessary to keep Afghans from perceiving the cause lost. If they felt the effort was a failure, they would act accordingly by siding with the Taliban, or arming themselves for the civil war that they thought would follow America’s departure.
In Iraq, perceptions had a very real ability to be self-fulfilling. Matt Sherman was a State Department official who joined my strategic advisory team that January after a yearlong tour advising a U.S. brigade in Logar and Wardak provinces. Matt noted that when he was in Iraq during the winter of 2006, he’d seen that as the American debate over whether to surge grew louder, it seemed to affect Baghdad’s security prospects: Muqtada al-Sadr fled to Iran, sectarian designs on Sadr City quieted, and political calculations among Iraqi leaders altered. We hoped something similar might nudge Afghanistan, though we knew we could not rely on it.
Though no single center of gravity existed in Afghanistan, if the south had a nerve center, it was Kandahar. And the citizens there reflected all the very human contradictions of a people long under the duress of war’s whim. Thirty years of it had made them both more stoic and more conspiratorial. They wanted better security, yet many had made a perhaps necessary peace with their plight that made them skittish about any operations there.
This anxiety we would now have to confront: Kandahar was next.
* * *
In truth, the fight to secure Kandahar had begun in Helmand. Our effort to expand contiguous areas of security between them was meant to stitch together key districts of what was known as Greater Kandahar, and before that Zabulistan—a subregion formed by the provinces of Helmand, Kandahar, Zabul, and Oruzgan whose economies, tribes, and politics were interlinked. The key node was Kandahar City itself, which sat at the juncture of immemorial trade routes between Kabul in the east, Herat and Persia in the west, and India to the south. The modern Afghan Ring Road that circles the nation, connecting Kabul, Kandahar, Herat, Mazar-e-Sharif, and Kunduz, added to the city’s economic importance, as did its proximity to the agricultural breadbaskets along the Helmand and Arghandab rivers and the import lanes from Pakistan.
The city had been the site of many of Afghanistan’s most historical pivots. Alexander the Great reputedly laid out the city in the fourth century BCE, and it bore his mark—it’s said Kandahar is a corruption of “Iskander,” the locals’ name for him. It was also where the modern Afghan state was born, thirty years before the United States. In 1747, a nine-day-long council of elders elected Ahmad Shah Durrani their leader, and he went on to congeal Afghanistan into the Duranni empire. His Durrani tribe produced each of Afghanistan’s rulers for the next two hundred and forty years, until the coup in 1978. The city hosted a massive Soviet garrison during the mujahideen war of the 1980s, and was later the seat of the Taliban government. The Afghan government’s ability to secure the nation’s second-largest city—Pashtun, Afghanistan’s most important center, and President Karzai’s family home—was an important measure of its capacity to assert sovereignty.
Long before Operation Moshtarak launched forces into Marjah, Rod had identified the importance of securing Kandahar to convince its residents and the wider population of Afghanistan that the city was neither a Taliban-controlled enclave nor perpetually threatened with strangulation by insurgent forces. In the spring of 2010, although Kandahar bustled with daily activity, security had deteriorated in the previous four years. The city was not under siege, but mortars and attacks had harassed the August 2009 elections. And the insurgents waged a meticulous assassination campaign against key leaders that sent a clear message to the population that if they didn’t call the shots, neither did the government.
While, unlike Marjah, Kandahar did not need to be recaptured from the Taliban, its sheer scale defined the challenge. The city’s population had swelled in recent years to over five hundred thousand, and the area grew dramatically w
hen we considered the need to secure the environs around the city. Much like the belts that Al Qaeda had sought to dominate and use as staging grounds to funnel violence into Baghdad from 2005 to 2007, the districts that encircled Kandahar were the traditional keys to controlling the city. Since 2006 and 2007, the Panjwai, Zhari, Daman, Shah Wali Kot, and Arghandab districts had been grinding battlegrounds. ISAF forces, led by a Canadian task force, had been struggling for several years to gain firm control over these critical approaches to Kandahar. But after a series of stiff fights, the districts remained unstable and contested in the face of growing insurgent strength. The fate of Kandahar City rested largely on our ability to secure these avenues, particularly the Arghandab River valley.
* * *
At the end of February 2010 I received an e-mail from a staff sergeant serving in the valley. He led a squad in an infantry battalion task force in the Zhari district, west of Kandahar. I’d made several trips to the districts around Kandahar, particularly Arghandab, where one of our Stryker units, an organization built around wheeled armored vehicles, had suffered significant casualties. But any note like his struck a chord inside me.
I don’t believe you fully understand the situation we face in this district, and I think you should come down and see it up close, Staff Sergeant Israel Arroyo wrote. Senior commanders don’t get many notes directly from squad leaders, particularly notes like that. I told Charlie Flynn to arrange for us to go down the following day.
We flew by C-130 cargo aircraft to Kandahar airfield and transloaded to UH-60 helicopters for the flight to their battalion’s main base before driving the final miles in Strykers to a sandbagged outpost on a small rise that overlooked an expanse of farm fields. There I met Arroyo’s platoon. After a short brief we went on a combat patrol. Departing from the outpost, we moved on foot for several hours, sweeping the area until we reached a small Afghan village, then returned. As we moved, I listened to the young leader’s thoughts and got to know members of his squad, in particular one of his team leaders, Mike Ingram—a corporal responsible for four soldiers. It was difficult ground to soldier in, and always had been. Southern Afghanistan had been the site of the only known mutiny of Arab troops during their global conquest thirteen hundred years earlier. Now both the physical and human terrain seemed to resist the platoon’s best efforts. The Afghans were distant in their demeanor, but that wasn’t uncommon. It was the cultivated fields that were striking. I felt as though I were walking through the grooves of corduroy: Instead of using wooden trellises to support fruit vines, the local farmers used packed mud. In long lines, they built walls six feet tall, four to five feet apart at the tapered tops, and narrower at the ground where the supporting base was wider. For soldiers, it was like operating in a maze, each corridor of sun-caked mud perfectly designed to channel them into waiting IEDs or well-placed ambush positions. It was still too early in the year for the vines to have fully bloomed, but by late spring the corridors would become like tunnels under a canopy of foliage, any movement inside largely hidden from the air.
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